Whewell’s Gazette
Your weekly digest of all the best of
Internet history of science, technology and medicine
Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell
Volume #8
Monday 11 August 2014
EDITORIAL:
Our editorial-staff is back from the first part of their holiday and managed to scrape together a somewhat deficient new edition of our links aggregator for the last seven days of Internet history of science, technology and medicine. If they missed your brilliant definitive blog post, sorry! WE missed slightly less than we might have done because the spirit of seventeenth-century alchemist and glassmaker Antonio Neri popped over to help Mr Whewell in the absence of those who are supposed to do the job, for which we are very grateful
Next weeks edition will also be somewhat curtailed as the editorial-staff are going away again for the weekend. You just can’t get good workers these days! As a result next weeks edition will appear on Tuesday and not our regular Monday.
ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:
BIRTHDAYS OF THE WEEK: William Hamilton and John Venn
Aperiodical: John Venn is 180
Irish Philosophy: What has Hamilton to do with philosophy?
Ernst Haeckel
Letters from Gowana: Ernst Haeckel, The Scientist as an Artist
Embryo Project: Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel
Youtube: Video: Proteus 2004
“Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of being and becoming!”
Shells and Pebbles: “Illegal Science” – The Case of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and German Biology Education
PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:
The Renaissance Mathematicus: “…realigning the heavens with a single stroke of the brush.” – Really?
Perimeter Institute: 10 Great Quotes from Richard Feynman
APS: Focus: Landmarks – Discovery of Particles inside the Proton
Science Notes: August 8 is Paul Dirac’s birthday
Leaping Robot: Remembering Dr Comet
The Nuclear Secrecy Blog: The Kyoto misconception
BBC: Will the Rosetta mission finally end our fear of comets?
Science Notes: August 10 marks the passing of Henry Moseley.
Starts With A Bang: The Man Who Invented the 26th Dimension
Physics Today: Navier-Stokes equations remain elusive
EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:
CBC News: Franklin search: Jim Balsillie, warship all part of largest effort yet to find lost ships
National Maritime Museum: The Art and Science of Exploration
MEDICINE:
The Triangle: The Graduates
Early Modern Medicine: Wounded at War
Wonders and Marvels: Poisoning Enemies in the Ancient Mideast
From The Hands of Quacks: Surgeons & Surgical Kits
Thought Catalog: Sick Roses: Disease And The Art of Medical Illustration
Boing boing: Dery on Disease and Art
CHEMISTRY:
The Public Domain Review: “O, Excellent Air Bag”: Humphry Davy and Nitrous Oxide
Shells and Pebbles: The Chemical Skeleton: Why Chemistry Mattered to 18th-century Medicine
EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:
A Medley of Potpourri: Alfred Russel Wallace
Letters from Gonwana: African Paleoclimate and Early Hominin Evolution
TECHNOLOGY:
Yovisto: Nicolas-Jacques Conté and the Pencil
Science Notes: August 5 is Neil Armstrong’s birthday
Ptak Books: Digital “Computers” 1450-1750: Memory and Calculating on the Fingers and Hands
Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: Alexi Baker on science, sales and spectacles in 18th-century London
Ri Science: One of the first ever drawings of a fuel cell (1842)
Yovisto: Marvin Minsky and Artificial Neural Networks
The Atlantic: The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame)
META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:
Cross-Check: A Brief Correspondence on Copernicus, Descartes, Kant, Darwin, Freud, George Ellis and Thomas Nagel (among Others)
The Recipes Project: First Monday Library Chat: Rijksmuseum
Guardian: Academics fear for Warburg Institute’s London Library, saved from the Nazis
Somatosphere: In the Journals, July 2014 – Part 1
John Stewart: Wikipedia in the Classroom
The H–Word Blog: Not moribund at all! An historian of medicine’s response to Richard Horton
Wellcome Library: Is Medical History Dead?
The Chirugeon’s Apprentice: Being a Medical History Blogger
ESOTERIC:
Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: Astrology and the novatores
The Appendix: Divine Reverie: Revelation, Dream Interpretation, and Teeth in Antiquity
homunculus: On the side of the angels
Yovisto: Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi – The Prince of Astrologers
Nautilus: Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot
Conciatore: Report from Parnassus
Conciatore: The Curious Reader
BOOK REVIEWS:
Chemical Heritage Society: Peter J. Bowler. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 328 pp.
Academia.edu: Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639-1712), the First Archaeologist…
TELEVISION:
Slate: How Accurate Is The Knick’s Take on Medical History?
Dr. William Halsted, inspiration for Clive Owen’s character in AtTheKnick, operating in 1904
NYAM: Bare-knuckle surgery? Why no gloves on The Knick
NYAM: It’s All in the Details
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
New Book: Piers Hale: Political Descent. Malthus, Mutualism and the Politics of Evolution
Hyperallergic: 15 Million Pages of Medical History are Going Online
Drawing of an embryo from “Hand-book of Physiology” by William Senhouse Kirkes (1860) via Wellcome Library
New Book: Russian California, 1806-1860: A History in Documents
History of Science Society: HSS 2014 –– Preliminary Program
LOOKING FOR WORK?
Jonathan Eisen’s Lab: Director of Charles Darwin research Station in Galapagos
Saxton Bampfylde: Director The Warburg Institute, University of London
