- topics: culture
What drives us to collect?
There is ample evidence that collecting is an inherited tendency. But sometimes there may be something in our personal history to explain why we collect ...
-
topics: culture
How does basic knowledge get lost?
The loss of basic knowledge or the supplanting of myth for fact seems fantastic in a literate society, and yet it happens all the time. ...
What does Wikipedia have to say on the purpose of the towers?
Not very much. The site mentions that the Guelphs and Ghibellines conflict and family rivalries “resulted in families building tower houses of increasing height.... ...
-
topics: culture, travel
Wikipedia on why the Pisa Tower leans?
As for the Tower of Pisa’s tilt, Wikipedia is explicit on the cause: an inadequate foundation on ground too soft on one side to properly ...
- topics: culture
Why did the flat earth myth take hold?
Scholars are clear that the earth's true shape was never lost. It is well established that educated people, from at least the 14th century on, ...
-
topics: culture
What does Wikipedia have to say about the play?
As to the historical basis for the Romeo and Juliet story, Wikipedia doesn't answer the question but its information does helps explain why the ...
- topics: culture
Serious superstition
An article in the Wall Street Journal (Nov 9, 1012) describes how real-estate agents price properties to include propitious numbers in ethnic neighborhoods. Among Chinese ...
- topics: culture
End of the World Panics
I thought that only American new-agey types were falling for the so-called Mayan Armageddon prediction, but it seems that the frenzy has jumped to the ...
After Sandy: a shortened updated version of the essay, A Matter of Time
With the so-called Mayan doomsday due tomorrow, apocalypse is on many minds. But here in America, global catastrophe is the stuff of science ...
- topics: culture
Does serendipity happen all the time?
An essay Mark Halprin wrote for the Home Section of the New York Times (Oct. 4, 2012) concerns some really quite amazing "good accidents" that ...
- topics: culture
When “stuff” is good.
Gretchen Rubin made a case, in the August 19th Sunday NY Times, for good "stuff." She acknowledges that getting control over our accumulations gives you ...
- topics: culture
Can information be inherited?
An interesting essay in the NY Times Science Section (8/21.12), by reporter Doreen Carvajal, posited the notion that "generations pass on particular survival skills and ...
- topics: culture
related films
There are three movies I can think of about wine tasting. Sideways, the popular 2004 film starring Paul Giamatti, directed by Alexander Payne, is apparently ...
-
topics: culture
Why can’t I appreciate wine?
I am a good cook and have a reasonably good palate. But I've never been able to identify very many flavors in wine and can ...