Zoonomian

Want a Full Spectrum Love Life? Watch This CD

Tim Jones — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:43:46 +0000

It’s that candlelit dinner stage of the evening. Soup through nuts, you’ve been your wonderful, genuine, self. And he/she is pretty fantastic too. But why take chances – this is deal clinching time. With the table cleared, quick as a whippet you pull out your Ethereal Collapse CD, and with a flourish Newton would die [...]

Book Review: The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover

Tim Jones — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 17:29:10 +0000

Hardcover: 528 pages Publisher: Sterling (23 Sep 2011) Language English ISBN-10: 1402778619 ISBN-13: 978-1402778612 Product Dimensions: 22.1 x 19.6 x 3.7 cm The Kindle’s supremely convenient, and the iPad’s drop-dead gorgeous. So why do I find Clifford Pickover’s good ol’ fashioned hardback version of The Physics Book so damn attractive. And I do mean [...]

Profiling the Victorian Door Knob

Tim Jones — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:40:17 +0000

Those crazy Victorian inventors. What can you do with them? Whenever I research a history project, some totally unconnected but wonderful distraction like this shows up and wants sharing. Maybe that’s how inventor James Wilcox thought about his ‘profile likeness’ doorknob keepsake idea from the Victorian era, reported in an 1838 edition of (take a [...]

The Darker Side (of some) Scientists

Tim Jones — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:48:52 +0000

I guess at times we all put up a mask in public. We might even have a bit of a dark side kept under wraps most of the time. But there’s something extra-disturbing when our heroes show a side to them we never knew, especially when it’s at odds with the comfortable stereotype they’ve come [...]

Nesting Grey Herons

Tim Jones — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:22:04 +0000

Quite a cold afternoon’s walk today; but the sun was up, the golfers were out, and so too were our local herons. I snapped this one just before sunset. He’s a Grey Heron (Aredea cinerea) and common in the UK. (I keep an eye out for the Blue Heron and super-rare Purple Heron, that [...]

Monkey Brand Comes Clean

Tim Jones — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:11:22 +0000

Like any normal person, I decorate my bathroom with Victorian engravings of anthropomorphised monkeys. These ones depict the kind of half ape / half-monkey used by Benjamin Brooke and Lever Brothers to promote Monkey Brand soap, a super-popular cleaning product at the turn of the twentieth century. There’s an intriguing little strap line at the [...]

Charles Dickens’s Mudfrog Homeopathy

Tim Jones — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:02:56 +0000

Nice to see as early as 1837 Charles Dickens doing his bit to comically debunk the efficacy of infinitesimal doses in medicine. Okay, he’s not quite talking about the bottles of total nothingness you can buy at the chemist and are an insult to reason today, but still interesting that similar ideas were an issue [...]

Darwin’s Many Origins

Tim Jones — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:47:45 +0000

Owning multiple copies of a book isn’t that unusual. There’s that extra copy for the bath, the duplicate Christmas present you don’t have the heart to return, or maybe you’ve just made home with someone with similar interests – and library: always a good idea. But no one has hundreds of copies of the [...]

Getting Cute at Disneyland

Tim Jones — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:43:23 +0000

The principles from Lorenz’s and Gould’s work have been applied to everything from vehicle design to this assessment of how cute NASA’s Mars rover Spirit is,…to pretzels. Applied to animals, they suggest our attitude, affection, concern, and the general way we treat species will be influenced by how closely each resembles a human child – [...]

A Century of Southern California Aerospace

Tim Jones — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:37:01 +0000

One of my favourite NASA clips shows the 1972 Apollo 17 lunar module blasting off, bringing home astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt – the last humans to set foot on the moon. The film is presently looping, next to an R-18 rocket engine like the one used in the ascent, at the Huntington Library’s [...]