Twain's Microbes
This week, I discovered the existence of an unfinished work by Mark Twain whose full title reads as follows:
Click to read on…
Elevators and the Rhesus Macaque
The elevator can be a gold mine of social behavior. Sometimes you walk in to see the button of your floor already lit. Did you interact with the other person with a smile or a head nod? You could break the silence to talk about the weather until the ride ended. Perhaps the stranger is standing next to the floor buttons so you said, “excuse me, uh, could you press 3 please…thanks.” Or maybe you just kept quiet, avoided eye contact and checked the time. Just within that small space in a short amount of time, there is such a wide range of possible social interaction that could have occurred.
Click to read on…Voltaire
One of my professors asked me a bit randomly to research the French philosopher Voltaire for our next class. Here’s a light little summary of things I found interesting from his bio:
Click to read on…Christmas Bird Count
Between December 14, 2015 and January 5, 2016 more than 70,000 people stepped across the entire Western Hemisphere grabbed their binoculars, put on their jackets, and stepped-outside to count and observe birds for the Audubon Society’s 116th Annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC). This event, used to collect census data about birds in the Western Hemisphere, holds the rather specific but nonetheless impressive title of „the nation’s longest-running citizen science bird project,“ and provides invaluable information about birds and their ecosystems for all varieties of Scientists, Conservationists, and Ornithologists.
Click to read on…The East India Company
In 1600, a few London businessmen received a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth to begin a small-scale commercial venture known as the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. After initial struggles, they gradually established factories and trading points along India’s coast. By the late 1700s, their small trading business, later known as the East Indian Company or EIC, accounted for half of the world’s trade in basic commodities such as cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt and opium. The Company eventually monopolized the spice trade and ruled large parts of India. Because of foreign competitors and its control over rather expansive territories, the EIC created its own private army, establishing military authority over India and other nearby regions.
Click to read on…Texasdeutsch
New Braunfels, Texas. A relatively small city in the middle of Texas, located in Texas Hill Country on the border of Comal and Guadalupe counties, where a community of between 4,000–6,000 Texans differentiate themselves from other Texans in an extraordinary way: they all speak German (a Texafied version of it, anyway) as their first language. While the language, called Texasdeutsch („Texas German“) by linguists, is facing the same sad future as many other dialects and languages in the age of Smartphones and Internet, it once was the primary language of as many as 100,000 Texans!
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