Happy Valentine’s Day!!!

Posted on February 14, 2013 by wellsdc

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I was planning on writing a snarky fake history of how the holiday came to be, involving an ancient barbarian warlord who sat upon a throne made of human hearts or something. I was going to name him Val-on-Tyne and say he lived in northern England. Two things stopped me: (1) Such an account would require either a heavily-Photoshopped picture or an actual drawing. I don’t want to devote the time to the first and a lack the skill for the second. (2) What little is known about the real St. Valentine is gruesome enough.

Via Americans Against the Tea Party

Via Wikipedia:

Though the extant accounts of the martyrdoms of the first two listed saints are of a late date and contain legendary elements, a common nucleus of fact may underlie the two accounts and they may refer to one single person.^[14] According to the official biography of the Diocese of Terni, Bishop Valentine was born and lived in Interamna and was imprisoned and tortured in Rome on February 14, 273, while on a temporary stay there. His body was buried in a hurry at a nearby cemetery and a few nights later his disciples came and carried him home.^[15]

Via Saints.SQPN.com:

Profile

Priest in Rome, possibly a bishop. Physician. Imprisoned for giving aid to martyrs in prison, and while there converted the jailer by restoring sight to the jailer‘s daughter. While Valentine of Terni and Valentine of Rome sometimes have separate entries in martyrologies and biographies, most scholars believe they are the same person.

There are several theories about the origin of Valentine’s Day celebrations that relate to love and sentiment. Some believe the Romans had a mid-February custom where boys drew the names of girls in honour of the sex and fertility goddess, Februata Juno; pastors “baptised” this holiday, like some others, by substituting the names of saints such as Valentine to suppress the practice. Others maintain that the custom of sending Valentines on 14 February stems from the belief that birds begin to pair on that date; by 1477 the English associated lovers with the feast of Valentine because on that day “every bird chooses him a mate.” The custom of men and women writing love letters to their Valentine started on this day. Other “romance” traditions have become attached to this feast, including pinning bay leaves to your pillow on Valentine’s Eve so that you will see your future mate that night in your dreams.

Died

beaten and beheaded c. 269 at Rome

buried on the Flaminian Way

relics later translated to the Church of Saint Praxedes

It’s an interesting enough story as it is. Just fill in the blanks with some political intrigue. Maybe picture Ciarán Hinds in the role of Valentine.

27 Years Ago Today, I Remember Where I Was

Posted on January 28, 2013 by wellsdc

On January 28, 1986, I was in 5th grade, in Mrs. Lukens’ class. We were working on math when the principal came on the PA to tell us that the space shuttle exploded.

Challenger_explosion

To this day, I get emotional about the memory. I think every generation has at least one “where were you” moment. My parents’ generation had the Kennedy assassination. We had the Space Shuttle Challenger. Then we had 9/11. I hope we’re done.

Photo credit: By Kennedy Space Center [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The America I Know

Posted on November 7, 2012 by wellsdc

1342516_29565745 Today is a victory for many people, and a defeat for almost as many. The sun rose this morning and is still shining as I write these words, so clearly the more Biblical of the warnings we heard regarding this election have not come to pass.

Right now, we have no way of knowing what the broader lessons of the 2012 presidential election will be. I can certainly hope that the reelection of Barack Obama, as much as I may find fault with his presidency, is an affirmation of what I might call (in a secular sense) the better angels of our nature. Not everyone shares my beliefs and my views about what America is, what it can be, or what it should be, but I feel as though some of those views have been affirmed by the events of the past few weeks.

America, perhaps unlike any other nation in the world, is and always has been a work in progress. The American Revolution did not end with the Treaty of Paris in 1781, nor did the many conflicts within America end at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865. The American Revolution was not just a war fought with muskets. The United States of America is the revolution, and it continues to this day. Continue reading →

Fun SciFi Trivia: 2001 Originally Had Nukes in Space

Posted on October 8, 2012 by wellsdc

MatchCut Remember the early scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the newly-smartened proto-hominid beats the leader of the competing pack to death with a bone, throws the bone up in the air, and the bone turns into a spaceship? Did you know that spaceship was originally supposed to be an orbiting nuclear weapons platform?

I just though that was an interesting bit of trivia. The film originally set up a continued nuclear stalemate between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the first spaceship we see was meant to be a missile launcher. At the end, when Dave Bowman appears above Earth as the Starchild, he was going to detonate all the nukes in orbit, which I guess was meant to bring Peace on Earth. Or a massive EMP returning Earth to the Stone Age. One of those, probably.

Anyway, Stanley Kubrick’s most recent film at the time was 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, so he was kind of over telling Cold War nuke stories. As Wikipedia says:

Another holdover of discarded plot ideas is with regard to the famous match-cut from prehistoric bone-weapon to orbiting satellite, followed sequentially by views of three more satellites. At first, Kubrick planned to have a narrator state explicitly that these were armed nuclear weapon platforms while speaking of a nuclear stalemate between the superpowers.^[60]

This would have foreshadowed the now-discarded conclusion of the film showing the Star Child’s detonating all of them.^[61] Piers Bizony, in his book 2001 Filming The Future, stated that after ordering designs for orbiting nuclear weapon platforms, Kubrick became convinced to avoid too many associations with Dr. Strangelove, and he decided not to make it so obvious that they were “war machines”.^[62]

Alexander Walker, in a book he wrote with Kubrick’s assistance and authorization, described the bone as “transformed into a spacecraft of the year A.D. 2001 as it orbits in the blackness around Earth”, and he stated that Kubrick eliminated from his film the theme of a nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union, each with a globe-orbiting nuclear weapons. Kubrick now thought this had “no place at all in the film’s thematic development”, with the bombs now becoming an “orbiting red herring”. Walker further noted that some filmgoers in 1968-69 would know that an agreement had been reached in 1967 between the powers not to put any nuclear weapons into outer space, and that if the film suggested otherwise, it would “merely have raised irrelevant questions to suggest this as a reality of the twenty-first century”.^[63]

In the Canadian TV documentary 2001 and Beyond, Dr. Clarke stated that not only was the military purpose of the satellites “not spelled out in the film, there is no need for it to be”, repeating later in this documentary that “Stanley didn’t want to have anything to do with bombs after Dr. Strangelove”.^{[64] Continue reading →}

In the Name of Atheism

Posted on September 14, 2012 by wellsdc

There were non-ideological reasons why World War II was so destructive. Bombs, for example.

The title to this post is intended to be a paradox, if that is even the right word. “Atheism,” in its most basic sense, denotes nothing more than a lack of belief in gods, supernatural forces, and so forth, in the absence of evidence. Atheism is therefore a “negative” viewpoint, in that it only addresses what a person does not believe. Atheism may, but by no means must, accompany “positive” views such as humanism or other philosophies, but by itself the word “atheism” has limited descriptive powers.

That does not stop others from ascribing traits to atheists as a whole, of course. (Part of this post is yet another re-phrasing of an irate Facebook comment, FYI.)

A Facebook commenter alerted me to an article on the website Evidence for God titled “What About Atrocities That Have Been Done in the Name of Religion?” It is yet another effort to move the goalposts on the question of evil in the world, and to cast aspersions on modern-day atheists by citing the activities of people more than half a century ago who may or may not have shared minute aspects of a worldview. The author begins, in the very first sentence, with a logical flaw: Continue reading →

No, he means the other founding documents… (UPDATED)

Posted on September 5, 2012 by wellsdc

Paul Ryan is unhappy with the Democratic Party. In other news, water is wet and I like donuts.

Specifically, Paul Ryan is unhappy that the Democratic party’s platform doesn’t mention the capital-G man even once. (Because if Democrats should be taking pointers on their platform from anyone, it should be the other party’s Vice Presidential nominee.)

The Democratic Party’s platform makes no reference to God, drawing criticism from Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

Ryan tells Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” the change is not in keeping with the country’s founding documents and principles and suggests the Obama administration is behind the decision. The Republican platform mentions God 12 times.

The 2008 Democratic Party platform made a single reference to God, referring to the “God-given potential” of working people.

“Founding documents and principles,” he says. Does he mean the Declaration of Independence? I’ll throw him a bone there, since it does mention “God” one time.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Well, it says “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Is that different from Paul Ryan’s God? Probably. Thomas Jefferson is credited with writing the Declaration of Independence, and he generally does not seem like a man who wasted words. Historians can argue over the precise meaning of “Nature’s God,” but the important thing to note is that, between this and the U.S. Constitution, i.e. the two “founding documents” that matter, this is the only time anyone uses the word “God.” He uses the word “Creator” elsewhere in the Declaration of Independence, but that’s even more ambiguous than “Nature’s God.” Continue reading →

Remembering the True Meaning of Labor Day

Posted on September 3, 2012 by wellsdc

Labor Day is about taking a day off work and buying reduced-price consumer goods, if Google’s suggested search terms are any indication.

The actual history of Labor Day is a bit more interesting than that. It is also a bit more “socialist,” considering that much of the impetus for declaring a national holiday revolved around labor unions in the 1880’s and 1890’s. The U.S. Department of Labor has a historical summary of how the first Labor Day celebration took place in 1882, and how it grew from there:

Labor Day: How it Came About; What it Means

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

***

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.
In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Labor Day Legislation

Through the years the nation gave increasing emphasis to Labor Day. The first governmental recognition came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. From them developed the movement to secure state legislation. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. During the year four more states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — created the Labor Day holiday by legislative enactment. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

A story on “The Origins of Labor Day” from PBS, first published in 2001, presents a far-less rosy view of how the holiday came to be:

Conceived by America’s labor unions as a testament to their cause, the legislation sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant election-year compromise.

The 1880’s and 90’s featured considerable labor unrest, and a number of prominent strikes figured into the decision to make Labor Day a federal holiday. A big one was the Pullman Strike of 1894, in which almost 4,000 non-unionized Pullman employees (the company that made railroad sleeper cars) walked off the job to protest pay cuts. They lived in Pullman, Illinois, a planned company town where the company owned almost everything, rent was deducted directly from employees’ wages, and Mr. Pullman ruled everything like a feudal baron.

The company fired hundreds of workers during an economic depression in 1893, then cut everyone else’s wages. It did not, however, lower rent, so people’s real income plummeted. A boycott of Pullman railroad cars resulted in 125,000 rail workers refusing to handle the company’s cars. The strike ended after President Grover Cleveland (in his second non-consecutive term in office) deployed 12,000 Army troops and thousands of U.S. Marshals to Pullman. Thirteen strikers were killed, at least two in direct confrontation with federal troops. This and other strikes created political pressure that led to Labor Day as a statutory federal holiday:

The movement for a national Labor Day had been growing for some time. In September 1892, union workers in New York City took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday. But now, protests against President Cleveland’s harsh methods made the appeasement of the nation’s workers a top political priority. In the immediate wake of the strike, legislation was rushed unanimously through both houses of Congress, and the bill arrived on President Cleveland’s desk just six days after his troops had broken the Pullman strike.

1894 was an election year. President Cleveland seized the chance at conciliation, and Labor Day was born. He was not reelected.

In a sense, the Labor Day holiday is a concession to the labor unions of the 19th century. As an interesting postscript of sorts to this story, Grover Cleveland didn’t even get his own party’s nomination in 1896. The Democrats chose William Jennings Bryan instead, who lost in the general election to the business-friendly Republican William McKinley. McKinley was assassinated in 1901, elevating his Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, to the White House. Students of history know that Teddy Roosevelt did quite a bit to curb many of the excesses of government and industry and help workers.

This Week in WTF? August 17, 2012

Posted on August 17, 2012 by wellsdc

– A fan of right-wing faux-historian David Barton Godwins himself, and not even subtly (cf. Godwin’s Law.)

– A lost parakeet in Japan named Piko-chan is reunited with his owner after telling police its address.

– Authorities in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, Russia, have found a Muslim sect (some might say “cult”) literally underground:

Seventy members of an Islamist sect have been discovered living in an eight-level underground bunker without heat for more than a decade, just outside the city of Kazan, Russia.

The BBC says four members of a breakaway Muslim sect have been charged with cruelty against children for keeping them underground in catacomb-like cells without heat. Many had never seen sunlight.

Police discovered the sub-terranean community in the Tatarstan region, a mainly Muslim area on the Volga River, during an investigation into recent attacks on Muslim clerics in the region.

Some of the children, aged between one and seventeen had never left the compound, gone to school or treated by a doctor.

A more nuanced view of the compound, suggesting (or hinting) that Russian authorities have exaggerated the conditions in order “to show they are cracking down on radical Islamic groups” comes from The Blaze, of all places.

– Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in Israel have the latest cutting-edge technology to protect them from seeing hotties out on the street:

New prescription glasses that blur out temptress daughters of Eve are now available for ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in Israel whose religious beliefs require that they strictly avoid contact with women in public, especially “immodestly” dressed women.

The new glasses allow ultra-Orthodox men to maintain a strictly devout lifestyle that prescribes segregation of the sexes on buses, streets, restaurants, parks and other public spaces. According to the ultra-Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, all contact between unmarried men and women is forbidden.

The Associated Press reports that the ultra-Orthodox community’s “modesty patrols” are selling the glasses equipped with special blur-inducing stickers on their lenses. The glasses allow for clear vision only up to a few meters but all objects beyond that range are blurry.

I have two thoughts on this: (1) This is a far preferable solution, as opposed to trying to dictate what Israeli women must wear or where they can sit. (2) It is very hard not to point out the symbolism of special glasses for ultra-religious individuals that only allow them to see a few feet in front of themselves.

– A newfangled 3D printer in Japan will create a replica of your unborn fetus. As Allegra Tepper at Mashable notes, “It’s kind of like a snow globe — of your unborn child.” So, uh, not creepy at all…

– A civilian contractor, with the oddly-appropriate surname Fury, faces two federal counts of arson for allegedly setting two fires on or near the nuclear submarine USS Miami. The fire on board the sub reportedly caused $400 million in damage and took twelve hours to extinguish. The prosecution is claiming that he set at least one of the fires so he could leave work early. The judge is keeping him in jail until trial.

– Medical marijuana activists sent fake letters, purporting to be from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, to pharmacies in San Diego warning them that they would be shut down within forty-five days. The point of the hoax, apparently, was to highlight U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy’s mission to shut down medical marijuana dispensaries around California (presumably because drugs are bad, mmmkay?), and the disparate treatment pharmacies receive from federal authorities compared to dispensaries. Hard to argue with the message, but the tactic seems very junior high.

Photo credit: Godwin Cat, via dollymix.tv.

Russians in California

Posted on August 9, 2012 by wellsdc

320px-FortRoss-chapel-reconstructed Russia maintained an outpost called Fort Ross in northern California, about 91 miles north of San Francisco, from 1812 to 1842. According to Wikipedia, on March 15, 1812, “Ivan Kuskov with 25 Russians and 80 Native Alaskans arrive[d] at Port Rumiantsev and proceed[ed] north to establish Fortress Ross.”

Spain still held most of California at the time, and they weren’t too thrilled to have Russians that close by. They built the Mission San Francisco de Solano near Sonoma in 1823 to keep an eye on them. Later on, after Mexican independence, Mexico built El Presidio de Sonoma in the area in 1836 for the same reason.

The fort provided agricultural products for Russia’s Alaskan colony, including crops and furs, but it ceased to be viable in the 1840’s when the Alaskan colony started obtaining goods elsewhere. The Russians sold it to a guy for $30,000, although Russian historians claim he never paid for it, and that the land is still titled to Russia. I’m sure they’ll be claiming on that any day now.

This is one of those things we never learned about in school, so I just thought you should know.

Russia also established a fort on the island of Kauai, Hawaii in 1817. They turned it over to the Hawaiians later the same year, though.

Photo credit: ‘The chapel in Fort Ross (reconstructed), California, USA’ by Introvert [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

The crazy things we’ve done

Posted on July 11, 2012 by wellsdc

Starfish5 Monday was the fiftieth anniversary of Starfish Prime, a high-altitude nuclear test the U.S. conducted over the Pacific Ocean. Via Phil Plait, a/k/a Bad Astronomer:

On July 9, 1962, the US launched a Thor missile from Johnston island, an atoll about 1500 kilometers (900 miles) southwest of Hawaii. The missile arced up to a height of over 1100 km (660 miles), then came back down. At the preprogrammed height of 400 km (240 miles), just seconds after 09:00 UTC, the 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead detonated.

And all hell broke loose.

It pretty much looks like what you would expect a nuclear explosion in low-earth orbit would look like. Nuclear explosions release huge amounts of radiation, obviously, plus electrons and heavy ions. The electrons basically crashed into the molecules of the atmosphere and created an aurora visible for thousands of miles. Then it got crazier: Continue reading →

Cryptic Philosopher

Reminders of a Simpler Time, When People Wore Bigger Lapel Pins

Category Archives: History