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...In the winter of 1807, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the Freemason's Tavern at Long Acre, in Covent Garden, to form a dining club called the Geological Society. The idea was to meet once a month to swap geological notions over a glass or two of Madeira and a convivial dinner. The price of the meal was set at a deliberately hefty fifteen shillings to discourage those whose qualifications were merely cerebral. It soon became apparent, however, that there was a demand for something more properly institutional, with a permanent headquarters, where people could gather to share and discuss new findings. In barely a decade membership grew to four hundred --- still all gentlemen, of course --- and the Geological was threatening to eclipse the Royal as the premier scientific society in the country.
The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of them went off to spend the summer doing field work. These weren't people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simply gentlemen with the wealth and time to indulge a hobby at a more or less professional level. By 1830, there were 745 of them, and the world would never see the like again.
It is hard to imagine now, but geology excited the nineteenth century --- positively gripped it -- in a way that no science ever had before or would again. In 1839, when Roderick Murchison published The Silurian System, a plump and ponderous study of a type of rock called greywacke, it was an instant bestseller, racing through four editions, even though it cost eight guineas a copy and was, in true Huttonian style, unreadable. (As even a Murchison supporter conceded, it had "a total want of literary attractiveness.") And when, in 1941, the great Charles Lyell traveled to America to give a series of lectures in Boston, sellout audiences of three thousand at a time packed into the Lowell Institute to hear his tranquilizing descriptions of marine geolites and seismic perturbations in Campania.
Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little "stone breaking" as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously, and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in top hats, and dark suits, except for the Reverend William Buckland of Oxford, whose habit it was to do his field work in academic gown.
The field attracted many extraordinary figures, not least the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot, and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.
Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, who was also an early socialist and author of many provocative pamphlets with titles like "Revolution without bloodshed." In 1794, he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy called "the Pop-gun Plot," in which it was planned to shoot King George III in the neck with a poisoned dart as he sat in his box at the theater. Parkinson was hauled before the Privy Council for questioning and came within an ace of being dispatched in irons to Australia before the charges against him were quietly dropped. Adopting a more conservative approach to life, he developed an interest in geology and became one of the founding members of the Geological Society and the author of an important geological text, Organic Remains of a Former World, which remained in print for half a century. He never caused trouble again. Today, however, we remember him for his landmark study of the affliction then called the "shaking palsy," but known ever since as the Parkinson's Disease. (Parkinson had one other slight claim to fame. In 1785, he became possibly the only person in history to win a natural history museum in a raffle. The museum, in London's Leicester Square, had been founded by Sir Ashton Lever, who had driven himself bankrupt with his unrestrained collection of natural wonders. Parkinson kept the museum until 1805, when he could no longer support it and the collection was broken up and sold.)
...Buckland was a bit of charming oddity. He had some real achievements, but he is remembered at least as much for his eccentricities. He was particularly noted for a menagerie of wild animals, some large and dangerous, that were allowed to roam through his house and garden, and for his desire to eat his way through every animal in creation. Depending on whim and availability, guests to Buckland's house might be served baked guinea pig, mice in batter, roasted hedgehog, or boiled Southeast Asian sea slug. Buckland was able to find merit in them all, except the common garden mole, which he declared disgusting. Almost inevitably, he became the leading authority on coprolites --- fossilized feces --- and had a table made entirely out of his collection of specimens....
...Bill Bryson: "A Short History of Nearly Everything"
...courtesy: Supratim
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...Posted by Ishani
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In the beginning, the world was Black & White...ask Calvin's Dad if you don't believe me.
I am talking of the IIT KGP Campus in the late 1970s. My friend NP has a shauq for the latest gadgets and gizmos and he was among the first in the Campus to instal a B&W TV set. It was bought and brought from Midnapore and installed ceremoniously by a team of youngsters who had to jump up the roof of his C1 Type Qrs that had no stairs but was about 15 feet high.
You may ask why roof? The answer: Where else can one find a higher place to install the multi-element Yagi antenna that looked like an elaborate crow-stand?
Indeed KGP Campus being an ornithologist's paradise, one could always watch birds of different feathers roosting there. Remember the famous bird-shit-noise associated with the Nobel-winning Holmdel Antenna?
This Yagi antenna of KGP was furiously unstable and after every gale had to be rotated manually to receive its faint signals from the only TV channel broadcast via Calcutta TV. KGP was then on the fringes of civilization and TV coverage and one had to have boosters of capricious ability to get any signal at all. NP was not so much interested in what was going on in front of the Box as at its rear...he would squeeze himself behind the huge red-hot tube-receiver trying to improve its S/N ratio with limited success...no amount of amplification can violate the golden rule: "Input BS...output more BS"
The high-flying antenna was a status symbol alright...but it came with its flip side. Whenever there was this football match between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, his huge hall was packed to capacity mostly by youngsters of both sexes...the crowd split evenly into two opposing cheerleads. The noise on the screen was matched by the noise of the crowd...no one could really see the spotty foot ball...but how does it matter...the audio was clear enough.
By and by, color came to KGP but for a long time Doordarshan was the only channel...a monopoly. I don't quite agree that it was too bad. Surely you were forced to watch the programs dumped on you...but once in a while there used to be great sitcoms like Hum Log...I know of ladies who would start their day with the bright prospect: "Today is Hum Log". When there is a pool of abundant talent in the country and commercial considerations don't prevail, you have the chance for top-class programs.
I wasn't much of a TV viewer...my mother-in-law was...indeed I had to buy a color TV set to amuse her when she visited us for a stretch of six months...the "Thermometer Effect"...TV was and is the Great Silencer.
But I was hooked to a program called Surabhi hosted by Siddharth Kak and Renuka Shahane...I don't know why...the programs themselves were no great shakes but there was this ambience...pronounced (equally well) 'ombiaance' by my son.
The one episode I recall vividly even now had to do with their team visiting a very old toothless man in thick specs that shone in the glare of the camera; and his turban headgear. He was doing a 'show & tell' of a figurine he made. The lingo was quite alien to me but the toothless smile wasn't. He was asked about his craft and he was telling them details of the how, why and wherefore of his family craft that was dying if not already dead.
As expected, finally, he was asked how much he makes selling them. And the old artist-artisan smiled and showed with his hands a big circle. And as Newton's Third law follows his Second, he was asked:
"What makes you keep on doing them when you can't sell these dolls?"
"Haa! Aaadmi shauq se bahut kuch karta hai!"
(Sorry I can't quite translate it into English)
But how true!!!
It was an eye-opener to me that the entire science of Geology was done by well-to-do gentlemen who had no more reason to do it than shauq:
...In the winter of 1807, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the Freemason's Tavern at Long Acre, in Covent Garden, to form a dining club called the Geological Society. The idea was to meet once a month to swap geological notions over a glass or two of Madeira and a convivial dinner. The price of the meal was set at a deliberately hefty fifteen shillings to discourage those whose qualifications were merely cerebral. It soon became apparent, however, that there was a demand for something more properly institutional, with a permanent headquarters, where people could gather to share and discuss new findings. In barely a decade membership grew to four hundred --- still all gentlemen, of course --- and the Geological was threatening to eclipse the Royal as the premier scientific society in the country.
The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of them went off to spend the summer doing field work. These weren't people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simply gentlemen with the wealth and time to indulge a hobby at a more or less professional level. By 1830, there were 745 of them, and the world would never see the like again.
It is hard to imagine now, but geology excited the nineteenth century --- positively gripped it -- in a way that no science ever had before or would again. In 1839, when Roderick Murchison published The Silurian System, a plump and ponderous study of a type of rock called greywacke, it was an instant bestseller, racing through four editions, even though it cost eight guineas a copy and was, in true Huttonian style, unreadable. (As even a Murchison supporter conceded, it had "a total want of literary attractiveness.") And when, in 1941, the great Charles Lyell traveled to America to give a series of lectures in Boston, sellout audiences of three thousand at a time packed into the Lowell Institute to hear his tranquilizing descriptions of marine geolites and seismic perturbations in Campania.
Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little "stone breaking" as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously, and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in top hats, and dark suits, except for the Reverend William Buckland of Oxford, whose habit it was to do his field work in academic gown.
The field attracted many extraordinary figures, not least the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot, and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.
Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, who was also an early socialist and author of many provocative pamphlets with titles like "Revolution without bloodshed." In 1794, he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy called "the Pop-gun Plot," in which it was planned to shoot King George III in the neck with a poisoned dart as he sat in his box at the theater. Parkinson was hauled before the Privy Council for questioning and came within an ace of being dispatched in irons to Australia before the charges against him were quietly dropped. Adopting a more conservative approach to life, he developed an interest in geology and became one of the founding members of the Geological Society and the author of an important geological text, Organic Remains of a Former World, which remained in print for half a century. He never caused trouble again. Today, however, we remember him for his landmark study of the affliction then called the "shaking palsy," but known ever since as the Parkinson's Disease. (Parkinson had one other slight claim to fame. In 1785, he became possibly the only person in history to win a natural history museum in a raffle. The museum, in London's Leicester Square, had been founded by Sir Ashton Lever, who had driven himself bankrupt with his unrestrained collection of natural wonders. Parkinson kept the museum until 1805, when he could no longer support it and the collection was broken up and sold.)
...Buckland was a bit of charming oddity. He had some real achievements, but he is remembered at least as much for his eccentricities. He was particularly noted for a menagerie of wild animals, some large and dangerous, that were allowed to roam through his house and garden, and for his desire to eat his way through every animal in creation. Depending on whim and availability, guests to Buckland's house might be served baked guinea pig, mice in batter, roasted hedgehog, or boiled Southeast Asian sea slug. Buckland was able to find merit in them all, except the common garden mole, which he declared disgusting. Almost inevitably, he became the leading authority on coprolites --- fossilized feces --- and had a table made entirely out of his collection of specimens....
...Bill Bryson: "A Short History of Nearly Everything"
...courtesy: Supratim
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...Posted by Ishani
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1 comment:
"You mentioned the TV show 'Surabhi' in your blog. I was thinking about it the other day. I was in class 10th-11th when they showed it - back in 1993-94 I believe. I used to love it. And precisely, as you said, for its ambiance. Felt very nostalgic reading about it in your blog.
Finally, you mentioned geology which brought to mind quasi crystals and Prof Steinhardt of Princeton. Steinhardt is more famous in Cosmology (inflationary universe), but he is also known in the condensed matter community for his work in Quasi Crystals back in the 80s. Apparently he never lost his interest in quasi-crystals. He and others kept looking for naturally formed quasi-crystals. His search culminated in a long trip to Siberia where they eventually did find these quasi-crystals! Rare to see a theoretical physicist undertake a good old fashioned trip to some faraway land to find some crystals. Some of it is mentioned here : http://www.princeton.edu/research/news/features/a/?id=6543"