The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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A painting of Mayan pyramids by a mysterious man, described on Public Domain Review (where I found this image) as an “artist, erotic publisher, explorer, and general enigma.” I recommend the article and can’t really do it justice here. Features a Mayan warrior in an unlikely jaguar onesie and a lithograph of a supposed Mayan relief with an elephant’s head in the middle. From an up-to-now unknown population of Central American elephants, one supposes.

Not that he was enti…

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This illustration, by Erik Nitsche and Roslyn Welcher, is from a book by CBF Macauley that claims to be “the first complete work ever dedicated to the subject of helicopters.” It’s a curious book, mislabeled on archive.org, and seems to be half popular science and half… cutesy humor? At least the illustrations have a kind of droll, James Thurber vibe to them. Obviously, helicopters were going to change life in large ways and small… though maybe not as much as Macauley expe…

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From Harry Winfield Secor’s The How and Why of Radio Apparatus, from the Experimenter Publishing Co., which you can read here.

Electricity was the theme of my Yule week.

SONG: “I Spent a Week in the Dark”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Science Daily, 8 December 2019, “A week in the dark rewires brain cell networks and changes hearing in adult mice,” as used in the post “A week in the dark rewires the brain (and boosts hearing sensitivity).”

ABSTRACT:
I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years, and now, suddenly, my wife is taking an active interest in how these songs get put together. The chorus to this came about because she said she liked the word “whispe…

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These are not dinosaurs – they’re older than that – but they are in The Dinosaur Book, Edwin H. Colbert’s 1945 guide to prehistoric creatures memorialized forever in the Japanese classic Godzilla Raids Again!. It was Ben’s review of that bit of cinema that brought this book onto my radar screen, for which, of course, I am grateful.

I’ve always had a thing for Dimetrodon. Had a shirt from some museum (Natural History Museum in New York, maybe?) that I’d gotten as an element…

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A dinosaur in a coat of arms for Dornogovi Province, Mongolia. It’s from Wikimedia Commons’ “Dinosaurs in Heraldry” section. As UNESCO reminds us, the Mongolian Gobi Desert is the largest reservoir of dinosaur specimens in the world.

I’m not sure what kind of dinosaur this is meant to be. It doesn’t look like an Udanoceratops, which is only known from one specimen found in Dornogovi. I’d like to read the blazon for this coat of arms, provided it’s in English.