History
cevans | September 28, 2012The space-heads among you have undoubtedly heard about the Curiosity rover's first significant discovery: the remnants of an ancient streambed on Mars, which would seem to indicate the presence of water in the planet's history. This jagged pile of alluvial rock and dust may not look like much, but it brings to mind one of my favorite pieces of Martian historical arcana.
For a time in the late 19th century, it was believed that there were canals on Mars.
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who observed Mars in 1877, was the first to describe, name, and lovingly illustrate mysterious…
sastyk | September 24, 2012It is the nature of popular books to inspire people to wildly overstate their importance. The most stunning example is Abraham Lincoln's statement upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war.” While _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was an incredibly important book, one that moved many people to shift their sympathies on the subject of slavery, this was, of course, the wildest hyperbole. So too are claims that _Diet For a Small Planet_ invented modern vegetarianism, that _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ started the local foods movement. …
tsmith | August 24, 2012Despite its reputation as a scourge of antiquity, Yersinia pestis--the bacterium that causes bubonic plague--still causes thousands of human illnesses every year. In modern times, most of these occur in Africa, and to a lesser extent in Asia, though we have a handful of cases each year in the U.S as well.
When Y. pestis was first confirmed as the cause of bubonic plague during an 1894 outbreak in Hong Kong, most people assumed that we also now knew the cause of the 14th-century Black Death, and the later plague outbreaks that resurfaced periodically. However, there has been lingering…
sastyk | August 14, 2012On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, 20 miles from where I would go to school 100 years later. The majority belonged to my great-grandfather, Edgar White, who studied latin and algebra in Jonesboro, Maine, and later went on to teach school in Cheshire, Connecticut, using the same books. My grandfather’s books were mostly published in the 1860s, right…
pharyngula | July 25, 2012I had never heard of the Women in Space Program before, but apparently, after the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova into space, there was actually an effort to train American women as astronauts.
The participants of the Women in Space Program experienced tremendous success. "Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts," Brandon Keim wrote in 2009. "Thirteen of them -- later dubbed the Mercury 13 -- passed 'with no medical reservations,' a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as…
aardvarchaeology | July 24, 2012Reading Anund & Qviberg's new guide book on Medieval Uppland, I came across a great religious legend: "The Grateful Dead". (The band got its name from a dictionary entry on this family of stories.) The earliest version of the legend is found in the German Cistercian prior Caesarius of Heisterbach's 13th century book of miracle stories, the Dialogus miraculorum. This book was hugely popular for centuries, and though Caesarius is largely forgotten today, we do remember his chilling line about how to tell a Cathar from a Catholic, attributed by Caesarius to one of the Albigensian Crusade's…
aardvarchaeology | July 22, 2012This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones's first gig, at the Marquee Club in London. Journalist Hanspeter Kuenzler and Bavarian e-book publishers The eBook People GmbH celebrate the occasion with a massive illustrated two-volume biographical anthology in English on the band. Counting the pages in an e-book is of course difficult. But suffice to say that the first volume, that Aard has received for review, extends to 694 pages on my smartphone, where I read it.
Kuenzler provides the year-by-year narrative backbone of the story and, in a nice touch, for each year lists…
oracknows | July 10, 2012About a week and a half ago, I took note of a rather unhinged rant by comedian Rob Schneider about vaccines in which he trotted out an antivaccine movement's greatest hits compendium of pseudoscience, misinformation, and logical fallacies, all in the service of opposing California Bill AB 2109. Antivaccine activists hate this piece of legislation in particular, the reason being that it would make it just a little more difficult for parents to obtain philosophical exemptions from school mandates. Right now in California, parents basically just have to sign a form, no questions asked, no other…
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2012Sweden's traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people's minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into prehistory, and so they don't respect the country's cities much, these generally being much later in origin.
Stockholm is a case in point. Today's urban area is neatly bisected by the boundary between Uppland and Södermanland provinces. Two years ago myself and other Stockholmers got half of our High Medieval itches scratched by a fine archaeological guide book covering Södermanland. Now Johan…
oracknows | June 29, 2012Remember California Bill AB 2109? I've written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that the reason was that a couple of days ago AB 2109 came up for discussion in the California Senate Health Committee (and passed to be sent out to the full Senate for a vote), after having passed the California House a couple of months ago. I also now know why antivaccinationists…
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2012Vår Gård in Saltsjöbaden is a conference venue and training centre whose history illustrates political trends in Sweden over the past century and more.
1892. The Thiel brothers, two of Sweden's wealthiest art patrons, buy a property by the sea in the new fashionable resort of Saltsjöbaden and build two luxurious summer mansions. They name the place Vår Gård, “Our Farmstead”.
1899. The Swedish Cooperative Union is founded.
1924. The Cooperative Union buys Vår Gård and adds a number of buildings to the property to house its new training centre and its art collection.
1932. Sweden's first Labour…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
drorzel | June 13, 2012In which we look at the end of the Steelypips era and the launch of ScienceBlogs.
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Before the Great Upgrade derailed things completely for a month, I was working on a recap of this blog's history, and had gotten up through the end of 2005, which marked the end of my time as an independent blogger.
I was first approached about the idea of ScienceBlogs in late 2005 by Christopher Mims, then at Seed magazine, who later tweeted a secret history of ScienceBlogs. I was initially a little apprehensive about the idea, as I was still pre-tenure at that time, and hadn't attempted to explain…
oracknows | June 12, 2012If there's one thing shared in common among nearly all advocates of pseudoscience, it is the belief that they know The Truth. More importantly, they know The Truth, and The Powers That Be don't want you to know The Truth and will do almost anything to makes sure that The Truth stays secret. Think about it. This sort of thinking is common, be it among advocates of alternative medicine, cold fusion advocates, HIV/AIDS denialists, 9/11 "Truthers," birthers, creationists, moon hoax believers, or Holocaust deniers. For instance, Mike Adams and Joe Mercola will tell you that the government in the…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2012I was thinking about African American culture and how it still shows signs of these people descending from slaves, US slavery having been abolished less than 150 years ago. And I asked myself, what is that subculture going to be like a few hundred years in the future? Then it hit me. That's where my subculture is now.
I've made the point before that all my readers are descendants of royalty. But a far greater percentage of our pedigrees lies with the slaves. All currently living members of the various European ethnic groups have ample slave ancestry.
Slavery was common in Iron Age Scandinavia…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2012
Played Eclipse for the first time with my new Muscovite friends Anton & Maria and frequent guest Swedepat. This Finnish 2011 boardgame has become a runaway international hit and is currently ranked #7 on Boardgame Geek. It's about interstellar colonialism: good fun, very neatly designed, and has a lot of inherent replayability. I look forward to future games. Guess which player ended up way ahead of the cluster of three stubble-chinned losers at the end...
Cycled in brisk & sunny weather for a second attempt at two recalcitrant geocaches. Found nada. How the great have fallen.
Had…
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2012
As a schoolboy I read the first original play performed publically written in Swedish, Urban Hiärne's Rosimunda (1665). Me and my friend Tor loved the absurd spelling, the odd changes that had occurred in the sense of many words and some of the comical one-liners. Recently I learned that about the same time Hiärne also wrote the first novel in Swedish, Stratonice (1666-68). Rosimunda deals with bloody intrigue at the Italian court of the conquering 6th century Lombard king Alboin. Stratonice is instead a pastoral romance set in the age of Alexander the Great. It is strongly derivative of…
pharyngula | January 30, 2012Ah, the 19th century…when mad scientists were really mad, and not only that, they were popular at parties. In 1818, Dr Ure and Professor Jeffray obtained the freshly killed corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, only an hour from the hangman's noose, and proceeded to experiment on it with a battery in the Glasgow University anatomy theater before a crowd of spectators. In my youth, I had to settle for recent roadkill, a 9 volt battery, and a dark basement, all by my lonesome — my jealousy is acute.
Here is a small portion of the account of that day's fun.
The supra-orbital nerve was laid bare in the…
sastyk | January 5, 2012
If you have followed energy issues from anywhere other than a cave on a mountain peak, you've probably heard technoutopians utter some variation on the following sentence two or three hundred times "We walked on the moon - of course we can do whatever it takes to shift from fossil fuels to some other source of energy." The moon shot is perceived as the ultimate example of "put in a quarter and get out the technological outcome you want" in our history. If we could set out to put a man on the moon and do it in less than decade, can't we do anything we want to, with just enough ingenuity?…
oracknows | December 24, 2011You knew it was inevitable. I'm just surprised it took this long. Then, via Stuff and Nonsense, I find this video:
Extra points for using a different scene from Downfall than the usual Downfall parodies use.
It also reminds me. There's a paper on just this topic that might require a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence early next week. For now, though, Orac is going to chill with his family. (Ensor will be so ticked off if I don't visit this year.)