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 #7
Monday 04 August 2014
EDITORIAL:
We are already up to the seventh edition of our little Internet journal, which seeks to anthologise all the best of the histories of science, medicine and technology to be found in cyberspace in the last seven days. Seven was also the number of the wandering stars or planets counted in the astronomy of the ancients a fact reflected in the names of our astrological week: Sun-day, Moon-day, Mars-day (Tuesday is Mardi in French), Mercury-day (Wednesday is Mercredi in French), Jupiter-day (Thursday is Jeudi in French) Venus-day (Friday is Vendredi in French) and Saturn-day.
Wheel of properties of the seven planets Bohme 1682
Astronomy, but not astrology, was just one of the multitudinous interests of the extraordinary seventeenth-century polymath Robert Hooke (28.07.1635-3.03.1703 ns) who is our birthday boy for this edition. Our favourite Hooke expert Dr Felicity Henderson (@felicityhen) has sent off a Google Doodle proposal for Hooke’s Micrographia, which celebrates its 350th anniversary in 2015. We hope her endeavours will be crowned with success.
This Week’s Featured Tweet: A series of thought provoking tweets from Nicholas Evans (@neva9257) on the use of the word science:
Pro-tip: things get weird immediately after you start the sentence “science is…” “Science” variously describes 1) a collection of facts; 2) a series of criteria for confirming those facts; 3) a set of methods for pursuing those criteria;4) an institution housing those methods; 5) a collection of agents that inhabit, guide and modify that institution; 6) all of the above;7) none of the above;8) some combination 1-7. So the second you start with “science is good/bad/awesome/evil/neutral/bunnies/etc.” I’d love to know about which “science” you are talking.
ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:
BIRTHDAYS OF THE WEEK: Robert Hooke
British Library: Fleas, moulds and plant cells: under a 17th century microscope with Robert Hooke
History of Geology: July 18, 1635(os): Robert Hooke
The Royal Society: Microscopic views of a spider (spot the error!)
It’s not a spider it’s a harvestman! h/t Matthew Cobb
Robert Hooke’s London: Micrographia inspires artists and creative writers
New York Academy of Medicine: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (Item of the Month)
Renaissance Mathematicus: Making the indiscernible visible: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia
Wallification: Happy Birthday to Robert Hooke
Science Museum: Brought to Life: Robert Hooke (1635-1703)
Hooke’s London: A mackerel sky
PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:
Guardian: Smashing Physics: How we discovered the Higgs boson (podcast)
Uncertain Principles: The Fermi Alternative
Forbes: Launching today: The Georges Lemaître: Last of the European ATV Space Vehicles
Guardian: The dreams of invisibility
Medievalists Net: A New Set of Fourteenth Century Planetary Observations
The Renaissance Mathematicus: Johannes Kepler’s Somnium and Katharina Kepler’s Trial for Witchcraft: The emergence of a myth
The Renaissance Mathematicus: How much can you get wrong in an eight hundred word biographical sketch of a very famous sixteenth and seventeenth-century mathematicus and philosophicus? – One helluva lot it seems?
Youtube: Video: Carl Anderson’s Positron Photograph made 2 August 1932
The Curious Wavefunction: Celebrating the 1939 Leo Szilard letter to FDR and setting the record straight
Yovisto: John Tyndall and the Physics of Air
EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:
Board of Longitude Project: A pirate map
University Library of Utrecht: Cuba or Cyprus? : a remarkable copy of the Mercator-Hondius atlas from 1606
MEDICINE:
BBC: When gin was full of sulphuric acid and turpentine
Fiction Reboot Daily Dose: MedHum Monday: Getting the Word Out with the Robert L. Brown History of Medicine Collection
Circulating Now: The Question of Rest for Women
OUP Blog: Video: Does Pain Have a History?
New York Academy of Medicine: Naissance Macabre: Birth, Death, and Female Anatomy
CHoM News: Medical Heritage Library Digitizes Ida Cannon’s “Social Work in Hospitals”
The Recipes Project: Sweet as Honey
NPR: Why Somebody’s Mummy Can Teach You About Heart Disease
Irish Examiner: The Anatomy of a Lie – The Irish woman who lived as a man to practice medicine
BBC: The man who helped save 50 million lives
Guardian: Influenza: How the Great War helped create the greatest pandemic ever know
CHEMISTRY:
Yovisto: Stephanie Kwolek and the Bulletproof Vest
Kim Renfield: Rivalry over the First Periodic Table
Science Notes: August 3 marks the passing of Richard Willstätter
EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:
3 Quarks Daily: Killing Things
Darin Hayton: Ernst Haeckel’s Letter to E.D. Cope
Youtube: Video: German Bone Wars Musical! Harald Rosenberger “Der Kampf um die Knochen”
The Boston Globe: Blaschka’s sea creatures surface anew at Harvard
Motherboard: What Wiped Out the Dinosaurs? Very, Very Bad Luck
New Website: William Smith Online
The Sloane Letters Blog: Strange Pigs
The Embryo Project: Leonard Hayflick (1928-)
The Public Domain Review: Adriaen Coenen’s Fish Book (1580)
Sandwalk: Obituary: Walter Gehring (1939-2014)
Science Notes: August 1 is Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck’s birthday
TECHNOLOGY:
The Atlantic: In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was ‘Too Fast for the Truth’
Science Notes: July 30 is Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin’s birthday
Atlas Obscura: Electrum: The World’s Largest Tesla Coil
Retronaut: 1933: Proposed tower for the 1937 Paris Exposition
Popular Science: Behind the Scenes of “The Whole Brilliant Enterprise”
Computer History Museum: The Cryotron: Extremely Rare Superconducting Digital Circuits Come to CHM
IEEE Spectrum: Frank Malina: America’s Forgotten Rocketeer
Ptak Books: A finely designed microscope ad, 1890
Renaissance Utterances: Jost Amman and the Wire Drawing Bench
Andrea M: Adolfo Wildtat’s Ear Shaped Entry Phone 1927
META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:
Conciatore: The Neighbors Reprise
Literacy of the Present: How Do You Like Your Science? Rare, Medium or Well-Done?
Yovisto: Karl Popper and the Philosophy of Science
Atomic Heritage Foundation: B Reactor Tours
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics: What Great Scientists Did When They Weren’t Doing Great Science
Cyborgology: An Extremely Brief History of Science and Technology Studies
Compass Wallah: East India Company & The Scientific Revolution
India House: The Sale Room
Conciatore: Celebrates his one-year bloggiversary: Gratitude
ESOTERIC:
Astrologie in der Frühen Neuzeit: Astrology textbooks in different movements in the 16th century
Parapsychology: On the Antiquity of Psychic Phenomena
Nancy Marguerite Anderson: The Sasquatch Story
Heterodoxology: Launching “Occult Minds”: official website of my postdoctoral research project
History of Alchemy: Podcast: Christina of Sweden
BOOK REVIEWS:
Cambridge Journals: Immortal Longings: F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Live after Death
Times Higher Education: Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, by Piers J. Hale
Chemical Heritage Foundation: Down, but Not Out Edward Shorter. How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown.
LSE: Are We All Scientific Experts Now? By Harry Collins
Brain Pickings: Magnificent Maps: Cartography as Power, Propaganda, and Art
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Queen Mary University of London: CfP Being Modern: Science and Culture in the early 20th century.
The Sloane Letters Blog: An explanation for absence: Shark Bites and Sloane Bobs
Scientific American: Nature at War: A special collection of articles originally published between 1914 and 1918
Somatosphere: Foreign Correspondents: call for reviewers and books to be reviewed
New Website: William Smith Online
Royal College of Physicians: Exhibition: The Anatomy of a Building: Denys Lasdun and the Royal College of Physicians 8 Sept 2014-13 Feb 2015
The Wellcome Library: The UK Medical Heritage Library: uniting digitised collections
Veterinary History London: The 41st Congress of the World Association for the History of Veterinary Medicine (WAHVM) 10-13 September 2014
Wharf.co.uk: What’s on: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest For Longitude at National Maritime Museum
Gravity Fields: Lecture: Newton and the Apothecary Dr Anna Marie Roos 25 September 2014
LOOKING FOR WORK?
University of Kent: Grading Evidence of mechanisms in physics and biology PhD Studentship and Postdoc Research Associate (philosophy of science)
Princeton University Press Editorial Assistant
Science Museum Group Explainer
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:
The editorial staff of Whewell’s Gazette are going on holiday tomorrow and will have little time and possibly very little Internet access so there will probably not be an edition of your favourite history of science, technology and medicine link aggregator next week or if there is it will be severely curtailed.
Whewell's Ghost 
Thanks for doing this, and have a nice holiday! Would you consider mentioning the English-language posts (about 1/2) from our Dutch history of science blog http://www.shellsandpebbles.com/ as well? I think our recent posts about Ernst Haeckel or Jerome Gaub would fit in quite well in this list.