Category Archives: Scientific History

Yellow Journalism, Sensationalism, and the Decline of American Reason

The conversation on Facebook started innocently enough, when an old friend posted a link to an article expressing disgust at a recent “revelation” that the Planned Parenthood group was “selling aborted fetal body parts on the open market.” I’d seen a link about this on another site, and decided to take a quick look at […]

Art Imitates Life

From time to time, someone manages to write an article that, while fictional in terms of context, contains a lot of very solid facts. I happened across one of these today and wanted to share it with all and sundry, because it’s total gold in terms of its content. Here’s the link: Archaeologists Officially Declare […]

The “Land Battleship”

Modern life, especially in the era since roughly the introduction of the CD player in the early 1980s, has conditioned us to deal with an increasingly rapid pace of technological change. One day $1000 “bag” style cell phones weighing 5 pounds are being used by highly paid professionals who think of them as status symbols. […]

Into the Modern Age: The Adoption of Standard Time

Our modern perception of time, with its almost slavish devotion to millisecond accuracy, was a totally alien concept to even our recent ancestors. Although mechanical timepieces were known even in the ancient world, time and timekeeping were inexact. Accuracy was generally low, with devices often “drifting” significantly. Where public clocks were in use, men employed […]