Month: August 2015
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The Collapse of Western Civilization – satire against climate change deniers
The Collapse of Western Civilization is a small book, published last year by climate historian Naomi Oreskes and historian of space science Erik Conway. Only a few months out, it already had quite some publicity. Also on me, Oreskes’ and Conway’s narrative had a bigger impact than other recent climate scenarios. The booklet of 104…
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Individualizing fatness, or: Why being Jewish lowered your life insurance premiums in the early twentieth century
Should fat people pay more for their life insurance? To us, this is mainly a moral question: is it ethical to charge people for their unhealthy lifestyle? Hardly anyone questions the underlying assumption, that being fat increases the chance of dying prematurely, even though science studies scholars and fat activists argue that the evidence is…
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Eenenzeventig argumenten voor de geesteswetenschappen: Coluccio Salutati’s “De nobilitate legum et medicinae”
Zijn er misschien twee soorten wetenschappen? Bijvoorbeeld: aan de ene kant wetenschappen die gaan over universele wetten, die op een rationele manier zekere en nauwkeurige kennis kunnen krijgen over die wetten, en hun kennis ook nog eens kunnen toepassen op een manier die voor iedereen aantoonbaar nuttig is. Aan de andere kant wetenschappen die eigenlijk…
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Lost in Digitization? Postcolonial Heritage Production, Bookish Art, and the Workers of Words behind Google Books
All screwed up Not long ago I looked up an eighteenth-century philosophical lexicon on Google Books. The unevenly numbered pages looked like this (image 1):