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 #12
Monday 08 September 2014
EDITORIAL:
The dozen is full and you can now read the twelfth edition of the #histSTM weekly links list Whewell’s Gazette. It’s a bit early to be getting out the champagne but it would appear that our journal is in the process of becoming established.
Time to ask the reader(s) for a little feedback. Do you like what you see? Do you want it to continue? Do you have suggestions for improvements (that don’t involve too much work!). Do you have a #histSTM blog that we have consistently ignore? If so pipe up and demand attention! Your opinion is important to us (maybe!).
An important message to all, who use images in the Internet.
The 1 September saw a sad anniversary in the history of nature and the environment with one hundred years since the death of the last known passenger pigeon, Martha. Once one of the most numerous birds in North America it was no more. We start our journal this week with a round up of some, there were many more, of the articles remembering Martha and the fate of her once so numerous fellow pigeons.
ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:
A Martha Special:
Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) Catalog no. 461042
© AMNH/C. Chesek
American Museum of Natural History: Cautionary Anniversary: Last Passenger Pigeon Died 100 Years Ago
Scientific American: Observations: Black Skies No More: Passenger Pigeons Slaughtered
West Virginia Public Broadcasting: The Flight of the Passenger Pigeon, Now 100 Years Extinct
Slate: The Loney Life and Mysterious Death of the Lasat Passenger Pigeon
Wildlife Activities: How many of our birds are destined to go the way of the passenger pigeon?
Live Science: A Century for the Last Passenger Pigeon
Bird Watching: On a Monument to the Pigeon, by Aldo Leopold
National Geographic: Century After Extinction, Passenger Pigeons Remain Iconic—And Scientists Hope to Bring Them Back
Smithsonian.com: 100 Years After Her Death, Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon, Still Resonates
environment 360: Fate of the Passenger Pigeon Looms as a Somber Warning
Financial Times: The extinction of the passenger pigeon
Natural History Museum: 100 passenger pigeon facts on the 100th anniversary of its extinction
The Lawson Trek: Along the Path: The Passenger Pigeon – – Returning to the Original Observers
PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:
Atomic Heritage: Marie Curie
Science Notes: Today In Science History – September 2 – Franz Xaver von Zach
Wired: Fantastically Wrong: The Imaginary Radiation That Shocked Science and Ruined Its ‘Discoverer’
Compass Wallah: The Auroras of Bombay (1872)
Space Watchtower: Astronomy and World War II
EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:
The Renaissance Mathematicus: The naming of America
Yovisto: The Travels of William Dampier
Map of the East Indies from Dampier’s “A New Voyage Round the World”, published in 1697
Halley’s Log: Halley writes from Long Reach
MEDICINE:
SFARI: London as a crucible for autism in the 1950s
Figaries: The case of five children: who were inoculated in Dublin, on the 26th of August, 1725
Conciatore: Top Physician Reprise
From the Hands of Quacks: Refitting a Hospital during the Great War
Constructing Scientific Communities: ‘Sir: I am not a medical man…’: Laypeople and Medical Journals in the Nineteenth Century
NYAM: Patient Photographs and Medical Collecting
The Atlantic: How Racism Creeps Into Medicine
Notches: Where are the animals in the history of sexuality?
A Durok sow with her piglets (Wikimedia Commons)
Swansea University: Obituary: University pays tribute to Professor Anne Borsay
The Conversation: Four weird ideas people used to have about women’s periods
The Atlantic: The Dawn of Modern Anesthesia
History of Medicine in Oregon: Leslie Kent became the first woman in the country elected president of a state medical association.
CHEMISTRY:
Science Notes: Today In Science History – September 1 – Carl Auer von Welsbach
SciLogs: Dorothy Hodgkin: The Queen of Crystallography
Nature: Milestones in Crystallography
Jennifer Sherman Roberts: Great Globs of Glowing Urine
Joseph Wright The Alchemist (Wikimedia Commons)
Ptak Science Books: The Molecular World in Not-Quite 3-D
Conciatore: Neri’s Cabinet #4
EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:
Yovisto: Sergei Winogradsky and the Science of Bacteriology
Guardian: Comment is Free: Limits to Growth was Right
The Embryo Project: The Pasteur Institute (1887- )
Yovisto: Ernst Curtius and the Excavation of Olympia
Kestrels and Cerevisiae: Mendelian-Mutationism (I): The Forgotten Synthesis
Mendelian-Mutationism (II): The Fluctuation-Mutationism Distinction
The Friends of Charles Darwin: The surprise punctuationist
Road to Paris: A very short history of climate change research
Letters from Gondwana: Ancient Greek Theater and the Past Mediterranean Climate
Trowel Blazers: Anne Phillips – The Curious Case of Miss Phillips’ Conglomerate
Anne and John Phillips’ grave in York. Photo by Liam Herringshaw, All Rights Reserved.
TECHNOLOGY:
Spitalfields Life: So Long, George Cossington the Steeplejack
Yovisto: Louis Henry Sullivan – the ‘Father’ of the Skyscraper
The National Museum of Computing: Computing in 1974 from Computer Weekly
Twister Sifter: 100 Years Ago this Telephone Tower in Stockholm Connected 5000 Telephone Lines
Stockholm telephone-tower 1887-1913 over 5000 telephone-lines connected
Photograph Courtesy of Tekniska Museet
Europeana: Early 20th Century Water Cycles
New Scientist: Soviet-era hyperboloid tower saved from destruction
Thick Objects: An “Incomplete” Artefact: Part 1 – Missing Pieces
Conciatore: Stonework
The Journal of Music: Where Electronic Music Began
Inside the Science Museum: Robert Watson-Watt and the Triumph of RADAR
Royal Museums Greenwich: John Harrison and the search for longitude
Ptak Science Books: An Harmonic Analyzer, 1916
The Physics Mill: Non-Digital Computers
META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:
The H-Word: Tattoos for Time Travellers at the British Science Festival 2014
The Nation: Science as Salvation?
Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: James Bradley’s Lectures on Experimental Philosophy
The Recipes Project: Teaching Recipes: A September Series
BSHS Travel Guide: Museum of Ethnography in Budapest
Scientia Salon: The return of radical empiricism
The H-Word: The big Australian science picnic of 1914
Map from The British Empire: its Geography, Resources, Commerce, Land-ways and Water-ways (1891). British Library Flickr
The Recipes Project: First Monday Library Chat: Wangensteen Library
Oregon State University: Dear Professor Einstein: The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in Post-War America
ITV: Bletchley code-breaking machine to be used in school history lessons
New York Times: So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class …
Royal Society: The Repository: “Went to Sir JB’s”: Charles Blagden’s diary and scientific life in Georgian London
The Medievalist: Women Scientists of the Middle Ages and 1600s
ESOTERIC:
British Library: Medieval Manuscripts Blog: A physicians Folding Almanac
A page from a 15th century physician’s folding almanac: London, British Library, MS Harley 3812, f.
BOOK REVIEWS:
Fiction Reboot : Daily Dose: My Notorious Life
The Neuro Times: Piers J. Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England
Portal to the Universe: Two New Eclipse Publications
DailyHistory.org Top Ten Social History of American Medicine Booklist
Richard Carter: ‘The Making of the Fittest” by Sean B Carroll
NEW BOOKS:
Historiens de la santé: Jewish Medical Resistance in the Holocaust
Historiens de la santé: Health and Wellness in 19th-century America
The MIT Press: Recording Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing
Springer: History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (includes History and Philosophy of Science)
Historeins de la santé: Unseen Enemy: The English, Disease, and Medicine in Colonial Bengal, 1617-1847
THEATRE:
Hull Daily Mail: The story of Bletchley Park: That Is All You Need To Know arrives at Hull Truck Theatre in September
Progress Theatre: Darwin & Fitzroy Mon 8 Sept–Sat 13 Sept
TELEVISION:
BBC TWO: Castles in the Sky (The story of RADAR) Just three days left to watch!
VIDEOS:
YOUTUBE: Science and Islam, Jim Al-Khalili – BBC Documentary
VIMEO: Society for the History of Technology Dissertation Video Contest
VImeo: The Nature of Things – Martin Gardner
Vimeo: Under The Knife – Opening Sequence
RADIO:
BBC Radio 4: A Point of View: Lisa Jardine: When fiction comes to the historian’s rescue
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Ghent University: Concepts and methods in philosophy and history of science: Calendar, 2014-2015
Medical Museion: “Anatomy, art and the body” – Copenhagen symposium on Vesalius’ 500th Anniversary
2015 BSHS Postgraduate Conference – Call for papers
The National Archives: All at Sea: international conference on Prize Papers 6 October 2014
All Souls College Oxford: CfP Mathematical readers in the early world 18–19 December 2014
University of Sheffield: CfP Social Networks 1450-1850
The Royal Institution: Ada Lovelace Day – Live! Tuesday 14 October
Wadham College: Symposium: John Wilkins and his Legacy
Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons) If somebody knows the artist tell me.
The British Museum: Exhibition: Witches and wicked bodies: 25 Sept 2014 – 11 Jan 2015
NYAM: Lecture: Author’s Night – Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine
H-NET: Call for submissions: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) book prize
Royal Museums Greenwich: Library Lates: Nevil Maskelyne, Longitude’s Champion 11 September
Manchester Science Festival 23 Oct – 2 Nov 2014
NIH: US National Library of Medicine: Exhibition: The Zwerdling Postcard Collection Pictures of Nursing
Royal College of Physicians: The anatomy of a building: Denys Lasdun and the Royal College of Physicians 8 Sept 2014 – 13 Feb 2015
American Association for the History of Medicine: George Rosen Prize Deadline 31 Oct 2014
Historiens de la santé: History of Iberian Science & Medicine
Art Daily: First major exhibition to explore the historical legacy of African cult astronomy opens at LACMA
The British Society for Literature and Science: CfP BSLS Syposium on Teaching Literature and Science
University of London: EMPHASIS programme 2014-15 (includes #histSTM)
Making Waves: Deadline extended! Science, Pure and Applied: Oliver Lodge, Physics, and Engineering, University of Liverpool, 31 October 2014
The Renaissance Diary: The Oxford-Globe Forum for Medicine and Drama in Practice 4 Oct 2014
The Renaissance Diary: CfP Towards a History of Errors Berlin 10-11 Dec 2014
Historiens de la santé: CfP Medical Humanities in Medieval England Deadline 15 Sept 2014
SHNH: Horniman Museum History of teaching natural history Oct 10-11 2014
Graham Farmelo: The life and Legacy of Sir John Cockcroft 18-19 Sept 2014
LOOKING FOR WORK?
The Museum of Science and Industry – Manchester: Curator of Science and Technology
Northwestern University: Postdoctoral Fellowships, Science in Human Culture
University of Notre Dame: Assistant Professor, History of Science
Two Faculty Positions in Science Studies at Michigan State University
Whewell's Ghost 
To the (ectoplasmic) Editor,
Congratulations to you on the first twelve issues of Whewell’s Gazette: a job very well done. Earlier this week, you made a call for comments and suggestions; as a dedicated reader, I ruminated on this a bit and here is what I coughed up. First, I would hate to see you make any drastic changes, or start embellishing. For me, what makes the whole enterprise so attractive is its bare-bones simplicity. It is a good idea well executed without a lot of fanfare. The Gazette is not simply an aggregator of the history of science, technology and medicine; it is a specific ghost’s personal take on the subject–which makes it very interesting indeed.
In the suggestions department, I only have one. It is modest, but admittedly self-serving; a subject that I am personally obsessed with and therefore would like to see as a dedicated category in the weekly roundup. You could call it “History Craft” or similar; a place to collect items focused on how history is told. By way of example, candidates might include Lisa Jardine’s recent BBC radio essay “When fiction comes to the historian’s rescue,” also the piece by Charlie Jane Anders at io9 on paradoxes about science fiction and history. Even the recent works of Thony Christie, that head-banger of lazy fact-checkers, would fit nicely under the heading.
Best regards
Paul Engle
(@conciatore_org)
http://io9.com/the-paradoxes-that-define-our-relationship-with-science-1633680608
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04g1dw8
http://thonyc.wordpress.com/