The Weekly Smörgåsbord #4
Posted by Darin Hayton on 03/14 at 09:48 AM
Along with the usual range of modern topics, there are a couple of links to late medieval and early modern topics. I’m always happy to see posts on earlier material.
- “Scott and Scurvy” — An interesting history of scurvy from the 18th to the 20th century.
- “Mysterious snake appears in painting of Queen Elizabeth I and Elizabeth I and a Snake?” — The Telegraph reported that a bunch of flowers in a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I might have, originally, been a snake. The blog Albert’s Window has a further comment on the portrait.
- “Philosophers Rip Darwin” — Michael Ruse’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on academics criticizing Darwin’s theory of evolution (I missed this originally but found it thanks to Beer=Evolution over at the Dispersal of Darwin)
- “On Knowledge and Consistency” — John Wilkins continues the discussion that began with his post, On the Need for Grownups.
- “Perpetual Motion Nonsense” — Nice post over at Skulls in the Stars chronicling dreams of perpetual motion.
- “How do We Fix Science Journalism?” — More in the on-going concern about science journalism.
- “Prester John” — Michael Robinson at Time to Eat the Dogs has a nice review of a recent thesis on the importance of the Prester John myth in the history of European exploration.
- “CIA Experimented with LSD” — The Primate Diaries points to an interesting article in The Telegraph on the CIA’s experiments on French villagers.
- “Anthropological Cosmology and Anti-Demarcationism, pt. 1” — Will Thomas offers another interesting historiographic post.
- “Thermodynamics, and the origin of replicators” — Evolving Evolution uses a post by Sean Carroll over at Discover as a point of departure to think about replicators and whether or not most explanations posit a “scientific miracle.”