Science
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I have the hardest time remembering the number of stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Is it 300 million or 300 billion? Either number is so far out of my ken, so far beyond my ability to grasp, that it won't stick in my head. Moreover, it doesn't seem to make much…
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I've just read Tim Birkhead's biography of The Wonderful Mr Willoughby, The First True Ornithologist (London, 2018). Birkhead's thesis is that Francis Willoughby was not merely a bird watcher, but an innovative, diligent, and imaginative scientist, the founder of a new area of knowledge. Ornithology when Willoughby (1635 –1672) started to look at birds was…
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Many years ago, sometime during the previous millennium, I was taken to an African game park — elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and lions (the hippos were AWOL). It was astonishing to see these huge beasts. I didn't realize at the time that it was semi-miraculous that these creatures had survived to our day, even in a…
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Victorian novelists had a hard time describing bodies, especially female bodies. Their usual practice was to sidestep such subjects entirely though the more daring of them might resort to suggestion or innuendo. Here's an instance in which Thomas Hardy ties himself into comical knots trying to tell his audience that although Tess Derbyfield (in Tess…
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Unlike most sciences, where there are numerous pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Latin coinages, geology offers all sorts picturesque and lovely words that have been in the language for years – and are novel to me. So "graywacke" –a muddy sandstone containing particles of quartz"; "fumarole" — a small vent emitting jets of steam; "sinter" – a crust…
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“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious — perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with…
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If one 4 1/2 year old grandson can launch five foot stream of urine from where he stands to the base of a tree, how many 80-year-old grandfathers would it take to equal the performance? Some answers: a) 20 (tag team line of grampas each contributing 4"). b) does it count if I hurl my…
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By all rights I should have been attending to the intricate areas of my face while shaving, but I lapsed into a reverie. My obsession of the moment–the beard. Why? Why in the world do human males grow hair on their faces? What's the point? The beard is completely valueless except to Gillette and Schick…