We’re almost a year into our hump-day history project here at Ether Wave Propaganda. We’ve farmed a few out (and are still hoping to farm more out), and Chris has been a big help in putting together some posts in the course of his own diverse researches. Personally, I’ve learned an awful lot, and I’m happy to note that the series has been our most popular, and it keeps our archived posts in healthy exercise. However, it’s also a hell of a lot of work getting up to speed on topics, especially when one reaches outside one’s specialty, and to try and be at least somewhat fair to a topic and its literature. We’ve left a lot of areas ill-covered. Biology has, for the most part, proven too intimidating and foreign a literature for me to venture into.
Anyway, getting the posts in on time has been a spotty affair lately, and I’m moving from my current apartment down to Capitol Hill next week—sadly, the historian of physics will no longer live on Newton Street! That’s going to take up time. Plus I’m frankly a bit fatigued with research and need to keep my eye closely on the ball with some projects at work that are coming to a boil at the moment, so cushy postdoc intellectual detours will have to take a back seat. Long story short, it’s a good time to take a little break. Like James Bond, Hump-Day History will return, possibly under a less taxing name, in a few weeks. In the meantime, we’ll keep posting in other series at regular intervals, Chris might have a primer or two to post, and, if you’re hankering for some mathematics and astronomy primers, particularly in the Renaissance and early modern periods—another area where we’re a bit sparse—frequent commenter Thony C has been issuing some nice posts at his blog The Renaissance Mathematicus. Do check it out if you haven’t already.