“The linguist who does not display at least token interest in the Chomskyian endeavor is not considered ‘a linguist linguist.’” — John McWhorter Forty years ago, while living in Boston, I started to worry that I’d inadvertently joined a cult. I was taking an introductory linguistics class and our teacher, a distinguished Harvard professor of […]
Barry Evans
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Blame Evolution
Many conspiracy theorists, who seem to make up about half the posters I’m seeing on Facebook these days, have glommed onto the idea that SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus causing the COVID-19 epidemic) was engineered in a lab. Where? Wuhan, China. Why? To cull China’s aging population and to sow chaos around the world. You’ll be relieved […]
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The 12-Second Life
Human lives generally last for 2 billion to 3 billion seconds; the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. Looking at those two statements on my laptop, I feel slightly giddy. I have a faint whiff of what the first statement means and very little understanding of the second. If you feel the same, here’s […]
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Railroad to the East
Humboldt has surely seen its fair share of far-fetched schemes: huge bladders full of Mad River water to be towed to Southern California; buoys to harness wave power for electricity (“Wave Power,” Oct. 23, 2008); a stuffed animal museum; an aircraft carrier tourist venue. One of the more venerable boondoggles, dating back more than a […]
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A Question of Longitude
Last week, we saw how, starting in the late 1600s, astronomers published almanacs of predictable celestial events, in particular the eclipses of Jupiter’s four bright (“Galilean”) moons, allowing travelers anywhere in the world to compare their local time with almanac time, thus giving them their longitudes. Let’s see how that worked in real life, especially […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Question of Longitude
For 2,000 years, since the time of Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy, we have defined our position on Earth by two numbers. Latitude tells you how far you are from the equator, measured in degrees, 0 to 90, north and south. Longitude is your angular distance from an imaginary “meridian” line drawn from pole to pole, […]
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Dark Energy:Blunder or Boondoggle?
Albert Einstein told physicist George Gamow that the greatest blunder of his life was his introduction of a “cosmological constant” designated by Λ, the Greek letter lambda. In his 1915 theory of general relativity, Λ, a sort of ubiquitous “anti-gravity,” keeps the universal static, neither expanding nor contracting. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that […]
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Does My BMI Make Me Look Fat?
OMG! My BMI (body mass index) just jumped from under 24, where it’s been for years, to more than 24. It’s only a matter of time before it tops 25, meaning, according to the World Health Organization, I’ll be overweight. Not obese — that doesn’t happen until it reaches 30. What happened? My weight didn’t […]
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Evolution Isn’t Progress!
Last week, I discussed the fallacy of thinking of evolution as a progressive process, that is, simple to complex, “lower” to “higher” animals, culminating, of course, in humans. The theory, “orthogenesis,” (from the Greek “straight origin”) is the opposite of randomness. Orthogenesis presumes that the variation from one generation to the next is directed toward […]
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Black English
“Black English … is a kind of tune-up of the English language. Some of the needless complexities are wiped away, just as happened all along the journey from Proto-Indo-European to English.” — Linguist John McWhorter Thanks to rap music, the internet, countless TV shows and movies, and just living in a mixed society, we’re all […]
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The Donbass Saga
A recent essay on the Clarke Historical Museum’s website about how Eureka came to be electrified attracted a single, terse comment: “Nothing beats the story of the Donbass.” Although the essay didn’t mention the Donbass, old-timers will surely know what’s being referred to. It’s quite a tale. Prior to Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt wanted […]
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How to Win $1 Million
It’s simple. Prove the Goldbach Conjecture: Every even integer greater than two is the sum of two primes. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Figure it out and you’ll win a cool mil from the Clay Mathematics Institute, and you’ll probably get a Fields Medal — the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize as long as […]