Aldous Huxley was highly educated, at Oxford, in all the right subjects: history, religion, the classics, literature and philosophy. He was blue blood. His brother Julian was a renowned biologist. His grandfather, Thomas Huxley, was the famous defender of Charles Darwin. Somehow he came to realize that he did too much thinking, with words, and not […]
Fossilized footprints of Neanderthal were recently found in the sandstone of an ancient beach in northern France, adults with children going one way, adults only going back the other way. Starting forty thousand years ago, Neanderthal gradually disappeared, the last of them living in caves in the north and eastern sides of the rock of […]
They were originally Siberian nomads. Some 8 thousand years ago, they crossed the Bering Strait into North America. The Nemeruh – “the people” – came to live a primitive hunting and gathering life in eastern Wyoming . They had no pottery, no farming, no priests. They were Stone Age hunters. In the early 1600’s, Spaniards from Mexico […]
November 22, 1963 In the morning, LBJ tried to talk JFK into having Ralph Yarborough, his political adversary, in the Presidential car on the motorcade, rather than John Connolly, his political ally. JFK said no. Jackie heard their heated exchange. Later in the morning, Richard Nixon boarded a plane, in Dallas, to fly home. As […]
Sir John Cowperthwaite was financial secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 – 1971. “His administration did not collect any economic data during his tenure.” Jairaj Devadiga “if I let them compute theses statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.” During Cowperthwaite’s administration, Hong Kong grew “ from being only one fourth as rich as the United […]
General Robert E. Lee married Mary Custis, grand step-daughter of George Washington. Thru this marriage he acquired slaves. He freed them by 1862, following the instructions of his father-in-law’s will. Lee did not find slavery completely without justification. [it was] “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. . . blacks […]
What something is, is different from what something is not. It is fundamental logical truth that when something is something, it can not also, then, be what it is not. What physicists seem to have found, however, is that the very basic stuff of reality. . . is both what it is and what it is […]
600 million years ago, in the Burgess Shale fossils of Canada, one can see dramatic changes happening in evolution. Life is exploding in form and diversity. Nature is experimenting wildly, with body shapes, body parts, eyes, and heads, fossils that look like Pixar animation. We aren’t sure why, but at that time, animals started eating other animals […]
Isaac Newton got the concepts right, perhaps better than anyone else in history. Mass is quantity of matter. Momentum is quantity of motion. Force is change in motion. Change of motion is acceleration. Mass is resistance to force. Force equals mass times acceleration. F=ma This equation “is the basis of our mechanical, civil, hydraulic, acoustic, […]
