They descended from 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 […]
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, […]
A fish won’t stare at you, but an octopus will. They watch you, with their human-like camera eyes, as much as you watch them. They are the smartest animal that has stayed in the sea, the only invertebrate – animals with no backbone – with a large brain. Though as primitive as shell fish, […]
“All humans of normal intelligence can learn any language, provided they start at a young age. After the age of five or six, a child can almost never become perfectly fluent in a language, and the ability to learn it can completely disappear soon after that. After puberty, it is almost impossible to perfect the […]
