al-mofhariz

“We have taken the liberty to add to this manual, a kind of classic legislative tablet, or memorandum. It will serve for private use, by methodising the most interesting points of the legislature. You may help your memory and do good, if you can thereby shew the necessity of filling the blanks in the assembly with a due portion of the classic information and assistance requisite for the business of the day: sometimes you will find you have too few commercial men, or too few agriculturalists, and often too few LIBERAL AMERICANS, who may embrace correct views for the interest of the whole of the union…” [More]

In Berlin, they keep dragons in the museum. Right next to the lions. And the aurochs.

See for yourself.



(The dragons are the strange-looking cat creatures....)
I recently* viewed the displays at the Pergamon Museum (named for the enormous alter in its first room, more on that later), and found them, once again, entrancing. Only the British Museum's artifacts compare with the Pergamon treasures.

I arrived at the museum with some new mental baggage and ended up enjoying my visit all the more. Keep reading for more Babylonian aurochs, a king's bodyguards, a few gods, and a tip to try on your next museum excursion.



Here's a closer look at one of those aurochs.

Beautiful, right? And well preserved for something from the sixth century B.C.

But, as it happens, this auroch doesn't only hail from sixth century B.C. Babyon. It's also a mid-twentieth century creature---one built from old remains, but updated with contemporary (German) skill and creativity.

Here, without such updating…

My undergraduate course in discrete mathematics introduced me to some of the paradigmatic problems of the field, including Euler's Seven Bridges of Königsberg or the Gas-Water-Light puzzle (the latter a creation meant, in my experience, to frustrate the solver and make the poser feel smug). Both problems reduce practical or real world situations to fascinating and generalized mathematics. The practical becomes the pure, in other words. At a variety of talks and sessions that I attended at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society (program here), it struck me how flat and unsatisfying a picture of the interactions of science and practice such examples provide us.



I first thought of Königsberg during a fascinating paper by James D. Skee (UC-Berkeley) exploring the use of operations research (OR) in the design of Disneyland and other parks. As Skee persuasively argued, consultants like Harrison Price trained in wartime operations research successfully sold their skills to a…

I am hesitant to blog about the hurricane ripping through the Mid-Atlantic, especially while I'm sitting comfortably safe and warm, six time zones away. I've read too many sad stories already and seen, electronically, too much destruction to want to drain the moment of its significance, its discomforts, and too often its tragedies. To my friends in the path, and every one else: I hope you're experiencing a speedy recovery.



Still I think it is appropriate to notice the success of the National Weather Service and its associated forecasters. Without their efforts, and subsequent evacuations, many more people might have been been killed or injured. One key to that success, according to Nate Silver, is the NWS's embrace of uncertainty, its frank acknowledgement of error, and its skepticism of its own models. The "cone of uncertainty," above, exemplifies the NWS ethos and makes it public. Instead of simple trajectory, we get a range of possible paths, and the caveat…

What do Newcomb, Twain, Mayr, and Crosby have in common? No, they aren't a 60s folk rock band. The answer is that they all tell us something interesting about the cultural power of the eclipse.
What is most interesting about them is the way they reflect various ideas about the capacity for scientific thinking among Americans and others, past and present. 
This occurred to me while reading Matt Stanley's very interesting article, "Predicting the Past," from the second number of Isis this year (2012). Stanley traces changing attitudes toward the role of history in astronomy and astronomy in history. His centerpiece is a disagreement between Greenwich's Astronomer Royal, George Airy, and the head of the American Nautical Almanac, Simon Newcomb. Airy turned to ancient Greek sources for data on past eclipses that could help him calculate the "secular acceleration"of the moon, a small but crucial constant necessary for making precise lunar tables. Newcomb, on t…