History
terrasig | July 16, 2006I've never properly acknowledged the commercial artist, Mr Brien O'Reilly of SaBOR Design, who designed the content-rich, scientific eye-candy banner in the masthead above for the Sb version of Terra Sigillata.
So, I'd like to kick off the week raising awareness of the banner and advertising Mr O'Reilly's talents and services by asking some questions of you about the design elements of the banner. And, since I know that many readers of Terra Sig are poor graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, I'm well-aware that nothing gets your attention like cash-for-knowledge. (Well, yes, free…
stcynic | July 15, 2006There is a long history of false claims of deathbed conversions becoming popular among what we might loosely call the religious right. From Jefferson to Darwin to Bertrand Russell, it seems that no man whose beliefs conflict with those of the faithful can be allowed to die without the fashioning of stories about how their last moments were filled with terror at the thought of hell and how they cried out to God and converted on the spot, admitting that all that they had believed was untrue. So when I came across this article by Greg Laurie in the Worldnutdaily about "famous last words", I just…
oracknows | July 15, 2006After last week's reemergence of the Hitler Zombie from his underground crypt to snack on the brains of a couple of political consultants in my home city of Detroit, my sister kindly sent me this link, which explains a bit more of the background.
It turns out that the HItler Zombie may be cleverer than even I thought. The use of Hitler imagery, besides being inspired by a chomp on the brain by the Hitler Zombie, appears to have a definite purpose beyond simply being over the top and offensive:
What is really going on here?
Here's a pretty well-informed guess. Everyone in Detroit politics…
purepedantry | July 14, 2006Apparently today will be poetry day. I found this poem in a book I was reading. It is by a man named Mortimer Collins (1860):
Life and the Universe show spontaneity:
Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!
Churches and creeds are all lost in the mists;
Truth must be sought with the Positivists.
Wise are their teachers beyond all comparison,
Comte, Huxley, Tyndall, Morley and Harrison.
Who will venture to enter the lists
With such a squandron of Positivists?
There was an ape in the days that were earlier;
Centuries passed and his hair became curlier;
Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist…
oracknows | July 11, 2006Sitting in a corner office, Adolph Mongo perused daily reports. It was early evening and nearly everyone in the office had gone home, leaving only a few die-hards left to finish up. A crack political operative who runs a political and media consulting firm active in Michigan and Detroit politics, Mongo never hesitated to play the race card when he thought it might help his client.
He heard a crash outside his door.
"Jonella?" he said. "Is that you?"
No answer.
Mongo went back to his reading, but he was tired. That's enough attacking Governor Grahnolm and defending Detroit Mayor Kwame…
pharyngula | July 10, 2006It's his birthday, and Coturnix has gathered about eleventy billion links to Tesliana (Teslaniana? Is there a word for this, or am I just making things up?)
pharyngula | July 10, 2006Carel Brest van Kempen has extracted a few fascinating quotes from an old book he has. It's titled Creative and Sexual Science, by a phrenologist and physiologist from 1870, and it contains some wonderful old examples of folk genetics.
President Bush would be pleased:
"Human and animal hybrids are denounced most terribly in the Bible; obviously because the mixing up of man with beast, or one beast species with another, deteriorates. Universal amalgamation would be disastrous."
Although, unfortunately, he then goes on to use this as an argument against miscegenation.
Another lesson is that…
stcynic | July 9, 2006This time it's about his false claims about George Washington. For the 8 people who actually care about our ongoing project to debunk the nonsense about the founding fathers that is produced in astounding volumes by the religious right, this post is worth reading.
pharyngula | July 8, 2006I've been told that there is a drop of old Dutch blood in my ancestry—that way back in the 17th century, an intrepid few Dutch immigrants mingled their seed with the mongrel mess of my father's line. I think now I sense a kindred spirit. Adriaen Coenensz, a fisherman and fish seller from Scheveningen in Holland wrote and illustrated a book between 1577 and 1580 titled Het Visboek ("The Fishbook"). It's an amazing browse. Apparently, Coenensz was interested in adventure and exotic dining experiences…
…he was an early devotee of science fiction…
…and most of all, he was obsessed with squid…
stcynic | July 7, 2006I have written probably a couple dozen essays taking the religious right to task for their constant misquoting of the founding fathers, and for sometimes just plain passing on false quotes attributed to them. I'm disappointed to see the same thing done in this post on Talk2Action by an advocate of church/state separation. At the end of a long essay rightly criticizing the Patriot Pastors, David Barton and others for their distortions, the author, someone with the nickname moiv, offers a few misquotes of his own. Like this one from Jefferson:
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one…
pharyngula | July 7, 2006Regular commenter Ed Darrell has started a weblog of his own now, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, dedicated to knowing US History. And really, don't you want to learn the story behind the name?
purepedantry | July 6, 2006The Department of Energy has begun a Nuclear Film Declassification Project where they are going to release the footage of old nuclear weapons tests. Sample videos and a statement below the fold.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has embarked on the Nuclear Weapons Film Declassification Project to make available to the public and many users films that contain historically significant events in the development of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. This is being done under the Department of Energy's Openness Initiative. The film project is being carried out by DOE's Albuquerque Operations…
oracknows | July 5, 2006Almost as if by design, after my post earlier today about LaShawn Barber's really bad analogy comparing the white nationalist teenage singing duo Prussian Blue's invocation of "white pride" to minority groups like the NAACP, I came across this post over on David Neiwert's blog showing what real white nationalists look like.
Almost as if by design...
stcynic | July 4, 2006Jon Rowe has a fascinating post at Positive Liberty about John Witherspoon, one of our more neglected founding fathers. As Jon notes, Witherspoon is interesting because he was a very orthodox Christian but also an outspoken proponent of the Enlightenment philosophy that undergirds our liberal democratic system. Though Witherspoon was a Calvinist, he broke with Calvin clearly on the subject of the rightful authority of civil government. Jon includes the following quote that illuminates the issue, from Walter Berns' book Making Patriots:
From Berns: "Like Jefferson and Madison, [Witherspoon]…
razib | July 4, 2006On another weblog I got involved in a rather long-winded thread on colonialism in British India. Someone made an assertion about Islam and its relatively non-effect on the subcontinent. This seemed strange. My own family is brown and Muslim, but one can't generalize from one's own experience, no?
So I was bored, the combined population of India-Bangladesh-Pakistan ("British India") is 30.5% Muslim. Assuming 1% defection rates from a pure Hindu state toward a Muslim state per generation, how many generations would it take to reach 30.5%? Well, turns out it would take 37 generations, and…
stcynic | June 26, 2006From Greg Laurie in the Worldnutdaily comes this little tidbit of absurdity:
It is my belief that one of the reasons for the great success of the United States of America over our 200-plus years can be found in our origins, the fact that our Founding Fathers built this country on a belief in Scripture and in the Ten Commandments.
What makes this so ridiculous is that his intellectual forebears, at the time of the Constitution, were making the exact opposite argument. From pulpits all around America, in pamphlets distributed in all of the original 13 states, and in newspaper editorials as well…
oracknows | June 24, 2006About two weeks ago, I did a brief post about a Lithuanian guy whose blood alcohol level was beyond what would kill most mortal men but who was fully conscious and nominally able to drive. I facetiously referred to it as "one quarter of my heritage at its finest," given that I'm one quarter Lithuanian. Well, I'm also one-half Polish on my father's side, and a little more than a week ago, I came across this example of that part of my heritage at its finest Not surprisingly, this item involves drinking too. It also involves the World Cup, in this case, a semi-friendly rivalry between Polish and…
evolvingthoughts | June 23, 2006Yahoo news is reporting that Harriet, the world's oldest tortoise, has died aged 176
Harriet was collected by Darwin on the Beagle voyage in 1830, when she was about 2 inches. She found her way to Brisbane, where I currently live, and was allowed to roam the Brisbane botanical gardens, but ignorant and nasty folk would put their cigarettes out on her carapace, which is covered in skin and nerve endings, so she was taken into a zoo and found her way to Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, about 100kms north of Brisbane, where she was a favourite attraction. I got to touch her there, whice set off a…
oracknows | June 23, 2006While we're on the topic of Holocaust deniers again, here's something on the lighter side...
I thought I'd seen everything. Then, via Improbable Research, I found something truly strange.
Are you ready for....Hitler Cats? It's a blog dedicated to cats that look like Hitler. I have to tell you, though, that some of them to me look like the "mustache" was painted on (although this one, at least, was photgraphed with a fine young Aryan child), and this particular cat doesn't look much like Hitler at all.
What can one say but: Heil Kitty!
oracknows | June 23, 2006Holocaust deniers sometimes refer to the Holocaust as the "Holohoax," as if the whole thing were one huge hoax perpetrated on the world by Jews. Indeed, if you have the stomach to dive into the deepest, darkest, most disgusting parts of the Internet, where Holocaust deniers freely spew their lies, you will even find explicit assertions that the Holocaust is nothing but a hoax that the Jews used to justify the formation of the State of Israel and to collect reparation money. Indeed, do a Google search for the term "Holohoax" and you will find well over 43,000 entries. That the Holocaust was a…