Mirabilis.ca

From the Guardian: Founders of British obstetrics ‘were callous murderers’.

They are giants of medicine, pioneers of the care that women receive during childbirth and were the founding fathers of obstetrics. The names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among today’s doctors, more than 250 years since they made their contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo’s reputations as outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.

But were they also serial killers? New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses. [continue]

Tags: William Hunter, William Smellie

I’ll tell you what depresses me about blogging (and the internet) these days. It’s the group of people who call themselves social media consultants. They present themselves as technical mavens, able to make a product famous and popular on the internet. They brand themselves nicely, pass around their cutting edge business cards, and say that they are experienced professionals who have access to influential outlets on the web. One such company says that its activities

…build and nurture relationships with online influencers—frequently bloggers, editors, forum moderators and fan site creators—to write about our clients’ products and services. We provide these industry influencers with new, differentiated content to target niche audiences. These online influencers then write about the topic and spread the message to their readers.

Let me translate that into English for you. Clients pay the social media consultant to get the word out on the web about, oh, a movie or some other big-budget thing. The consultant spams me about it, taking care to sound friendly and personable. I’m supposed to publish her drivel on my blog so that she can get paid.

I don’t get paid, and I’m not even supposed to realize that I’m the free part of a commercial transaction. I just get used. And spammed again, and again, and again. My readers get used, too, if I’m stupid enough to take the bait. They’re supposed to be obedient consumers, and toddle off to see the movie, buy the book, or whatever. It’s unconscionable.

I’ve been blogging since 2002, and have had nonsense mail about a lot of crap for years. All kinds of people want me to promote their products on my blog, it seems. So at the top of my contact form, I’ve said things like I will not promote your product or event. Do not send press releases. You’d think that would stop these marketing types, wouldn’t you? But no. Each single one thinks she’s the special exception. Surely this promotion is the one I really do want to receive.

Um, no. After eight years of responding politely to these selfish morons (please take me off this list; please don’t send me any more of this…) I finally snapped at one of them last month. What is so hard to understand about no press releases or promotional email? What is so very hard about that?

I want to blog, and I want to be left in peace to do that without being bothered by social media marketers whose behaviour I despise. I want to hear from real readers about real things, not these social media consultants who want to use me, and my blog, for their own profit.

Hey, social media consultants, social marketing agencies, emerging media marketing services, and whatever the hell else you call yourselves: please take this blog off your list forever. I think you’re worse than spammers, and I hate the duplicity you use to get your clients’ products onto blogs. I will never help you. You will never have results you like as a result of sending me promotional materials.

Dear Mirabilis.ca readers: for many years I’ve enjoyed the comments you’ve sent me through the contact form on this site. I’ve had to take down the contact form for now, though, because I can’t figure out a way to keep social media marketers from mis-using it. It’s either that or give up blogging altogether.

Sigh.

So, yeah. Social media marketers are what depress me about blogging and the internet. They make me feel like giving up altogether.

Tags: scoundrels, search engine marketing, SEO, social media consultant

From the Telegraph: Vatican reveals Secret Archives.

A 13th-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope is among a collection of documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives that has been published for the first time.

The Holy See’s archives contain scrolls, parchments and leather-bound volumes with correspondence dating back more than 1,000 years.

High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen before in public, have now been published in a book. The Vatican Secret Archives features a papal letter to Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch bark by a tribe of North American Indians, and a plea from Mary Queen of Scots. [continue]

This makes me feel like a Luddite. Here I am running around with a plain old digital camera (yeah, yeah, I know Luddites don’t use digital cameras… but still!) and this guy’s taking photos by framing what he wants with his fingers.

I might as well go join the old-order Amish.

Continue Reading »

Tags: Pranav Mistry

From Hurriyet Daily NewsAncient seed sprouts plant from the past.

A 4,000-year-old lentil seed found during an archeological excavation has germinated, exciting scientists as the event might lead to invaluable data for comparisons between the organic and genetically engineered plants of today. It would be the first seed from very old times whose genes were never modified, say the scientists. [continue]

From Canada.com: Soup can yields details on doomed 19th-century Arctic expedition.

Scientists studying a 160-year-old can of soup found in the Canadian Arctic have detected lead levels in its broth and sealant that are off the scale — further evidence, they say, of the lead poisoning believed to have doomed the 19th-century Franklin Expedition during its quest to transit the Northwest Passage.

Researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton and Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum — which had the historic tin of ox-cheek soup in its collection — performed tests on the can and its contents to try to confirm a controversial theory about the ill-fated polar voyage of the British ships Terror and Erebus in the late 1840s. [continue]

From the Guardian: Bones find from abandoned village ’show tough life of medieval women’.

The fearsome northern woman of legend and cliche, broadchested and with a frying pan poised to whack sense into her man, has proved to have genuine historic origins.

Analysis of bones from Britain’s biggest medieval excavation has unearthed a race of real-life Nora Battys, ruling a Yorkshire roost nearly 1,000 years ago.

Skeletons from Wharram Percy, a village on the Yorkshire Wolds abandoned after the 14th century Black Death, have much larger bones than those of contemporaries elsewhere. [continue]

From New Scientist article by Melanie Bayley: Alice’s adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved.

What would Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess’s baby or the Mad Hatter’s tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you’ll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.

As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helena Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author’s day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford. [continue]

Tags: algebra, Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

From the BBC: Octopus snatches coconut and runs.

Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team says it is the first example of tool use in octopuses.

One of the researchers, Dr Julian Finn from Australia’s Museum Victoria, told BBC News: I almost drowned laughing when I saw this the first time. [continue, see video!]

From New Scientist: Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest.

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. [continue]

From the New York Times: Boom! Hok! A Monkey Language Is Deciphered.

Krak krak! (Watch out, a leopard!)

Hok hok hok! (Hey, crowned eagle!)

Very good — you have already mastered half the basic vocabulary of the Campbell’s monkey, a fellow primate that lives in the forests of the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. The adult males have six types of call, each with a specific meaning, but they can string two or more calls together into a message with a different meaning. [continue]

In Montana a Hassidic rabbi helps police speak Hebrew — and it’s all for the benefit of a police dog. From the New York Times:

Miky, pronounced Mikey, is in a Diaspora of his own. He was born in an animal shelter in Holland and shipped as a puppy to Israel, where he was trained by the Israeli Defense Forces to sniff out explosives. Then one day, Miky got a plane ticket to America. Rather than spend the standard $20,000 on a bomb dog, the Helena Police Department had shopped around and discovered that it could import a surplus bomb dog from the Israeli forces for the price of the flight. So Miky came to his new home in Helena, to join the police force.

The problem, the officer explained, was that Miky had been trained entirely in Hebrew. [continue]

From the BBC: Crofter finds a ‘Viking’ anchor on the Isle of Skye.

A crofter has uncovered what is believed to be a Viking anchor while digging a drain on the Isle of Skye.[continue, see photo]

What would you do if you were a Jewish rabbi threatened by the KKK? Ponder that for a moment, then go read about what Rabbi Michael Weisser did.

From The Guardian: Indian villager takes 14 years to dig tunnel through mountain.

An Indian villager burrowed for 14 years with a hammer and chisel to cut a tunnel through a mountain so that his neighbours could reach nearby fields and he could park his truck outside his home.

Ramchandra Das, 53, who lives in eastern Bihar state, carved a 10m-long, 4m-wide tunnel through the hill range from his village of Kewati. Das took up the Herculean task after villagers found the 7km trek over the mountain increasingly arduous.

When the authorities refused to help to cut the journey time, Das began carving his way through the earth in the direction of the nearest big town, Atri. The job became more pressing when Das became the first man to own a truck in the village and was unable to drive it to his home. [continue]

From The Ottawa Citizen: Ancient camp unearthed.

A team of archeologists working for the City of Ottawa has uncovered the oldest aboriginal camp yet found within the city limits, including stone tools and pieces of artfully decorated pottery dating from 300 BC to 700 AD.

Archeologists believe that the camp on the Rideau River was used periodically by Algonquin people because it was a good site for fishing, hunting and perhaps for gathering berries. [continue]

Tags: Algonquin

From the Guardian: German banker admits transferring money from rich to help poorer clients.

In these financially troubled times, bankers tend not to score too highly on the scale of public admiration, with their bonuses, bailouts and bad loans. But today details emerged of a woman who may confound the popular view that everyone in the industry is in it for themselves.

The 62-year-old branch head of one German bank was hailed as a hero after she confessed to transferring money from rich customers to help her poorer clients. Already, she has been dubbed Die Robin Hood Bankerin. [continue]

From The Atlantic: In Italy, Eating Gets Graded.

The day my daughter’s kindergarten teacher called me into her Italian classroom to tell me my child was failing lunch, I knew I had run up against the great continental culinary divide. As an American married to an Italian, I’ve lived off and on in Italy for years, in both Bologna and Venice. I’m an adventurous and enthusiastic cook, an impassioned eater, and one of those parents who throw their kids into the deep end of the culinary pool from birth. Sink or swim: eat your fava beans and grilled calamari or starve.

Yet the teacher’s face was grave. Lunch, in this Bolognese classroom, was a subject, as important as any other, and though my apple-cheeked five-year-old sat still, said per favore and grazie, ate all her tortellini and strawberry yogurt, she was still failing. At issue, the teacher informed me, was the meat course. My kid was consistently skipping the bistecchina, and something had to be done. [continue]

From wired.com: Birth of New Species Witnessed by Scientists.

On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.

In many ways, the split followed predictable patterns, requiring a hybrid newcomer who’d already taken baby steps down a new evolutionary path. But playing an unexpected part was chance, and the newcomer singing his own special song. [continue]

From liveleak.com:

Paul Nicklen describes his most amazing experience as a National Geographic photographer — coming face-to-face with one of the arctic’s most vicious predators. Not only did he get to swim and take photos of a 12-foot leopard seal in the Antarctic (and didn’t get eaten), he was actually adopted by it!

You must see this, you just must. Go look.

From the Beeb: The ‘youngest headmaster in the world’ .

At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He’s a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family’s backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.[continue]

Now this, this is amazing. It’s a BBC article about what William Kamkwamba did when he was a teenager in Malawi.

Unable to attend school, he kept up his education by using a local library.

Fascinated by science, his life changed one day when he picked up a tattered textbook and saw a picture of a windmill.

And so he

knocked together a turbine from spare bicycle parts, a tractor fan blade and an old shock absorber, and fashioned blades from plastic pipes, flattened by being held over a fire.

And it worked. Here’s the rest of the article.

This is the most touching story I’ve come across in a while: Boy Lifts Book; Librarian Changes Boy’s Life. Go on now, read it.

From the Telegraph: Anglo-Saxon hoard is ‘unprecedented’.

The Staffordshire Hoard is by some distance the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, in terms of both the number of items (over 1,300) and the total mass (around 5kg of gold, and 1.3kg of silver).

The majority of the finds are fragments of decorative fittings from swords or helmets, all of high quality, reflecting the high status of the original owners.

Even a single new find of this type is highly significant, and to find so many objects together is unprecedented. As a group, the hoard will add massively to our understanding of the metalwork of the period, and will allow archaeologists to re-evaluate the significance of existing material. [continue]

Thanks to Cynthia for telling me about this photo gallery of the hoard on the CBC website.

How many people in England do you suppose went out to buy metal detectors when they read this story?

From Wired: 1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth.

A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today. [continue, see photos]

Tags: spiders