Last week, I presented arguments supporting the anti-Stratfordian case, that Stratford’s “Shakspere” wasn’t the sublime writer William Shakespeare. If the man from Stratford didn’t write the Shakespearean canon, who did? Originally, Francis Bacon was considered the prime candidate. Later contenders included: Christopher Marlowe; Henry Neville; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; William Stanley, sixth Earl […]
Barry Evans
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Doubting Shakespeare, Part 2: Problems
“They’re both bonkers!” — Stanley Wells, Britain’s leading Shakespeare expert, on the opinion of preeminent Shakespearean actors Sirs Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, that the Stratford man didn’t write the Shakespeare canon. Last week, I noted that the traditional “Stratfordian” belief that a wool merchant from Stratford-on-Avon in England was the author of the Shakespeare […]
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Doubting Shakespeare, Part 1: Stratfordians vs. anti-Stratfordians
On April 26, 1564, 460 years ago, the baptism of one “William Shakspere” was recorded in the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. According to the conventional story, this glover’s son grew up to become the greatest writer in the English language, author of 38 plays, 154 sonnets and three long poems. But was […]
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A Brief History of Dildos
“Thou … madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.” — Ezekiel 16:17, KJV Along with notable human achievements such as the invention of the plow and the wheel, we should also celebrate a much older innovation, by tens of thousands of years: the dildo. In 2005, a team of researchers […]
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Eclipse!
Science started around dusk on May 28, 585 B.C. Don’t take my word for it, that’s the opinion of the late polymath/sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. On that date, the Iranian Medes and Greek Lydians, who’d been warring for six years, were fighting a battle near Turkey’s Halys River when, late in the day, the sun […]
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The Little Drone that Could
Ingenuity, “Ginny” to its friends, will never fly again. The little Mars-based helicopter-drone landed badly on its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, damaging all four of its carbon fiber wingtips and ruling out future flights. But in the three years since being released from the underbelly of its “mothership” the Mars rover Perseverance, it […]
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Multiverse
“… at a time when our world, the real world, faces serious problems, [scientists] dwelling on multiverses strikes me as escapism — akin to billionaires fantasizing about colonizing Mars.” John Horgan There are two categories of multiverses, conveniently labeled “landscapes” and “dreamscapes” by physics professor Paul Halpern in his new book The Allure of the […]
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Why Two Sexes?
“The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare.” — Paul Griffiths, professor of Philosophy of Biology, University of Sydney With the current debate about gender identity, particularly with regard to the rights and welfare of transgender people, this seems an appropriate time to […]
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A Not So Boring 2024
At first blush, the number of the year we’re living in, 2024, sounds pretty uninteresting. First off, it’s obviously not prime (a prime number being only divisible by 1 and itself), unlike, for instance, prime years 2017 and 2027. I like prime years for their individuality. Same with my age: Two years ago, 79 was […]
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Cosmic Crisis
There are crises and crises, and unless you’re an avid science buff, you may not realize that cosmologists — the few thousand researchers whose lives are dedicated to understanding the history of the universe from birth to death — are currently faced with a huge predicament that’s only getting worse. It’s to do with the […]
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The Awesome Dumbbell Nebula
Charles Messier (1730-1817) was a French comet hunter. Today, scattered around the globe, hundreds of amateur astronomers follow his lead every night, each striving to be the first to discover a fuzzy, luminous patch that (a) turns out to be moving against the background stars, that is, a comet; and (b) is subsequently named after […]
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Putin Moments
A year ago, lying in bed at 3 a.m., I had what I think of as my “Putin Moment”: I couldn’t remember the name of the Russian president. Not that I’m a hypochondriac but I asked my physician the next time I saw her if she thought this might the start of cognitive decline, along […]