Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm a big Night at the Museum fan, so when the third film actually took place in the British Museum I knew it was a travesty that I hadn't been there yet.

Yes, all the exhibits were alive,I grant you, but they were so cool. The sheer variety on display was more than I'd ever thought about. It reminded me that the place existed, basically, and I had a hunger to get my backside down south and experience the real deal: arguably the biggest and best museum in the country.

And I was not disappointed.

The British museum itself is free, situated on Russel street, which is easily reached from the major stations via the tube or bus. For me, it was a 20 min ride on the Piccadilly line (westbound) from St Pancras station and a short walk. The museum itself is a large traditional building with Edwardian classical styling, but as soon as you walk through into the main hall you can see that this is no ordinary structure. The entrance hall is sweeping and beautiful in a loose circle, with the temporary exhibits occupying the upper floor of the central circle, and with all the other steady exhibits spread around it across five levels.

Luckily there are plenty of facilities and cafes (and gift shops!), so while nothing's cheap you can easily spend all day having a good explore. Personally we spent well over 6 hours there, until our howling feet and fatigue claimed us and we had to call it a day. Even then, there is plenty to come back for.

"Six Hours?! How Much is There to See, Really?"

A whole world. Despite the name, The British Museum really isn't just about the history of Britain, or even the British Empire, but exists as a capsule of the whole world's cultures. You can find treasures from the Ancient Near East, the Islamic World, Africa, Egypt, China, South & South East Asia, Japan, Korea, The Pacific and Australia, Mesoamerica, Central and South America, North America, Prehistoric Europe, The Greek World, The Roman Empire, Roman Britain, Medieval Europe, Renaissance and Later Europe, Modern Europe and America, as well as modern examples of art mixed in with each culture. Having almost all of the world's cultures in one place to seamlessly journey through is -to put it bluntly- a goddamned revelation.

This stunning mural of an Assyrian lion hunt went on for several ROOMS at full scale.

"But Colonialism!"

Yes, I know that the British Museum is at the centre of debates on colonialism in museums, and I have mixed feelings on the subject that I have already written about at length here:

http://preludesblogofwords.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/what-can-digital-heist-of-bust-of.html?m=1

But you can't argue against the sheer awe at walking around this whole world of art and history in a day and what this can teach you. Everything is beautifully curated and treated with great respect and value and by holding everything side by side, no one item is treated as being more important than another, or one culture as being 'superior' to another. The end effect is all so amazing that it makes you proud to be human.

"Ok, So What Are The Highlights?"

As well as the general feeling of awe and discovery that comes with experiencing so many cultural treasures side by side, the thing that stuck out most to me were the sheer sense of scale that the museum was able to accommodate. 

For example, there were plaques of the beautifully intricate Assyrian lion hunt, snaking through rooms in a  dramatic tableaux. There were panels from the flipping Patheon (!), in full scale, wrapping around the whole building. Huge Egyptian pharaohs stared down at you, and Assyrian gatekeepers smiled next to the storeys-high gates themselves. Noble totem poles stood as markers and full-floor mosaics decorated the stairwells. Reams upon reams of orange and black pottery, and intricate gold-work, fabulously detailed islamic tiles, ticking timepieces and curios nestled against one another in displays. I have never seen anything like it.

One of the many Pharaohs keeping an eye on us.

In addition to the scale, what really excited me was finally seeing in person so many of the treasures that I has viewed in countless picture books about history while I was growing up. It was like encountering a celebrity!

"Look! A real easter island figure!"

"oh my god it's the jade-mosaic aztec snake. I've never seen it in real life!"

"Oh Jesus that's THE Lindlow bog man!"

"HOLY BALLS THAT'S THE GODDAMNED ROSETTA STONE!!!"

In the end, It's just very hard to describe how the sheer wonder of the place hits you right in the gut. All you can do is to go see it for yourself.

A beautiful part of the African exhibit

Bonus feature: One very happy blogger.

When people think of courtly jesters, often what comes to mind are grinning performers with bells on their hats, quipping and gamboling for the rulers of the realm. But in Henry VIII's court, the newer 'natural' fools held a different and very special place in court.

So what is a 'Natural Fool?'

Not a 'Natural Fool' at all...

A 'skilled fool' or 'jester' was a regular member of the royal courts from at least medieval times, typically a bold performer and/or actor who was shrewd enough to gauge the royal family's sense of humor without causing danger to themselves, and providing levity in the back-biting, claustrophobic and stressful environment of the courts . Often these performers were comedic and goofy, but they could also act as magicians, jugglers and more. The 'Natural Fool' however, which seems to have been adopted more commonly around the time of Henry VIII, was an altogether different figure of the court. This individual was an 'innocent' - a person with a particular disability (usually a learning disability) that was retained as a figure of levity and, at times, the source of many a humbling statement that none other would dare utter to those in power.




Why take on a 'Natural Fool'?

The 'Natural Fool' served as a figure of comic relief in many ways that the traditional jesters

William Sommers

did, but they also served a more Christian purpose. Due to their learning difficulties the king and his court appreciated what they saw as a natural frankness and innocence which would in turn encourage the royals to humility. While it is impossible to say how far these individuals were aware of the full spectrum of their words, there are examples where especially shrewd and cutting commentaries could be directed to the king as no one else dared to say. 
William Sommers, for example, was a 'Natural Fool' who was valued by the king and granted access to the monarch at all times, especially towards the later pained years of Henry VIII's life. In 1553 Thomas Wilson quoted William as commenting to Henry:

"As please your grace...you have so many fraud-iters, so many conveyers, and so many deceivers to get up your money, that they get all to themselves."

Wilson explains that William meant to say 'auditors, surveyors and receivers' and in this characteristic slip he criticised the king's organisation as no other would, amusing him while making him think starkly on the position of his accountants. Whether William genuinely confused his words or whether he chose them carefully is lost to history, unfortunately. The royals nevertheless viewed him and his kind as naturally closer to God, as if God himself spoke through them due to their 'innocence', and so it's likely that his words struck a very real chord.



Were 'Natural Fools' Exploited?

From the 'All the Kings Fools' production

While to modern sensibilities the position of 'Natural Fool' is at best tone-deaf and insensitive and at worst exploitative, there is evidence that the position was very valued and that the 'Natural Fools' were themselves very well respected and afforded a status that was high above that of their neurotypical peers.

On the one hand we cannot escape the dehumanising elements of the position of 'Natural Fool'. These people were placed in a position of being a source of amusement for the court and it is certainly a patronising role that is likely to have paid little attention to the person's own rights as an individual. Looking at William 'Patch' Sexton, who predated William Somer as the court 'Natural Fool', he was treated largely as one treats property. Cardinal Wolsey, out of favour with the king, gave Hampton Court palace to the king and Sexton was included in the gift. Unsettlingly, it is recorded that it took six tall yeomen to transport him into court when he was clearly distressed. whatever his problems on that day he was going, like it or not.
Yet one can argue that this isn't so out of keeping with the general hierarchy of the time, where lower serving classes were used for the benefit and amusement of the ruling classes, with little true autonomy of their own. 


One thing that can be said for the 'Natural Fools' is that they occupied a higher status than their 'skilled fool' counterparts, and certainly a far higher status than other contemporaries with learning difficulties could ever hope to enjoy. In many ways they were very much a treasured part of the royal family itself.The idealised picture 'the family of Henry VIII' was painted in 1545, showing the king (healthier than he was), his son and heir, the long dead Jane Seymour (the king's favourite wife and mother to Edward VI) and his two daughters (who had been recently restored to the succession). Also, flanking the royals, is Jane the fool and William Somer - the two 'Natural Fools'. Their inclusion is a significant display of their value within the royal household as, it's worth noting, the current living Queen Katherine Parr was not even included in this portrait.

Jane Fool on the left with William Sommers and his monkey on the right.

Evidence of the 'Natural Fools'' esteemed position is evidenced by far more than just an interpretation of a painting. Jane the fool seems to have been especially treasured and largely passed about the tudor family, moving between Mary Tudor and Queen Katherine Parr. Katherine, with genuine warmth, seems to have noted that Jane was not properly occupied, and court records show that she ordered in several geese and a hen for her to look after and care for, which were subsequently trotted around the court. None of the natural fools ever had to wear traditional jester's clothing, and instead wore the rich clothing that matched in value and dignity to the queen's ladies - the wives and daughters of nobility. Jane, for example, had more clothes in greater numbers ordered for her than anyone else but the queen herself (though admittedly cut in the Dutch style rather than the more fashionable French.)  While under Lady Mary's care, Jane was also included in the annual St Valentines Day Lottery, which seems to indicate how the members of the court afforded her considerable equality. Here lots were drawn by all male courtiers for who among the ladies of the court should be their partners for dancing. a Mr Hete and a Mr Barnes were both rewarded in black satin for acting as 'Jane our fool's valentyne'. It is clear that Mary at least was actively caring and generous to her and Jane was well cared for in any illness.


All in all, the position of 'natural fools' shows a fascinating insight into the day-to-day running of the royal family, as well as how some of the disabled were given an opportunity to rise above their usual lot in life to perform valuable service in the courts. They were far more than simple jesters.


Source
- All the King's Fools .co.uk
-Suzannah lipscomb All the King's Fools
- The Anne Boleyn Files - Jane the Fool
- Fools and jesters of the English court by John Southworth (Ch 11 -
- Historic England - the king's fools: disability in the Tudor court

A while ago I went on at length about why you should be curious about the game No Man's Sky..

You can read my article here but basically the exciting thing about No Man's sky was the amazing procedural generation coding they used which allowed them to created a vast game that could generate 18 quintillion planets without any of the lagging and massive hard drive space required of many more traditional procedurally generated games. This generation was tied to a distinctive art style (with a computer that was physically 'taught' colour theory, no less) in order to create infinitely varied beautiful worlds that the player would discover themselves for the first time ever, without anyone else on the planet having seen what they've seen before.

Exciting stuff.

One of the planets i discovered on my playthrough

Now the game has released and we've all had a chance to play it, I've written a review over at 'The Player of Games' blog about the good and bad points of the game, whether it deserves the hate that it seems to be receiving lately, and whether you should fork out the £50 needed to play it.

If you're curious make sure to check it out.

It's amazing where a research grant can take you. Often it's not just about Gravitational Waves or stuffy labs, but actually getting out there to improve the lives of global communities.

One such project was headed by the University of Oxford in order to combat one of the alarming side affects of the successful elephant conservation effort. 

So what's the problem?

Fences don't always work...

In many places of Africa, elephant populations are improving after decades of hard-fought conservation efforts and actions against poaching. While this is fantastic news for the growing elephant populations, it has left the local farmers increasingly vulnerable to elephant attacks. Some herds return to old migratory routes only to find small farms in their way which they then plough through, while others find themselves coming up against humans when hunger sets in and the crop-laden fields are too hard to resist. In both cases both animal and human are at serious risk: with their livelihood and safety on the line farmers can do little else but face down the huge creatures themselves, armed with whatever they can find. In some cases this means shooting the elephants, and in others it means making a enough noise in an effort not to shoot them that it simply scares the elephants and gets the farmers killed. Non violent deterrents like cow-bell fences can do little but simply warn farmers that elephants are coming, and more effective methods like tall electric fences are simply far too expensive for the majority of communities. A hungry elephant is a determined one, and a frightened or angry elephant is a horror.

The answer to the problem was surprisingly simple.

Anyone who loves elephants will tell you that we have a lot in common: elephants are intelligent and some people even think that they can mourn. However, their most famous feature is their decades long memory and they, like us, often remember experiences that are unpleasant and will learn from them.

Enter the humble honeybee.

When a person is stung by a bee they learn quickly to spot the signs of the insects nearby and will actively avoid hives - after all, once you've encountered an angry bee it's not a situation that you'd like a repeat of. Elephants, despite their size and tough skin, also hate bees as the tiny creatures can swarm and sting their sensitive eyes, trunks and ears. Like us, they'll give hives a very wide berth indeed, and encourage their friends to do the same. The university looked into this phenomenon, working with local farming communities to experiment with the idea of using bees as a deterrent but in a way that farmers could afford, maintain and actually use to improve their lives in addition to keeping the dangerous animals away in a peaceful faction. The solution was to make a fence of living buzzing beehives.

A fence of langstroth hives

Researchers found that just the sound of bees was enough to keep 94% of animals studied away from the area. Moving on to the real thing, a study of 34 communally-run Kenyan farms found that when they adopted the bee-fence method, only one elephant actually crossed the beehive fence out of a total of 45 attempted raids. It seemed to work.

The main challenge was to figure out a way of creating a beehive fence that fit the needs of the farming communities who owned them. The researchers worked with them and created a pamplet that outlines how to construct and maintain these fences, giving them three design options of increasing effectiveness and price. In each option, the hives are linked together and separated 6m apart. Because elephants would learn to recognise the hives on sight, not every 'fence post' needs to be an active hive, and dummy hives can be created. Each construction needsa thatched roof to keep it shaded and dry, and allows for honey collection so that the farmers can supplement their income. 
The cheapest option is the traditional log hive: effectively a log suspended with a roof. This design makes honey collection difficult and inefficient, but was ideal for poorer farmers who can scavenge the main materials from the landscape. The medium-priced option is the top-bar hive which requires more construction effort and costs around $35 per hive, but allows for easier honey collection and protects the larvae within. Finally the most expensive option was the purpose-designed  langstroth beehives (pictured above) which come in at about $60 per hive, but are the most sophisticated examples for honey collection and provide the greatest quality honey. The farmers have the ability to pick the option that suits them best while also investing in a new form of income in the form of Elephant Friendly Honey.

Construction of a top bar hive

In short, this simple solution saves lives; human, elephant and even bee. What's not to love?

It may have taken a whole research project to bring it to light, but this simple solution is just about as natural and wholesome as you can get.

So now you know. If life gives you trouble....

Sources
 - REF Impact case study: UOA05-20 Using Honey bees as an effective deterrent for crop raising elephants.
-Beehive Fence Construction Manual
- Using honeybees to keep elephants out of farmer's fields
-BBC Earth news: beehive fence deters elephants

This week I wanted to share with you a little something I found while wandering around the science side of Tumblr: probably the best takedown of evolution's critics that I've read.

[P.s - i had no idea about the aortic arch - how fascinating!]

MadSciences

Whenever someone tries to claim that evolution is a lie, I send them a picture of platybelodon.

1. It’s an excellent example of transitional evolution.

2. It’s a mess who would intentionally do this and why

3. It makes them piss themselves a little.

“Evolution is just a theory-”

Fraternalwinandidiots:

Not to be rude, but evolution is just a theory, albeit a probable one. 

You can’t prove it, the only thing you can do is disprove it, which is what good scientists are supposed to do, try to disprove their theory.

MadSciences

Ah, but that’s the thing; A scientific theory IS a proven fact, and evolution is a very good example of an undeniably true one!

I’ve been meaning to write a post about what the meaning of a scientific theory is, and this seems like a good opportunity.

In science we have theories, and we have laws. It’s a very common misconception that a scientific theory is a an unproven hypothesis. This is understandable, but leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. A scientific theory isn’t the same as what we commonly refer to as a ‘theory’. Here’s a definition:

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation. x 

Compare this to the definition of a scientific law:

A scientific law is a statement based on repeated experimental observations that describes some aspects of the universe. A scientific law always applies under the same conditions, and implies that there is a causal relationship involving its elements.x

This means, basically, that a law summarizes observations about some sort of natural phenomena (usually mathematically). A good example is Newton’s law of gravity! 

Newton’s Law of Gravity explains through mathematics how different bodies react to each other because of this force we call gravity, both on earth and in space, but it doesn’t explain why it happens or even what gravity actually is. No explanation, therefor a law!

Then we have theories, which not only document phenomena, but give explainations as to why these phenomena happen and what they are. A scientific theory requires more testable evidence than a law, and usually encompasses multiple laws and explains them more thoroughly. For example, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Newton’s law of gravity was testable, but it was only after Einstein proposed the theory of relativity that we started to understand what gravity actually is and how it functions. Einstein was able to give us explainations mathematically for why the laws of physics work as they do. Explanations for how it worked, therefor a theory!

(It’s also important to remember that a scientific theory and a scientific law are two very different things, and one can never become the other. A theory will always be a theory, and a law will always be a law.)

One of my favorite examples of this is the laws of Mendelian inheritance. 

Long before we knew what genetics were, farmers were breeding for favorable traits. They didn’t know where they came from or how they were passed from one organism to the next, but they knew that if they bred a large dog with another large dog, they’d get large puppies, and they knew that if they bred only their best produce that their plants would produce better produce in the future.

Gregor Johann Mendel started conducting experiments by hybridizing pea plants, and was able to prove that this consistently happened. By doing this he created three separate laws that all fall under the Laws of Inheritance; The Law of Segregation, the Law of Independent Assortment, and the Law of Dominance. It gets a little complicated here and I’m not an expert on DNA, but I’ll try to summarize.

The Law of Segregation states that all organisms contain two alleles for each trait, and that those separate during meiosis so each gamete only contains one of them. That means that offspring receives a pair of alleles from its parents for each trait, resulting in one allele for each trait from each parent. For example, a calico cat and a tabby may breed and produce 4 tabby kittens, but all of those kittens will also carry the genetic information of a calico.

The Law of Independent Assortment states that alleles for these traits are passed independently of one another during gamete formation. For example, if the calico is a manx and the tabby is a scottish fold, the kittens can inherit a short tail without inheriting their calico parents coloring. They can also look entirely like one parent despite carrying the genetic information of both. Each trait is passed independently of all other traits.

The Law of Dominance states that recessive alleles will be masked by dominant alleles. For example, blue eyes in cats is a recessive trait. Therefor even if the scottish fold has blue eyes (is a carrier and affected), the dominant trait eyes of the manx will determine the color of the kittens eyes, and we’ll only have a slim chance of producing affected, blue eyed kittens if the manx also carries the recessive blue eyed gene, and those genes line up.
(If I’ve made any mistakes here, I’d appreciate someone with more knowledge on genetics letting me know)

But you’ll notice he didn’t show how or why this happened, he was just able to observe it and prove that it did. It wasn’t until the Chromosome Theory of Inheritance was discovered that we could explain why. This was the theory that explained that chromosomes are what carry genetic material and pass these traits from one generation to the next. 

It’s a fundamental, unifying theory of genetics that shapes how we conduct our science today. This theory is the basis of genetic engineering, which has had a huge impact on modern science. Just for example, the manufacturing of drugs (insulin and vaccines!), gene therapy, the genetic engineering of lab animals, and, most famously, agriculture. AKA, GMOs.

This leads into another requirement of a theory; Being supported by numerous other fields of science. Genetics is one of the sciences that hugely supports the Theory of Evolution. This is how we’ve been able to sequence DNA and discover how closely all life on earth is related, and how the DNA of humans and chimps is nearly identical.

[Source]

And this isn’t the only field of science that supports the validity of the Theory of Evolution. 

We have radioisotope dating! Isotopes make up all matter on earth, and by measuring the decay of radioactive isotopes, we can date rock layers. We can do this because we know the rate of radioactive decay. This is how we know that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. We’ve used this to date fossils and prove that transitional forms came between connected species, and that humans and modern animals didn’t live alongside dinosaurs.

We have paleontology! The fossil record shows extremely detailed evidence of evolution occurring. Evolution is so accurate in its predictions that there’s never been a single fossil found in a place that it shouldn’t be. For example, the transitional fossils between dinosaurs and modern birds is found right in the middle, exactly where we’d expect it to be. So is the ancestor of platybelodon, and its relatives as they became our modern elephants!
We’re able to predict so accurately where fossils should be located that we’ve been able to pick sites to excavate based entirely on that, then find the fossils we expected! Predictive power is a huge part of a proven scientific theory.

We have molecular biology! Which proves that gene sequences among extremely different organisms are still related. The basic structure of all DNA on the planet is in the form of the double helix, and while we predictably have nearly all the same DNA as our primate cousins, over half of our DNA is also identical to banana plants!

Then we have embryology! When we compare embryos, not only are most animals nearly indistinguishable from each other, but we see holdover traits from our previous ancestors. The most compelling examples are the fact that human fetuses, and all other mammals, have gill slits as embryos. In mammals these develop into the eustachian tubes and the ear canal, while they continue to develop into gills in fish. Humans also have tails and yolk sacs as embryos! (Also look up lanugo in fetuses, very interesting and shared among other mammals)

Then there’s biochemistry! The basic chemistry that occurs in the cells of all life on earth is extremely similar, and shows that all modern organisms had a common ancestor. For example, all animals have enzymes and hormones. Trypsin is just one that’s found in everything from humans to sea sponges.

Then biogeography! The fact that groups of organisms that are related are all found near one another is more evidence for the validity of evolution. If life didn’t evolve, there’d be no reason for certain life to only exist on certain continents, or for species to be distributed in a pattern that reflects their genetic relationships with one another.

Modern observations are extremely helpful as well! This is why we now see antibiotic resistant strains of viruses, elephants becoming less likely to have tusks because of poaching, and the peppered moth becoming darker to better camouflage itself during the industrial revolution.

There are others, but I’ll end with comparative anatomy, which is one of the coolest, imo. (I’m probably biased because I collect bones lol)

[Source]

When you compare the skeletal structures of vertebrates, we have extremely similar structures regardless of how wildly different our environments and behaviors are. The skeletal structure of a fin is hardly the best way for a fin to be designed, but because whales evolved from terrestrial mammals, they adapted using what they had. (we can also show the full evolution of cetaceans through the fossil record, which is very cool if you want to look it up.)

This is true in non-mammals as well. An excellent example is the laryngeal nerve! In fish, the nerve makes a direct line from the brain down to the larynx, which is practical and to be expected. In animals that developed longer necks, however, we see that the nerve is trapped under the aortic arch!

[Source]

The nerve had to evolve with us as we evolved from our aquatic ancestors, so our laryngeal nerve is forced to not go from our brain to our larynx, but rather to take a detour into our chest and around the aortic arch before doubling back! 

This is amazing in giraffes, where the nerve is nearly 15 feet long because it was forced to grow as the giraffe’s neck did, and now takes a detour down the entirety of the giraffe’s neck and around the heart before returning the the larynx, which was its destination.

[Source]

There are mountains more evidence, but it’d take a lifetime to cover it all.

 
So you’ve got the way a theory works a little backwards; A theory only remains a theory when it can’t be disproven, and therefor is proven accurate. For a theory to be a theory, it has to be proven true. This is why we teach other theories, for example:

Plate tectonics theory: Plate tectonics is the theory that the outer rigid layer of the earth (the lithosphere) is divided into a couple of dozen “plates” that move around across the earth’s surface relative to each other, like slabs of ice on a lake.

Cell theory: In biology, cell theory is a scientific theory which describes the properties of cells. These cells are the basic unit of structure in all organisms and also the basic unit of reproduction.
and

Atomic theory: In chemistry and physics, atomic theory is a scientific theory of the nature of matter, which states that matter is composed of discrete units called atoms.

In your tags you state that evolution is a theory, and therefor can’t be taught as fact. I’m sure you don’t believe that we shouldn’t teach about the existence of atoms and the function of cells because they’re ‘only theory’, so I hope this makes clearer why that notion is flawed. We accept all of these as true because we know factually that they are. 

The reason that evolution is given such intense scrutiny is because it disproves the notion that humans are a separate, superior entity to all other life on earth. This is a blow to some egos and contradicts some people’s religious beliefs. The discovery that Earth wasn’t the center of our solar system, much less the universe, was met with the same sort of scrutiny for the same reasons. The ever building proof that we’re only a tiny flicker of what has been and will be in the universe inspires strong reactions in people, for good or bad. Personally, I find it endlessly interesting!

Also, to clarify, attempting continually to disprove a theory wouldn’t necessarily be good science. When you have a theory like plate tectonics, trying to disprove it at this point really isn’t a good use of your time. We know how it works, we’ve seen it working, we can predict how it’ll work, we can prove this is how mountains formed and earthquakes happen and continents drift. Being critical and making sure things line up properly is good science, but trying to continuously disprove something we know to be fact is a waste of energy and resources.

Evolutionary theory is the basis of everything from vaccines and Glofish to agriculture, modern medicine and decoding DNA. It’s so ingrained in everything that we do, that it’s vital for people to understand how it works. 

If it were proven false tomorrow, it’d take a lot of other fields of science down with it. But most of us are understandably doubtful that it’ll happen, because it’s been undergoing this same intense scrutiny since Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. That’s an awfully long time and a lot of scientific advances for there to have never been a single, solitary piece of evidence that disproved it.

To stay on theme, let’s end with a platybelodon family reunion.

[Source]