First Blog

Some demand respect simply because they exist. You may as well give respect to a bucket of dirt. ----------- On days like today I must give my salute to Archimedes, and not just because he was the greatest scientist of antiquity.   More importantly, it was he who first wrote about the lever, of which the greatest application is the modern corkscrew.   Cheers! ----------- Did you know the Greenland shark, the world’s largest fish, is very long lived?   One example was recently determined to be between 272 and 512 years old.   How can you do this?   It has no birth certificate or driver’s license.   It was done through carbon dating.   But carbon dating* works only on dead life forms, such as long buried bones or old dead wood.   In the ocean, when anything dies, it is consumed within days or months.   So, you can’t just find dead sharks lying about.   It turns out that within the shark’s eye, there remains some embryonic tissues.   These can be dated, and was.   Amazing. ---

The most powerful words in our highly political country these days are not what you'd expect. You might think, "I love you," would rank way up there. These are powerful words but personal ones. Think of other possibilities. Let everyone respect others. (4) Can't we just get along? (5) Protect our environment. (3) Death to infidels. (3) But these are old, and we are basically numb to these slogans not really believing anything will happen. However, should someone say to this or that event, cause, or circumstance, "I am deeply offended ...," action results. Judges act. Magistrates react. Advocates rejoice. Politicians jump on board. Headline news expostulate. Just be "offended" and you get results. Or so it seems these days.