“I have been extremely ill used by the gentlemen who I might have expected better treatment from.” — John Harrison, on his struggle to receive the reward for solving the Longitude Problem For centuries, the Royal Navy was the mightiest maritime force in the world, helping a small country on the edge of Europe establish […]
Barry Evans
Posted inField Notes
Thales’ Eclipse and the Saros Cycle
“… just as the battle was growing warm, day was on a sudden changed into night. This event had been foretold by Thales, the Milesian, who forewarned the Ionians of it, fixing for it the very year in which it actually took place. The Medes and Lydians, when they observed the change, ceased fighting, and […]
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Childbirth: Why So Difficult?
The “obstetrical dilemma” was born, so to speak, in 1960, not in a medical journal, but in the pages of Scientific American magazine. There, anthropologist Sherwood Washburn proposed that the ease with which most non-human primates give birth when compared to humans comes down to bipedalism. While a mother-to-be great ape will seek seclusion to […]
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Pullet Surprise: Fun with Mondegreens
I suspect everyone has their favorite “mondegreen,” a misheard word or phrase which is usually more fun than the original. For instance, check my title against that annual journalism and literature award. The word mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Harper’s Magazine essay. As a child, Wright had misheard a line from the […]
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An Etruscan Venus and the Patriarchy
“Patriarchy has tried to erase imagery of the feminine since time immemorial. Destroy the image and you can control the narrative.” — Syreeta McFadden, The Guardian U.S., April 13, 2015 Almost life-sized, the “Venus of Cannicella” looks out at us from behind her protective transparent cylinder in an archeological museum in the town of Orvieto, […]
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Revisiting the Whorf Hypothesis, Part 2
“The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that if you immerse yourself in another language, you can rewire your brain.” — Jeremy Renner’s character in Arrival Last week, I discussed the strong and weak versions of the Whorf Hypothesis. The former claims that one’s native language determines our worldview, to the point where we’re unable to think thoughts not […]
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Revisiting the Whorf Hypothesis, Part 1
“The Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to past, present or future.”— Benjamin Lee Whorf Early in this column’s existence, I took a rather superficial look at what’s come to be known as the Whorf Hypothesis (“The Whorf Hypothesis,” […]
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The Purloined Letter
“The fish is the last to see the water.” — Anthropologist Ruth Benedict Our lives are filled with obvious phenomena that sit right in front of our noses (sometimes literally), yet we often miss seeing them at all. I call it Purloined LetterSyndrome, after Edgar Allen Poe’s 1845 short story of that name. Synopsis: If […]
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Saturnian Drone: Dragonfly at Titan
As we saw last week, Titan’s surface is a tapestry of abundant carbon-rich chemistry, a delicious target for curious Earthlings to explore. The challenges are immense, including temperatures that make Minnesotan winters look positively tropical, a 90-minute-long communication gap with Earth, sand-like dunes ready to bog down wheeled vehicles and surface sunlight one thousandth the […]
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Saturnian Drone: Dragonfly at Titan (Part 1)
“[On early Earth] you need to have gone from simple to complex chemistry before jumping to biology, but we don’t know all the steps. Titan allows us to uncover some of them.”— Zibi Turtle, Dragonfly principal investigator “A bizarre Earth” is how one investigator describes icy Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and the target of NASA’s most […]
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Midsummer Puzzle Time Q’s
TrianglesHow many triangles can you find in this figure? The Old ‘Rope around the Equator” PuzzleYou tie a rope tightly around the Earth’s equator then add three feet to its length and raise it evenly as high as possible. Can a cat now get under the rope? TimepiecesA sundial has no moving parts. What timepiece […]
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Sex: Nature’s Greatest Hack
Although I wrote about this topic quite recently (“Why Two Sexes?” Feb. 15, 2024), I’m revisiting it due to increasing interest — and confusion — around gender politics. While one’s gender can be as fluid as our culture is diverse, biological sex isn’t. Eukaryotes like us are born male or female, depending on the size […]