Whewell’s Gazette: Vol. #23

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

Emblem

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)

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

Reddit: ‘The Imitation Game’; or ‘How the breaking of the enigma code was kept secret from Winston Fucking Churchill’

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’

The Imitation Game Movie.com

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)

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

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…

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

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

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.

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

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:

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)

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)

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

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)

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.

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

9780226108186

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.

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

EAHMH: CfP: Biennial conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Cologne Germany 2-5 September 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About thonyc

Aging freak who fell in love with the history of science and now resides mostly in the 16th century.
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3 Responses to Whewell’s Gazette: Vol. #23

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  2. Pingback: Mega inanity | The Renaissance Mathematicus

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