Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Hard to put a date on when the political and media normalizing of blatant racism and far-right views began, but surely it was something of a pivotal moment when the world's richest man gave a Nazi salute and all the media said "Well it's ambiguous". (As did the Royal Society, it seems.)

Dutch Light Buy Dutch Light Main Market by Aldersey-Williams, Hugh (ISBN: 9781509893355) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

I can’t believe it’s been five years:
Discoveries!
Inventions!!
New theories!!!
Bitter priority disputes. International wars. Fickle patrons. Grim executions. Enormous wigs.
www.amazon.co.uk/Dutch-Light-...

Happy birthday and deathday to 17th-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682). See our Browne related content here, including essays by @HoooAW and Claire Preston: https://publicdomainreview.org/tags/thomas-browne #OnThisDay #OTD

Dorothy, Lady Browne (née Mileham); Sir Thomas Browne attributed to Joan Carlile oil on panel, circa 1641-1650 NPG 2062 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Happy birthday (and death day) to Sir Thomas Browne, who had the foresight to write about this particular coincidence.

His advice is as good now as ever: ‘Though the World be Histrionical, and most Men live Ironically, yet be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thy self.’

XC398794 Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) Awful wind noise in the original! See sonogram and notes of the recording circumstances on p12 of Gretton A. (1991) The ecology and conservation of the Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris). ...

It's also not "just another" extinction, it's the first from mainland Europe in centuries. CENTURIES.

And there will be others within our lifetime.

That's biodiversity loss.

We'll never hear this sound, ever again xeno-canto.org/398794

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today.

Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

A searchable works list has been released to identify the authors’ works that were stolen by US Corporation Anthropic, to train its AI models. It includes UK authors whose works were copied without their permission or payment.

A strange statement typical of our times: if a Fellow publicly espouses and acts from values contrary to the freedoms the Society finds important to scientific research, expelling that Fellow seems to be acting in the best interests of science by the Society’s own lights.

Cycladic marble figure of a bird, postcard sent by Tony Harrison

RIP Tony Harrison. When I was writing a thing about the German WW1 chemist Fritz Haber, I wrote to him in relation to his then recent play Square Rounds. He sent back this typed postcard, patiently answering my questions, and ending up, ‘I doubt it will be revived in my lifetime. Afterwards, maybe!’

If, like me and, apparently, Rembrandt, you can’t draw dogs, then copy someone else’s drawing . . .

From dissemination to firefighting: The new reality of science communication? Three things happened recently in my Bluesky timeline which made me think about the fate of science communication. In this post I’ll use these brief glimpses into science communication activities, …

Tylenol/paracetamol and #scicomm - what is the strategy? Is there a strategy? Or is even firefighting wrong in this context? makingsciencepublic.com/2025/08/09/f...

Notice, #earlymodern #skystorians, the logo at the middle of the photo? The VOC (Dutch East India Company).

All the more reason to reckon with the legacies of these companies and how they integrate (or don't) with shifting ideas of globalisation, integration, capitalism, and national identity.

Love this picture. I used in Dutch Light as illustrative of the Huygenses’ household music-making (although Constantijn Huygens played the theorbo, and there isn’t one here).

21st century Britain
where it's illegal to project an image on a wall
but not illegal to supply weapons to mass murdering genocidal psychopaths

Slightly diminish a book:

Drive Your Car over the Mini Roundabout near the Cemetery

New Norfolk partnership helps asylum seekers volunteer In a win-win process, asylum seekers in Norfolk do great work as volunteers to help make their communities better

Asylum seekers can now volunteer in Norfolk thanks to two local charities, New Routes Integration and Voluntary Norfolk.

Fantastic news for International Charity Day

Very pleasing that my letter @lrb.co.uk should come out on his day!

Portrait of Constantijn Huygens and his wife Susanna by Jacob van Campen, c. 1635

Constantijn Huygens was born on this day in 1596. As he grew older – and older – he wrote himself little birthday odes. On his 70th: ‘How many Septembers, Lord, and how many fourth days will you suffer me yet?’ At 82: ‘Cease murderous years and think no more of me . . .’ (He died at 90.)

From my book Dutch Light about the difficulty of building science institutions and how easily they are recklessly destroyed

From the conclusion of my Christiaan Huygens biography, Dutch Light.
Now unexpectedly and horribly pertinent.

This is a great resource, much more searchable by theme than the BBC Sounds archive. Not sure what Thomas Browne would make of rubbing shoulders with ‘John Bull’ though.

Lovely opportunity here to explore Constantijn Huygens’s music and adventures in perfumery.

Will spend the rest of my life considering how we were rushed into "going paperless" for the good of the environment only for the next generation of digital tools to become far worse for the environment.

Reform UK, which has a grand total of four MPs, was just given an uninterrupted platform for an hour and a half on the BBC and Sky News channels, in order to talk about its plans for mass deportations

When was the last time the Greens (with four MPs) or the Lib Dems (with 72) were given the same?

Cornelis Elandt, Gezicht op Scheveningse Zeestraat, 1663–70 (Rijksmuseum)

Huygens didn’t just predict the ‘seaside’, he lobbied to bring it into being, imagining a grand avenue from The Hague to Scheveningen, which still exists today. It was built without him in the end, but he made sure he got some credit for it by building up his role in his long poem Zeestraet.

Portrait of Constantijn Huygens by Caspar Netscher, 1672

Off to the seaside (II)? The English word seaside, meant as a holiday destination, was coined by the Dutch Constantijn Huygens in 1670. This is his verse to the painter Peter Lely (then in England) containing its first usage:

Portrait of Constantijn Huygens by Caspar Netscher, 1672

Off to the seaside (II)? The English word seaside, meant as a holiday destination, was coined by the Dutch Constantijn Huygens in 1670. This is his verse to the painter Peter Lely (then in England) containing its first usage:

A Distinct Phenomenon in Itself: C. V. Raman’s Discovery of Why the Sea is Blue (1921) On a voyage from England to Bombay, C. V. Raman penned a short paper that forever changed how we see the sea.

Off to the seaside? Wondering why the sea is blue? This man found the answer, and won the first non-western Nobel Prize
publicdomainreview.org/collection/r...

Yes. They put marzipan on your pillow if you’re staying there.

Holstentor, Lübeck

Lübeck marketplace

New and old houses, Lübeck

Merchants’ houses, Lübeck

Lovely Lübeck, Hanseatic city. From the days of trade before nationalism.

Michaelisplatz, Hamburg, where the alchemist Hennig Brand lived and discovered phosphorus in 1669

St. Michaelis church, Hamburg

In Hamburg, disappointed to find no commemoration of Hennig Brand at the site in St. Michaelisplatz where, in 1669, he was the first person to discover a chemical element – phosphorus.