Historical Tidbits Archives

March 14, 2025March 20, 2025

A Disjointed Post

Rendered by Google AI, this Frankenstein robot drawing is the only creative AI used here

Surgery is the topic of today’s post, namely because I had shoulder arthroplasty last Tuesday. The technique was reverse shoulder replacement and, as you ask, what is that? be assured that I will get there. We have to cover a little anatomy, anthropology, Popular Mechanics, history (of course), and technology along the way.

Fish Gotta Swim, Horses Gotta Run, Humans Gotta Throw Spears

Let’s talk about joints, specifically shoulders, ball-and-socket joints, and the term synovial. I had originally thought that fish had no ball-and-socket joints, and I was going to claim that it was the reptiles, crocodiles crawling out of the water, who began to develop those movable arm and leg joints rather than fins. But it turns out that, even at the beginning, fish had some types of ball-and-socket joints in their jaws, in their vertebrae, and even in their fins.

Synovial=(Greek) put together+egg=the shape of certain joints

The word synovial is important here because it means that within rigid bones, there is a hollow part and a bumpy part that fit together. Even with fish, there were hollow/bumps that fit together in fins and jaws which allowed for more flexibility and rapid movement. When reptiles developed the ability to walk on land and swim in the water, those fins turned into longer bones with multiple places for movable joints.

February 20, 2025February 21, 2025

Reading Between the Lines in the Life of Susie King Taylor

It’s hard to preserve history. The paper that holds the stories crumbles or sticks together, stored in damp basements or behind walls. Officials throw files away, burn them, or shove them into unlabelled boxes. People die without telling us what happened.

Yet at the same time, it’s not so simple to erase what happened, not with a wave of a wand or the stroke of an expensive pen. Stories once told take on a life of their own. Files are rediscovered; skeleton bones fall out of closets. History can’t simply be ripped off the wall. If you hadn’t heard, a school official recently took Harriet Tubman posters down in advance of a visit from Trump government officials. As if that would remove what Harriet Tubman was or what she did.

If we choose to remember, if we work to remember–dig underneath the bland encyclopedia entries to uncover what we must remember–then nothing will erase the real stories. February is still Black History Month, whether there are posters or not.

I came across the remarkable life of Susie King Taylor, looking for an appropriate subject to write about this month, somewhat discouraged about writing at all. You can read a few paragraphs about her on Wikipedia, at the Library of Congress, or via the National Park Service. She was the first African-American nurse in the Civil War, the first Black woman to teach at a school in a Union camp, the first woman to write about life in the camps. The “first” business doesn’t really matter. The point is that she did things and wrote her story, proving how important a task that is.

January 22, 2025January 24, 2025

The Dragon Hunt

Dragon from San Francisco New Year parade, 2020. Kajmeister photo.

A few weeks back, while still wrapped in the blanket of dinosaur research, I started thinking about serpent gods, flying monsters, and dragons. I wondered how scholars had addressed this question, but when a few glances at research led to papers on children’s stories and the ancestral memory of tree shrews, I gave up quickly. It was Christmas; I had presents to wrap and muffins to bake. Those few who discussed the possible origins of dragons appeared limited to art museums, mythology experts, or psychologists, rather than historians or paleontologists.

But last Thursday was of all things, Appreciate a Dragon day, according to Sandra Boynton. And we are finishing the Year of the Dragon, after all, with January 29th ending this most auspicious year and moving on to a different animal in the Chinese calendar, Year of the Snake.

Perfect timing to take another dive into the topic.

It seemed a simple question. After all, dinosaurs once covered the earth, which, at the beginning of the Triassic, was a single land called Pangaea. The continents split up after the dinosaurs proliferated, so dinosaur fossils now cover the globe, with similar species now found flung far apart in Argentina, the Rockies, and the Gobi Desert. Dragon stories also span the globe. It seems a question with a fairly obvious answer: Were human ideas and stories about dragons influenced by dinosaurs, by fossils found by ancient, primitive paleontologists?