Recent Comments

1. 12 days ago on Non Sequitur

   I’ve just been reading a new book (by the excellent science writer Dave Sobel) about Marie Curie: if ever there was a case of a person who, with her husband until a random street accident killed him, worked at a dangerous project and succeeded, it was them. Only person (of any gender) to win two Nobel Prizes in two different fields, and yet always humble and generous. One of the largely-unknown aspects of her contribution that’s covered in this book is how she mentored so many young (mostly women) scientists who went on to also make major discoveries. Interesting stuff. So sometimes that which (could) kill us ends up becoming something really important, if we work through it successfully (and live long enough!)

2. 20 days ago on Non Sequitur

   when you said in your ‘lesson’ that ‘Dead people lie in their graves until Judgement Day’, for what it’s worth, the Bible contradicts that, when it reports that after Jesus’ resurrection, many of ‘the saints which slept’ (were dead) arose and went into the city… (and probably scared everyone else to death, figuratively speaking. see Matt 27:52-54)Given that the subject of this cartoon is completely different, this side discussion is irrelevant, though.

3. 3 months ago on Non Sequitur

   the link to ‘cartoonists for Kamala’ is down below the comments…

4. 4 months ago on Non Sequitur

   looks like ‘stupid’ got away with it, and the guy following him (the one in the cartoon) got the hit instead…

5. 4 months ago on Non Sequitur

   as if it wasn’t known for the last 10 years, it’s become even more certain this year…

6. 4 months ago on Non Sequitur

   I’ve long heard about and thought about the nuances of translation over the centuries, esp before the printing press made it easier to have the same text, though I have no Hebrew and only a tiny bit of Greek. I’ve just been reading Charles Freeman’s new book “The Reopening of the Western Mind”, and one point he makes in it that I hadn’t thought about was that many (actually, most of them, it sounds like) of the monks copying ancient texts didn’t know Greek themselves, so it was understandable that copying errors, or errors in interpretation of “what’s that word supposed to be?” came into the text. As papyrus supplies disappeared in Europe and parchment—made from cowhides so requiring lots of cows—were at something of a premium, some triage of which texts to put resources into copying was required: there was some interest in copying crucially important ancient texts of the Greek and Arab worlds, but priority given to religious texts because those were more directly important to their perceived mission. I hadn’t really thought about the scribes not knowing the language they were copying.

7. 9 months ago on Non Sequitur

   i can imagine Hobbes and Lucy getting along very well—they’re the “grownups in the room”…

8. 10 months ago on Non Sequitur

   yes… i remember my father making the radical addition to our old Ford by adding a turn signal to the steering column—so he didn’t have to always hold his arm out the window. And I remember doing my dissertation on punch cards, and running my Fortran program at HMC until it timed out…

9. about 1 year ago on Non Sequitur

   congratulations—that’s a wonderful accomplishment—we’re glad that you’ve enjoyed it so much together!

10. about 1 year ago on Non Sequitur

    when I worked as an editor many decades ago, 2 spaces after the period was the standard, but I learned then that newspapers had a 1-space standard (to save space, presumably—didn’t help readability).