Because all knitters are eccentric

I post this for my knitterly friends:

The Knitted Garden (with some patterns, in fact, but the rest of us will just stare at the pictures): http://www.bhkc.co.uk/data/the_knitted_garden.htm

The Great British PicKnit, with pictures
http://www.bhkc.co.uk/data/shaun_the_sheep.htm
but cute patterns: http://www.bhkc.co.uk/data/PicKnit_Patterns.htm

Their page also has more free knitting and crochet pattern links:
http://www.bhkc.co.uk/data/index4.shtml
More Crochet-related stuff, like an exhibition of a crocheted Great Barrier Reef demonstrating hypobolic space.

Poor old Magellan.

There's a nasty little quote going around the internet, attributed to Ferdinand Magellan. Now, I have no problem with people complaining about christianity or the church for things they actually did. But the problem with this quote is that it alleges that Magellan said the Church told him the earth was flat. I have never been able to find any source of this quote, because the Church did NOT believe the Earth was flat in his time. *

I finally tracked down a source for this quote, because someone else found it:
http://www.churchoffreethought.org/cgi-bin/contray/contray.cgi?DATA=&ID=000011010&GROUP=048

It's not in the words of Magellan. It's in the words of Robert Green Ingersoll, a freethinker, who first used this alleged quote from Magellan, in an 1873 text called Individuality:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/individuality.html

What's even more curious about this is the text that follows his made-up quote:

The trouble with most people is, they bow to what is called authority; they have a certain reverence for the old because it is old. They think a man is better for being dead, especially if he has been dead a long time. They think the fathers of their nation were the greatest and best of all mankind. All these things they implicitly believe because it is popular and patriotic, and because they were told so when they were very small, and remember distinctly of hearing mother read it out of a book. It is hard to over-estimate the influence of early training in the direction of superstition.

Yup. He's absolutely right. He's managed to put words in the mouth of a guy that was dead over 300 years when he wrote, and because they are both dead, everyone believes that it actually happened.

* while somewhat apologistic, Jeffrey Burton Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians lays out the evidence on this point very well.

*hyperventilates*

The journal Medieval Archaeology -- free online
"In celebration of the Society for Medieval Archaeology's 50th anniversary the first fifty volumes of Medieval Archaeology have been made available in digital form"-- thoough the rest of the plates will come up in 2008 to be sure authors have been notified

http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/med_arch/index.cfm?CFID=484248&CFTOKEN=56692303

Including this 1972 article:
Moorhouse, Stephen & others Medieval distilling-apparatus of glass and pottery
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol16/16_079_122.pdf

So-called Needle Cases (1974):
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol18/18_151_154.pdf

Barred Combs of Frisian type in England (1975):
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol19/19_195_198.pdf

A summary of Polish archaeology in 1975
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol20/20_001_015.pdf

A group of early medieval Spades
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol24/24_205_210.pdf

Research into the early history of the Slav populations in the territory of the German Democratic Republic (1983) http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol27/27_089_106.pdf

Late medieval pottery plant-holders from eastern Yorkshire [Humber ware] (1984)
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol28/28_194_202.pdf

A medieval depiction of infant-feeding in Winchester Cathedral (1996)
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol40/40_230_233.pdf

Recent Palaeoenvironmental Evidence for the Processing of Hemp (Cannabis Sativa L.) in Eastern England During the Medieval Period (2005)
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-769-1/ahds/dissemination/pdf/vol49/49_317_322.pdf