A few facts: Almost half of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day.
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Photo by 30daysreplay
Musing on a sixty-eighth birthday
The reading glasses go on at forty. Sex drive starts slipping at fifty. Memory is a problem at sixty. I’m waiting to see what happens at seventy.
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The path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles…
During my lifetime, America party politics have mostly turned on matters of class, money, and race. This year’s election is the first where the fault line between the parties is primarily religious.
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The mystery of life? I don’t know
Albert Einstein said, “Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
A portion of the Ultra Deep Field • NASA/ESA (Public Domain)
The visible and the invisible
“The power of the visible is the invisible,” wrote the poet Marianne Moore.
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If it walks like a quack, and quacks like a quack…
Scientists tend to resist any attempt to infuse their work with spiritual values. They are fearful, rightly so, of diluting a successful knowledge-generating methodology with “mysticism.” With creationists, pseudoscientists and New Agers storming the gates, intent on bringing down the walls, who can blame scientists for jealously maintaining their aloofness from “spirituality.”
Coumaknock, Mount Brandon • Photo by SteuveFE (CC BY 2.0)
In the mountain hollow
My newest book, “Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland’s Holy Mountain,” was launched here in Ireland the other evening, by (appropriately) Brandon Books, which — like me — makes its home near the base of the mountain.
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What immortal hand or eye…
Chimps and gorillas get about by knuckle-walking. They curl back their fingers and bear the weight of their upper bodies on their knuckles, which permits them a four-legged scoot on the ground while retaining long, grasping fingers for swinging Tarzan-like among the branches. A nice compromise between life in the trees and life on the ground.
Stowe gardens, Buckinghamshire • Photo by flowcomm (CC BY 2.0)
Taming the wild
Last week’s visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in England put me again under the spell of Lancelot “Capability” Brown.
Robert Hooke's drawing of a flea from “Micrographia” (1665)
Microscopes and lucky charms
For anyone interested in the history of science, London and its environs are a living museum. Perhaps only ancient Alexandria — the city of Archimedes, Euclid, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Eudoxos — came near to approaching London as a center of scientific creativity.