Fralambert
Jonty WareingLife goal: Get a plaque this good
Franceska MannA life well lived!
webhat
Ozzelot 
M. Grégoire@ozzelot @webhat @jonty
No discussion of the pie crust solution on Wikipedia, alas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hales
No discussion of the pie crust solution on Wikipedia, alas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hales
Neo Ehproque
groff 🇺🇦"As I know you loved the good old man," wrote Gilbert White to a friend, "how can I do better than send you some anecdotes respecting him. His attention to the inside of ladies' tea-kettles that from thence he might judge the salubrity of their wells; his advising water to be showered down suspicious ones before men ventured to descend; his teaching the housewife to place an inverted egg cup at the bottom of her tarts and pies in order to preserve the juice;
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his directing air holes to be left in the out-walls of ground floor rooms to prevent dry rot. These are but a few among those useful pursuits on which his mind was constantly bent. Though a man of a baronet's family and of one of the best houses in Kent, yet was his humility so prevalent that he did not disdain the lowest offices, provided they tended to the good of his fellow men.
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The last act of benevolence on which I saw him employed-and I can somehow see him at it now-was at Farrington, the next parish to this, where I found him in the street with his paint pot before him, much busied in painting white, with his own hands, the tops of the foot-path posts, lest his neighbours might run against them in the dark."
Tamar@jonty In his book ‘At Home’ Bill Bryson discusses how lots of interesting endeavours and discoveries came from clergymen, largely because they were a well-educated, wealthy group of people with lots of free time. They only needed to do one sermon a week and many of them just bought a book of sermons, so didn’t need to prepare any of their own. (I couldn’t help but think about basic income during this section of his book!)
@jonty Of note: Thomas Bayes (of Bayes’ theorem), Edmund Cartwright (inventor of the power loom), George Garrett (inventor of the submarine), Jack Russel (breeding small dogs), Thomas Malthus (population theory), William Buckland (first scientific description of dinosaurs), Octavius Pickard-Cambridge (spider expert), William Shepherd (wrote a history of dirty jokes), John Mackenzie Bacon (pioneering balloonist and aerial photographer) John Michell (devised a method to weigh the Earth)
rooney (not the famous one)@gammapeak @jonty Someone named Octavius studying spiders. The universe is having us on.
Mike Prior-Jones@gammapeak @jonty and Gilbert White, one of the first naturalists, who is on fedi here: @gilbertwhite
clewSmall gentry who weren’t beneficed clergy would be a fair comparison group, I think. Probably someone has done the work of figuring out if the clergy were more likely to discover things than the equally rich otherwise idle.
forest 
@jonty i didnt realize middlesex was a region so i was like 'oh, ye olde intersex or nonbinary coming up with some cool stuff' lmao
@swiftyshq Hahahaha
Phil Ashby 
🍵Essex => "yes-sex"
Sussex => "ooh madam"
Wessex => "you are kidding me.."
Middlesex => "Donna Summer fan"*
[full disclosure: I'm an Essex boy]
* "get in the middle of a chain reaction" 🎵 - well what did you think that song was about? 🙃
keeps vis.social running@jonty Trying so hard, but failing to resist, saying that these 'discoveries' were probably things women did and he recorded.
But still a super cool plaque!!!
Jon Roach
SarcastiCanadian@jonty Talk about burying the lede!
"It was for the future king, George III, that he 'contrived an ingenious machine to expedite the preparation of syllabub'."
jarkman