Archive for July, 2006
There’s always someone faster
Jul 28th
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?
Jul 28th
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? (more…)
Archimedes
Jul 26th
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 More >
Eles, April 14th 2000
Jul 23rd
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 More >
The Frog and the Ant
Jul 22nd
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.
Is being a good Historian in the genes?
Jul 21st
[Cross-posted to Revise & Dissent]
Historian (in jeans no less). Photo by Gerard Van der Leun.
One of the problems in being a slow thinker and slow in commenting is that often you find someone has already said what I’m thinking, and said it better than I would.
An example is a debate following the recent History Carnival at Air Pollution. Our host Andrew Israel Ross opened the debate.
Last night I was in the middle of a conversation that I think happens quite frequently amongst grad students in the humanities, at least those informed by history. Do members of oppressed groups today have special access on the past of those groups? In other words, do gay people or Black people, have a special claim to an understanding of the gay or Black past? My answer: yeah, I’m afraid so. And I say this even though one of my favorite queer theorists happens to be a married woman.
This has been challenged by ADM at Blogenspiel. ADM’s position is:
[I]t’s pretty easy to be a medievalist — and I think it’s easier the earlier one goes … but we really are in ‘the past is a different country’ land. We don’t have to worry about identifying with More >
Archaeology Image Bank
Jul 20th
I’ve been sat on this for a while and when the launch is finally announced I forget to mention it.
The HEA’s Archaeology Image Bank is now open. It will eventually be an extensive collection of annotated images for use in teaching and research. My photos should also be available from Flickr under a CC BY-SA licence which is slightly more open than HEA’s terms. I have a few up there including this one of Stonehenge, which is listed at number three in the download chart. I’m not asking people to download it the hi-res version purely to boost my ego. You should download it because it’s a useful photo. And then download a second copy tomorrow to boost my ego. I appreciate the photos could be used by unpleasant people, but the sort of people I wouldn’t want using the photos are the sort of people who wouldn’t ask me or tell me about using them anyway. All a more stringent licence would do is deter people who might otherwise do interesting and imaginative stuff with them. There is the loss of commerical gain, but I don’t think I’m losing a substantial income by making the photos usable for free. You may call More >
Galileo: A Very Short Introduction by Stillman Drake
Jul 16th
[Cross-posted to Revise & Dissent]
Blackwells in Oxford has done something which is either very good or very evil. They’ve put up a wall of Very Short Introductions, along with a 3 for 2 offer. They’re handy for something to read on the train and considerably more substantial and durable than a magazine which I can skim through in a half hour. I can forsee me spending a lot of money. I’ve made an effort to limit myself to just three a week, so this week I bought Ancient Egyptian Myth, Russell and Galileo.
Galileo: A Very Short Introduction, isn’t a new book as such but an older book re-titled for the Very Short Introduction series. I tend to me more wary of these titles. Roman Britain was good for its time, but its time was 1984 and that VSI is a bit of a disappointment. This book by Stillman Drake, who I hadn’t heard of, was originally published in 1996 and hasn’t dated as far as I can tell. Given that I didn’t recognise the name of one of the major scholars on a pivotal event in the History of Science you should be able to work out I’m not exactly a More >
New UNESCO World Heritage Sites
Jul 13th
UNESCO has added some more names to their list of world heritage sites. I seem to have a different list to the one their website has, so I’ll go with theirs. Interesting sites on the list include.
Finally and most importantly Tequila is now listed as a world treasure. “It reflects both the fusion of pre-Hispanic traditions of fermenting mescal juice with the European distillation processes and of local technologies and those imported from Europe and the U.S.A.”
hic!
Sun Symbolism and Cosmology in “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment” by Valerie Shrimplin
Jul 13th
[Cross-posted to Revise & Dissent]
Valerie Shrimplin’s Sun Symbolism and Cosmology in “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment” is a difficult book to write about. I like it, but it tackles such a varied range of sources that it raises a lot of intriguing questions. Certainly more than can be covered in one blog post so, for now, I’ll leave them for a later post. For now I’ll start from the popular, if incorrect, view of the arrival of Copernicanism.
Sometime in the 16th century Nicolaus Copernicus discovered that contrary to the teachings of the church, the Earth went round the Sun. Fearing condemnation by the Church he refused to publish his theory until his death. The next day Galileo buys a copy of the book and is inspired to discover Jupiter’s moons with a telescope. This proves Copernicus’s theory and he tells the world about it. In the Vatican all hell breaks loose, figuratively speaking. The Inquistion is sent to deal with Galileo, much to his surprise, and so the church becomes an army of darkness in the War for Enlightenment.
The above is nonsense, but perhaps a fair stereotype of the Science vs. Religion battle that continues to this day. So what would it mean More >
