The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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An ancient Roman central heating system – hot water would be flooded through the basement, and the floors would warm up. “Hypocaust” was the name of the system. This particular one, painted in 1884, was built in the city of Rottenburg am Neckar, which the Romans called Sumelocenna when they lived there. The city might have gotten its “rotten” name because of an earlier version of the word “rotten,” which also meant “ruined” – the Germans built their city over the ruins of th…

Here, an astronomical family is building a 36-inch refractor telescope known as the Great Lick Refractor in the 1880s. It’s named for James Lick, an eccentric entrepreneur who financed the observatory. Please, don’t lick the telescope.

The lenses were fabricated in France, then shipped to Boston where Alvan Clark and his sons ground and polished the glass, built the telescope to house the lenses, then set them in place in a new observatory in Harvard College. They had to wait to put the fini…

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A bird in its home (grown on a vine, fashioned by humans).

Cute little guy, too.

I found this on the Scientific Illustration tumblr, which got it from the Cincinnati Public Library’s copy of Illustrations of the nests and eggs of birds of Ohio.

Apparently, the book started as a kind of by-subscription service, like a bird-watching newsletter, but then was bound together and published as a guide.

Seems like something people still do today, I suppose. Only more …

This image is from the British Library archive, a book called The Cruise of the Marchesa … With maps and … woodcuts drawn by J. Keulemans, C. Whymper and others. by Francis H. H. Guillemard, a medical doctor who decided to explore New Guinea (and the Malay Archipelago) rather than settling down in Kent to practice medicine. Then, Cyprus. Then, Morocco. Then, Cambridge, where he became geographical editor of the Cambridge University Press.

The book says this about the korowaar:

On…

SONG: “My Batteries”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Jacob Margolis’ Twitter feed, 13 Feb 2019, 3:30 AM “The last message they received…,” as used in the post “A Moment of Silence for Opportunity.”

ABSTRACT: This song was kind of a no-brainer. (I couldn’t afford more, the weekend I’ve had – sick day, plumbing emergency, surprise bulldozers removing part of my back yard….) I mean, it’s not literally a moment of silence. It is using a technique I used more than a decade ago to put a six-word…

A close-up of the tiny ear-bones of a few kinds of animals, including human beings.

This is a detail of a page from Musurgia Universalis, which was the book of the month at the Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department for November 2002. A few centuries earlier, in 1650, it was a groundbreaking work by the Jesuit polymath, Father Athanasius Kircher.

He liked music, and was very, very curious about how listening happened.