* Tributes to D. G. Myers.
* Ronald Aronson reflects on the fiftieth anniversary of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man.
* Philosophers' Carnival #169 at "A Bag of Raisins".
* Richard Marshall interviews Anna Marmodoro on causal powers.
* Maths, Just in Short Words
* Whewell's Gazette #22 has history of science links.
* Brother Guy Consolmagno receives the Carl Sagan Medal.
* Christopher Graney's guest-post at "Renaissance Mathematicus" on the importance of a semicolon is an excellent read for anyone interested in Galileo.
* Building Medieval Plate Armor
* Gerard Magliocca discusses how the American understanding of the Bill of Rights has changed through time.
* Nick Romeo has an appreciation of Aristotle's innovative and ground-breaking work in biology, noting that while he got many of his specific empirical claims wrong, he has also often been shown to be right.
* Carl Rovelli, Aristotle's Physics: a Physicist's Look (PDf). He argues that just as Newtonian theory can be seen as an approximation of relativity theory, so also Aristotelian theory can be seen as an approximation of Newtonian theory. In particular, the Aristotelian theory of motion is capable of accurately capturing the phenomena on the assumption that bodies are suspended in a fluid in a uniform spherical gravitational field -- which, of course, the bodies around us are.
Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, The four elements in Robert Grosseteste's De Impressionibus Elementorum (PDF) discusses some of Robert Grosseteste's experimental work concerning the four elements.
* The last of the original Navajo Code Talkers from World War II, Chester Nez, recently died.
* When Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, it was almost immediately taken up and turned into stage plays. Some people think that the confusion between Victor Frankenstein and his monster, so that the latter is often called 'Frankenstein', began with the movies, but in fact it goes almost all the way back to the beginning, having arisen due to the nineteenth-century stage plays. And just as in the twentieth century up to our day more people had seen the movies than read the book, so in the nineteenth century more people had seen the plays than read the book, a fact somewhat significant given that the plays, like the later movies, amped up the drama and special effects. Online you can read the most famous of those plays, Richard Brinsley Peake's musical extravaganza, Presumption: or, the Fate of Frankenstein, whose major special effect was that it ended with a snowstorm and avalanche. Mary Shelley herself actually went to see it in the theater; she thought it badly managed as a whole, but liked how the Creature himself was portrayed and played.
* In the ancient world trade routes went everywhere, so there was a diffusion of artifacts over the entire African-Eurasian landmass -- very slow, but very definite. An archeological find from a fifth century Japanese tomb was recently confirmed to be a dish made in the Roman Empire in the first or second century.
* Thomas MacDonald discusses the old party game of snapdragon, in which kids would stick their hands in a flaming bowl of liquor to grab raisins. Can you imagine the fits some people would have if you did that at a kids' party today? I imagine that kids would love it, though. There's a website that gives a description of what it's like to play the game.
* Robert Cheeks discusses the philosophy of Edith Stein.
* Peter Kwasniewski considers the question of whether it is a mortal sin to depart from the liturgical rubrics.
ADDED LATER:
* Paul Raymont also has some links up.
