A tour of 1927 London in color

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society

Genetic Map of Europe

This site was mentioned in the comments section of the post “The Blue Eye Map of Europe” by Alex Divcincenzo.

From the nytimes.com article:

The map shows, at right, the location in Europe where each of the sampled populations live and, at left, the genetic relationship between these 23 populations. The map was constructed by Dr. Kayser, Dr. Oscar Lao and others, and appears in an article in Current Biology published online on August 7.

The genetic map of Europe bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map. The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.

Read the article here.

The Pagan Roots of Christmas

Parts of our Christmas celebrations have roots in Pagan Roman festivals Saturnalia, Sol Invictus & the Calends.

See a short video from discovery.com here.

Sacred Destinations

Text from sacred-destinations.com:

A richly illustrated guide to the world’s sacred places, sacred art, religious architecture and historic religious sites.

Explore sacred sites, ancient wonders and religious places of the world.

See the site here.

The Consequences of the Sexual Revolution

From the dailymail.co.uk article entitled “My generation created the sexual revolution – and it has been wrecking the lives of women ever since”:

When the novelist Martin Amis said recently that it was the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies that destroyed his ‘pathologically promiscuous’ sister Sally, an alcoholic who died in 2000 aged 46, he provoked a wave of controversy. His views were ridiculed by his critics, who claimed that his sister ‘was out of control. It was her doing, not the culture.’

Well, I was part of that culture too. As a university student between 1966 and 1969, I experienced first-hand the impact of the sexual revolution, and the sweeping changes it wrought between men and women.

To suggest any individual was immune from that tidal wave of change, or from the pressures that came with it, for women in particular, is frankly wrong.

Yet Amis has hit a nerve, with liberals in particular, who rightly read his comments as a criticism of everything they believed in and fought for through the massive social upheavals of those decades. It was not ‘the free love culture’ which caused her death, they insist, but her own self-indulgence. After all, we all have choices, don’t we?

To me, this is one of the most fascinating issues of our time – raising so many questions about freewill, and cause and effect.

I’m always amazed at the way the liberal Left is eager to make excuses for any dubious results of their progressive ideas.

Read the article here.

Science may be objective; Scientists emphatically are not.

From the ft.com article:
With no disrespect to sausages and laws, Bismarck’s most famous aphorism clearly requires updating. “Scientific research” is bidding furiously to make the global shortlist of things one should not see being made.

Understandably so. Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.

Read the article here.

Plastics ingredients could make a boy’s play less masculine

From the sciencenews.org:
Exposures in the womb to a ubiquitous family of industrial chemicals can subtly perturb preferences of boys for certain types of child’s play thought to be hardwired in the brain, a new study suggests. Phthalates are widely used solvents and plastics softeners. In this study, the greater a boy’s fetal exposure to certain phthalates, the less often he tended to engage in typically masculine play.

Read the rest of the article here.

See this other related story about the The Disappearing Male.

Hogganvik Runestone

From the www.khm.uio.no website:

A new stone with a Proto-Norse runic inscription was discovered on 26 September 2009 at Hogganvik in Mandal, Vest-Agder, Norway. The inscription with elder runes must date to the period of the Germanic tribal migrations, roughly 350-500 AD. With its sixty-two runes, one a bind-rune, the text is the second or third longest from this period of time, following well behind the Tune stone, and about equivalent to the Rö stone from Bohuslen (where several runes are entirely missing/unreadable).

See more here.

Thanks to Markku at Runes of Christ for providing notice about this story.

Top 10 Color Classical Reproductions

From the listverse.com site:
When we think of statues and buildings of the classical period, we tend to imagine white marble; scientists in recent years have discovered that it is in fact most likely that many of the buildings and statues were painted and probably adorned with jewelry. The Vatican Museum has recently put on an exhibition of some of the most famous antiquities from the era with reproductions painted as close to the originals as they can – this is possible because many statues contain trace amounts of pigment from their original coats of paint. This is a list of ten spectacular reproduction statues from the Classical Period. As usual, click each image to view a larger version.

See more comparison pictures here.