History
pharyngula | November 16, 2011The infamous Kensington Runestone is kept in a museum just a few miles up the road from me. It's a carved rock that was dug up on a farm in the 19th century by a Swedish farmer, and purports to tell the tale in runes of a doomed Viking expedition that had come down from Hudson's Bay to meet a tragic end at the hands of the Minnesota natives. More likely, it's a cunning artifact produced by the farmer, Olof Öhman. It's an unlikely bit of pseudo-history, and I'd love to see an unassailable disproof of its source.
Martin Rundkvist is reporting that Öhman's signature has been found on the stone.…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2011
If we look only at contemporaneous written evidence and disregard kings, Iarlabanki Ingefastson is probably the most copiously documented Scandinavian of the Viking Period. But his name does not occur even once on vellum. His memory lives entirely in the many rune stones he commissioned.
Iarlabanki (Jarlabanke in modern Swedish) was a major landowner in Uppland north of Stockholm, and his lifetime happened to coincide with the great mid-to-late-11th century rune stone craze in that province. Iarlabanki was a Christian, probably only of the third generation, and like other monuments of the…
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2011German archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn (1905-90) is a contentious figure. A passionate Nazi soldier and SS archaeologist up until 1945, he became one of the country's most influential post-war archaeologists from the late 50s onward. Fornvännen 2011:3 has just come out containing a contribution on the younger Jankuhn's heartfelt Nazi enthusiasm, as documented by recent archive finds.
I'm reading Wolf-Dieter Tempel's charming professional memoir, Am Rande der Archaäologie. Here's a wonderful snippet from his recollections regarding Jankuhn, who was his teacher (and I translate).
The Göttingen…
pharyngula | November 1, 2011I cringed reading this woman's lament that evolutionary biology is responsible for the oppression of women, starting with Darwin. It's one long colossal failure of logic.
The argument has some genuinely true facts embedded in it, which then get spun out into a series of false conclusions. It is true that the Victorian gentlemen who formulated and expanded upon the theory of evolution tended to be 19th century chauvinists who made up stories about the inferiority of the feminine mind, and Darwin was right among them. It is also true that there are contemporary biologists who still make up…
pharyngula | October 27, 2011If you tuned in to that local debate on Christian radio, you know that one of the points the Christian fool trotted out was the tired old claim that the Nazis were no true Christians — no True Christian™ would ever commit such horrible acts. It's an annoyingly feeble and unsupportable argument, but it has a lot of life in it, unfortunately.
This same argument has come up in Faye Flam's Evolution column for the Philly Inquirer, and has gone on through several articles thanks to that hack from the Discovery Institute, Richard Weikart. It started with an article titled "Severing the link between…
oracknows | October 26, 2011As hard as it is to believe, I've been a physician for 23 years now and a fully trained surgeon for over 15 years. If there's one thing I've learned in that time, it's most doctors really, really don't like to be told what to do. I don't know if part of it comes from all the long years of medical school and residency, with fellowship tacked on for many, during which we're relentlessly told what to do by more senior residents, fellows, and attendings or if it has something to do with the personality traits that lead young people to go into medicine, particularly surgery. It's probably a little…
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2011
Though I played a lot of tabletop role playing games in the 80s and 90s, I've never been much of a live action role-player (LARPer). Just seems to be way too much preparation for such short events. So the only real LARP I ever took part in was in May of 1992 (it was called Saturday Night Live, ha-ha-ha) - until this past Sunday, when I tried again. And it was fun!
Boardgaming buddies head-hunted me for this extremely well organised LARP because they had a male deficit. The event was titled Kärlek och fördel, "Love and Advantage". The idea was basically to collect all the main characters…
pharyngula | September 27, 2011Steven Pinker has a new book coming out next week, and I'm very much looking forward to it. It is titled The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined, and its premise is that humans have been becoming increasingly less violent over time. I'm very sympathetic to this view: I think cooperation, not conflict, has been the hallmark of human evolution.
There's an overview of Pinker's argument at Edge.
Believe it or not--and I know most people do not--violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. The…
pharyngula | September 21, 2011Earlier this semester, I gave my first-year students a thought question. I do this now and then just to wake them up and get them thinking and talking — in this case, I wanted them to speculate and also think hard about how they came up with their answers, and how they would try to evaluate them. Here's the question:
Anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record about 150,000 years ago. The first record of systematic agriculture appears about 10-15,000 years ago. The Industrial Revolution began about 300 years ago. People nowadays seem to be coming up with new ideas at an…
pharyngula | September 18, 2011And deeply regrets it.
It's very sad. I remember when cable TV was new, and had such promise — there would be channels dedicated to specialty disciplines, that would pursue a niche doggedly for a slice of the audience. The History Channel would be about history, not von Daniken and Nazi UFOs; Discovery would be about science, not motorcycle enthusiasts and bargain hunters; the Learning Channel would be about learning, not octuplets and hoarding; the SciFi channel would actually present decent science-fiction, instead of schlock horror, ghost-hunters, and fake wrestling. Garbage conquered all…
oracknows | September 11, 2011Once again we come to another September 11. It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since that horrible day. It's become my tradition over the last few years to post this video as a reminder of what happened that day.
This video was shot by Bob and Bri, who in 2001 lived in a high rise a mere 500 yards from the North Tower. On this tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I think it's important to post this again. It is the most prolonged and continuous video of the attack that I have seen, and, as such, It is difficult to watch.
That's why it's so important to watch.
Second,…
pharyngula | September 5, 2011I think one thing Razib says is exactly right:
One of the most interesting things to me is the nature of Creationism as an idea which evolves in a rather protean fashion in reaction to the broader cultural selection pressures.
Creationism has evolved significantly, but it's not exactly protean: it's punctuated equilibrium. If we had a time machine and could bring a typical creationist who came to age after Whitcomb and Morris's The Genesis Flood face-to-face with a pre-Scopes trial creationist, there would be a fabulously ferocious fight, because their theology and their basic beliefs would…
sastyk | August 30, 2011One of the hardest things for people to get their heads around is the fact that just because we can do something doesn't mean we will. For affluent people in the west in an era of rising energy availability, for the most part can and do went together. In an era of declining resource availability and declining wealth, however, many of us are likely to get to know the experience of much of the world, which is that what we can do doesn't have much to do with many people's experience..
One of the hardest concepts for many Americans to absorb is this - that technical feasibility rests on a…
milhayser | August 12, 2011
On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, Dr. Isis solicits hypotheses for the increase in the number of A's awarded to students at American universities. In 1960's, one out of six students got an A (and C used to be the most Common). Now an A is most common, and the number of C's (and D's) has fallen by half. Dr. Isis says, "It's interesting that the real change in grading appears to have occurred in the period between 1962 and 1974, probably coinciding with the increase in conscription for the Vietnam War." Mike the Mad Biologist offers, "I think it's pretty obvious what happened:…
pharyngula | July 24, 2011The cartoon version of my Scandinavian ancestors has swarms of fiercely bearded men charging off of their longships into monasteries, where they lopped the heads off priests and plundered the gold and silver from the altars. While I admit that I find that imagery quite romantic and appealing, the truth was more complicated: they were also settlers and traders. Also, the beards may have been less common than we thought—an examination of Viking graves in East England, graves that were assumed to have belonged to men because they contained swords and shields, has revealed a surprise. When they…
pharyngula | July 20, 2011It's really a shame he didn't live to be even 78 or so, so Gregor Mendel could have lived to see his work recognized.
I also wonder what he would have thought to know that even godless atheists centuries after his life would know his name and his scientific work so well…
Also, via Google today:
Notice the parental, F1, and F2 generations from left to right, and the 3:1 ratio in the F2s…nice.
oracknows | July 19, 2011Since I was still recovering from TAM9 last night and crashed on the couch at around 9 PM, I didn't have time for one of my usual logorrheic posts. I did, however, have time to take note of an update on a story I started covering six years ago. One of the greatest things about having a long running blog (six and a half years) is that sometimes, after not having heard anything for a long time, I'll be surprised by new information on a story I commented on years ago and can update my readers. So it is with this rather bizarre story about two teenaged girls who formed the group Prussian Blue…
aardvarchaeology | July 12, 2011
Driving through Hagby parish in Uppland on a tiny road Friday, I was lucky enough to cross the bridge at Focksta right at the moment when the afternoon sun hit this lovely runestone straight on. I didn't even have to get out of the car to take the photograph.
Dating from the early 11th century, the stone is an unsigned work of Ãsmund KÃ¥resson (U 875). It's unusual in that it has a couple of Bronze Age cupmarks too. The inscription reads, "Tyrvi and Ingegärd and Tjälve had this stone erected after Kalv, Tyrvi's husband. May God and God's mother help his spirit."
Note the cross and the…
tsmith | July 8, 2011As good news surfaces regarding a new (well, old) potential drug to help combat malaria--a drug already used to treat river blindness--KeithB and Phil Scheibel alerted me to another old malaria fighter featuring Dopey, Sneezy, and the whole gang:
Other Disney disease-fighting videos include Water, Friend or Enemy, Insects as Carriers of Disease and Hookworm. A list of other wartime shorts is here.
pharyngula | July 1, 2011Weird ideas can flourish if enough people share a false preconception, and here's a marvelous article on the history and philosophy of widely held certainty that other planets were inhabited by people. Not just any people, either: good Christian people.
By the 1700s, there could no longer be any doubt. Earth was just one of many worlds orbiting the Sun, which forced scientists and theologians alike to ponder a tricky question. Would God really have bothered to create empty worlds?
To many thinkers, the answer was an emphatic "no," and so cosmic pluralism - the idea that every world is…