Odd Bag

There are, perhaps, few more ignoble ways for a battleship to go down:

In the Second World War, Bahia was once again used as a convoy escort, sailing over 100,000 nautical miles (190,000 km; 120,000 mi) in the span of about a year. On 4 July 1945 she was acting as a plane guard for transport aircraft flying from the Atlantic to Pacific theaters of war. While Bahia’s gunners were firing at a kite for anti-aircraft practice, one aimed too low and hit depth charges stored near the stern of the ship, resulting in a massive explosion that incapacitated the ship and sunk her within minutes. Only a small portion of the crew survived the blast, and even fewer were still living when their rafts were discovered days later.

That is definitely an “oops” moment.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_cruiser_Bahia

I am not good at math. The farthest I ventured into this field was basic trigonometry and advanced algebra–and I don’t think I retained very much of the latter. But as much as this subject is alien to me–a field in which I have not a scrap of skill–I can still recognize that it is important. It is when I read about a genius in math, and how they see and feel math, that I begin to dimly see how much is beyond my vision.

Benjamin Peirce (4 April 1809 – 6 October 1880) was an American mathematician who taught at Harvard University for forty years. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, number theory, algebra, and the philosophy of mathematics. He was a rare genius of math. Edward Waldo Emerson relates a story of George Flagg about Peirce: “His talk was informal, often far above their heads. ‘Do you follow me?’ asked the Professor one day. No one could say Yes. ‘I’m not surprised,’ said he; ‘I know of only three persons who could.’ At Paris, the year after, at the great Exposition, Flagg stood before a mural tablet whereon were inscribed the names of the great mathematicians of the earth for more than two thousand years. Archimedes headed, Peirce closed the list; the only American.”

Peirce could rhapsodize about math like a poet might write about nature. He said,

Geometry, to which I have devoted my life, is honoured with the title of the Key of Sciences; but it is the Key of an ever open door which refuses to be shut, and through which the whole world is crowding, to make free, in unrestrained license, with the precious treasures within, thoughtless both of lock and key, of the door itself, and even of Science, to which it owes such boundless possessions, the New World included. The door is wide open and all may enter, but all do not enter with equal thoughtlessness. There are a few who wonder, as they approach, at the exhaustless wealth, as the sacred shepherd wondered at the burning bush of Horeb, which was ever burning and never consumed. Casting their shoes from off their feet and the world’s iron-shod doubts from their understanding, these children of the faithful take their first step upon the holy ground with reverential awe, and advance almost with timidity, fearful, as the signs of Deity break upon them, lest they be brought face to face with the Almighty.

And in talking about symbolism in math he begins to sound like a poet discussing the use of symbolism in poetry:

Some definite interpretation of a linear algebra would, at first sight, appear indispensable to its successful application. But on the contrary, it is a singular fact, and one quite consonant with the principles of sound logic, that its first and general use is mostly to be expected from its want of significance. The interpretation is a trammel to the use. Symbols are essential to comprehensive argument. [...] In Algebra, likewise, the letters are symbols which, passed through a machinery of argument in accordance with given laws, are developed into symbolic results under the name of formulas. When the formulas admit of intelligible interpretation, they are accessions to knowledge; but independently of their interpretation they are invaluable as symbolical expressions of thought. But the most noted instance is the symbol called the impossible or imaginary, known also as the square root of minus one, and which, from a shadow of meaning attached to it, may be more definitely distinguished as the symbol of semi-inversion. This symbol is restricted to a precise signification as the representative of perpendicularity in quaternions, and this wonderful algebra of space is intimately dependent upon the special use of the symbol for its symmetry, elegance, and power.

I don’t get the meaning of the square root of minus one, but I do get the importance of symbols.

Peirce was, to those who studied math, both a character and a delight. As a pupil of Peirce, Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled,

He gave us his “Curves and Functions”, in the form of lectures; and sometimes, even while stating his propositions, he would be seized with some mathematical inspiration, would forget pupils, notes, everything, and would rapidly dash off equation after equation, following them out with smaller and smaller chalk-marks into the remote corners of the blackboard, forsaking his delightful task only when there was literally no more space to be covered, and coming back with a sigh to his actual students. There was a great fascination about these interruptions; we were present, as it seemed, at mathematics in the making; it was like peeping into a necromancer’s cell, and seeing him at work; or as if our teacher were one of the old Arabian algebraists recalled to life.

Speaking of Peirce, Abbott Lawrence Lowell said,

Looking back over the space of fifty years since I entered Harvard College, Benjamin Peirce still impresses me as having the most massive intellect with which I have ever come in contact, and as being the most profoundly inspiring teacher I ever had. … As soon as he had finished the problem or filled the blackboard he would rub everything out and begin again. He was impatient of detail, and sometimes the result would not come out right; but instead of going over his work to find the error, he would rub it out, saying that he had made a mistake in a sign somewhere, and that we should find it when we went over our notes. Described in this way it may seem strange that such a method of teaching should be inspiring; yet to us it was so to the highest degree. We were carried along by the rush of his thought, by the ease and grasp of his intellectual movement. The inspiration came, I think, partly from his treating us as highly competent pupils, capable of following his line of thought even through errors in transformations; partly from his rapid and graceful methods of proof, which reached a result with the least number of steps in the process, attaining thereby an artistic or literary character; and partly from the quality of his mind which tended to regard any mathematical theorem as a particular case of some more comprehensive one, so that we were led onward to constantly enlarging truths.

I will never travel in such circles, or understand such things, but somehow I can still feel a bit of sympathetic delight with those who find such fascination in learning and understanding things.

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(1) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Peirce
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Peirce

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the name of a town in Wales. It is true, in spite of it sounding like some kind of joke children might make up. The long form of the name is the longest officially recognized place name in the United Kingdom and one of the longest in the world. The name means “St Mary’s Church (Llanfair) of a hollow (pwll) of white hazel (gwyngyll) near (goger) the swirling whirlpool (y chwyrndrobwll) of the church of St Tysilio (llantysilio) with a red cave ([a]g ogo goch).”

The solemnity of this fact is somewhat ruined because the village was originally known as Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and only in the 1860s was the longer name artificially contrived as a publicity stunt. Nonetheless, the name stands and as of this writing the Wikipedia article has a sound file demonstrating how the name is pronounced. Think you can say it?

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(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

The weird word for today is: Errhine

Etymology

From Latin errhīnum, from Ancient Greek ἔρρῖνον, from ἐν (“in”) + ῥίν (“nostril”).

Adjective

Meaning: Causing an increase in mucus within the nose, and hence causing one to sneeze.

My comment: Dust would fit this for me. “The errhine dust is bothering me today.” Dust does a lot of increasing mucus and sneezing on me.

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(1) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/errhine

Consider this another entry in my erratic, informal, exploration of lesser known aspects and events within the history of Christianity.

Did you know early Protestant leaders defended bigamy on theological grounds? To put it that way makes it sound worse than it is–and yet not. The attempt to justify bigamy was not a concerted act of the Reformed Protestant movement as a whole–any insinuation as such would be dishonest. Nonetheless three very prominent Protestant leaders were involved in this scandal, and that is reason enough for those who claim any degree of Protestant heritage to stop and pondering the roots of this failure.

Martin Bucer (early German Butzer) was a leader during the early Protestant Reformation. He began his religious life as a member of the Dominican Order, later having his vows annulled and joining the work of the Reformation. He had extensive contact with Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and, at the end of his life, with Thomas Cranmer influenced the second revision of The Book of Common Prayer in England.

The Reformation is a fascinating time in history, particularly in regard to religious matters. It was a time of upheaval, strife, and oppression. This confluence of events has the effect of shining a bright light on the nature of men in all of their contradiction, weakness, and insight. Under the pressure of trying times people reveal more about themselves than we might like, and in looking over the historical record of such things a person can find much to ponder about men and their ways.

I agree with certain things said by various leaders in the Reformation, but I am always extremely disconcerted by a common habit in some circles of enthusiastically embracing a Reformation figure, be it Calvin, Luther, or someone else. The great names in the Reformation were deeply flawed men–and in that broken state no different from any other man or woman. A careful reading of history shows them as people who were inconsistent in what they said and did, even flatly contradictory. They were often wrong, or only partly right. They often did not follow right knowledge with right action. Those who today enthusiastically cling to some leader of the Reformation as a model for emulation open themselves to the charge of being either ignorant of what those people said and did and so living in a fantasy, or deliberately blind and so living in a delusion.

I don’t claim to be any better than those men of the Reformation. But I don’t think my faults should be hidden or denied and neither should the faults of those claimed as leaders. The desire to hide the Bigamy scandal is wrong. The weakness brought to light by the Bigamy scandal was more than an isolated and regrettable incident. It was a sign of a deeper problem, and those who brush it all aside remain willfully unreflective. Error ought to be exposed, and named for what it is.

The Reformation period was complex, with many different historical events interweaving to create the full picture. Anything so short as a Wikipedia article will be overly simplistic, leaving much out (and one could even argue presenting a biased account). But for a single event illustrating the flaws of Martin Bucer and the Reformation men of his age consider the following:

In November 1539, Philip asked Bucer to produce a theological defence of bigamy, since he had decided to contract a bigamous marriage. Bucer reluctantly agreed, on condition the marriage be kept secret. Bucer consulted Luther and Melanchthon, and the three reformers presented Philip with a statement of advice (Wittenberger Ratschlag); later, Bucer produced his own arguments for and against bigamy. Although the document specified that bigamy could be sanctioned only under rare conditions, Philip took it as approval for his marriage to a lady-in-waiting of his sister. When rumours of the marriage spread, Luther told Philip to deny it, while Bucer advised him to hide his second wife and conceal the truth. Some scholars have noted a possible motivation for this notorious advice: the theologians believed they had advised Philip as a pastor would his parishioner, and that a lie was justified to guard the privacy of their confessional counsel. The scandal that followed the marriage caused Philip to lose political influence, and the Reformation within the Empire was severely compromised.

Appalling is not too harsh a word to describe this. These men are supposed to be pillars of truth and moral integrity, and they conducted themselves like weasely political lackeys. People today who attempt to cover over these failings, or excuse them, in a desire to venerate their chosen heroes do not do the truth any favors.

The lives of the Reformers were messy, and at times even ugly. I do not consider this cause to discard all they have said, but it is reason to be very careful about heaping praise or following carelessly in their footsteps.

What caused Luther and Bucer to err in such an obvious way? It was a weakness not unique to them: They wanted to please men and they got loose with the truth to reach that end. The more one understands church history the more one sees this terrible flaw. It is a universal siren’s call–deadly, and pervasive. When a fear of men, or desire to please them, is ruling within a church this attitude does far more damage than any persecution from without.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bucer

I came across this interesting word and thought to share it:

Frowst

Etymology – Back-formation from frowsty

Noun. (plural frowsts)

1. Stuffiness; stifling warmth in a room.
* 1916, John Buchan, Greenmantle
I was pretty bad myself, but managed to move about all the time, for the frowst in my cabin would have sickened a hippo.

Verb. to frowst (third-person singular simple present frowsts, present participle frowsting, simple past and past participle frowsted)

1. (intransitive) To enjoy a warm, stuffy room.
* 1902, Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories

The cure for this ill is not to sit still, / Or frowst with a book by the fire;

The sound of the word brings both toasty and frosty to my mind in the nature of synonym and antonym. (Not to say it is literally the case.) In any event, the word is deliciously obscure, providing those of us who are conversationally handicapped with something to utter during an awkward moment in a full room.

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http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frowst

Have you ever heard of William Cowper? Probably not. But it is much more likely that you know some of what William Cowper has written. Know the phrase, “Variety is the spice of life”? That was William Cowper–

Variety’s the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavour.

(Book II, The Timepiece, l. 606)

And if you go to church, or sing hymns, you may know more of what he has written. Perhaps most famous:

There is a fountain fill’d with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.

The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day;
And there have I, as vile as he,
Wash’d all my sins away.

Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood
Shall never lose its power,
Till all the ransom’d church of God
Be saved, to sin no more.

E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream
Thy flowing wounds supply,
Redeeming love has been my theme,
And shall be till I die.

Then in a nobler, sweeter song,
I’ll sing Thy power to save;
When this poor lisping stammering tongue
Lies silent in the grave.

Lord, I believe Thou hast prepared
(Unworthy though I be)
For me a blood-bought free reward,
A golden harp for me!

‘Tis strung and tuned for endless years,
And form’d by power divine,
To sound in God the Father’s ears
No other name but Thine.

But then also,

Oh! for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame;
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb!

Where is the blessedness I knew
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refershing view
Of Jesus and his word?

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void,
The world can never fill.

Return, O holy Dove, return!
Sweet the messenger of rest!
I hate the sins that made thee mourn
And drove thee from my breast.

The dearest idol I have known,
Whate’er that idol be,
Help me to tear it from thy throne,
And worship only thee.

So shall my walk be close with God,
Calm and serene my frame;
So purer light shall mark the road
That leads me to the Lamb.

And finally,

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never-failing skill,
He treasures up his bright designs,
And works his sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain;
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain.

William Cowper and John Newton wrote a hymn book called Olney Hymns. It was very popular in its day and some survive in popularity today. To have written such great hymns William Cowper must have been a great man, right? But the story of William Cowper’s life is not what you would expect after reading those hymns.

Cowper suffered from severe manic depression and in 1763 when he was offered a Clerkship of Journals in the House of Lords, he broke under the strain of the approaching examination and experienced a period of insanity. At this time he tried three times to commit suicide and was sent to Nathaniel Cotton’s asylum at St. Albans for recovery. Then again in 1773, Cowper, now engaged to marry Mrs. Unwin, experienced a new attack of insanity, imagining not only that he was condemned to hell eternally, but that God was commanding him to make a sacrifice of his own life.

In the aftermath of his suicide attempts he penned the following poem,

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas:more abhorred than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy Master.
Twice betrayed Jesus me, this last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors;
I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram’s.

Him the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent quick and howling to the center headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.

It is a sad loss that the people singing “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins” do not really know the man who wrote those words. When people go to church to sing hymns they want to think about great hymns written by great men. But it would be better if they knew also “Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion” for though those words do not rest sweet upon the ear, they speak words of truth, words of brokenness, needed to be heard. All the great men people think they see are broken men. They are broken in ways that shock and dismay us. And far from being a thing shirked from, it should be a truth that informs our understanding of words lifted in praise.

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(1) Wikipedia article on William Cowper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper
(2) Selected quotations from William Cowper: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Cowper
(3) Poems of William Cowper: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/abuse-of-the-gospel/
(4) Olney Hymns Online: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/newton/olneyhymns.toc.html

If you spend enough time wandering about on the internet you will discover people fretting about the audience for their writing. It is a common affliction of those who write–they want the public to be pleased, and to pay attention. But a few people take a different stand.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the
public and have no self.

–Cyril Connolly

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(1) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cyril_Connolly
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Connolly

If you read enough history, you come across all sorts of fascinating stories. Some things are just plan educational–you didn’t know that had happened before. And some historical occurrences put things in perspective that life could be a lot worse.

The following two stories have a superficial similarity, but their outcomes are radically different. The first seems like the Egyptian plague of darkness as recorded in Exodus chapter 10. The second even sounds a bit like the afflictions in Revelations that accompanied the seals, trumpets, and the bowls in Revelations chapters 6, 8, and 16.

New England’s Dark Day

Date: May 19th, 1780

An unusual darkening of the day sky is observed over the New England states and parts of Canada. The darkness was so complete that candles were required from noon on. It did not disperse until the middle of the next night. According to Professor Samuel Williams of Harvard College, the Darkness was seen at least as far north as Portland, Maine, and extended southwards to New Jersey. The Darkness was not witnessed in Pennsylvania.

The earliest report of the darkness came from Rupert, New York, where the sun was already obscured at sunrise. Professor Samuel Williams observed from Cambridge that: “This extraordinary darkness came on between the hours of 10 and 11 A. M. and continued till the middle of the next night.” Reverend Ebenezer Parkham, of Westborough, Massachusetts, reported peak obscurity to occur “by 12″, but did not record the time when the obscuration first arrived.

At Harvard College, the obscuration was reported to arrive at 10:30 AM, peaking at 12:45 PM, and abating by 1:10 PM, although a heavy overcast remained for the rest of the day. The obscuration was reported to have reached Barnstable, Massachusetts, by 2:00 PM, with peak obscurity reported to have occurred at 5:30 PM.

For several days before the Dark Day, the sun as viewed from New England appeared to be red, and the sky appeared yellow. While the Darkness was present, soot was observed to be collected in rivers and in rain water, suggesting the presence of smoke. Also, when the night really came in, observers saw the moon as red as blood.

Regarding the cause of this strange event, it is speculated that the likely cause of the Dark Day was smoke from massive forest fires in Ontario, Canada.

The above information was extracted from the Wikipedia article⁽¹⁾ on the event. You can find a little more info (including a few more anecdotes) at a Wired article⁽²⁾

The Desolation of Iceland

Date: June 8th, 1783

The dark day of New England ended up being a fascinating (or frightening) piece of phenomena, but in the end it caused no lasting harm–at least to those recorded as having observed it. Not so for the June 8th eruption of Mount Laki in Iceland three years later. The effects from this were of staggering, apocalyptic, proportions.

According to Wikipedia:⁽³⁾

On 8 June 1783, a fissure with 130 craters opened with phreatomagmatic explosions because of the groundwater interacting with the rising basalt magma. These are sometimes mistaken by non-volcanologists as being “plinian” but are not. Over a few days the eruptions became less explosive, Strombolian, and later Hawaiian in character, with high rates of lava effusion. This event is rated as VEI 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, but the eight month emission of sulfuric aerosols resulted in one of the most important climatic and socially repercussive events of the last millennium.

The eruption, also known as the Skaftáreldar (“Skaftá river fires”) or Síðueldur, produced an estimated 14 km3 (3.4 cu mi) of basalt lava, and the total volume of tephra emitted was 0.91 km3 (0.2 cu mi). Lava fountains were estimated to have reached heights of 800-1400 m (~2,600-4,600 ft). In Great Britain, the summer of 1783 was known as the “sand-summer” due to ash fallout. The gases were carried by the convective eruption column to altitudes of about 15 kilometres (10 mi). The aerosols built up caused a cooling effect in the Northern Hemisphere.

The eruption continued until 7 February 1784, but most of the lava was erupted in the first five months. Grímsvötn volcano, from which the Laki fissure extends, was also erupting at the time from 1783 until 1785. The outpouring of gases, including an estimated 8 million tons of fluorine and estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide gave rise to what has since become known as the “Laki haze” across Europe.

One of the most important climatic and socially repercussive events of the last millennium? Why don’t the history books they give you in school spend more (any?) time on this? You get to read all about Pompeii and its obliteration, but hear nary a word about this.

Continuing from the Wikipedia article:

The consequences for Iceland — known as the Mist Hardships — were catastrophic. An estimated 20-25% of the population died in the famine and fluorine poisoning after the fissure eruptions ceased. Around 80% of sheep, 50% of cattle and 50% of horses died because of dental and skeletal fluorosis from the 8 million tons of fluorine that were released.

A first person account states,

“This past week, and the two prior to it, more poison fell from the sky than words can describe: ash, volcanic hairs, rain full of sulfur and salt peter, all of it mixed with sand. The snouts, nostrils, and feet of livestock grazing or walking on the grass turned bright yellow and raw. All water went tepid and light blue in color and gravel slides turned gray. All the earth’s plants burned, withered and turned gray, one after another, as the fire increased and neared the settlements.”

And Gilbert White recorded at Selbourne that,

The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phaenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust- coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers’ meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people began to look with a superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun;

And as for the wider impact on Europe,

An estimated 122 Tg (120 million tons) of sulfur dioxide were emitted: approximately equivalent to three times the total annual European industrial output in 2006, and also equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo-1991 eruption every three days. This outpouring of sulfur dioxide during unusual weather conditions caused a thick haze to spread across western Europe, resulting in many thousands of deaths throughout 1783 and the winter of 1784.

The summer of 1783 was the hottest on record and a rare high pressure zone over Iceland caused the winds to blow to the south-east. The poisonous cloud drifted to Bergen in Norway, then spread to Prague in the Province of Bohemia by 17 June, Berlin by 18 June, Paris by 20 June, Le Havre by 22 June, and to Great Britain by 23 June. The fog was so thick that boats stayed in port, unable to navigate, and the sun was described as “blood coloured”.

Inhaling sulfur dioxide gas causes victims to choke as their internal soft tissue swells. The local death rate in Chartres was up by 5% during August and September, with over 40 dead. In Great Britain, the records show that the additional deaths were outdoor workers, and perhaps 2-3 times above the normal rate in Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire and the east coast. It has been estimated that 23,000 British people died from the poisoning in August and September.

The haze also heated up causing severe thunderstorms with hailstones that were reported to have killed cattle until it dissipated in the autumn. This disruption then led to a most severe winter in 1784, where Gilbert White at Selborne in Hampshire reported 28 days of continuous frost. The extreme winter is estimated to have caused 8,000 additional deaths in the UK. In the spring thaw, Germany and Central Europe then reported severe flood damage.

The meteorological impact of Laki resonated on, contributing significantly to several years of extreme weather in Europe. In France a sequence of extremes included a surplus harvest in 1785 that caused poverty for rural workers, accompanied by droughts, bad winters and summers, including a violent hailstorm in 1788 that destroyed crops. This in turn contributed significantly to the build up of poverty and famine that triggered the French Revolution in 1789. Laki was only a factor in a decade of climatic disruption, as Grímsvötn was erupting from 1783-1785 and a recent study of El Niño patterns also suggests an unusually strong El-Niño effect between 1789-93.

Did you read that? It produce three times the sulfur dioxide of the annual industrial output of Europe in 2006! It puts things in a bit of perspective. People are all in a tizzy over global warming, or the possibility that a meteor could hit earth and cause catastrophic damage. And if a big one did strike, it could cause terrible destruction. But something doesn’t have to fall from the heavens to do that. The ground can simply erupt from beneath our feet. Imagine what would happen if Laki erupted again like it did in 1783, or even worse?

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(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England%27s_Dark_Day
(2) http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/05/dayintech_0519?npu=1&mbid=yhp&ybf1=1
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

–Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer said that, but it isn’t really a quote that originated with him. The book of Proverbs holds the same sentiment, and however wrong Herbert Spencer was on some things this statement is certainly true, and very applicable today.