Greg Ross reports, on the Futility Closet blog: “Light crosses space with the prodigious velocity of 6,000 leagues per second.” – La Science Populaire, April 28, 1881 “A typographical error slipped into our last issue that it is important to correct: the speed of light is 76,000 leagues per hour — and not 6,000.” – […]
Tag: history
One way to tell a story: drunkenness + Tesla + Franklin
The folks behind the video series Drunk History honed a particular way to tell a story, using drunkenness as a frame that makes the picture more interesting. In these episodes, they tell the basic story of Nicola Tesla:
“doesn’t know his patronyms from his epithets”
Historians, most of them, agonize over how much to trust the work of earlier historians. The Got Medieval blog writes of one terrible bout of agonizing: … Indeed, a reputation as a bungler who doesn’t know his patronyms (son of the horrible one/Uther) from his epithets (horrible son) is about the best that Geoffrey could […]
A (or an) historian muses about history and the Ig Nobel Prizes
Historian William G. Pooley, in his blog, muses about history and the Ig Nobel Prizes: Who cares about the funny little people you spend your time researching? What do you think people really learn from studying the family lives, emotions, or sexuality of our ancestors, beyond soft ideas of cultural relativity or platitudes about the importance […]