So You Want to Motivate People to Get Vaccinated…

Posted on April 17, 2014 by wellsdc

Now that we are seeing outbreaks of diseases that were once relegated to the history books and vaccine labels, and now that even Jenny McCarthy seems unable to control the beast she helped to create, perhaps it’s time for some stronger rhetoric than mere science and mockery.

The following photo was taken during World War II at the 363rd Station Hospital in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (which was part of Australia at the time):

About 27,000 Allied soldiers contracted malaria in New Guinea during the campaign against Japan, which lasted more than three years, from early 1942 until the war ended in August 1945. Antimalarial drugs were among the most effective tools in controlling the disease.

You didn’t forget your antimalarial meds. If you did, you had a pretty good chance of dying, even without anyone shooting at you.

So go get your dang vaccines. Any questions?

Photo credit: By Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health & Medicine (OTIS Archive 1) ref: D44-145-1 (MAMAS) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

A Few Totally True Facts

Posted on March 27, 2014 by wellsdc

I have plenty of unfinished posts and important topics that deserve my attention, but instead I want to share a few items from “77 Facts That Sound Like Huge Lies But Are Actually Completely True,” by Dave Stopera at BuzzFeed. Most of the ones I picked deal with the passage of time, and our oft-skewed perception of it. The links are in the original, but I added a picture or two.

5. The name Jessica was created by Shakespeare in the play Merchant of Venice.

8. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid.

20. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.

21. Not once in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme does it mention that he’s an egg. Continue reading →

The History of the United States in One GIF

Posted on March 26, 2014 by wellsdc

Click to embiggen.

From a set posted by dayyad to Imgur.

The GIF only covers the time period from 1789 to the present, so it leaves out a lot of colonies and (going further back) nations, but there’s only so much you can pack into one animated GIF.

What I’m Reading, March 21, 2014

Posted on March 21, 2014 by wellsdc

Micronesians Continue To Seek Justice On The 60th Anniversary Of The Castle Bravo Nuclear Test, Michelle Broader Van Dyke, BuzzFeed, February 28, 2014

The U.S. conducted at least 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. The nuclear test conducted at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, Operation Castle Bravo, remains the largest test ever conducted by the U.S. and yielded 15 megatons, almost 1,000 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Bravo vaporized two surrounding islets and sent a plume of highly radioactive debris floating over the lagoon and into the open water. Atolls downwind of Bikini, including Rongelap and Utirik, hadn’t been informed of the tests but were showered with dangerously radioactive ash, which residents believed was snow — something they had never seen.

In the years following the test, people who were exposed burned from the radiation, became nauseous, developed thyroid problems, had loss of blood cells, and women who were pregnant miscarried. And decades after the bombings, the health problems persist with unusually high rates of birth defects and cancer among Micronesians.

Keurig Will Use DRM In New Coffee Maker To Lock Out Refill Market, Karl Bode, TechDirt, March 3, 2014

The single coffee cup craze has been rolling now for several years in both the United States and Canada, with Keurig, Tassimo, and Nespresso all battling it out to lock down the market. In order to protect their dominant market share, Keurig makers Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has been on a bit of an aggressive tear of late. As with computer printers, getting the device in the home is simply a gateway to where the real money is: refills. But Keurig has faced the “problem” in recent years of third-party pod refills that often retail for 5-25% less than what Keurig charges. As people look to cut costs, there has also been a growing market for reusable pods that generally run anywhere from five to fifteen dollars.

Continue reading →

America at War

Posted on February 24, 2014 by wellsdc

By Lordkinbote at en.wikipedia [Public domain or Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons Wikipedia has a page showing all (or at least many) of America’s military engagements at home and abroad in two timelines, 1770 to 1900 and 1900 to present (h/t Juan Cole).

The first thing you might note is that we have gone to war a lot. Most of the 19th-century campaigns were against this or that Indian nation—manifest destiny stuff, mostly—but there are also lesser-known foreign engagements like the Philippine-American War (1898-1902), which resulted in more than 4,000 American deaths, mostly from disease, and as many as 1.5 million Filipino civilian deaths. We also seemed to like to do some occupying back in the day, including Nicaragua (1912-33), Haiti (1915-34), the Dominican Republic (i.e. the other half of the island with Haiti) (1916-24), and the Dominican Republic again (1965-66).

The timelines color-code each war or conflict to indicate whether the conflict is ongoing or whether the U.S. was the winner, loser, or neither. It identifies seven “ongoing” conflicts: Continue reading →

When Are Orcs More Plausible than Women?

Posted on February 22, 2014 by wellsdc

By anonymous (modified image: http://freywild.ch/i33/i33en.html) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons The short answer is “never,” but bear with me.

Some guy who goes by the name Vox Day on the internet has announced plans to create a medieval combat video game. The game will allow players to manage the combat of a variety of characters, including humans, elves, and dwarves. The game will also have goblins, orcs, and trolls, but I don’t know if those are playable characters or enemies. (I don’t play much of this style of game, so I don’t know exactly how it works.)

What the game will not have is female characters. At all. Because as far as Vox Day is concerned, women don’t fight in combat, and to claim otherwise would require him to “throw out historical verisimilitude.” (Also, he figures “whiny women” won’t be playing his game anyway.)

As David Futrelle (linked above), Ophelia Benson, Jason Thibeault, and PZ Myers have all pointed out, women have in fact served in combat throughout human history, including in the European Middle Ages (PDF file). I will describe another woman warrior below, but first, I have an observation about Vox Day’s game.

He will include goblins, trolls, orcs, elves, and dwarves in his game, but he considers women to be implausible.

Forget historical accuracy for a second. If you have difficulty even imagining a woman in a combat role alongside actual mythical characters, well, you may have issues.

By U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Keith Brown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Women in the military? That’s unpossible!

Now then, let me tell you a bit about Milunka Savić. Continue reading →

Living History

Posted on February 18, 2014 by wellsdc

By Edwards & Anthony [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Pictured: A player to the very end.

President John Tyler took office in 1841, after William Henry Harrison died. He served until 1845, but wasn’t even nominated to run again in the 1844 election (there are reasons I’ll get into below). He died in 1862, but he has two grandsons who are still alive.

First, an historical aside: Harrison served about thirty days in office, most of them spent with the illness that would take his life. He was the first U.S. president to die in office, the shortest-serving U.S. president in history, and the first victim of the “Curse of Tecumseh,” so named because of his military victory over the Shawnee leader 38 years earlier.

The “curse,” which is only apparent in hindsight, held that the president elected every twenty years would die in office. This pattern persisted for over a century, through Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, and Kennedy. Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 and died in 1850, is the only president to die in office outside of the “curse.” I remember when the curse was on everyone’s mind after Reagan was shot in 1981, but you could either say that he broke the curse or that the curse never really existed.

Now then, back to President Tyler. Continue reading →

What Really Happened on Easter Island, Maybe

Posted on February 13, 2014 by wellsdc

An article by Robert Krulwich at NPR offers a relatively new theory on what happened to the Easter Islanders, who allegedly turned an isolated, tree-covered Pacific island into a comparatively desolate wasteland covered in statues. In my opinion, the competing theories of what happened all seem lacking in something. I’ve read that the Easter Islanders (or Rapa Nui) cut down all the trees in order to move the moai statues, or that they nearly drove themselves into extinction through warfare. Thanks to Google, I now know that there is also an alien “theory” (scare quotes intentional), although I don’t know why I’m surprised.

The new theory, from University of Hawaii anthropologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, might make quite a bit more sense, although it is perhaps more discomfiting than the other theories. I won’t spoil it for you, because the article is worth a read and has interesting illustrations. In short, though, they believe that Easter Island was a success, not a failure—meaning that the bedraggled condition in which Europeans found them was the result of their survival. But it’s only one particular view of “success.” As Krulwich puts it:

Humans are a very adaptable species. We’ve seen people grow used to slums, adjust to concentration camps, learn to live with what fate hands them. If our future is to continuously degrade our planet, lose plant after plant, animal after animal, forgetting what we once enjoyed, adjusting to lesser circumstances, never shouting, “That’s It!” — always making do, I wouldn’t call that “success.”

Anyway, go read it.

Photo credit: Aurbina (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

So You Want to Compare Something to the Holocaust

Posted on January 26, 2014 by wellsdc

Farhad Manjoo’s flowchart can help you determine if your comparison is appropriate.

IS X LIKE THE HOLOCAUST? I made a handy flowchart! pic.twitter.com/eAf6PKVWvN

— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) January 25, 2014

Monday Morning Cute: Guardians of the Pillars of Hercules

Posted on January 20, 2014 by wellsdc

Gibraltar, the British territory on the southern tip of Spain at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, is the home of the only population of wild monkeys in Europe. About three hundred Barbary macaques live there, where they are somewhat erroneously known as the Barbary apes (they’re actually monkeys).

Gibmetal77 [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons

The above picture shows Sergeant Alfred Holmes (1931-1994) of the Gibraltar Regiment with two Barbary macaques, surveying the city from the Rock of Gibraltar. He held the position of “Officer-in-Charge of the Apes” for more than thirty-eight years, calling the macaques “Gibraltar’s greatest treasure.”

The consensus seems to be that the Moors brought the monkeys to Spain as pets between the Eighth and Fifteenth Centuries, but monkeys had probably been in Europe long before that. Continue reading →

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