The Weekly Smörgåsbord #11
Posted by Darin Hayton on 05/25 at 10:56 PM
This week’s links fall into a few groups. Happily, people seem to be finding the time again to write (excluding me), making for some interesting reading.
A couple posts by the ever-talented The Renaissance Mathematicus:
- Circumnavigating the Globe — A nice post on the Franconian instrument maker and printer Johannes Schöner.
- Jerry the Builder from the Waterfall — Renaissance anatomy and medicine in the work of Girolamo Fabrizi d’Aquapendente.
Of course, no Smörgåsbord is complete without some posts by Will Thomas over at Ether Wave Propaganda:
- The Newman-Chalmers Dispute, Pt. 1: Chymistry and Natural Philosophy — A nice summary of the issues separating Newman’s Boyle from Chalmers’s.
- Two Schaffer-Related Items — a pointer to Simon Schaffer’s latest article, on astrology and Mesmerism, coming out in June in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and his new project on longitude.1
- Bites of History — Looks at some of the ways professional organizations are making bits and pieces of their archives available. While not robust enough for most historians’s tastes, these bits and bobs offer a nice way even for historians to learn something.
- Schaffer on Metrology — Continuing his survey of Simon Schaffer’s corpus, Will looks at some of his articles on measurement in Victorian Britain.
John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts seems to be on a “Was X a Philosopher?” and a “What is philosopy?” spree:
Craig Venter’s work on synthetic cells (Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome) is attracting considerable attention:
- Creation Myths
- Immaculate Creation: Birth of the First Synthetic Cell
- The World’s First Artificial Life Form
- Public is Relaxes about First Artificial Life
Some miscellaneous articles and links:
- The Leviathan’s Shoulders — This month’s history of science blog carnival, focusing on posts about the ocean or the seas.
- Cyclists Find New Way to Use Old Doping Tool — As we approach the Tour de France, we are again facing the problem of drug use in the peloton.
- Andrew Wakefield and MMR: the ‘Impact Factor’ — A story about the MMR-Autism scare.
- Kopernikus ein zweites Mal beigesetzt — A short video on Copernicus being interred (again) in the Cathedral in Frombork (complete with some journalistic license about Copernicus’s relationship to the Catholic Church).
- The 10 Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries — Speaking of Copernicus, his heliocentric system is #1 on this most disturbing list.
Notes—
1This forthcoming volume has a number of essays on the history of astrology in it, including one by me: “Instruments and demonstrations in the astrological curriculum: evidence from the University of Vienna, 1500-1530.” Unfortunately, a paywall blocks full access, but the abstracts are freely available.⇑