Friday, July 18, 2014

Links of Note

* The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World is awesome. Want to know how long it takes for an ancient Roman to travel by oxcart from Damascus to Rome? This is the source to go to. (The answer, incidentally, is approximately 309 days; obviously an ancient Roman really wanting to go from Damascus to Rome would go by sea rather than by land where possible, and by foot rather than by oxcart, cutting the total trip across the Mediterranean to about a month.)

* Alicia Puglionesi had an interesting post on the shift away from amateur contributions to research in psychical research. There were analogous shifts in other fields of research, e.g., natural history, so studying it here potentially sheds light on a lot more than psychical research itself.

* Volume 4 of the Whewell Gazette is up, with lots of links on the history of science.

* "Renaissance Mathematicus" has a guest post by Melinda Baldwin on the history of the word 'scientist'. I happened to mention some of this history in passing when talking about the Google N-gram for the word 'scientist'; but there are lots of quirks in the history of the word that make it interesting.

* Sarah Emsley's Mansfield Park event is still going on.

* John Farrell talks about the influence of the Timaeus.

* Sr. Mary Melone was recently appointed the first woman rector of a Pontifical University.

* Catarina Dutilh Novaes has a good interview at 3 A.M.

* Philosophers' Carnival #165

* A bit of poetry reading: