Apparently it was the worms wot did it – it being the pre-Cambrian explosion of bio-diversity. Do follow that link for some great pics…
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Monthly Archives: January 2007
Science HistoryWheelbarrows, older than you’d think
January 27, 2007 – 11:30 am
Had I been forced to guess when wheelbarrows were invented I would have put it as quite recently – perhaps down to some efficiency-seeking Victorian builder – but my daily OED email proves me wrong.
The oldest usage given is from c.1340:
Sikeman lith in hors-bere..And the crepul in the wilbarewe.
(I’m struggling to translate that, though it looks fun… Any thoughts?)
In fact lots of the early usages seem to refer to escapades. From c. 1600: “To be jaunted up and down London Streets in a lethern wheelbarrow.” But I guess it was more fun to write about that than about builders or stablehands at work.
For today at least you can read the full entry here, where you can also sign up for the email.
Sad news from Educador
January 26, 2007 – 11:38 pm
I wrote recently about Ecuador getting its first female defence minister as part of a newly gender-balanced cabinet. Sadly she, and her teenaged daughter have been killed in a helicopter crash.
That she was a socialist, and the first non-military person appointed to the post has raised some questions about the nature of the crash … the country is said to be politically very tense.
But which cinnamon tea?
January 26, 2007 – 11:29 pm
Odd how information collects itself. On the wonderful CEL-ery copyediting list, a discussion of milky drinks led me to mention cinnamon tea (well tissane would be the technical term, if you can make tissanes out of spices as well as herbs).
I drank it first at an Egyptian “peasant food” restaurant in Cairo and found it good, and have been making it as a late evening drink ever since. Not very difficult – cinnamon, hot water and a dash of milk. As I recall the Cairo version was sweetened, but I don’t usually feel it needs any sugar.
But then Dick of words/myth/ampers & virgule, who happens in a past life to have been a spice trader, asked me which cinnamon I meant. So it was I learnt that the cinnamon I was drinking in Egypt, Syria and now in the UK is “true” cinnamon, made from the bark of a tree native to Sri Lanka from the laurel family. But were I to go to the US, Germany or Indonesia, I might have a nasty shock, for in those places “cinnamon” is made from the bark of a tree of the acacia family, and rather stronger and more bitter.
You have been warned…
Should you want to know more about Egyptian food, this is a good summary of its main points and influences. (Thanks Joanne!)
And should you want to know more about cinnamon, Wikipedia has it (together with a suggestion that cassia in large quantities, as I have my cinnamon tea, might not be a good idea for health).
A “green” print-on-demand T-shirt shop?
January 26, 2007 – 12:19 pm
Not a big ask, I would have thought: I’m looking for a shop like Cafepress, but offering environmentally friendly products, and in the UK or at a pinch in Europe. There must be such a thing, mustn’t there? If not, I’m giving away the business idea for free.
And while I’m in the “enquiries” mode, can anyone explain why this has appeared in my sidebar since I upgraded to WordPress 2.1?
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘ASC’ at line 1]
SELECT * FROM wp_categories WHERE cat_ID > 0 AND link_count > 0 ORDER BY cat_ASC
Yes I could try to first find the manual, then try to make sense of it all, but since nothing seems to be actually broken on the site I’m hoping the answer will just appear.
UPDATE: Thanks for the help Sharon and Gavin. There was something wrong with the blogroll code, but since I don’t actually use it – my blogroll is just a straight list, for reasons dating back to sending referrer problems, the code was just sitting there. Once I took it out, the problem disappeared.
*****
Everything at the moment seems to be conspiring to make me more and more techie – I’ve been learning more and more about Joomla, Drupal, back-end content management systems and similar than I really want to know at the moment…
Today’s horror story
January 26, 2007 – 12:13 pm
From The Times, women being murdered in China to be “ghost brides” for dead peasant men.
The men preyed on the superstitions of ill-educated farmers eager to ensure that a dead son was happy in the afterlife. It is not uncommon in rural parts of China for a family to seek out the body of a woman who has died to be buried alongside their son after the performance of a marriage ceremony for the deceased pair.
I’ve never been a great believer in claims about the “good old days”, and romantic visions of peasants as close to the land. This sort of thing only helps to confirm that view.
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