A very good friend of mine recently suggested that we as a society are currently suffering from a crisis of responsibility, and ever since then I have been finding it a remarkably insightful lens through which to analyze current events, perspectives, and opinions that I observe being promulgated.
Private Matters
What separates human beings from other animals? What makes us distinct, different, unique, what traits do we alone have who have done things that no other species has on Earth? For that matter, what is different between a person hunting for subsistence and a person settling the Fertile Crescent?
Origins of Language Article
This is just a quick post to share an article across which I recently came. It was published in the Wall Street Journal, and since we often discuss linguistics in our posts it seemed worth sharing.
Thoughts on Losing the War
Perhaps I could have made this into a “book review” – the essay is certainly lengthy enough to justify it – but I rarely have trouble keeping up with book reviews, while writing Tuesday’s blog posts can be more of a challenge. More pertinently, I don’t so much want to review Losing the War for you, as I do want to share my thoughts on this peculiar, rambling essay. It was something my dad first found and shared with me several years ago, and it somehow came up in recent conversation, so I decided to revisit it. If you haven’t read it before, you can find it here: Losing the War.
Opening Lines
I remember having several English teachers, especially early in my schooling, who spent a great deal of time talking about how important a good opening line is. As they likely did for many of you, they called this opening line a “hook,” and explained how the entire fate of the universe, or at least my essay, rests on having a “hook,” a first line that will draw readers in and make them desperately excited to learn more about what I have to say on such fascinating topics as Lyme’s disease, Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home, or the intelligence of dolphins.
Back to Methuselah Review
I came across a reference to it when I was looking for the attribution for a quote I was using in an essay for work (that quote is: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”, in case you were curious), and thought the brief plot summary sounded interesting, so I added it to my list. This despite thinking to myself "self, in all of the George Bernard Shaw books and plays that you were forced to read in school, you hated precisely all of them. Why would you possibly think that you're going to like this one?"
Science In Defense of Liberty
This is a website for stories. I make a concerted effort to keep it a writing website, and I work very hard to refrain from using it as a platform to talk about things that don't relate to writing, whether those topics are controversial or not. I avoid talking about current events, politics, or even my own "real" job, because I don't think that it's appropriate to use this platform for something other than what I built it to do: share stories. I don't write stories to have deep messages, hidden meanings, or social commentaries, although some people have taken such meanings from my tales. I write to entertain, to tell stories that I would myself enjoy reading, so I assume that is mainly why readers come here, too.
Statistics
Humanity's fascination with numbers can be traced back to the Sumerians, and the ancient language, cuneiform. In some of the species' earliest cities, written communication was invented as a means of keeping track of numbers. Census data, to be specific, which was used to levy taxes on the populace. Aside from showing that both writing, and math, were developed in order to facilitate taxation, this is arguably the start of humanity's fascination with using numbers to explain the world around it. As we developed new mathematics and new techniques for recording information, the unique capabilities of statistics were leverages for wider ranging applications. Geometry, for instance, which oddly enough has the same root word as geography or geology, geo, which means earth, is called geometry because the Egyptians invented it to measure out parcels of land.
IGC Publishing 