Just The Write Type

01/10/2020

"[It's] as if it’s a whimsical fantasy he dreamed up rather than a real creature he examined under a microscope. His drawings of sponges reveal their intensely geometric structure—they look architectural, like feats of engineering.”

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel—German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, and physician—not only "described and named thousands of species" and "coined several scientific terms commonly known today (such as ecology, phylum, and stem cell)," he also created gorgeous illustrations.
https://buff.ly/2rZVUj1

If you follow the ongoing beef many popular scientists have with philosophy, you’d be forgiven for thinking the two disciplines have nothing to say to each other. That’s a sadly false impression, though they have become almost entirely separate professional institutions.

01/07/2020

"The simplest questions could carry you out to the edge of human knowledge."

Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.

01/06/2020

[Arctic] is generally capitalized unless it is:
◾️ used metaphorically; “an arctic stare” (CMOS 8.47, 8.61)
◾️ refers to very low temperatures; "arctic gale" (CSE 14.1.1.2)
◾️ part of established name for Arctic flora/fauna; "arctic char" (CSE 14.1.1.2)


(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

01/03/2019

"It is believed to be the first time a man has been charged with a murder bid in Antartica."

Sergey Savitsky, 55, and Oleg Beloguzov, 52, were avid readers to pass the lonely hours during four harsh years together.

01/02/2019

“This writing system is three-dimensional, dependent on touch as well as sight.”

A lost language encoded in intricate cords is finally revealing its secrets – and it could upend what we know about Incan history and culture

12/28/2018

Not only are we talking about bugs less, we're talking about them differently. ... "texts published before 1960 contained nearly nine times as many emotionally charged descriptions of insects than those that came after. In the past, insects were praised with words like 'industrious' and 'friend.'"

Insect-related content fell 75 percent in textbooks published after 2000 as compared to those published before 1965.

12/27/2018

Some reading suggestions for this .

Language is a funny thing. If you're reading this sentence, for example, there's a good chance that you speak and understand English perfectly well. But there's also a good chance that your English is slightly different from my English — we might…

12/26/2018

It has been "argued that the traditional values associated with each letter diminish the role of skill in the game, and recommended changing them to make Scrabble scores more indicative of skill."

You can find Lynda Woods Cleary playing Scrabble every Tuesday at a Panera in Princeton, NJ. Cleary, a 68-year-old retired financial…