Posts tagged Folklore
Making sense of meteorites
Sep 28th
A were-llama?
There’s been a couple of interesting posts on the Peru Illness Flap recently. If you haven’t been reading about this, somewhere in the Andes near Lake Titicaca villagers saw a flash of light and heard a bang. They went to investigate and found a crater. They say there was a strange smell and that people are getting ill.
I’d been planning to blog about this when there was more information, so I was pleased to read Hysterical about hysteria on the SciAm blog. A lot of sites have been rubbishing the idea that this was an extra-terrestrial illness, which is fine, but George Musser at SciAm gets it exactly right when he argues that if you want to talk about the incident’s effect on the local people simple Geology isn’t enough. Geology is great when it comes to rocks, but it’s a remarkably poor method to investigate people. (more…)
It’s good, but is it Science?
Jul 15th
There was an interesting page in News @ Nature yesterday. Ruth Ludwin, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network at the University of Washington in Seattle, has been studying stories from the Salish people of the North American west coast about a’yahos, a spirit associated with shaking of the ground and rushing, muddy water. All very nice but even better, by tracing the tales to specific locations, she’s able to tie the stories to evidence of ancient landslides.
Nature notes:
Ludwin is keen to continue her work, but says she is having difficulty securing funds from the US Geological Survey. “I think they feel it doesn’t strictly fall under their mandate,” she explains. “It kind of falls somewhere between the humanities and the sciences.” She says she will look for alternative sources of funding.
If you’re interested she has a webpage Cascadia Megathrust Earthquakes in PNW Indian Legend. The reference to her current letter is: Ludwin R. S., et al. Seismol. Res. Lett., 76. 431 – 436 (2005).
