Can machines translate human languages?
Articles from December 2021
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
A Leonid meteor • Image by Navicore (CC BY 3.0)
Listening for the music of creation
The 11 p.m. weather report said there might be breaks in the clouds before dawn.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
A word from the heavenly Gates
Moses went up the mountain. There God gave him Ten Commandments carved into stone tablets. The tablets were labeled “Version 1.0.”
A 1946 nuclear test at Bikini Atoll • US Department of Defense (Public Domain)
Can we ever make amends?
A decade ago, landscape photographer Peter Goin was granted access to several of America’s most restricted nuclear weapons facilities. His visits resulted in a haunting book of color photographs called “Nuclear Landscapes.”
Photo by Autumn Bradley on Unsplash
Mother Nature can use some help
Seven a.m. The meadow mists are tinged gold by the rising sun. I cross the plank bridge over Queset Brook, skirt the water meadow, then take the higher path through the old orchard.
“The Astronomer” by Johannes Vermeer (c. 1668)
A way of knowing, ways of believing
“Science Finds God,” screamed the cover of Newsweek not long ago.
Modern reconstruction of a Neanderthal • ©2021 Neanderthal Museum—Holger Neumann
The circle widens, much too late
Neanderthal. For most people, the word evokes a hulking, hairy, thick-necked brute, a “missing link” sort of creature who occupied a place on the developmental scale somewhere between the gorilla and modern man.
Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels
The moment when life ceased to be microscopic
Early in Jules Vernes’ “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Captain Nemo welcomes Pierre Aronnax, professor of natural history at the Paris Museum, aboard his submarine.
The Plimouth Plantation living history museum • Photo by Lindsay E. Durant on Unsplash
From the Pilgrims’ axes, an ethic of squander
Sunlight falls through autumn gold of oaks, maples and hickories, onto a green sub-canopy of sassafras and flowering dogwood, spilling at last onto a sandstone slab, the doorstep of a long-vanished house.
“David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy” by Joshua Reynolds (1761)
Did Darwin make him do it?
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.