61–70 of 105 posts
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A bit like CS Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis is the one you’d expect to be religious based ont heir popular works, but nope.
Lewis was quite religious himself. He wrote more nonfiction books, many of them Christian books, than fiction.
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Really? Most of the stories are well done even if not every bit of his "ratiocination" holds up. I feel like one can enjoy them for what they are without trying to take them as real-life forensic science.
It just sits a bit bitter when you used to look at him as an unconventional man who employed the scientific process of deduction to solve his cases.... only for you to later realise that he was applying abductive reasoning the whole time, whilst claiming otherwise and chasing down any lead like a mad dog. Holmes wasn't smart, just driven.
> Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a keen spiritualist, even consulted a medium to attempt to solve the mystery of her disappearance. This bit was the most surprising part of the article for me, given the themes of science and materialism in Sherlock Holmes books. Looking a bit into it, Doyle really seems to have been into Spiritualism for some bizarre reason [0]. [0] https://arthurconandoyle.co.uk/spiritualist
> Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a keen spiritualist, even consulted a medium to attempt to solve the mystery of her disappearance. This bit was the most surprising part of the article for me, given the themes of science and materialism in Sherlock Holmes books. Looking a bit into it, Doyle really seems to have been into Spiritualism for some bizarre reason [0]. [0] https://arthurconandoyle.co.uk/spiritualist
Conan Doyle was into a lot of pseudoscientific stuff and it runs through his Holmes stories. He didn't think of it as "pseudo-" at all so just presented it as run of the mill science, like the hoary "10% of your brain" nonsense. Holmes' "reasoning" processes were often pretty dubious too. I read those stories as a kid (we had a huge single volume for some reason) and tried to figure out how to emulate Holmes' thinkin…
I remember in one story Sherlock concludes a man must be smart because his hat size is large. I mean, come on, even in Doyle's time this would have raised more than one eyebrow.
I don't hold this against the stories because my enjoyment of them is more about the mystery and Sherlock as a character, rather than they actually making rational sense.
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At that time "mesmerism" was sold as possible new branch of science that will properly explain after life, ghost, etc. without religion. Obviously was a reboot/remake/remix "product" perfectly crafted for a new public as sceptics like Sir Conan Doyle.
It's easy in hindsight to see these types of things as being ridiculous and obviously bunk. We do have the equivalents today, although YMMV on what you think is the modern day "mesmerism".
I think Conan Doyle was a very gullible man for his time. He would have been gullible for today's quakery if he was still alive.
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Well Newton was seriously into alchemy so you never can tell.
From a scientific standpoint, nuclear fission is pretty much alchemy, right? I feel like we use the term to dismiss quacks, but changing one element into another is literally something we now know how to do. Lead (atomic number 82) isn’t even that far from gold (atomic number 79).
The problem with alchemy is that there was no rhyme or reason to its method, other than mysticisim; it wasn't scientific in nature.
If it sparked chemistry, that's a good thing; but it doesn't stop it from being quakery.
Hah, that marriage certificate. the condition column. bachelor is fair enough(man who never married) but spinster(woman who never married?) nowadays the terms, especially spinster, have a sort of connotation with age. 24 is not that old but would younger people(18-20) have a different condition. and now I am curious what other "conditions" there are. my guess. widow/er divorced(are there archaic gender specific terms…
We also had to buy $110 (roughly) of “Marriage Stamps”.
> Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a keen spiritualist, even consulted a medium to attempt to solve the mystery of her disappearance. This bit was the most surprising part of the article for me, given the themes of science and materialism in Sherlock Holmes books. Looking a bit into it, Doyle really seems to have been into Spiritualism for some bizarre reason [0]. [0] https://arthurconandoyle.co.uk/spiritualist
Arthur Conan Doyle famously embarrassed himself with the Cottingley Fairies fake [1]. A grown man, believing in fairies -- small women with butterfly wings -- based on some dodgy (doctored) photographs. He went beyond believing in them; he actually promoted the case. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
The 5th photo is the only one that doesn't look immediately like a cutout. It's believed to have been the result of a double exposure, but one of the women maintained until her death that the 5th photo was genuine.
The photos: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/english-literat...
I was interested to learn that Agatha Christie is the best-selling author in history (ahead of JK Rowling by well over 1 billion copies sold). Only Shakespeare rivals her.
The list of best-selling / most-published books includes the Bible (~5 billion copies), The Qur'an (~800 million), and the Book of Mormon (~190 million). Along with Mao's book, all of these share the characteristic of being propaganda, in the modern and/or original senses of the word, literally.
Of individual books with a known author: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (>500 million), A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (>200 million), and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (~200 million) top the list. Rowling and Christie are 4th and 5th on that list.
Rowling tops the list for book series (500 million), followed by R.L. Stein, and Erle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason series).
Curiously, Shakespeare doesn't appear on the list. Wikipedia, caveat lector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books>