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 #23
Monday 24 November 2014
EDITORIAL:
The #histSTM story of the week on a popular level is without any doubt the start of the film biography of Alan Turing staring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly, The Imitation Game. Previous editions of Whewell’s Gazette have featured several previews, trailers and whatever leading up to the premiere, all of which has left our editorial staff with the uneasy feeling that the film will only add to the hagiography that has overtaken the Turing biography since 2012 and the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. As most people are totally incapable of understanding his genuine ground-breaking contributions to meta-mathematics, for which he should justifiably be honoured, his contributions in other fields have been blown up out of all proportions turning him into a sort of boffin superman. Most recently we read the statement that he was “…the tormented outcast who gave us the modern world”, which we commented with Hyperbolic, hagiographic, bullshit! We haven’t had the chance to see the film yet but we thought our readers might be interested in what others who have thought of the film most hotly tipped to sweep the Oscars.
Dazed: Alan Turing expert dissects The Imitation Game
The Guardian: Hidden heroes of codebreaking history
The Telegraph: Imitation Game: how did the Enigma machine work?
Poet Freak: On 100th Birthday of Alan Turing
UCL: STS Observatory: The Imitation Game
Endgadget: ‘The Imitation Game’ puts the spotlight on Alan Turing and his groundbreaking machine
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH stars in THE IMITATION GAME (Film still)
The Guardian: Benedict Cumberbatch wins genius status at Time magazine
Wall Street Journal: Benedict Cumberbatch and ‘The Imitation Game’
Business Insider: You Need To See ‘The Imitation Game’ If You Care At All About Technology
http://www.businessinsider.com/turing-film-the-imitation-game-is-great-2014-11
ABC News: ‘The Imitation Game’: A Look at the Life and Legacy of Alan Turing
Flickering Myth com: Second Opinion – The Imitation Game (2014)
The Aperiodical: An Alan Turing expert watches the “The Imitation Game” trailer
I Know Today: Alexandre Desplat – Movie Score Composer For The Imitation Game
NY Daily News: Benedict Cumberbatch puts celebrity to use illuminating historical wrong in ‘The Imitation Game’
Quotes of the Week:
I can’t wait for the new TV series “I’m A Celebrity, Land Me On A Comet And Leave Me There!” @telescoper
“I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.” GB Shaw
Is there any academic discipline more misused, abused, and misunderstood than History? @Eganhistory
“History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just . . . things happening one after another.” ― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:
Yovisto: Eugene Wigner and the Structure of the Atomic Nucleus
Eugene Paul Wigner (1902-1995)
AIP: Oral History Transcript – Dr Eugene Wigner
The New York Times: Is Quantum Entanglement Real
Now Appearing: The most obscure physics laureate?
Royal Museums Greenwich: From sundials to caesium – a brief (140 characters) history of time
Image: National Maritime Museum
Atomic Heritage Foundation: The Soviet Hydrogen Bomb Program
Yovisto: Alfonso X from Spain and the Alfonsine Tables
John D. Cook: How medieval astronomers made trig tables
EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:
Londonist: The British Library Searches For A Northwest Passage
The Bookhunter on Safari: Lines in the Ice
The Guardian: Chilling History: the men who hunted the elusive Northwest Passage
Tetrapod Zoology: Chet van Duzer’s Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps
Compasswallah: The Compass of Kãlidãsa
British Library: Maps and views blog: These maps were made for walking
Ptak Science Books: A Bestiary of Maps
John Bull and His Friends. A Serio-Comic Map of Europe By Fred W. Rose…
Academia.edu: Map of Asia Minor with Greek Names
Ptak Science Books: Visionary Maps: the Earth Without Water, 1694
Compasswallah: The Double-Edged Map
MEDICINE:
The Atlantic: Why No One Can Design a Better Speculum
Perceptions of Pregnancy: Megetia’s jaw: a rare historical insight into hyperemesis gravidarum
The New Yorker: Drool: Ivan Pawlov’s real quest
British Red Cross: Dogs of War: The First Aiders on Four Legs
Gas mask hounds
The Generous Georgian; Dr Richard Mead: Venomous Exhalations
BBC: The self-publicist whose medical text books caused a stir
Notches: Clitoridectomies: Female Genital Mutilation c.1860-2014
The Quack Doctor: Detective Caminada and the quack doctors
The Embryo Project: Dennis Lo (1963- )
Early Modern Medicine: Puppy Water, Beauty’s Help
Image Credit: Wellcome Library London
Dr Alun Withey: Good and Bad Deaths in the Seventeenth Century
Warwick Knowledge Centre: Nigella Seeds: The Vicks Inhaler of Ancient Greece and Modern Day Marrakech
Advances in the History of Psychology: “Hermann von Helmholtz’s Empirico-Transcendentalism Reconsidered”
The New York Times: Willy Burgdorfer, Who Found Bacteria That Caused Lyme Disease , Is Dead at 89
The Chirugeon’s Apprentice: Death is All Around Us: The Plague Pits of London
Yovisto: William Beaumont and the human digestion
The Lancet: Perspectives: The art of medicine: Drugs, alchohol, and the First World War
CHEMISTRY:
The Recipes Project: The Pharmaca of Jozeph Coelho: A Family of Converso Apothecaries in Seventenh-Century Coimbra
Credit: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, BNP 2259, Pharmaca de Jozeph Coelho (1668), fol. 1r.
EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:
Letters From Gondwana: The Plant Fossil Record and the Extinction Events
The Guardian: Mammoths are a huge part of my life. But cloning them is wrong.
Palaeoblog: Died This Day: Carl Akeley
Wired: Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Seriously Believed Criminals Were Part Ape
Medievalist.net: A Royal Beast and the Menagerie in the Tower
Slate: How One 17th-Century Artist Produced a Good Painting of an Animal He’d Never Seen
Science in the Making: He Told Animal Stories
Trowelblazers: Katherine Woolley
Natural History Museum: Rare Stegosaurus skeleton to be unveiled at the museum
The Museum’s new Stegosaurus specimen
History of Geology: Earth’s Age and the Cosmic Calendar
Notches: Mau Mau, anti-colonialism and “female genital mutilation”
Slate: Beautiful, Terrible Watercolors of a 19th-Century Whale Hunt, Found in a Ship’s Logbook
Natural History Museum: Evolution pioneer’s illegible notebook brought back to life
Thinking Like a Mountain: (Re)Introducing the Capercaillie to Scotland, 1837-1900
Taylor & Francis Online: Brass for Brains: Lord Kelvin and tide prediction
The Embryo Project: Edwin Grant Conklin
Wallifaction: Piltdown Man
Business Insider UK: Researchers Found Something Amazing When They Autopsied A 40, 00-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth
Nature: Lucy discoverer on the ancestor people relate to
The Guardian: Shelf Life: 33 Million Things
Terrain.org: The Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell
Kestrels and Cerevisiae: The Turkey
Pierre Belon du Mans, L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux, 1555:
TECHNOLOGY:
Internet Society: Brief History of the Internet
Conciatore: Cardinal del Monte Reprise
Active History.ca: History Matters: ‘It’s history, like it or not’: the Significance of Sudbury’s Superstack
Inside the Science Museum: How did tea and cake help start s computing revolution?
Leo I electronic computer, c 1960s (Image: Science Museum)
University of Toronto: Scientific Instrument Collection: For the Birds: The Bird Behaviour Recorder
The Atlantic: Old, Weird Tech: John Muir Mechanical GTD Desk Edition
Motherboard: The Evolution of Planetary Rovers in Pictures
Slate: The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature
My medieval foundry: The origin and use of bellows, especially in medieval Europe
NPR: How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Set Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard
How We Get To Next: The Big Cooking Geek Trend of 1911, Paper Bags
Science Museum: Automatic tea-making machine (1902-10)
Auttomatic Tea-Making Machine built by Albert E Richardson, a clockmaker from Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire. (Image: Science Museum)
Yovisto: Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Suez Canal
Giacomo Parrinello: Aqueducts 1800-1940: An Animated Map
NYAM: A Different Kind of Flush
Christie’s: A British Typex Cipher Machine
Atlas Obscura: Barthman’s Sidewalk Clock
Brand Thinking: Do You Remember When Printing Was Still a New Technology?
META – HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:
Eccentric Parabola: Peter Hopkirk – Historian of the Great Game
Fortune: Can we survive technology (Fortune 1955) John von Neumann
Remedia: Archive Magpie Vol. 2
Guardian: Exhibition review: Into the orgasmatron! The Institute of Sexology hits the spot
Thinking inside the box … Stephen Moss sits inside an ‘orgone accumulator’. Photograph: David Levene
Historiens de la santé: History of Psychiatry December 2014; 25 (4) Contents
Productive (adj) A lively look at work-life balance: How to attend a conference with a baby
The Royal Society: The Repository: An alternative philosophical supper
Corpus Newtonicum: SIN Meets LSA
THE: Wellcome Trust announces major funding scheme changes
Wellcome Trust: Wellcome Trust unveils new funding framework
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science: Historicizing Big Data
Qatar Digital Library: Why were so many of the Greek-Arabic Translators Christians?
New APPS: In memoriam Patrick Suppes
Historiens de la santé: Social History of Medicine Vol. 27 (4) Contents
The Conversation: Sorry minister, but philistinism is not an educational policy
BBC: Imperial War Museum library closure petition launched
Science Book a Day: Interviews Philip Ball
Brain Pickings: A Visual Timeline of the Future Based on Famous Fiction
Royal Historical Society: Public History Prize
Doctor or Doctress: Exploring American history through the eyes of women physicians
University of Edinburgh: Paper (OA): Science and sociability: Women as audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901 @beckyfh
SHOT 2014: Tweets Storified
ESOTERIC:
Medievalist.net: The Book of Felicity
Conciatore: The Dominican Connection
Mitteldeutsche Zeitung: 500 Jahre alte Alchemistenwerkstatt in Wittenberg
Restauratorin Vera Keil vom Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte begutachtet Hinterlassenschaften einer rund 500 Jahre alten Alchemistenwerkstatt. (BILD: DPA)
History of Alchemy: Elizabeth I and Alchemy (podcast)
BOOK REVIEWS:
Double Refraction: How to end the science wars: a review of Harry Collins and Jay Labinger, The One Culture? A Conversation About Science, part I/II
Forbes: A Magisterial Synthesis of Apes and Human Evolution
Professor Russell H. Tuttle, University of Chicago. Image courtesy of Phys.org.
NEW BOOKS:
Chicago Tribune: James Watson on ‘Father to Son’
The H-Word: History of science books: Pickstone Prize shortlist announced
h-madness: A new biography of Freud by Élisabeth Roudinesco
John Tyndall Correspondence Project: Vol. 1 of the Tyndall Correspondence is nearing publication!
Pickering & Chatto: Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700-1880 now available as eBook
Historiens de la santé: The Recent History of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
Historiens de la santé: Medical Monopoly. Intellectual Property rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry Joseph M. Gabriel
THEATRE:
FILM:
The Huffington Post: Sir Isaac Newton and the Inadvertent Feminist
TELEVISION:
VIDEOS:
OSU: Special Collections & Archives: “The Live and Work of Linus Pauling (1901-1994): A Discourse of the Art of Biography”
Vimeo: The Earth is Round! The Image of the Earth in the Middle Ages
Vimeo: The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries
American Museum of Natural History: Shelf Life: Episode One: 33 Million Things
Youtube: Jocelyn Bell Burnell – Pulsar Discovery
Youtube: Trust in Science workshop in Toronto
Youtube: Museums and STEM Engagement: Objects of Invention
CBS News: Almanac: Vacuum Tubes
Youtube: Introduction to the Board of Longitude
RADIO:
PODCASTS:
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
CHOMI: University of Ulster: History of Medicine Essay Prize 2015
Durham Medieval Philosophy Lab: The Medieval Mind Lecture Series 2014-2015 Preliminary Schedule
Umeå University: The Anthropocene – A History of the World (course)
University of Oxford: Faculty of English: CfP: Medicine of Words: Literature, Medicine, and Theology in the Middle Ages 11-12 September 2015
Aarhus University: Centre for Science Studies: CfP: Biannual meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice 24-26 June 2015
Royal Historical Society: Public History Prize
Miami University: Kimberly Hamlin honored with Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize
Wellcome Collection: Exhibition: The Institute of Sexology 20 Nov 2014-20 Sept 2015
H-memory: CfP: “Material traces of Mass Death – the exhumed object” France Nov 2015
Chemical Heritage Foundation: Exhibition: Books of Secrets: reading & writing alchemy Opening Friday 5 December 2014
An Alchemist in His Laboratory, follower of Gerrit Dou, 17th century, oil on panel. Courtesy of Roy Eddleman.
Royal Historical Society: CfP: An Honourable Death Birkbeck, University of London 9 May 2015
Writing Fieldwork: CfP: Two-day symposium on fieldwork, its history, and the place of writing and texts within it. Princeton University 24-25 April 2015
Society for the History of Chemistry and Alchemy: Making Chemistry: History, Materials, and Practices: Royal Institution and Institute of Making, UCL, London 8 December 2014
University of Southampton: CfP: Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic 15-16 June 2015
The Harvard Crimson: Professor Wins History of Science Award
Royal Museums Greenwich: Lecture: The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch 27 November
LOOKING FOR WORK:
Port Towns & Urban Culture: Come and work with us! Lecturer/ Research Fellows in Naval History
University of Manchester: Research Fellow in the History of Biology/Medicine
Science Museum Group: Current Vacancies
University of Oxford: Over 900 Scholarships for new graduate students at Oxford in 2015-16
Queen Mary University of London: Postgraduate Research Studentships
University of Portsmouth: Lecturer/Research Fellow in the History of the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail, circa 1660-1815
Wellcome Trust: Portfolio Development Manager: Medical Humanities
Wellcome Trust: Senior Project Manager
