(b)logophile » history

London infested with feral pigs

tikitu — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:37:12 +0000

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 or simply because things were done really differently.

Which brings me to the pigs. Apparently London was so filthy (ditches but no sewer system; slaughtering of animals all over the city; bucket-based toilets for much of the populace) that it was infested not just with rats but also with dogs and pigs. The first in a succession of moves to clean up the city is “the establishment of a mechanism for appointing official swine killers, who are paid 4d for every pig they remove.” (And in 1311 “the flaying of dead horses is prohibited within the city walls”, which I imagine improved the atmosphere.)

In closely related news, very likely the first thing you would notice on arriving in fourteenth-century London would be your nose shutting down in protest. Or possibly falling off.

Scott and scurvy

tikitu — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:36:59 +0000

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 went wrong would make a lovely case study for a philosophy of science class.

(I can’t help summarising the juiciest morsel: the British Admiralty switched their scurvy cure from lemon juice to lime juice in 1860. The new cure was much less effective, but by that time advances in technology meant that most sea voyages were so short that there was little or no danger of scurvy anyway. So poor Scott’s expedition, as well as applying “state-of-the-art” (i.e. wrong) cures, were falling back on a “tried-and-true” remedy that in fact had been largely ineffective already for 50 years… without anyone noticing.)

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More on coffee

tikitu — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:33:39 +0000

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, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hag over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiff but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend ’twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it.

Claude Shannon and his juggling robot

tikitu — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 15:48:19 +0000

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 juggling robot, “W.C. Fields”. As a juggler and computer scientist myself, it’s wonderful to see that one of the greats has devoted so much attention to the art.

Actually, following the link trail a bit further I found Arthur Lewbel’s obituary for Shannon (the source of the movie), with many juggling references and the following statement of Shannon’s “Juggling Theorem”:

(F+D)H=(V+D)N, where F is the time a ball spends in the air, D is the time a ball spends in a hand, V is the time a hand is vacant, N is the number of balls juggled, and H is the number of hands.

Which just goes to show, no matter how anchored in the real world a mathematician might seem to be, the lure of generalisation just can’t be ignored. Number of hands?!?