Comments on: Giant’s Shoulders Blog Carnival #16

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:35:57 +0000

Harald, I agree with you about the link text being too visually vague. We’ll have to fix this.

Regarding the quote, I will quote Darwin, when one of his ideas appeared in print before he published it.

“It doesn’t matter who thought of it first. It only matters who published it first.”

…. I’m pretty sure Darwin said that….

By: Harald Hanche-Olsen

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:23:30 +0000

PS. The blog sure doesn’t draw the readers’ attention to links in the comments, does it? There were two links in my previous comment. Mouse over to find them.

By: Harald Hanche-Olsen

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:21:23 +0000

Wikiquotes has the Giant's Shoulder quote on the Newton page, under the Sourced heading no less. They claim it was in a letter to Robert Hooke of 15 February 1676 (Gregorian). It's in Latin, however. Moreover, Newton was apparently not the first to come up with the metaphor.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:29:15 +0000

Harald: I’ll fix that link right away.

As to the quote, it appears that my carnival owes its greatness to the smallness of google.

It is a I’ve heard and read many times, but not recently … i.e., it may have been circulating prior to the Internet, which contrary to popular belief, does not mean that it does not exist. I had originally heard it was H. L. Mencken. But, naturally, I once made that attribution on the internet and was swamped by people telling me that it was not Mencken but some other person more obscure in the past and so on and so forth.

Same with the Giant’s Shoulder quote. For a long time it was attributed to Newton but apparently that attribution is wrong.

By: Harald Hanche-Olsen

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:17:52 +0000

The link to bees and bees got some HTML wrongly embedded in it. Fix?

(And what is the source of that second quote of yours? It seems to be unknown to google, except as taken from your site.)

By: PalMD

PalMD — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:40:05 +0000

Thanks, Greg. I keep meaning to write and intentionally submit a post, and i keep forgetting to!

By: Mike Haubrich

Mike Haubrich — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:27:27 +0000

There were political, religious and gender forces leading to the witch craze of Europe (and to a minor extent the colonies.) In many cases, the way to win political control was to accuse the spouse of your opponent of witch craft. Once accused of witchcraft, there was no “not guilty” plea recognized, and being married to a witch was pure political poison. Another reason was that once the formalized Christian Church started moving from the urban to rural (pagani) there was religious competition that needed to be “eliminated.” Kill the wise ones, (wicce,) of the existing religion and then co-opt the Holidays as Christian holidays; and bam – Jesus is everywhere.