Author: Josh Witten

http://www.thefinchandpea.com

Eric H. Cline’s “1177BC”: Bronze Age Bogeymen & the Fate of Civilization

Representative image of the precautions needed to protect my creative endeavors. Surviving photograph shows use of a Lite Brite
Representative image of the precautions needed to protect my creative endeavors. Surviving photograph shows use of a primitive Lite Brite

When I was young, I used to build elaborate castles out of wooden blocks. Then, my younger brother Ben, would come running through and smash it all to pieces. Ben was a metaphor for the way my high school history book1 presented a variety of groups like the Mongols, the Huns, the Vikings, and the Sea Peoples (oddly not the Conquistadors, etc.) as nightmarish, irresistible, and bent on wanton destruction. Like my brother, they were external forces of chaos that swept in, pushed “Western Civilization” to the breaking point, and then mysteriously vanished. Of these groups, the Sea Peoples distance in the past made them, by far, the most mysterious.

In Eric H. Cline’s 1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed2 does not set out to clarify the record on the Sea Peoples – they remain pretty clouded in the mists of time. Rather, Cline walks us through what historians know, suspect, and argue about. Cline’s goal is to help us understand what collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, what “collapse” actually meant, why it was so important, and what were the factors that caused this change. Continue reading “Eric H. Cline’s “1177BC”: Bronze Age Bogeymen & the Fate of Civilization”

…all of them should learn from rugby

Needless to say, I agree with everything filmmaker Werner Herzog has to say about rugby in this excerpt from a Vulture interview. They were discussing Association Football (aka) and the dishonor of taking a dive:

No, that’s an awful disgrace. It’s a disgrace. And it shouldn’t be [allowed]. And all of them should learn from American football. And more so, all of them should learn from rugby. What a manly, decent sport that is. There is a great kind of honor to rugby. I really love rugby for that.

They’re less protected than in American football.
Yes, and [I love] the kind of dignified way they deal with one another. Even though sometimes they sort things out in a brief fistfight. The ref lets them sort it out very quickly and then be decent again.
–Werner Herzog interviewed by Steve Marsh (bold) for Vulture Transcript

*Hat tip to Michele Banks.

Polio in Pakistan – Collateral Damage of the War on Terror

Thanks to the CIA using fake vaccination programs (something they claimed to have stopped doing earlier this year) in the terrifying “War on Terror” the Taliban banned polio immunizations since 2012. It should come as no surprise that the Taliban is perfectly happy to violently enforce this ban. Not only are polio cases increasing in Pakistan, but more 60 healthcare workers have been killed trying to administer life saving polio inoculations.

They are among the more than 60 polio workers who have been killedsince the Pakistani Taliban banned polio immunization in 2012…The edict by the Islamic militants to ban immunization was in response to the CIA’s setting up a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Pakistan. The covert operation was part of an attempt by the U.S. spy agency to verify whether Osama bin Laden was holed up in the city of Abbottabad. – Jason Beaubien, NPR

*Hat tip to Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing.

#TheGrantfather

First there was #SciWars, then there was a flailing attempt at #ConanThePostDoc. This weekend a smattering of Twitter users got together to sciencify classic quotes from The Godfather films under the hashtag #TheGrantfather.

You can see a storify of the reworked quotes here:Screenshot 2014-08-04 10.18.14

What classic film should lay the science too this Friday?

A work of staggering genius

Ben Young Landis has done the smartest thing I’ve seen all day – adding a smartphone camera friendly abstract panel to a comprehensive poster design, in order to make it easy to capture the poster’s soul.

by Ben Young Landis
by Ben Young Landis (Used with Permission)

For many of us, working a research conference using smartphones has become second-nature…It was the poster aspect that had me thinking for a while. How can we make a better poster layout that will be more friendly to smartphone users…and…will stand out from the crowd?

You can see the beginnings of my experiment with this design I created for Kevin Lafferty, a P.I. with the U.S. Geological Survey and UC Santa Barbara. A key innovation is the “Project Snapshot” — this is actually where I’ve tucked all the technical language, the citation, the coauthors, the email addresses, and all the “usual” poster elements. Essentially, I’ve written up your notes for you in this 9×12 inch space, and the camera icon is a reminder that you literally can just take a snapshot of this box, and not have to write all this down. – Ben Young Landis

Continue reading “A work of staggering genius”