20 MAR 2018 by ideonexus
How the Civil War Changed Southern Evangelicalism
There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America’s most powerful evangelical denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery. Southern denominations faced enormous social and political pressure from plantation owners. Public expressions of dissent on the subject of slavery in the South were not ...Folksonomies: civil war evangelicalism
Folksonomies: civil war evangelicalism
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Archeologist's Search Image
A fossil hunter needs sharp eyes and a keen search image, a mental template that subconsciously evaluates everything he sees in his search for telltale clues. A kind of mental radar works even if he isn't concentrating hard. A fossil mollusk expert has a mollusk search image. A fossil antelope expert has an antelope search image. ... Yet even when one has a good internal radar, the search is incredibly more difficult than it sounds. Not only are fossils often the same color as the rocks among...Folksonomies: fossils archeology
Folksonomies: fossils archeology
Varies from hunter to hunter, but must be able to find camouflaged bones that might be fragmented into many pieces.
28 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
What opposite discoveries we have seen!
What opposite discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses, one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets, ...Folksonomies: poetry
Folksonomies: poetry
From science, bombs and immunizations, guillotines and life-saving surgery. A poem by Lord Byron.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Herschel's Sister was Cheaper than a Male Assistant
Herschel made no bones about the fact that a female assistant, even his sister, would cost half as much as a male. It is possible to be indignant about this, but contemporary standards must be taken into account. Female domestic servants were paid £10 per annum, while a highly trained governess like Mary Wollstonecraft was paid £40 per annum by Lord Kingsborough in 1787. In fact a £60 stipend would have been handsome, exactly one-fifth of that paid to the Astronomer Royal. In Europe women ...A short survey of other female scientists working at the time.
09 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Look at the Total Form
If any person thinks the examination of the rest of the animal kingdom an unworthy task, he must hold in like disesteem the study of man. For no one can look at the elements of the human frame—blood, flesh, bones, vessels, and the like—without much repugnance. Moreover, when anyone of the parts or structures, be it which it may, is under discussion, it must not be supposed that it is its material composition to which attention is being directed or which is the object of the discussion, bu...Aristotle from "Parts of Animals". Appears to be arguing that the parts of a biological being do not matter, but rather the animal in totality.
10 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
Freedom
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations; The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up; The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing, awakening, Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst. Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field, Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; Let the inchained soul, shut up in darkness and...Folksonomies: totalitarianism oppression
Folksonomies: totalitarianism oppression
Blake describes freedom from oppression.
19 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
We Recapitulate Evolution in Nine Months
Evolution sceptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling. JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you ...Folksonomies: evolution fetal development
Folksonomies: evolution fetal development
...to build a complete human being.
08 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
The Use of Gold for Money Leads to Efforts to Inflate Its...
Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, and abolished from ideal society as though it were the cause instead of the instrument of human baseness; but, indeed, there is nothing bad in gold. Making gold into vessels of dishonour and banishing it from the State is punishing the hatchet for the murderer's crime. Money, did you but use it right, is a good thing in life, a necessary thing in civilised human life, as complicated, indeed, for its purposes, but as natural a growth as the bo...Folksonomies: economics
Folksonomies: economics
Reminds me of the Mortgage crisis, when homes became a source of money and every effort was made to over-inflate their value.