The Historian (of Religions) as Detective

Saliva as a Detective Biofluid

Saliva is a complex fluid consisting of secretions from the major and minor salivary glands. Saliva has been described as the mirror of the body and indeed as a mirror of our blood as these biofluids and their molecular components share many similarities. As a diagnostic fluid, saliva offers distinctive advantages over serum including the simple and non-invasive method of collection and its eas...

The Origin of Religions

Sometime ago, I was listening to a radio program about people celebrating the winter's solstice. One of the people interviewed on the program talked about the celebrations of Druids in ancient England. Druids attached religious significance to many things, among them the shortest day of the year, evergreen trees, and mistletoe. As part of the solstice celebrations, Druids were believed to have ...

The Value of Detective Stories

On a recent Sunday morning, The Times-Picayune, a newspaper from New Orleans, carried news that two young people had been arrested for an arson death, that a jury had convicted a man of killing a waitress in a robbery, and that a 15-year-old escapee from a youth detention facility had been recaptured. Those three stories were among the six main stories making up the first two pages of the local...

Paolo Sylos Labini as a historian of economics

Objective performance analysis as a tool for the musical detective.

sures in EllY Ney's recording. The two renditions of measures 5-8, however, were virtually identical, within the limits of measurement error. The evidence is presented in Figure 1. Figure 1a shows the differences between the first and second renditions in the inter-onset intervals (lOIs) between sllccessive (clusters of) tones, as measured in the digitized acoustic waveform (see Repp, 1992). Th...