Human Achievement Hour

Since my lights are powered by nuclear fusion1, I will not be turning them off tomorrow night.

Instead I will be turning on all that I can, in order to celebrate human ingenuity and technology.

If you really care about the earth, why don’t you spend a month naked in the woods, without fire, which, after all, produces carbon emissions!

  1. The sun heats up the ocean, whence water vapor forms clouds, which precipitate rain onto the mountains, which runs into a turbine and powers my lights.

Lingvoj Konstruataj

Ä´us aperis ĉe la New York Times artikolo pri konstruataj lingvoj enhave multajn demandon de legintoj, kiujn alrespondis Arika Okrent, aÅ­toro de la mirinda In the Land of Invented Languages, kaj Paul Frommer, verkisto de la lingvo Na’vi por la filmo Avatar.

Verŝajne kreskas granda grupo studante la Na’vi post la ekapero de la filmo. Ekzistas pluraj retejoj, kie oni povas ĝin eklerni.

Tute krome, kial mi ofte ricevas ruslingvajn spamajn komentojn ĉi tie?

The Danger of “Scientific Consensus”

Read a great article this morning on the dangers of scientific consensus. The Royal Navy had established in the 18th century that lemon juice cured scurvy. But in the second half of the 19th century, when steamships’ fast travel times had mostly eliminated the danger of scurvy, scientists enamoured of the new germ theory of disease hypothesized that scurvy was in fact caused by bacteria.

Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes.

On Scott’s Antarctic expidition they made sure to boil all their fresh food extra long (in the process destroying all its vitamin C), and immediately began getting scurvy. They switched to freshly-killed seal while they stayed on the Antarctic coast, which cured them, but on their final push into the interior had to make do with processed food, with fatal results.