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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sumer Represents

Sumer Represents

by Tom Levenson|  April 9, 201410:20 am| 56 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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All you need to know about Heartbleed, Randall Munroe style:

heartbleed

 

xkcd is one of the few unequivocal demonstrations that the web is (can be) a force for good.

Over to y’all.

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Previous Post: « Why we still have not found the black boxes that we found
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Reader Interactions

56Comments

  1. 1.

    low-tech cyclist

    April 9, 2014 at 10:25 am

    Nitpick: I think you meant Randall Munroe.

  2. 2.

    Belafon

    April 9, 2014 at 10:26 am

    The attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion is probably the worst fate we’ll ever suffer.

    ETA: You should add a link.

  3. 3.

    Tom Levenson

    April 9, 2014 at 10:32 am

    @low-tech cyclist: Yup. Fix’t. Thanks.

    Now hunting down the next caffeine dose.

  4. 4.

    Tom Levenson

    April 9, 2014 at 10:34 am

    @Belafon: too bloody right. Fix’t as well.

    More coffee…

  5. 5.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 9, 2014 at 10:35 am

    Noisemax strikes again, in an exclusive interview with Bellatrix Lestrange:

    Mary Matalin: Feinstein Report Goes ‘Beyond Hypocrisy’

    Also, too more fun from Noisemax:

    O’Reilly Slams Colbert: A Progressive Fanatic

    VDE slams O’Reilly: A fascist dipshit

  6. 6.

    Amir Khalid

    April 9, 2014 at 10:38 am

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    To me, being a fanatic for progress is actually a good thing.

  7. 7.

    bemused

    April 9, 2014 at 10:40 am

    Rep Vance McAllister is one (out of many) completely idiotic elected legislators out there. Who texts back without a clue to a random stranger about the cheating mess one is in.

  8. 8.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    April 9, 2014 at 10:48 am

    There’s something offputtingly winky and too-clever-by-half about xkcd for me. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s always just annoyed me, however insightful it may be.

  9. 9.

    Belafon

    April 9, 2014 at 10:54 am

    @Xecky Gilchrist: Because he succeeded by drawing stick figures and the rest of us haven’t.

  10. 10.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    April 9, 2014 at 10:56 am

    @Belafon: I do applaud xkcd for being strong enough on content to get away with that.

  11. 11.

    srv

    April 9, 2014 at 10:56 am

    xkcd is just for the digital elite, a new form of snobs

  12. 12.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 10:59 am

    I have a new review of the latest Cosmos here. I think this episode was the best so far. Also a good counter point to Andrew Sullivan’s stupid assertion that Christianity was responsible for the scientific revolution.

    ETA: BTW are my Cosmos reviews getting too physicsy? and unintelligible? As a physics kitteh I have no way to judge. Any feedback is appreciated. Kthx.

  13. 13.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 11:01 am

    @Xecky Gilchrist: I sometimes find xkcd funny, sometimes the humor sails right over my head. I also don’t get the fuss over Allie Brosch’s illustrations. I find her writing funny but her illustrations scary.

  14. 14.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 9, 2014 at 11:05 am

    @schrodinger’s cat: Hmmm. Andrew Sullivan isn’t terribly learned on Galileo and Copernicus, is he?

    I’m shocked, shocked at this.

  15. 15.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 11:07 am

    @Villago Delenda Est: Cosmos hurt his devout Catholic fee-fees.

  16. 16.

    Librarian

    April 9, 2014 at 11:09 am

    “Paper and clay tablets are safe.” Har de har har.

  17. 17.

    WereBear

    April 9, 2014 at 11:13 am

    @schrodinger’s cat: Andrew Sullivan’s stupid assertion that Christianity was responsible for the scientific revolution.

    And people should take him seriously… why?

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne

    April 9, 2014 at 11:15 am

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    As I said over at your place, you only have to read Galileo’s Daughter to see what an uninformed idiot Sullivan is when it comes to the history of science and the Catholic church.

    ETA: Also, it’s a very good and entertaining book that humanizes Galileo through the letters he exchanged with his daughter, who was a Poor Clare nun.

  19. 19.

    Amir Khalid

    April 9, 2014 at 11:15 am

    @schrodinger’s cat:
    As you know, for centuries, many of the scholars and scientists in Europe were of the clergy, e.g. Giordano Bruno and Galileo, because they had the education and the time to pursue such things. But these scientist-clergymen still had to fight Catholic dogma when it conflicted with their scientific findings; and in a fight between the Church in its medieval pomp and one monk with a telescope, you would fear for the latter. I wouldn’t call Sullivan’s assertion stupid, not exactly; but it is far from the whole truth.

  20. 20.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 11:15 am

    @WereBear: I think it is his posh accent.

  21. 21.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 9, 2014 at 11:16 am

    @Mnemosyne: Well, Sullivan, being Tory scum, is pretty much uninformed about everything, in the great tradition of John Stuart Mill.

  22. 22.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 9, 2014 at 11:18 am

    @Amir Khalid: One can make an even more compelling argument that Islam is responsible for a lot of scientific advancement.

    Which of course is even more entertaining as we watch wingtards’ haids kerplode.

  23. 23.

    Roger Moore

    April 9, 2014 at 11:20 am

    @WereBear:

    And people should take him seriously… why?

    He is in the “Blogs We Monitor And Mock As Needed” category rather than the blogroll.

  24. 24.

    dmsilev

    April 9, 2014 at 11:21 am

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    ETA: BTW are my Cosmos reviews getting too physicsy? and unintelligible? As a physics kitteh I have no way to judge. Any feedback is appreciated. Kthx.

    They look fine to me. While I’m in the same boat as you re: personal knowledge of physics, I have done a fair amount of teaching-to-freshmen and broad community outreach stuff (going all the way down to 2nd or 3rd grade level), and based on that experience, I’d say you’ve written to a level that’s pretty accessible to an interested layperson.

  25. 25.

    MomSense

    April 9, 2014 at 11:22 am

    Thank FSM for xkcd and existential comics.

  26. 26.

    ? Martin

    April 9, 2014 at 11:22 am

    Guaranteed the NSA has been exploiting this bug for 2 years now.

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    April 9, 2014 at 11:23 am

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    One can make an even more compelling argument that Islam is responsible for a lot of scientific advancement.

    What did the Muslims ever do for us, other than Arabic numerals, algebra, large amounts of astronomy, and preserving far more of the classical Greek and Latin texts than Europeans managed?

  28. 28.

    Mnemosyne

    April 9, 2014 at 11:23 am

    @Amir Khalid:

    Slight correction: Galileo was not a priest. He came from a family of musicians and studied medicine at the University of Pisa. He did have to hustle his whole life to find patrons to support his studies.

  29. 29.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 11:24 am

    @Amir Khalid: I made a similar point in an earlier review. But Sullivan’s point was that there was something about Christianity in particular that lead to the scientific revolution.
    This is what Sullivan highlighted and had me seeing red. In addition to being complete BS it is extremely Christian and Eurocentric.

    [quote from Walter Percy]

    …it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation.

    ETA: I have no idea who this Percy is, but the book was written in the 30s. So Percy was probably the Charles Murray of his era.

  30. 30.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 11:28 am

    @dmsilev: Thanks, I appreciate your perspective.

  31. 31.

    Mnemosyne

    April 9, 2014 at 11:28 am

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    But Sullivan’s point was that there was something about Christianity in particular that lead to the scientific revolution.

    Yeah — it was the fact that the Christian nations were wealthy after robbing the Americas and had money and leisure to explore those ideas.

    Plus that episode of “Cosmos” pointed out another reason: fundamentalism (of several stripes) halted scientific progress in China and the Islamic nations. The one argument you could make that “Christianity” helped advance science was the ginormous split in Christianity between the Roman Catholic Church and the various Protestants, which made it much harder for the RCC to chase down heretics and suppress their findings.

    Sorry, Andy, but it was Protestantism that plowed the ground, not Catholicism.

  32. 32.

    dmsilev

    April 9, 2014 at 11:33 am

    @schrodinger’s cat: Color me completely unsurprised that Sullivan (or the guy he’s approvingly quoting) either doesn’t know about or is willfully ignoring the scientific advances in the Islamic world which predates Galileo.

  33. 33.

    Amir Khalid

    April 9, 2014 at 11:46 am

    @Mnemosyne:
    I stand corrected.

  34. 34.

    Anoniminous

    April 9, 2014 at 11:50 am

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Reads fine to me.

  35. 35.

    E.

    April 9, 2014 at 11:50 am

    Some day everyone in America will wake up to discover their bank accounts have been fully emptied. Whether that arises from formally legal activities by the Koch brother brigade or illegal action of teenage computer geniuses in Vladivostok, only time will tell.

  36. 36.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 11:54 am

    WP eated my comment because I tried to go in and fix the messed up block quotes. So I am trying once again.
    @Amir Khalid: I made a similar point in an earlier review. But Sullivan’s point was that there was something about Christianity in particular that lead to the scientific revolution.
    This is what Sullivan highlighted and had me seeing red. In addition to being complete BS it is extremely Christian and Eurocentric.

    [quote from Walter Percy]

    …it is no coincidence that science sprang, not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, not from the Egyptian-Mayan astrological South, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if the reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the Incarnation.

    ETA: I have no idea who this Percy is, but the book was written in the 30s. So Percy was probably the Charles Murray of his era.

  37. 37.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 9, 2014 at 11:57 am

    @Mnemosyne: Protestantism also freed up thought on economics and finance that the Princes of the Church had been retarding for centuries.

    The Enlightenment probably would not have happened without the Reformation, which was bloody enough already, thank you very much. The American “founding fathers” were much closer to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries than we are, which greatly influenced their views on separating church and state.

  38. 38.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 11:58 am

    @Mnemosyne: Exactly, the English and the Germans were at the forefront of the scientific revolution.

    Apart from the various Bernoulli brothers I can’t seem to come up with Italian scientists after Galileo.

  39. 39.

    Anoniminous

    April 9, 2014 at 12:02 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    One can make an even more compelling argument that Islam is responsible for a lot of scientific advancement.

    The capture of the public library at Toledo caused an intellectual revolution in Christian Europe, laying the basis for Abelard, et. al., to spread and Aquinas to systematize Aristotelian Logic. The Toledo library and further contact with Islam laid the foundations of mathematics: Algebra for the first, Fibonacci for the second.

    And that’s the basis for Modern Science.

  40. 40.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 12:10 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: Correction: The block quote is from a book by Alfred Whitehead

  41. 41.

    Villago Delenda Est

    April 9, 2014 at 12:11 pm

    @Anoniminous: See! I told you all that one could make a compelling argument that Islam is responsible, and here we have it!

  42. 42.

    Ben Cisco

    April 9, 2014 at 12:12 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    He is in the “Blogs We Monitor And Mock As Needed” category rather than the blogroll.

    I propose a new category: “Blogs We Ignore b/c The Blogger Is A Racist, Fascist Douchebag”

  43. 43.

    Anoniminous

    April 9, 2014 at 12:20 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    I live to serve.

    :-)

  44. 44.

    Roger Moore

    April 9, 2014 at 12:21 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    The American “founding fathers” were much closer to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries than we are, which greatly influenced their views on separating church and state.

    They were closer in time to the 30 Years War than we are to them, and closer to the English Civil War than we are to the American Civil War.

  45. 45.

    Roger Moore

    April 9, 2014 at 12:41 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Apart from the various Bernoulli brothers I can’t seem to come up with Italian scientists after Galileo.

    There have been some, even if they aren’t the top of the heap. Some names you might recognize: Torricelli, Avogadro, Volta, Marconi, and Fermi. Fermi is the only one I saw who came to Galileo’s level, and I don’t see anyone at the level of Newton, Darwin, or Einstein; I don’t know if any of them come to the level of Dalton, Pasteur, or Mendel.

  46. 46.

    Alex

    April 9, 2014 at 12:48 pm

    Jim DeMint explaining that slavery was ended due to something something. Definitely not a massive expansion of the federal government.

    DeMint: Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God.

    — http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/jim-demint-asserts-federal-government-played-no-role-freeing-slaves

  47. 47.

    Alex

    April 9, 2014 at 12:50 pm

    And in more open threadness — George W. Bush’s paintings were all sourced to Google Image Search. http://animalnewyork.com/2014/george-w-bush-took-paintings-google-images/

    It’s the combination of a lack of a personal touch and just not caring that makes it great. Especially since they’re being displayed as a gallery of how much of a personal connection he had with the world leaders.

    “I place a high priority on personal diplomacy. Getting to know a fellow world leader’s personality, character, and concerns made it easier to find common ground and deal with contentious issues. That was a lesson I had picked up from Dad, who was one of the great practitioners of personal diplomacy.” -George W. Bush — http://www.bushcenter.org/special-exhibits/art-of-leadership

  48. 48.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 12:52 pm

    @Roger Moore: I remembered Fermi too, several hundred years separate him from Galileo.
    I was kinda thinking more about Newton’s contemporaries and was hard pressed to come up many Italian scientists. Galileo’s persecution must have sent a lot of the science in Italy underground.

  49. 49.

    Robert Sneddon

    April 9, 2014 at 1:02 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: Strongly Catholic communities had an escape route for smart young men, the seminary and the Church and especially the Jesuits. More Protestant communities still had churches and a need for educated young entrants but fewer of them. This might have made a difference.

  50. 50.

    peggy

    April 9, 2014 at 1:09 pm

    Offhand, I can name two Italian Nobel prize winners in biology- Salvatore Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Physical science might provide others- can’t say, not my field.

  51. 51.

    peggy

    April 9, 2014 at 1:32 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Italian_Nobel_laureates lists several other Italian Nobelists, including Rubbia of CERN.

  52. 52.

    Origuy

    April 9, 2014 at 1:33 pm

    There’s Cassini, but he became director of the Paris Observatory in 1669 and stayed there the rest of his life.

  53. 53.

    Eric U.

    April 9, 2014 at 2:22 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est: the Spanish Inquisition was ongoing while the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution. I have to imagine that it was on their mind

  54. 54.

    Gene108

    April 9, 2014 at 2:28 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Percy can go back to using Roman numerals, if he thinks the East has contributed nothing to the sciences.

    A good argument can be made that Vedic astrology is the basis of all mathematics.

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics#Vedic_period

  55. 55.

    Calouste

    April 9, 2014 at 2:33 pm

    @Mnemosyne:

    Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire in 391 AD. Pretty much f’ all happened scientifically in Europe from that point onwards for the next 1000 years.

  56. 56.

    schrodinger's cat

    April 9, 2014 at 3:18 pm

    @Gene108: No culture has the monopoly either on the stupid or the genius. There have been times when certain cultures have been more dominant than others. The past few centuries it has been mummy (Britain) and daughter (US) among others, but I am not sanguine about the current tide of stupid, aided and abetted by the Republicans.

    ETA: Although what Christianity had to do with the English and US dominance is something I fail to see.

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