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Tag Archives: history

London infested with feral pigs

Friday, July 2, 2010

In the fourteenth century, that is. I’m reading The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, which is turning out much better than its title would suggest. The gimmick is to try to bring the period to life by focusing on the things we would be confused or puzzled by, whether because our stereotypes are off-beam [...]

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Scott and scurvy

Friday, March 12, 2010

Idlewords has a fascinating essay on the history of scurvy: Scott’s Antarctic expedition in 1911 was plagued by the disease, despite its having been “conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease.” How it all [...]

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More on coffee

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Ooer. As counterpoint to the coffee-madness song-and-animation I posted about recently, here’s Early Modern Whale with a pamphlet from 1674: For the continual sipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-point without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, [...]

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Claude Shannon and his juggling robot

Monday, June 6, 2005

Couldn’t resist this, although it’s purely link propagation. If you don’t know who Claude Shannon is, this might not be so exciting. But the excellent blog collision detection has a post on juggling as a physical Turing test, which links to a wonderful short piece of video showing Shannon first juggling, then demonstrating his own [...]

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