We have already discussed how much one trillion dollars would buy. Well, the Boston Globe did its own story about this subject, using the more conservative figure of $456 billion (the estimated cost by September). My favorite is where it says $456 billion could have fed and educated the world's…
In the June '07 issue of Scientific American, the article "A Simpler Origin for Life" discusses a new approach for figuring out how life could have spontaneously arisen. The views of evolutionary biologists have evolved over the last few decades from assuming that the extremely unlikely spontaneous formation of simple…
Unfortunately, you'll have to read nearly this entire story to get to the part where the girl credits God with giving her a nearly 3-carat diamond. These sorts of things are where bad science, and faith in false deities, come from. If that girl's parents let her go on believing that God answered her…
Many of us spend a lot of energy wondering whether there is life on Mars, on the moons of Jupiter or elsewhere in the galaxy. If we found life out there, it would make huge headlines. The June 2007 edition of Science has a beautiful photo of an orangutan and…
OK, bear with me here. I’m still processing the adventure a friend and I had earlier this week as we attempted to elicit information, of the public record kind, from our country’s federal bureaucracy. I accompanied my friend on a quest for information about a long-deceased relative. Wow. After only a small glimpse into the inefficiencies of, well, everything, we could only wonder how our entire system has not yet imploded upon itself. First, some background:
This relative in question died in the mid-1930s, and my friend’s family knows that he never became naturalized as a citizen of the US. He was still a citizen of his native Italy as of the 1930 census, the only government document my friend has found thus far (found, by the way, via the genealogical website, http://www.ancestry.com). The relative died only a few short years later. My friend’s search this week is for proof of this lack of naturalization. In order to acquire some documents from Italy, he must show that a search has been conducted for naturalization papers and that they have never been found. Dates are sketchy, as the only living relative with information was just a child when this man died, so the family is working from approximations.
My friend, a very organized fellow, had all the paperwork he’d been able to gather thus far carefully compiled in a folder. He’d scoured the websites of the USCIS (that would be the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly known as the …