Archive for July, 2006
There’s always someone faster
I had a spare five minutes and an inquistive mind. It turns out I’m not the only person who thought of adding this professor.
Academic Idol – or do we need Historical Rock Stars?
The BC-52’s – Historical Rock Stars.
Picking up from Coturnix and Afarensis there’s a discussion about Scientist Rock Stars. It comes from a comment by Morgan Spurlock:
We’ve started to make science and empirical evidence not nearly as important as punditry–people using p.r.-speak to push a corporate or political agenda. I think we need to turn scientists back into the rock stars they are.
I’ll widen the net by looking at it from a History and Archaeology perspective and then take that back to the sciences.
Assuming the stars cannot be fictional, and ideally not dead so that they can interact with the media, are there any historians or archaeologists that the public get excited about?
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Archimedes
From HASTRO-L comes news of the live unveiling of the Archimedes Palimpsest at 4pm PST on August 4, which is midnight onwards GMT, or 1am BST. The press-kit states “Join us at the Exploratorium or online as we watch ancient text revealed and read for the first time in a thousand years!“, which makes them much more honest than me. I’d have made sure my panel of experts knew exactly what was going to be revealed so they could coo appreciatively and say something useful to the webcam.
The press-centre links to several sites on the subject. I’d particularly recommend Reviel Netz’s The Origins of Mathematical Physics: New Light on an Old Question, from Physics Today. He’s a very imaginative thinker. He’s not simply good at mathematics, but can also pose interesting social questions on maths.
One paper he’s written is Greek Mathematicians: A Group Picture. He poses the question, if we were to take a group photograph of ancient Greek mathematicians, what would it look like? Some of the answers are a bit obvious perhaps, they’d be overwhelmingly male. But how many? Perhaps not as many as you might think. He gives evidence that Archimedes struggled to find anyone to send his results to, who might be able to appreciate them. He also raises questions about who would become a serious mathematician.
Anyhow, for the Archimedes Palimpsest there’s an hour long video on Google.
You can download the video from Google.
Eles, April 14th 2000
The first page from my MPhil thesis, and probably the only page which wouldn’t be re-written from scratch if I were to go back to it.
Contrary to the proverb, it’s never darkest before the dawn. As I stood looking out to the eastern horizon, the few clouds in the sky shone in brilliant silver against a metallic cobalt vault. Behind me the sky slowly yielded from midnight blue to lighter hues. Today, as for every other day for the past couple of millennia, there was quite a crowd for the day’s opening event. Scores of people were waiting for the sun to rise. They all wanted a good view of the sunrise and had been sitting on the slopes of the hillsides to ensure an unobscured view. The sun rose, initially peeking over the horizon like the tiniest gem of fire. The first rays of light shot over land into the hearts of the watchers, bringing with it a promise of rebirth and renewal. As long as we had the sun we too would be reborn each day. Like the sun we would return from the sleep of the night and we would never truly die.
At least this is one explanation of the morning’s events. I was unable to ask my fellow spectators if this was a correct interpretation, as they had all been buried for centuries.
The Frog and the Ant
Socrates is reported to have said that the Greeks were scattered around the Mediterranean like frogs or ants around a pond. I have a pond, but no apoikiai or emporia. I do however have frogs and ants.
This is a test of YouTube and the movie function on my cheap but usable camera. It’s a brief record of a frog and an ant arranging to meet for lunch. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that no ants were harmed during the filming of this clip. At least not physically, though the experience may have left psychological scars.
The insect might be hard to spot, so I’ve drawn a diagram. Yes I am that sad.
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