Masks

A cabinet of masks and figurines in the Pitt Rivers Museum of anthropology and archaeology in Oxford.  This museum is housed in a poorly-lit back room of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.  Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827 - 1900) was one of the first archaeologists to stress the importance of collecting and cataloguing all artefacts, not just the beautiful and unusual ones.

What I changed my Mind about in 2007

Over at Edge.org, John Brockman asked over 160 scientists and other intellectuals what they had changed their mind about and why.  Though not explicitly restricted to 2007, some people seem to have interpreted it that way.

My biggest change of mind during 2007 was brought about by reading Stephen Oppenheimer's The Origins of  the British. Before then I had more or less accepted the traditional view that the English people were mainly descended from Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian immigrants who arrived in the centuries following the departure of the Romans.  However, Oppenheimer describes recent genetic work which indicates that most of the genes in present day English people have been in England since well before the Romans arrived.  Indeed, most of these genes probably came with the first people to recolonize England after the ice sheet retreated around 10,000 years ago. 

Last summer I stood on one of the  Bronze-age burial mounds on the moors above Guisborough and looked out over the town that I, my father and his father had grown up in.   For the first time, it occurred to me that we might actually be related to the people buried in those mounds.

Time and Determinism

A footnote from the physics textbook Motion Mountain by Christoph Schiller:

This is very strong type of determinism will be very much challenged in the last part of this text, in which it will be shown that time is not a fundamental concept, and therefore that the debate around determinism loses most of its interest.

Time not a fundamental concept?  I think someone should tell the philosophers.

The Northern Pennines

A photo taken on 2007-07-29 from the path on the west side of Highcliff, above Guisborough, Cleveland, UK.  When I was younger I always assumed that the hill that stands out on the horizon (in the centre of this photo) was Cross Fell (893m), the highest point in the Pennines.  But, since taking this photo, I have worked out that this peak is actually Great Dun Fell (848m) and that Cross Fell is is the long flat hill that just peeps above the horizon near the right side of the photo. The hill in between is Little Dun Fell (842m) and the long hill to the left is Mickle Fell (788m).  Click on the image to go to an annotated version of the photo.

Added 2008-01-01:  This is part of another photo I took at the same time as the above one.  It  provides confirmation that the central peak is Great Dun Fell.   The white dot on the summit must be the radar station that is mentioned here.

Frederick Accum and Food Safety in 1820

I have just listened to a wonderful little radio program on Frederick Accum and Food Safety in 1820.  It is the first episode in a 5-part adaptation of Bee Wilson's Swindled: From Poisoned Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee being run as the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.  Recordings of the episodes can be found here for a week after they have been broadcast.  Accum used the methods of the then relatively new science of chemistry to uncover the widespread use of poisonous substances in foodstuffs in early 19th Century England.  He wrote a book on the subject:

A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spiritous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy

You can find a copy here.  Accum also played a part in the introduction of gas-lighting to London.  I think his name deserves to be more widely known.