JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

US President Obama said America would get out of Iraq. Dissent has a section on Getting Out: Learning from Past Exit Strategies. Stanley Karnow, author of In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, looks at how the US got out of the Philippines.

HOWEVER much their methods differed, the British, Dutch, and French intended to cling to their colonies forever. But, from its start in 1898, the United States meant to limit its control of the Philippines—and, to that degree, the American-Filipino experience was unusual in the annals of imperialism…

Was Tycho Brahe Murdered by a Contract Killer?

Over 400 years after the death of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, scientists in Prague are preparing to exhume his body. Was Europe’s most renowned scholar poisoned with mercury? A Danish scholar claims to have decoded the murderer’s diary. Read the article in Der Spiegel.

Tycho Brahe had measured the heavens and demonstrated that comets follow heliocentrid paths, but stuck with the geocentric system of planetary motion. The murder suspects include the Jesuit order, Brahe’s assistant and fan Johannes Kepler, King Christian IV of Denmark, Brahe himself, and his “affectionate” distant cousin, the Swedish count Erik Brahe.

Tycho was rich, arrogant, condescending, and did not lack for enemies. When he was still at school, a fellow student questioned his abilities in math, so he challenged him to a duel. In the swordfight, part of Tycho’s nose was sliced off. He had the missing part restored in gold and silver and attached to his face.

When my sister and I went to Prague (and nearly froze our noses off), we looked up Tycho Brahe’s grave at Tyn Church in Wenceslas Square. Unfortunately I can’t locate that photo, but I found this snapshot of a monument to Brahe and Kepler.

A view of Prague from the battlements of the Castle.

View from another tower.

If you’re planning to visit Prague (airfares are going down), be prepared to climb a lot of stairs.

On February 12 we mark the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin.

I’ve read a lot of good books and even more bad books, and I’m ashamed to admit that I have not read probably the most important book ever written, The Origin of Species. (Although I know that Darwin’s grandfather founded the Wedgwood china factory.) So I’m going to try and make up for my ignorance by reading TOS and keeping a diary of the experience. Join me.

More on Darwin’s 200th at Science News.

“For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed. But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that (the Nazi doctor, “Angel of Death” Josef) Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.”

An Argentine historian claims that Josef Mengele is responsible for the astonishing number of twins in a small Brazilian town.

“Of course, the biggest disappointment was Gore’s failure to handle Hurricane Katrina properly. Not only did the massive evacuation of New Orleans prove a costly and time-consuming overreaction, since the levees – fortified in 2003 – held up fine. The emergency management agency also took over 24 hours to set up trailers for evacuees along the Gulf Coast, leaving them without government housing assistance for a full day. And Gore’s decision to single-handedly venture into a flattened house in Mississippi and free a trapped two-year-old showed him to be an irresponsible showboat. Sure, President Gore knows CPR, hears like a German shepherd, and has the strength of 10 men – but we didn’t need to see it…”

TA Frank’s alternate history of America, 2000-2008.

“I have a small wish of my own in this season of public and private Utopias. It is that the emergence—or should I say ascendance?—of Barack Hussein Obama will allow the reentry into circulation of an old linguistic coinage. Exploited perhaps to greatest effect by James Baldwin, the word I have in mind is cat. Some of you will be old enough to remember it in real time, before the lugubrious and nerve-racking days when people never knew from one moment to the next what expression would put them in the wrong: the days of Negro and colored and black and African American and people of color. After all of this strenuous and heated and boring discourse, does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? A “cat” also, in jazz vernacular, can be a white person, just as Obama, in some non–Plessy v. Ferguson ways, can be. . .”

Hitchens bats for the return of “cat”.