Science
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I would have thought that I'd have had in the hopper all the senses, proper and improper, of "'stopper." But I've come a-cropper. The most familiar stopper is, of course, the blocker of liquids, as for example the cork that fits into the top of the wine bottle — or the polished glass stopper that used…
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Why Indeed? And also, while we're considering the question, why don't chimpanzees get atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, endometriosis, myocardial infarction, falciparum malaria, HIV infection, or epithelial cancers? Chimpanzees are, after all, our closest living relatives. We share a common ancestry and we only embarked on separate path some six or seven million years ago –a blink of an…
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I am inordinately fond of mass extinctions. I find them consoling. The most recent mass extinction, the newly-famous Yucatan-comet-iridium K-T boundary event of 66 million years ago is one of my personal favorites. To recall: a comet six or seven miles in diameter, zooming along at 65,00 miles per hour and therefore generating a good bit of momentum, smacked into what…
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I read Planet of the Bugs (Chicago, 2014) by Scott Richard Shaw, a Wyoming entomologist. It's a good book on a great topic — the evolution of insects. In the acknowledgements, Shaw thanks his editor for helping him to "shape a bulky manuscript into a sleeker book" but I think I would have much preferred the fatter unpublished…
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In Breaking Bad, Walter White disappears for a few days when he is kidnapped — he escapes only by murdering his meth-addled drug dealer. In order to cover his tracks and account to his family for the missing days, he feigns amnesia. And he's persuasive, possibly because everyone has seen so many amnesia movies. He's so persuasive, in fact,…
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'The placement of the human male genitalia is ridiculous and ill-conceived. What in the living heck are such sensitive and vulnerable organs doing right out there — in front, dramatically positioned to be bumped by furniture or careless hands, struck by flying objects, or pummelled by grandchildren. In any intelligently-designed universe, the penis would be…
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How are we new-millenium readers supposed to grasp the social significance of nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles when even characters in nineteenth-century novels can be easily baffled? True enough that Miss Alice Vavasor and Lady Glencora are both very young ladies, and true also that they've lived marvelously protected lives, but still — such appalling ignorance: " [Alice Vavasor] saw…
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By March of 1962, John Fowles had finished but not yet published The Collector, a work that I've never loved, and was still fussing with The Magus, the novel that hit me so hard when it appeared in 1965. Fowles was also reading just as randomly as I do, as I have now discovered from…
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Shakuntala Devi, who died in India a week or so ago, was an incredible arithmetician. She once "accurately multiplied two random 13-digit numbers in a few seconds." "On a visit to this country, an American psychologist set her two problems: the cube root of 61,629,875, and the seventh root of 170,859,375. Shakuntala Devi gave the…
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We were not always the earth's sole hominid. Neanderthals (and Denisovans, and Homo floresiensis (if they were truly distinct species) overlapped our time. Here are two skeletons, one of ours and one of theirs. The first Neanderthals appeared perhaps a quarter of a million years ago and certainly by 170,000 years BP. They seem…