History and Philosophy (often of Science)
jlynch | March 11, 2008Theodore Beale, a.k.a. "Vox Day", quote-miner and "Christian libertarian opinion columnist," apparently has issues with women in science. This via Ed Brayton:
Because they are the intellectual driving force of humanity, men will be fine. They will simply continue to do what they have always done and pursue the same challenges they have always pursued, focused on the realities of success rather than its superficial attributes. It is the institutions they are exiting, voluntarily and involuntarily, that will be destroyed instead. It is written that "women ruin everything"; having destroyed the…
jlynch | March 11, 2008Births
1910 - Robert Havemann, German chemist
1920 - Nicolaas Bloembergen, Dutch physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1920 - Julio Garavito Armero, Colombian astronomer
1955 - Alexander Fleming, Scottish scientist and Nobel Prize laureate
1977 - Ulysses S. Grant IV, American geologist
jlynch | March 9, 2008Events
1977 - Rings of Uranus: Astronomers discover rings around Uranus.
1982 - Syzygy: all nine planets align on the same side of the Sun.
2006 - Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives at Mars.
Births
1628 - Marcello Malpighi, Italian physician
1709 - Georg Steller, German naturalist
Deaths
1585 - Rembert Dodoens, Flemish physician and botanist
1670 - Johann Rudolf Glauber, German chemist
1942 - William Henry Bragg, English physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1966 - Frits Zernike, Dutch physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | March 9, 2008Apparently it is PZ's birthday. Wander on over and remind him how old he is ...
Events
2006 - Liquid water is discovered on Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of Saturn.
Births
1564 - David Fabricius, German astronomer
1758 - Franz Joseph Gall, German neuroscientist & phrenologist
1887 - Fritz Lenz, German geneticist
1923 - Walter Kohn, Austrian-born physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1851 - Hans Christian Ãrsted, Danish physicist
1954 - Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs, German astronomer
1954 - V. Walfrid Ekman, Swedish oceanographer
1974 - Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr., American physiologist…
jlynch | March 8, 2008Sincerest apologies for being MIA for quite a while now. This week in particular was hectic (in good ways) and time to blog was negligible. Two candidates interviewed and the systematics workshop was excellent. But it is now Saturday, Spring Break has started, and I theoretically have some down free time. Wilkins is going to be staying with me for a few days, so we hope to hit the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum and the "Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight" exhibit at the Arizona Museum of Natural History before heading north to Utah for the Edges and Boundaries of Biological Objects…
jlynch | March 3, 2008Apologies for no Monday Mustelid yesterday. Busy, busy.
Events
1675 - John Flamsteed appointed first Astronomer Royal
1774 - First sighting of Orion Nebula by William Herschel.
1997 - Bill Clinton bans federally funded human cloning research.
2002 - Canada bans human embryo cloning but permits government-funded scientists to use embryos left over from fertility treatment or abortions.
2006 - Final contact attempt with Pioneer 10 by the Deep Space Network. No response was received.
Births
1835 - John Hughlings Jackson, English neurologist
1847 - Karl Bayer, Austrian chemist
1854 - Napier…
jlynch | March 2, 2008
Events
1879 - The United States Geological Survey is created.
Births
1918 - Dr. Arthur Kornberg, American biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1703 - Robert Hooke, English scientist
1765 - William Stukeley, English archaeologist
1988 - Sewall Wright, American evolutionary biologist
1999 - Gerhard Herzberg, German-born chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | March 1, 2008It’s going to be quite the busy week here at ASU. John Wilkins is in town, as is Richard Dawkins. For the latter’s talk on Thursday, I’ve managed to snag VIP tickets - courtesy of the RDF - for Wilkins and I. Then we also have the launch of the International Institute for Species Exploration (Monday) and a two-day workshop Systematics and Biodiversity: Concepts and Prospects (Tuesday and Wednesday) featuring such names as Norm Platnick, Olivier Rieppel, Robert Kohler, Polly Winsor, a bunch of us ASU people, and, eh, Wilkins. A nice mix of historians, philosophers and taxonomists.
On top of…
jlynch | March 1, 2008No real time to post anything substantial - still grading and we have job candidates in this coming week. Still, here’s something to keep you amused.
Events
1808 - The inaugural meeting of the Wernerian Natural History Society was held in Edinburgh.
1972 - The Pioneer 10 space probe is launched
1998 - Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicates that Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice.
Births
1779 - Joel Roberts Poinsett, American statesman and botanist
1862 - Boris Borisovich Galitzine, Russian physicist
Deaths
1729 - Francesco Bianchini, Italian philosopher and…
jlynch | March 1, 2008Events
1896 - Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity.
1966 - Venera 3 crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet.
1980 - Voyager 1 probe confirms that Janus (moon of Saturn) exists.
Births
1910 - Archer John Porter Martin, English chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1943 - Richard H. Price, American physicist
1943 - Rashid Sunyaev, Russian physicist
Deaths
1697 - Francesco Redi, Italian physician
1911 - Jacobus Henricus van ’t Hoff, Dutch chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1966 - Fritz Houtermans, German physicist
1995 - Georges J.F. Kohler, German biologist and…
jlynch | February 23, 2008Vox Day - who writes for WorldNetDaily - has published a book, The Irrational Atheist which is available for free online. It’s an attack on Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and other "new atheists". Brent Rasmussen over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has taken the book very seriously. So I decided to check it out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t start off very well for Day.
Turning to chapter 1, you see the epigraph Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science attributed to Charles Darwin. Is Darwin actually saying that the "voice of God" is not to be trusted in science? As anyone who…
jlynch | February 17, 2008It’s that time of the year - first set of papers to be graded. That, coupled with our job search and some other things means I’m not going to be able to post anything over the next seven to ten days.
So there’ll be no "Monday Mustelid" or "Today in Science" for a while. Just warning ya!
jlynch | February 16, 2008Births
1723 - Tobias Mayer, German astronomer
1781 - René Laënnec, French physician
1792 - Karl Ernst von Baer, German biologist
1796 - Philipp Franz von Siebold, German physician
1888 - Otto Stern, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1600 - Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher
1680 - Jan Swammerdam, Dutch biologist
jlynch | February 16, 2008Births
1727 - Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Austrian scientist
1804 - Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold, German physiologist
1822 - Francis Galton, English biologist and biometrician
1834 - Ernst Haeckel, German zoologist and philosopher
Deaths
1531 - Johannes Stöffler, German mathematician and astronomer
1754 - Richard Mead, English physician
1980 - Erich Hückel, German physicist
1997 - Chien-Shiung Wu, Chinese-American physicist
jlynch | February 14, 2008Events
1946 - ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania.
Births
1564 - Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer and physicist
1809 - André Dumont, Belgian geologist
1861 - Charles Edouard Guillaume, French physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1873 - Hans von Euler-Chelpin, German-born chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1988 - Richard Feynman, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1999 - Henry Way Kendall, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | February 13, 2008Events
1961 - Lawrencium is first synthesized at the University of California.
2000 - NEAR Shoemaker enters orbit around asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.
Births
1848 - Benjamin Baillaud, French astronomer
1869 - Charles Wilson, Scottish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1898 - Fritz Zwicky, Swiss-American physicist and astronomer
Deaths
1975 - Julian Huxley, British biologist
1989 - James Bond, American ornithologist
2003 - Dolly, first cloned mammal
jlynch | February 12, 2008Events
1633 - Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition.
1880 - Thomas Edison observes the Edison effect.
2004 - The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovers the universe’s largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093.
Births
1672 - Ãtienne François Geoffroy, French chemist
1743 - Joseph Banks, English botanist and naturalist
1910 - William Shockley, American physicist, eugenicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1787 - RuÄer BoÅ¡koviÄ, Croatian scientist
2005 - Emilios T. Harlaftis, Greek astrophysicist
jlynch | February 11, 2008Events
2001 - NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touchdown in the "saddle" region of 433 Eros becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.
Births
1637 - Jan Swammerdam, Dutch scientist
1665 - Rudolf Jakob Camerarius, German botanist and physician
1785 - Pierre Louis Dulong, French physicist
1804 - Heinrich Lenz, German physicist
1809 - Charles Darwin, English naturalist
1918 - Julian Schwinger, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1612 - Christopher Clavius, German astronomer
1799 - Lazzaro Spallanzani, Italian biologist
1958 - Douglas Hartree, English mathematical physicist
jlynch | February 10, 2008Births
1657 - Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, French scientist
1839 - Josiah Willard Gibbs, American physicist
1898 - Leó Szilárd, Hungarian-born physicist
1908 - Vivian Ernest Fuchs, English geologist
Deaths
1868 - Léon Foucault, French astronomer
1973 - Hans D Jensen, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1976 - Alexander Lippisch, German scientist
1978 - James B Conant, American chemist
1991 - Robert W. Holley, American biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | February 10, 2008
As promised, here [pdf, 7.83M] are the slides from today’s Darwin Day talk for the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. There were somewhere between 80 and 100 people in attendance, and I think it went quite well.
And for any attendees who stop by here [pdf] are the slides from my September talk on Intelligent Design.