I recently read a fascinating book called The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (Walker and Company, NY, 1998). The author's thesis is that the telegraph was very similar to the modern internet in its ability to connect people from all over and to send information anywhere, almost instantly. He traces the invention of the telegraph [...]
Category: science and engineering
Guest Post: Dr. Lucy Hancock on dust rings around Earth (bumped)
This is the presentation Dr. Lucy Hancock gave at a session on space weather at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society's session on Space Weather, in January, 2022. Dr. Hancock presented an anomaly in solar radiation data, and suggested it be explained as the effect of space dust shading the line of sight [...]
Spinning wheels in the 1700’s
There's a lot of argument about the importance of spinning improvements in a medieval economy, but there is no argument that the device called a 'spinning jenny' helped to start the industrial revolution. Spinning in general consists in taking individual fibers of cotton or wool or hemp or nettle and twisting them together into a [...]
What is Science?
One of the reasons that I loved Dante, once I figured out how to read him, was that his attitude towards the world was one of careful observation. He knew, for example, where the stars were in the heavens at different times of the year, and different times of night, and different parts of the [...]
Is the Pope making the Galileo Mistake, continued
Making mistakes/owning mistakes Is the Pope Making the Galileo Mistake "He that is giddy thinks the world turns round." W. Shakespeare Galileo's insult to the Pope ended in a trial for disobedience (not heresy). Galileo was convicted and sentenced to house arrest. (If you want a good summary of the trial look for Stillman Drake's [...]
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