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What folks know that ain't so

A friend wrote to ask, "When did European Universities stop teaching that the world is flat?" My response was: Trick question, eh? Of course UNIVERSITIES never taught that the world was flat. The ancient Greeks (and Babylonians, Egyptians, etcetera) all recognized that the earth was a globe. In fact the Greeks were estimating the circumference of the Earth in the 4th or 3rd century B.C. with the tools of trigonometry. How accurate the result was is unclear since the answer was expressed in stades and nobody is sure which stadia he meant or even how long those were. The luminous quality of this fact is that it demonstrates that men were not only aware that the world was on a sphere, but even trying to approach the question of 'How big is it?" in a scientific, rational manner. The procedure was this: Erect a vertical pole at some point in northern Egypt (say Giza) and do the same at someplace upriver (Abu simbel, for instance) that lies on about the same longitud
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Portugal, 2008 Lisboa About 24 hours after I left Dallas , I arrived in Lisbon . What a marvelous city! Although you would never confuse one for the other, it is most reminiscent of San Francisco , right down to the stunning red high suspension bridge that spans the harbor mouth. In many neighborhoods, the architecture could never pass for San Francisco 's, but the comparatively low buildings and their colors ring a bell(some soft pastels, some vibrant colors). Every time I thought I was getting carried away by the San Francisco comparison, some new vista would make me reconsider my self-assessment. The city is crammed onto hills and surrounded by water, so coming over the crest of a steep hill and seeing the water from between the buildings affords obvious opportunities for parallels. The corker, though, had to be approaching the bridge. Quite the same feeling as approaching th Golden Gate Bridge from the presidio. Miguel, who was giving us the Cook's tour on
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Ezetimibe, Statins, and Heart Disease Headlines are filled today with news that a popular combination of drugs for lowering cholesterol levels is no better than the older of the two drugs alone (c.f. “Trial: Popular cholesterol drug fails to improve heart disease” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/30/cholesterol.drug.ap/index.html ). Cholesterol and the mechanisms for lowering it are subjects with which I am not unfamiliar. This conclusion comes from the so-called ENHANCE trial of vytorin vs simvastatin [An aside, in clinical trials, especially those related to cardiovascular disease, there is a tradition of clever names from tortured acronyms and this one is one of the more tortured: Ezetimibe and Simvastatin in Hypercholesterolemia Enhances Atherosclerosis Regression – you figure out how this is an acronym] suggests that the combination therapy is no better than the statin alone. So, if one is taking the combination (sold as Vytorin), as I am doing, should one
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As I read the various statements arising from the debate over the stimulus package, I have come to see the fundamental differences between supports of the bill and opponents as stemming from their conception of what money is. All simplifications of complex phenomena have limitations. They nevertheless can be extraordinarily helpful in facilitating our understanding. Opponents of the stimulus package may be categorized as those who believe that money is a thing. In point of fact, many of these same people have advocated the position that only gold is ‘real’ money. In this view, there is only a fixed supply of wealth in the world and any increase in the money supply is an offense against the natural order. One supposes that the extremists holding this position believe that there should be no banks or lending. Proponents of the package, by-and-large, understand money as a medium of exchange representing, ultimately, human effort. In this understanding, gold coins, for example, are
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