Category: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Johnny Appleseed, Apple Genetics, and Burnt Orchards

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One of the podcasts I listen to quite a bit is Stuff You Missed in History Class. They recently ran a “classic” episode demystifying the life of Johnny Appleseed, as John Chapman has become known.  Now, all I really knew about him was from the Disney cartoon and one volume about the man in the Value Tales books. (Remember those? The one about him was titled The Value of Love.) Given that, I found it surprisingly interesting, though it turns out it’s pretty hard to demystify the life of someone about whom a lot of stuff has been made up… and who …

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Medicine in the Early 18th Century

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From Jennifer Lee Carrell’s The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox, a brief account of how, in the early Georgian era, … medicine was unabashedly aggressive; in an attempt to be heroic, it was more often horrific. A very few practical men had begun systematically observing their patients and describing symptoms that clustered into specific maladies. The most eminent physicians of the day, however, were abstract philosophers who snipped and stretched experience to fit theory, in their case a modified version of the ancient Greek theory of the four humors. Good health, in this system, was a perpetual circus act, …

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The Perfect Pitch Karaoke Paradox… and its Probable Resolution

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I’m still working my way through the book I mentioned in my last post, Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, and I seem to have come upon a paradox. The paradox has to do with the geographical distribution of perfect pitch and relative pitch ability in adult humans, as it relates to the invention of karaoke.

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Verbal Grooming, Social Media Tribalism, and Opiates

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So, a follow-up to my earlier post on Social Networks and how we behave on them: Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body is a fascinating book, even if sometimes I feel like the short chapters jolt me out of the experience, and even if his use of the word “ape” as non-inclusive of humans (who actually are members of the ape family) is distracting. The text mostly addresses the question of how deeply linked, evolutionarily and neurologically speaking, are the human capacities for music and for language, as well as exploring various theories about the musicality of speech and the the …

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The Really Intractable Thing: North Korea, Climate Change, and Why We’re Failing

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Over at The Week, a depressing piece on the horrors up North, titled “North Korea isn’t Nazi Germany — in some ways, it’s worse”: Unless North Korea invades or bombs another country, or China gives up its patronage of the Hermit Kingdom, it’s hard to see much concrete coming out of the report. Paul Whitefield at the Los Angeles Times remembers the post-Holocaust slogan, “Never Again,” then throws up his hands in resignation: So what should the world do? What can the world do? Must we accept that in North Korea, basic freedoms — even such a simple thing as the right not …

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