Last night, All Hallows Eve, I heard the doorbell ring (yet again). A tightly packed crowd of small costumed individuals were clustered on my porch wearing eager expressions, and all holding bags or other containers. As I opened the door, the tallest "kid" dressed all in brown reached over the…
I’ve gotten used to the world of email and blogging. Back in October I read a (typically good) short article in Smithsonian Magazine about Regional American Dialects entitled “Say What?” by Ulrich Boser.
The last line quotes University of Pennsylvania linguist Bill Labov commenting on linguistic drift:
“But it’s not really like biological evolution. No linguist believes that language gets better as it changes.”
To which my mind immediately snapped: “Say What?!?” I typed a quick reply commenting on the misapplied value judgment attributed to the course of biological evolution. I got an email this week advising me that the editors will print my “letter” in the December 2006 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
Oops.…
Hey, I know the headline isn't grammatical! It was to get your attention regarding this post by Bob Cesca on Huffpo. Cesca makes the point that "Bring em on!" cost who-knows-how-many deaths, while Kerry's recent gaffe was but a gaffe. It must be surreal to be criticized by a speaker…
This annoys me. In 1971, Dick Van Dyke starred in a movie called Cold Turkey. It was a comedy about a dying town attempting to win a prize sponsored by a tobacco company that was betting against any town remaining "smoke free" for a certain length of time. Van Dyke…
One of the many miscommunications between people of science and Creationists is the assumption that the universe was created for man. If so, the engineer behind this place was wa-ay off the mark. The universe is nowhere near human scale, and the vast majority of it has nothing to do with Man.
We only began to understand the heavens when some very careful measurements were made using precision instruments. Copernicus had to note the precise movements of dots in the heavenly sphere for a long time to be sure enough that they were centered on the Sun, not the Earth. It was easier for Galileo, who polished some chunks of glass to see that even these dots had smaller dots in orbit around them. Dots that couldn’t possibly be seen by, nor affect, the average human.
Then Leeuwenhoek ground some smaller lenses and noticed that there were complete creatures too small to see, and that they were everywhere! He opened up the microscopic revolution in which it turned out that humans (and other creatures) are not made of continuous stuff, but rather each organ is composed of colonies of lesser lifeforms, cells. In fact, each organ is an ecosystem. Our skin (our largest organ after birth) is host to an abundance of microbes, mites, bacteria, and fungi that ideally coexist peacefully to maintain the health of our skin. These “parasites” are essential to our well-being, but they do not share our DNA.
When Mendeleev worked out the periodic arrangement …