You must read today’s xkcd: The Pace of Modern Life. That’s all, gotta go. I just had to pluck out one example. The managers of sensational newspapers…do not try to educate their readers and make them better, but tend to create perverted tastes and develop vicious tendencies. The owners of these papers seem to have …
Category Archive: History
Jun 12 2013
Knowing a little history clarifies issues
We’ve had this long-simmering football controversy here in the upper midwest — a North Dakota football team named itself after an Indian tribe. They try to argue that it’s not racist and claim that it’s a respectful homage to the natives, but look at the history of such naming elsewhere: the Washington DC football team …
Jun 10 2013
People have been treating other people horribly for a long, long time
Those English…they have bodies buried in their basements. Here’s this lovely little farm in Kent, which looks quite ordinary, except that it’s the site of an archaeological dig. View Larger Map And what lies beneath it? Why, evidence of grisly ritual murders carried out over centuries, a few thousand years ago. Respectful Late Bronze Age …
May 25 2013
Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, you’ve got some explaining to do.
23 years ago yesterday, as my friends Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were driving through Oakland, California on their way to appear at a Santa Cruz rally against clearcutting California’s remaining old-growth redwoods, a bomb exploded beneath the driver’s seat. Judi was in that drivers’ seat and nearly died of her wounds. She lived in …
May 11 2013
Bring back the huffle and bagpiping!
I love expanding my vocabulary, and this article on the modern history of swearing has a number of interesting words for obscene acts that should come back — no one would understand what I was talking about until they reach wider currency.
Apr 21 2013
François Jacob has died
Jacob and Jacques Monod, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for their work on the lac operon, were the fellows who really put gene regulation on the map, working out the mechanisms behind switching genes off and on in response to environmental cues. I always talk about their work on day one of my …
Apr 04 2013
Jewish women master retroactive invisibility!
It’s too bad it came too late to help them. Here’s a famous photo of Jewish civilians being herded out of the Warsaw ghetto by Nazis. Awful, horrifying stuff, right? Yet when a conservative Haredi newspaper in Israel published this photo, they edited it in interesting ways. Isn’t it ironic that the Jewish women who …
Mar 30 2013
The last intelligent creationist
Earlier today, Maggie Koerth-Baker posted this tweet: I dig this graph, but I think it misses an outreach opportunity by ascribing common misconceptions to creationists only bouncingdodecahedrons.tumblr.com/post/17808416988 It links to a diagram showing evolution as a linear path rather than a branching tree, and it got me thinking about terribly popular misconceptions about evolution that …
Mar 19 2013
Fair’s fair
I was mean to the History Channel yesterday — I mocked them for portraying Satan as a dark-skinned man with a resemblance to Obama. But you know, that wasn’t fair. It’s not as if that show about the Bible is full of coded racist references to appeal to the yahoos of America. Why, look here: …
Mar 16 2013
Happy St Patrick’s Day to you all!
Oh, look, I found the perfect cartoon to illustrate the day: the evolution of Irish heroes. Those Christians ruin everything, and I don’t know why we should celebrate Irish culture by honoring a horrible old saint and getting drunk. Why not name it after a hero worth remembering and reciting poetry, for instance…something Ireland is …
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