My wife, Louisa, and I recently found ourselves looking up at a statue comprised of 7,400 welded aluminum plates, the Winged Virgin of Panecillo Hill in Quito, Ecuador. It’s the tallest aluminum statue in the world with a total height of 135 feet. Based on a 48-inch-tall wooden sculpture created in 1734, the Virgin was […]
Barry Evans
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The Flammarion Engraving
“That good anchorite, who boasted of having been as far as the end of the world, said likewise, that he had been obliged to stoop low, on account of the joining of the sky and earth in that distant region.” — Francois de la Mothe Le Vayer, 1662 The lovely engraving of a pilgrim — […]
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Aspirin: The World’s Most Popular Drug
About 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates, the so-called Father of Medicine, wrote about the curative and pain-killing properties of willow leaves. In particular, he recommended willow leaf tea to relieve the pain of women in childbirth. He was following a long tradition: Ancient Sumerian tablets had recommended willow leaves to treat rheumatoid arthritis, while the Egyptian […]
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Milankovitch Cycles and Climate Deniers
Talk to a climate denier — someone who believes global warming has purely natural causes — and chances are you’ll soon hear the phrase “Milankovitch cycles.” These, not humans, are responsible for climate change, they’ll say. Actually, this is what your regular climate denier will claim. In the extreme version, some of these benighted souls deny […]
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Axis of Evil
Don’t blame me for the clickbait heading. Capitalizing on Dubya Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address in which he singled out Iraq, Iran and North Korea as Earth’s baddies, cosmologists Kate Land and João Magueijo employed the same phrase three years later for the title of their scientificxpaper. In it, they described a spooky […]
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Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
Following the death of his great friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, the poet Alfred Tennyson began writing In Memoriam AHH, perhaps the greatest elegy in the English language. It would take him 17 years of composing, writing and editing until he finally published it — anonymously — in 1850. While the long (2,916 lines […]
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30 Minutes that Made All the Difference
Thirty minutes. That’s all it took, 66 million years ago, to put the future on track for you to be reading this. Had the Manhattan-Island-size asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico arrived 30 minutes earlier or later, we wouldn’t be around to unravel the consequences of that mighty collision. We know very little […]
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AMOC and the Inevitable Climate Threat
Like other acronyms that slowly seeped into our consciousness — think COVID — I predict that you’ll soon be familiar with AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. We and our children may — with a great deal of luck and statesmanship — dodge such potential global catastrophes as another pandemic (thanks to the magic of […]
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Guns, Germs and Steel
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — First sentence of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy This is the second of two discussions about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, published in 1997. Last time, I focused on the role of “Eurasian” diseases (to which European invaders had […]
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Guns, Germs and Steel, Part 1: Lethal Diseases
“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we Black people had little cargo of our own?” — Yali, a Papua New Guinean politician, in conversation with Jared Diamond. “Cargo” here refers to inventions and manufactured goods. When Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of […]
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Cancer and Me
“Congratulations!” “Er, thanks — what for?” “For beating cancer!” Congratulations are certainly due but not to me. I was just the patient; all I had to do was be on time for my many medical appointments, follow my oncologist’s instructions and avoid crowds following my chemo infusions while my immune system was recovering. The real […]
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From the Occult to Modern Science
Today, science is so well established as the path to knowledge via observation, experimentation and the weighing of evidence that it’s hard to credit its roots in the occult alchemy and astrology of times past. But just a few hundred years ago, many of the pioneers of modern science — figures such as Isaac Newton, […]