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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here.Joe Carillo
Nature as shoddy architect and God’s algorithm for Rubik’s Cube
We have four very thought-provoking readings for our time out from English grammar this week:
Nature’s shoddy aesthetics. In “A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck!”, an essay she wrote for the August 9 issue of The New York Times, Natalie Angier ponders how Nature, supposedly the supreme architect, could create such profoundly ugly monstrosities as the star-nosed mole with its blown-away face, the blobfish with its haplessly sad-sack expression, the sphinx cat with its devilishly gargantuan ears, the vampire bat with its squashed snub nose and razor-toothed gape, and the warthog with its trapezoidal skull straight out of Picasso’s “Guernica.” Why is it that we find such animals so unsightly even when they don’t really threaten us with venom or compete for our food? “Classical beauty is easy,” Angier muses, “but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard.”
Read Natalie Angier’s “A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck!” in The New York Times now!
The Neandertal in us. In what he describes as “a tale worthy of a romantic novel, brought to you by science,” Michael Shermer nurses a suspicion that Neandertals and anatomically modern humans had interbred sometime in the distant past. In “Our Neandarthal Brethren,” an essay he wrote for his personal website, Shermer says he based this conjecture on the fact that humans are the most sexual of all the primates, “willing and able to do it just about anywhere, anytime, with anyone,” and on the observation of the late Harvard University biologist Ernst W. Mayr that species are “actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.” He thus muses: “One has to suspect that close encounters of the corporeal kind occurred not infrequently in those dark and lonely cave nights over the course of those long-gone millennia.”
Read Michael Shermer’s “Our Neandarthal Brethren” at www.michaelshermer.com now!
Reflections about life after death. After reading four recently released books about the afterlife, Jacques Berlinerblau, an associate professor of Jewish civilization, found himself bedeviled by these questions: “Will my enduring ghost be a mute witness to the goings-on down here, waving its vapory arms frantically at the undead? Or will it be an agent, endowed with the capacity to act? Put differently, if someone chooses to immortalize me in lyric, will I get to sing along?” In “You’re Dead. Now What?”, an essay he wrote for the August 8, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Berlinerblau says based on what science has to say as well as on “the perceptions of heaven and hell across cultural time and space” that we amass in our lifetime, there just are so many possibilities. In the absence of definitive answers, though, he recommends this prudent approach: “living according to some minimal standard of decency and cherishing our bright moments.”
Read Jacques Berlinerblau’s “You’re Dead. Now What?” in The Chronicle Review now!
God’s solution for Rubik’s Cube. At long last, every way the Rubik’s Cube puzzle can be solved has been found! According to a news story from Washington state, an international team of researchers using Google computer time has figured that the puzzle, which often endlessly bewilders enthusiasts, can always be solved in 20 moves or less. The research team reports: “There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than 40 moves.” But if God were to play Rubik’s Cube, the team says, it’s likely He would use the shortest sequence of moves—a number that’s been shown to be 20. How fast can He do it? There’s really no way of knowing, but among humans, the fastest it has been done is in just 7.08 seconds.
Read “Study uncovers every possible Rubik's Cube solution” in Yahoo.com now!
