Will your reputation follow you for 100 years?

It's the 100th anniversary of the Piltdown Man. The British hoax that claimed a pre-modern human skull and jawbone were 1,000,000 years old, but were later found to be much more recent - and actually a combination of human skull and orangutang jaw.

There is an interesting news article about it here because people are bringing the evidence back out of storage for some more analysis.

Now that's a terrible way to celebrate an anniversary. Dig out the evidence of a fraud you believed in for 50 years, do more analysis to see how it was done, and publicize it again. I guess it's a British thing.

If you read the news article closely, it goes into some very interesting details about the character of many of the men involved in the scam. One of them was described as: "palaeontologist and alleged practical joker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin".

Just how many practical jokes did this man pull in is lifetime to get this reputation? How is it that many years after his death, he is still known as a "practical joker"? What do you have to do, and in what public domain do you have to do it in, to have a reputation that stretches so many years after your death?

It's not a reputation given to all the men involved in the Piltdown Man hoax, so it's not just the one infamous "practical joke" that stuck to his reputation.

"Your reputation precedes you" is often a very great compliment. Is "your reputation has followed you for a century" a compliment? I think it must be. For most people birth and death dates are what's on the gravestone, and how they are remembered 100 years later. Some people do actions which are recorded in history books, they are remembered as long as the history is read. Whether good or bad, if memory of what your personality included survives you for so many years after your death, you made quite the impact. I think it's an extraordinary statement if your personality survived the ravages of time.

So how long will your reputation follow you?

Is this a new Swiss Army Knife tool?

The big space tidy-up has finally begun! The Swiss have put a cleaning tool into orbit to grab old non-functional satellites and push them into orbit to burn up. Watch this video for details.

So how do we get them to make more of these?

Everyone who puts stuff up into orbit should have one. It should be one of the essential Swiss Army Knife tools that space focussed countries should have. It would go really well with the cork-screw and scissors. Something you won't miss until you really miss it, so you should have one with you at all times.