History
oracknows | March 27, 2011These are two videos that appeared to have disappeared from YouTube for a while, thanks to takedown notices from the distributors of the film. Fortunately, they appear to be back, which is pure awesomeness. Unfortunately, because I'm busy putting the final touches on a grant today, the first one resonates in a rather eerie way. Unfortunately, neither of them appear to allow embedding:
Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945
Hitler NIH rejection
Back to work, now...
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2011
Sankt Joachimsthal ("Valley of Saint Joachim") is the German name of Jáchymov, a small town in the Czech Republic. It's in the Erzgebirge mountains near the country's north-western border towards Germany. This place currently has only a bit more than three thousand inhabitants, and yet its name is used daily by billions of people worldwide. Jáchymov is the birthplace of the Valley Coin, the Thaler, the daler, the dollar.
In 1516 a major silver lode was discovered near the Bohemian village of Conradsgrün. The following year the village was re-christened Sankt Joachimsthal, and in 1519 the…
oracknows | March 15, 2011Yesterday, I did a post about ethics in human experimentation. The reason I mention that is because in the comments, a commenter named Paul pointed out an editorial of the sort of variety that we frequently see whenever there is a revelation of misdeeds in human research and a response to that article that is far too mild for the level of idiocy in the editorial. The editorial was written by Justin Goodman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Appearing in the Sacramento Bee, Goodman's article makes a dubious and typical false analogy for an animal rights activist,…
oracknows | March 14, 2011Today is the Monday after Daylight Saving Time started. I always hate this day. Getting to work on time is always that much more difficult, and I always feel a bit run down for the few days afterward until my body adjusts. This time of year also predictably produces idiotic screeds about Daylight Saving Time, for instance, this one by someone named Chip Wood entitled Who's The Idiot Who Foisted Daylight Saving Time On Us? While I can sympathize with the sentiment, the actual rant is a heapin' helpin' of burning stupid:
It all began back in the dark days of the Great Depression, I'm told. The…
oracknows | March 13, 2011Progress in science-based medicine depends upon human experimentation. Scientists can do the most fantastic translational research in the world, starting with elegant hypotheses, tested through in vitro and biochemical experiments, after which they are tested in animals. They can understand disease mechanisms to the individual amino acid level in a protein or nucleotide in a DNA molecule. However, without human testing, they will never know if the end result of all that elegant science will actually do what it is intended to do and to make real human patients better. They will never know if…
pharyngula | March 9, 2011You may not want to know. Only read this heartrending article about the Collinwood School Fire in 1908 if you can handle a tragic tale — but if you do, you won't complain about those annoying fire drills ever again.
jdupuis | February 6, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science, is from November 19, 2008.
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Enough with the physics books, already! After a summer of more or less nothing but physics books, I should…
drorzel | February 3, 2011I make an effort to say nice things about pop-science books that I read, whether for book research or blog reviews. Every now and then, though, I hit a book that has enough problems that I have a hard time taking anything positive from it.
I got David Bodanis's E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation from Union's library because I like the subtitle, and plan to reference it in the relevant chapter of the book-in-progress. I figured that, if I'm going to swipe his subtitle, I should at least be able to say something substantive about the book.
Bodanis takes pains to say that…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2011Mount Everest: named after Colonel Sir George Everest (1790-1866), British Surveyor General of India.
K2: an early land-surveyor's shorthand notation, used because nobody lived near enough to the mountain for it to have a local name.
Himmelbjerget: "Mount Heaven", 147 meters above sea level. Denmark's highest point is in fact Møllehøj, "Windmill Barrow", at 171 m a.s.l.
Kebnekaise: "Kettle Peak". Sweden's highest mountain carries this name due to a misunderstanding between local Saami and surveyors, as the mountain with the concave peak is actually nearby Tolpagorni.
Mount McKinley: the…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2011
Upon hearing that I'm going to Minnesota, my excellent detectorist buddy Kenth Lärk sent me some scans of postcards from Duluth that his emigrant uncle sent home to Sweden in the early 1910s. I particularly like this image of the 1892 Union Depot, as the architecture is similar to that of the station houses along the Saltsjöbanan commuter railway that I've been riding for most of my life. It was built in the early 1890s, at a time when American architecture was en vogue in Sweden -- but in the US, the style is known as "French château". New Englanders will instantly feel at home in the…
pharyngula | January 17, 2011Awesome. Italian police caught someone trying to smuggle away an ancient piece of Roman statuary, and traced him back to find…The Lost Tomb of Caligula. That should have been the title of the last Indiana Jones movie — at least it would have promised a little more excitement.
oracknows | January 12, 2011Clearly, once the allegations of Andrew Wakefield's fraud, conflicts of interest, and business plans to profit off of his demonization of the MMR came to light, it was only a matter of time before this arrived:
NOTE: Apparently the creator of this parody has removed it. I've sent an e-mail asking to reconsider.
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2011Historiography is meta-history, that is, the historical study of historical studies in the past. It is useful and valuable to historical research as ongoing quality control and provides a kind of user's manuals for those who wish to use old literature in new studies of the past. Also, it can often help explain political ideas, movements and propaganda in the past, as that field in society often attempts to use and manipulate history. I am, however, of the firm opinion that if you are interested in, say, the High Middle Ages, you have no reason to delve into Victorian ideas about that period.…
oracknows | December 31, 2010As hard as it is to believe, today is the last day of 2010. An old year has flown by once again, and, almost before I realized it, a new year will arrive where I live in mere hours. It's been a truly weird year, even more so than the average level of weirdness. That's why I can't think of a better way to close it out than to post something that is just as weird as 2010 has been. Ever since I saw this on Bioephemera nearly three weeks ago, I've been looking for an excuse to post this video. Given that I'm going to spend the last day of 2010 working on a grant, leaving little time for finishing…
oracknows | December 28, 2010It's the week between Christmas and New Years, and, oddly enough, I'm feeling exceptionally lazy. For one thing, it's a slow "news" time; nothing much is happening to blog about, at least nothing that's motivated me to rouse myself from my declining food-induced coma to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence today. For another thing, I'm supposed to be on vacation! Well, sort of. I will be working on grants for part of today, and I've already answered a whole bunch of work-related e-mails, fool that I am. In any case, this post dates way, way back to November 2005. True, I did repost it…
oracknows | December 28, 2010It's the week between Christmas and New Years, and, oddly enough, I'm feeling exceptionally lazy. For one thing, it's a slow "news" time; nothing much is happening to blog about, at least nothing that's motivated me to rouse myself from my declining food-induced coma to lay down some not-so-Respectful Insolence today. For another thing, I'm supposed to be on vacation! Well, sort of. I will be working on grants for part of today, and I've already answered a whole bunch of work-related e-mails, fool that I am. In any case, this post dates way, way back to November 2005. True, I did repost it…
pharyngula | December 23, 2010You know who else celebrated Christmas?
HITLER!
Uh-oh. I just godwined Christmas. If it ends now, it's all my fault. Sorry.
(via Inside a Nazi Christmas Party, 1941, from Life magazine)
pharyngula | December 21, 2010History isn't often pretty. Archaeologists have been excavating a site called Towton, where a major battle was fought in the Wars of the Roses in 1461, and in which 28,000 people died and were buried in mass graves scattered about the battleground. It's a fascinating story of the soldiers involved in the battle, and they were both diverse and contradicting certain stereotypes about medieval citizens.
The men whose skeletons were unearthed at Towton were a diverse lot. Their ages at time of death ranged widely. It is easier to be precise about younger individuals, thanks to the predictable…
jdupuis | December 18, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Countdown: A History of Space Flight, is from November 14, 2006.
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The decision to read this book was certainly not rocket science, even if it is a book about rocket science. An engaging and fascinating read,…
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2010Here's a case of odd priorities. The Royal Library in Stockholm keeps a copy of everything that is printed in Sweden (and Swedish), and also has a lot of people tending LIBRIS, the national bibliographic database. Recently, the folks who keep track of scholarly publications in historical research (through the Swedish Historical Bibliography project) completed the digitisation of a huge printed bibliography for their field, which means that LIBRIS now contains references to almost every piece of historical research that has ever been published in this country.
Now, how is the Royal Library…