On religion, science, and The Breakfast Club
Hellraiser: The Breakfast Club‘s John Bender, played by Jud Nelson Note: This is a reworked version of a post published back in 2011. If all goes well, this version will be showing up at Huffpost later this week. A few posts ago I discussed the Bronze Age Goat Herder Conceit. This is the idea, held [...]
Irony 101, Lesson 7: Creationists co-opt Scopes
John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925 for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. He was tried in a famous case known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. He later said of the trial, “I furnished the body that was [...]
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Advent III: Behold the star, or comet, or supernova, or planetary conjunction, or UFO, or celestial trope, of Bethlehem
Giotto di Bondone, The Adoration of the Magi, 1304-06. In Giotto’s time comets were considered to be harbingers of significant earthly events, so it’s not surprising that he chose a comet to play the role of the star. Entertaining note: From 1985 to 1992, the European Space Agency managed a deep space mission named Giotto. [...]
The majesty of the man: his palace, his serfs, his nose, his elk, his dwarf, his murder(?): exhuming Tycho (again)
Tycho Brahe’s great mural quadrant. One of the most famous images in the whole of the history of astronomy was the fresco that was painted within the arc of the great mural quadrant at Uraniborg, Tycho’s palatial observatory on the (then Danish) island of Hven. Tycho is portrayed beneath portraits of his liege-lord and in [...]
Welcome to the boundary: dragons, dark, a desert
Detail of the Carta marina, one of the first maps of Scandinavia, by Olaus Magnus, 1593. Click on the image to get a beautiful high-resolution reproduction of the entire map At the boundaries, knowledge gives out. The simplest example of this is the edges of old maps that say things like, “Here there be dragons.” [...]
