The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Archive for 2008
Cosmic WTF
A new article in Sky & Telescope magazine reports on a recent discovery of a highly anomalous “optical transient” detected by the Hubble telescope in the constellation Bootes. The object, in the location of no known star or galaxy, appeared and brightened to the 21st magnitude over a span of about 100 days, and then […]
Politely ignoring linguistic primitivity
M.J. Harper (The Secret History of the English Language–see previous post) has been taken to task for an apparent misunderstanding of how evolution works: A form can’t evolve from another living form, goes the dogma; rather, two related forms are said to share a common ancestor. So, for example, humans did not evolve from chimpanzees; […]
The Secret History of the English Language
Reckoning the origins of words is a politically significant exercise, and etymologies, wherever and whenever they are from, are notoriously full of shit. They always reflect someone’s political vested interests or fantasies of “who was here first.” Yet somehow the old dons who gave us our etymological bible, the OED, have always remained above suspicion. […]
Evolution of the Eye
Wikipedia has a terrific, thorough and readable explanation of the evolution of the eye from earlier structures (directional photodetectors found in simple, even single-celled organisms). It has nice diagrams and pictures of the intermediate forms leading to this astonishing structure. Next time you have lunch with a Creationist or “intelligent design” proponent–who love to flog […]
Juniper of Pistoia (or, sex and the art of memory)
Lately I’m obsessed with Peter of Ravenna. All the histories on the art of memory mention him as the first profit-minded memory wizard to actually write a popular manual on the subject (late in the 15th century) — a book aimed at regular people trying to get ahead in business, law, or whatever. His book, […]
