diana.shull

by Matthew Sitman

Nina Caplan finds that, despite the all the pages written about the British Empire, “one great culprit in the colonisation project rarely receives its fair share of blame: gin.” How the gin and tonic helped shape history:

Without quinine, malaria would have felled the conquerors; without gin to alleviate the bitterness of this highly effective anti-malarial, the soldiers would have refused to down their medicine.

The Spanish went to the Andes and found the cinchona tree, the bark of which turned out to contain an acrid but exceptionally useful substance. The British planted the tree in their Indian colony and attempted to sweeten that bitter bark with sugar, water and lemon: the resulting “tonic” turned out to be much more palatable when dosed with gin. Halfway down my second Pahit, I still can’t work out which is more peculiar: that those long-ago soldiers needed booze to persuade them to protect themselves from an often fatal disease? Or that a spirit so lethally popular that a quarter of mid-18th-century Londoners averaged a pint of the stuff a day was enlisted to save the lives of those same poor people—the ones who became foot soldiers in the Imperial British Army? The ability to withstand malaria helped Britain to conquer half of Africa and keep India subjugated (more or less). So much misery, engendered by one of the world’s most inspired taste combinations.

(Photo by Armando Alves)

Dimock, Julian A. “Three Seminole girls, The Everglades, Florida, 1907.” from the AMNH Digital Special Collections

The American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) research library last month hosted the official launch of its new online image database for Digital Special Collections. Begun as a project to digitize 1,000 of the museum’s photos and rare book illustrations using grant funding from the New York Metropolitan Library Council, the Digital Special Collections program has evolved into a long-term project that will offer the public free online access to the museum’s research library collection. The new database includes more than 7,000 archival images that document the Museum’s efforts in New York and around the world, dating back to scientific expeditions from the 19th century.

These images are just a fraction of the museum’s collection, said Tom Baione, AMNH’s Harold Boeschenstein director of library services, during his introduction to the museum’s “Slide Slam: From Archive to Art” event, held last month at AMNH’s Kaufmann Theater to debut the new database. Addressing a full house, Baione reflected on the ways in which the 145-year-old institution’s image collections had served previous generations of educators.

“The Digital Special Collections site, unfortunately, only makes available less than one percent of the images in the library’s collections,” he said. “Before the advent of the Internet and Powerpoint, educators and lecturers had to use slides, and the library sold copies of images from our collections… Every year, we sold tens of thousands of these slides to fill those old-fashioned slide carousels.”

“Dutch women, Ellis Island” [n.d.] (LS173-33) from the AMNH Digital Special Collections

This digitization effort has captured images from many of those lantern slides, “illustrating cultures, paleontology, botany, and zoology in places as diverse as Greenland, Mongolia, and Kenya,” according to an AMNH description.

The image database also includes: illustrations from the research library’s collection of 14,000 rare books, “including the work of pioneers in natural science from as early as the 16th century;” the research library’s Julian Dimock Collection of approximately 3,400 photographs on glass “documenting the daily lives of African Americans in South Carolina and Alabama, new immigrants at Ellis Island, and the Seminole Indians of Florida at the turn of the last century;” The Lumholtz Collection, which includes images documenting ethnographer Carl S. Lumholtz’ four expeditions to northwestern Mexico between 1890 and 1898; The Jesup North Pacific Expedition collection documenting “the peoples and cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America and the eastern coast of Siberia from 1897 to 1902;” and photos capturing the Museum’s own educational programs and activities for New York children throughout the 20^th century.

For many of those children, visits to the museum prove to be formative experiences. The “slide slam” event featured two special guests—renowned New York-based artists Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman—who discussed ways in which the museum had inspired their work.

Rota, Alex J. “Installing models for the Forest Floor exhibit, 1958.” (325494) from the AMNH Digital Special Collections

“This institution has been… for me the most important institution in my artistic life,” Rockman said in his opening comments. “My mom used to work here. I took classes in this room when I was a kid,” he said, going on to describe his 1990 painting “Forest Floor” as an homage to a forest floor diorama in the museum’s Hall of North American Forests.

Dion agreed, describing the museum as “an extraordinarily important place for me… I think in the past 30 years I’ve probably visited the museum at least once a month. And nowhere has been more welcoming and warm in the museum than the library. I’ve spent a lot of time in those stacks… And I’m very happy that we’re here to celebrate the images being available in a broader way, so that people can experience the richness that I’ve found in the archive, and continue to find every trip there.”

The Digital Special Collections project utilizes flatbed scanning, adhering to standards and workflows based on the Federal Agencies Digitization Guideline Initiative’s (FADGI) Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials. Images are cataloged by staff, interns, and volunteers, with data entered into modified Dublin Core fields in an Omeka database.

“Painting, suggested habitat, Canada Lynx and Snowshoe Hare Group, Hall of North American Mammals, [1935].” from the AMNH Digital Special Collections

“To maintain historical integrity, we retain legacy information about the images through data fields such as original caption, but include modern terms to ensure discovery through newly generated titles,” the project site explains.

Baione emphasized that the site is open to the public, encouraging the audience to visit, browse its collections and special exhibits, and use the images for their own work.

“We encourage folks who are producing lectures or blogging to click, save, and distribute these images,” he said. “Please just let everybody know where they came from…. Now that our new image database is up and running, as we commemorate this, we’re also going to be able to begin to seek funding to get more images…up and out and accessible.”

For additional coverage, see the launch announcement with additional links from Gary Price on LJ infoDOCKET.

“I hope you can see, dear Neil, that it isn’t just that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, but also that there is more active, vigorous, interesting, and intellectually respectable philosophy to be explored than you and some of your colleagues have been able to dream of so far. Please, keep that in mind the next time someone asks you about it. Or ask them to give me a call,” – Massimo Pigliucci, a biologist and philosopher at the City University of New York, and a friend of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

If you want a classic example of political Christianism – and its active hostility to spiritual Christianity – it’s hard to beat Sarah Palin’s remarks yesterday. I offered a brief response last night, but this obscenity needs to be unpacked some more. And the first thing to say is that a former US vice-presidential candidate did not just endorse a war crime; she endorsed it as routine for every human being suspected of terrorism. And she seems to endorse it as an introduction to captivity. “Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” is a glib statement but a revealing one. Baptism is the beginning of something, an introduction. And so torturing prisoners accused of terrorism is a signature of the America Palin believes in. It’s how we welcome them to our prison camps.

Now look how far we have come from the original notion – pioneered by Charles Krauthammer and popularized by “24″ – that torture should only be used in the hypothetical ticking time-bomb case. That argument – only ever hypothetical – nonetheless assumes that torture is evil and should only be used in extremis to prevent imminent catastrophe. Palin, in contrast, like her party, has long since blown past such niceties. She believes that torture should be the first resort – a sign of how America treats its foes, a badge of honor.

What can one say but that this is a bona fide fascistic sentiment. It revels in violence against individuals tied down by their hands and feet and strapped to a terrifying board in order to be suffocated hundreds of times to near-death. It is the kind of statement you might expect from the Khmer Rouge, or from the Chinese Communists who perfected “stress positions”, or from the Nazis, whose Gestapo pioneered “enhanced interrogation”, i.e. brutal torture that would leave no physical traces. Except it’s worse than that. Even totalitarian regimes have publicly denied their torture. Their reticence and lies are some small concession of vice to the appearance of virtue. Not Palin – who wants to celebrate brutal torture as the American way.

And then she manages to go one step further. She invokes torture in the context of a Christian sacrament. Not since the Nazis’ Deutsche Christen have we seen something so disgusting and blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar opposite. Mercifully, some Christians on the right have managed to say something. Dreher rightly calls it sacrilege:

Not only is this woman, putatively a Christian, praising torture, but she is comparing it to a holy sacrament of the Christian faith. It’s disgusting — but even more disgusting, those NRA members, many of whom are no doubt Christians, cheered wildly for her … What does it say about the character of a person that they could make that joking comparison, and that so many people would cheer for it.

It says something quite clear to me.

It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism. Rod should know this by now. In the best recent polling on the question, 62 percent of white evangelical “Christians” back torture as often or sometimes justified, with only 16 percent holding the orthodox position that it is never justified. Now compare those numbers with Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion: the number in that demographic is 40 percent in favor in some or many cases, and 26 percent against it in all circumstances. Is this a function of wayward and uncommitted Christians? Nope. Support for torture is highest among those who attend church at least weekly and lowest for those who rarely or never go to church. In America, torture is a Christian value. And some people wonder why I prefer to term “Christianist” to describe these people.

Joe Carter gets it right:

The truly Christian position is to never forget that evil comes not just from the actions of “terrorists” or “enemies” but from the heart of a fallen, sacred yet degraded, human beings. If we are to preserve our own humanity we must not forget that our enemy differs from us in degree, not in kind. Like us, our enemies need to accept Jesus and to be baptized by water and the Spirit. That is the Christian way, not as Palin would have it, to have our enemies fear a pagan god and have their spirit broken by water.

It seems to me, moreover, that torture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

(Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images)

A new study found that books with anthropomorphized animals may teach children fewer facts:

Over two experiments, the researchers tested preschool- and kindergarten-aged kids’ knowledge of a few obscure animals—cavies, oxpeckers, and handfish—by reading books about the animals with them and then asking questions. Some books contained realistic pictures and descriptions, some cartoon drawings and humanized language (e.g., “mother cavy tucks her babies into bed in a small cave”), and some a mix.

While all kids learned something about the three animals from whichever book they read, those who read the realistic books ended up with a better factual understanding of the creatures. Those who read the anthropomorphized books didn’t learn as much and also had a harder time reasoning about the animals.

Study author Patricia Ganea talked about how the results have been misinterpreted:

People have gone crazy out there. They think we are saying, don’t read books that interweave fantasy with reality. That’s not the message from this.

It’s if you want your children to learn more facts about animals, it would be better to use books that are more realistic. Of course parents should read a variety of books to their children. Fantasy is important for their imagination and their cognitive development. … I think [this study is important] because it may have implications for our use of picture books as a tool for science education. Studies say picture books are an excellent tool for giving kids knowledge about the world. You can have a five- or six-year-old learn important biological concepts. So our work suggests if you want to establish foundations for a more accurate scientific understanding of the world early on, you use factual books.

Katy Waldman defends talking animals:

Sometimes, an overly anthropomorphic view of animals can be harmful, as when people get mauled by bears because they regard them as cuddly human friends in bear suits. But to the extent that humanized characters are both more accessible to and more likely to inspire empathy in young readers, I don’t see how they could be construed as bad for kids, the animal kingdom, or even science.

Scaffolding familiar traits onto alien subjects is a powerful way to promote learning, one that children do naturally from the age of 12 to 24 months. And imaginative play—the type where you pretend a badger gets jealous of her baby sister—has cognitive benefits: “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Albert Einstein once said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

Dr. Pat McGovern, author of Uncorking the Past, is “a notable pioneer in the fascinating field of experimental fermented beverage archaeology“:

Most recently, his team worked on artifacts found in various sites in Denmark and Sweden that once held ancient Nordic grog, a term loosely used to define beverages containing multiple fermentable sugar sources. With the help of this chem-lab technology they were able to detect the presence of tartaric acid, which hints at the presence of grapes, a group of plant compounds associated with lingonberry and cranberry, and traces of other compounds related to juniper berry, bog myrtle, and yarrow.

But rather than stop at a list of ingredients and a journal publication, Dr. McGovern has been taking his work one step further. Using these results and other evidence from Nordic dig sites, Dr. McGovern and Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione teamed up to bring this ancient grog, along with several other brews, back to life. Named Kvasir after a Nordic deity born from the spit of other gods, this orange-hued brew is made with wheat, cranberry, lingonberry, bog myrtle, yarrow, honey and birch syrup. The result is a tart and complex beer that is packed with spice and floral notes. Instead of coming off as a gimmick, Kvasir feels and tastes more like a refined museum artifact that should studied and pondered. Instilling this millennia-old historical accuracy into a large-scale production beer is certainly no easy feat. It’s a tricky task that calls for innovation and compromise.

A prime example of this is Dr. McGovern and Dogfish Head’s most ancient of ales, the 9000-year-old Chinese elixir known as Chateau Jiahu. … Chateau Jiahu is a brew that must be experienced with an open mind. Beer certainly isn’t the first word that comes to mind when taking the initial sips. Sweet and complex, with subtle grape and white flower nuances, this ancient concoction drinks much more like a dessert wine. I’d suggest slowly enjoying this contemplative brew while relishing in the thought of consuming something that hasn’t been tasted for 9000 years.

Previous Dish on ancient alcohol here.

(Image of Chateau Jiahu by Flickr user edwin)

There’s never been a better time to be a planetary scientist:

For almost all of [the field’s] history, it could study only the eight planets that make up the local solar system. But the boom in exoplanet research over the past decade or so has furnished the field with a wealth of data from elsewhere in the galaxy. Much of this has come from a specially designed space telescope called Kepler, some of the discoveries of which are illustrated in the artist’s impression above, along with objects from the local solar system, for comparison. Kepler’s discoveries, and others, have done plenty of exciting violence to old theories of what planets are and how they form. Several papers discussing what is happening were presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society which took place this week in Washington, DC.

Astronomers are particularly interested in planets intermediate in size between rocky Earth and gassy Neptune, which along with Uranus is one of the solar system’s two “ice giants,” and which has a radius 3.8 times that of Earth and is around 17 times as massive. Planets of this intermediate size are common, but because the local solar system does not host one, they are also mysterious. Are they scaled-up Earths, scaled-down Neptunes or a mixture of the two? And, if they are a mixture, where is the boundary between the rocky ones, known as super-Earths, and the gaseous ones, known as mini-Neptunes?

(The Kepler telescope has identified 238 planets and 3,538 “planet candidates” in this section of the Milky Way. Photo: Carter Roberts.)

Before you set your alarm tonight, read Casey N. Cep on the perils of hitting snooze:

Since 1956, we have been confusing snooze for sleep, sacrificing our waking life nine minutes at a time. Not only do we delay the start of our days, but we compromise the very sleep we are trying to steal. The healthy, continuous sleep cycles we need are thoroughly disrupted by the snooze. When we hear the first sound of the alarm, our bodies release adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that wake us, interrupting our natural sleep cycle to make us alert.

Surrendering to the temptation of the snooze erases that hormonal surge: our bodies try to reenter the deeper periods of sleep. Only those restorative levels of sleep take a lot longer than nine minutes to enter, so every snooze confuses our bodies even more. We think three or four snoozes are the equivalent of an extra 30 or 40 minutes of rest, but the patchy, interrupted sleep of snooze is worse than no sleep at all. Instead of the natural sleeping then waking, the snooze drags us into unhealthy, unsatisfying fits of trying to sleep and trying to rise, but failing to do either.

As Emily Badger notes, magazines have been ranking places to live for more than 80 years:

[C]onsider a three-part series by H.L. Mencken that ran in The American Mercury in 1931: It was succinctly headlined, “THE WORST AMERICAN STATE.” In the impressive tome, which covered some 47 pages across three issues of the magazine, Mencken and Charles Angoff methodically ranked the states (at the time, there were only 48 plus the District of Columbia) on everything from farm electrification to literacy rates to the salaries of teachers to the number of natives in Who’s Who in America. (*Blush*: They also included the local circulation per thousand people of The Atlantic Monthly). 

Matt Carmichael, editor of the website Livability.com, dug up this gem (“on microfiche!”) while working on a much more modern ranking of America’s 100 best small and mid-sized cities to live in, which he’s published today. … Mencken’s list, Carmichael notes, included some metrics we would never measure today, like the prevalence of lynchings (surprise leader: Wyoming) or death rates from typhoid fever (sorry again, Mississippi).

In preparing his own ranking, Carmichael became interested in how ideas about quality of life evolve, and not just with respect to rising living standards. “What would you have measured if you were doing a ‘best places to live’ list in 1965?” he asks. “Would it have been mall density? Or cul-de-sacs per capita?”

That was one of the clearest, simplest and most moving presidential speeches to the nation I can imagine. It explained and it argued, point after point. Everything the president said extemporaneously at the post-G20 presser was touched on, made terser, more elegant and more persuasive.

The key points: it is an abdication of America’s exceptional role in the world to look away from the horrific use of poison gas to wipe out civilian populations and kill rebels in a civil war. Given that the world would have ignored August 21 or engaged in meaningless blather about it, Obama took the decision to say he would strike. Since such a strike was not in response to an imminent threat to our national security, Obama felt he should go to the Congress, and reverse some of the strong currents toward the imperial presidency that took hold under Dick Cheney.

As that moment of truth loomed, the Russians gave way on defending or denying Assad’s use and possession of chemical weapons. Putin only did so if it could be seen as his initiative and if he could take the credit for it. Kerry’s gaffe provided the opening. And we now have a diplomatic process that could avert war if it succeeds. And of course, Obama is prepared to give such a proposal a chance. Any president would be deeply foolish not to. There is no urgency as long as Assad has formally agreed to give the weapons up, doesn’t use them again, and the process can be practically managed as well as verified at every stage.

I’m tired of the eye-rolling and the easy nit-picking of the president’s leadership on this over the last few weeks. The truth is: his threat of war galvanized the world and America, raised the profile of the issue of chemical weapons more powerfully than ever before, ensured that this atrocity would not be easily ignored and fostered a diplomatic initiative to resolve the issue without use of arms. All the objectives he has said he wanted from the get-go are now within reach, and the threat of military force – even if implicit – remains.

Yes, it’s been messy. A more cautious president would have ducked it. Knowing full well it could scramble his presidency, Obama nonetheless believed that stopping chemical weapons use is worth it – for the long run, and for Americans as well as Syrians. Putin understands this as well. Those chemical weapons, if uncontrolled, could easily slip into the hands of rebels whose second target, after Assad and the Alawites and the Christians, would be Russia.

This emphatically does not solve the Syria implosion. But Obama has never promised to.

What it does offer is a nonviolent way toward taking the chemical weapons issue off the table. Just because we cannot solve everything does not mean we cannot solve something. And the core truth is that without Obama’s willingness to go out on a precarious limb, we would not have that opportunity.

The money quote for me, apart from the deeply moving passage about poison gas use at the end, was his description of a letter from a service-member who told him, “We should not be the world’s policeman.” President Obama said, quite simply: “I agree.” And those on the far right who are accusing him of ceding the Middle East to Russia are half-right and yet completely wrong. What this remarkable breakthrough has brought about is a possible end to the dynamic in which America is both blamed for all the evils in the world and then also blamed for not stopping all of them. We desperately need to rebuild international cooperation to relieve us of that impossible burden in a cycle that can only hurt us and the West again and again.

If the Russians can more effectively enforce what the US wants, it is a huge step forward to give them that global responsibility, and credit. That inclination – deep in Obama’s bones in domestic and foreign policy – is at the root of his community organizing background. Stake your ground, flush out your partner’s cards, take a step back and see what would make a desired result more likely without you, and seize it if it emerges. The result is one less dependent on US might or presidential power, and thereby more easily entrenched in the habits and institutions of the world.

Yes, he’s still a community organizer. It’s just that now, the community he is so effectively organizing is the world.

Ben Marks profiles artist John Gilroy, whose oil paintings were the basis of Guinness’ advertising campaigns in the mid-20th century:

“Within the Guinness archives itself,” [brewing expert David] Hughes says of the materials kept at the company’s Dublin headquarters, “they’ve got lots of advertising art, watercolors, and sketches of workups towards the final version of the posters. But they never had a single oil painting. Until the paintings started turning up in the United States, where Guinness memorabilia is quite collectible, it wasn’t fully understood that the posters were based on oils. All of the canvases will be in collections within a year,” Hughes adds. For would-be Gilroy collectors, that means the clock is ticking.

As it turns out, Gilroy’s entire artistic process was a prelude to the oils. “The first thing he’d usually do was a pencil sketch,” says Hughes. “Then he’d paint a watercolor over the top of the pencil sketch to get the color balance right. Once that was settled and all the approvals were in, he’d sit down and paint the oil. The proof version that went to Guinness for approval, it seems, was always an oil painting.”

Based on what we know of John Gilroy’s work as an artist, that makes sense. For almost half a century, Gilroy was regarded not only as one of England’s premier commercial illustrators, but also as one of its best portraitists. “He painted the Queen three times,” says Hughes, “Lord Mountbatten about four times. In 1942, he did a pencil-and-crayon sketch of Churchill in a London bunker.” According to Hughes, Churchill gave that portrait to Russian leader Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which may mean that somewhere in the bowels of the Kremlin, there’s a portrait of Winnie by the same guy who made a living drawing cartoons of flying toucans balancing pints of Guinness on their beaks.

(Image via Collectors Weekly)

by Matt Sitman

That’s the catchphrase Judith Shulevitz nominates as the most pernicious cliché of our time, tracing it back to Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. She argues that its constant invocation reveals what “George Orwell pointed out, which is that stale phrases mechanically repeated have dangerous political effects”:

You can’t blame Christensen and his co-writers for all the dumb things said and done in the name of disruption. But you can spot some unsavory habits of mind in their prescriptions. For one thing, they possess an almost utopian faith in technology: online or “blended” learning; massive open online courses, or MOOCs; cool health apps; and so on. Their convictions seem sincere, but they also coincide nicely with the interests of the Silicon Valley venture-capital crowd. If you use technology to disrupt the delivery of public services, you open up new markets; you also replace human labor with the virtual kind, a happy thought for an investor, since labor is the most expensive line item in all service-industry budgets.

Second, Christensen and his acolytes make the free-market-fundamentalist assumption that all public or nonprofit institutions are sclerotic and unable to cope with change. This leads to an urge to disrupt, preemptively, from above, rather than deal with disruption when it starts bubbling up below. Third, they don’t like participatory democracy much. “The sobering conclusion,” write Christensen and co-authors in their book about K–12 education, “is that democracy … is an effective tool of government only in” less contentious communities than those that surround schools. “Political and school leaders who seek fundamental school reform need to become much more comfortable amassing and wielding power because other tools of governance will yield begrudging cooperation at best.”

Choir singers not only harmonise their voices they also synchronise their heartbeats, a study suggests.