Non-English Languages Lack the Words for Talking About Te...

By the early 19th century, just three—French, English, and German—accounted for the bulk of scientists’ communication and published research; by the second half of the 20th century, only English remained dominant as the U.S. strengthened its place in the world, and its influence in the global scientific community has continued to increase ever since. As a consequence, the scientific vocabularies of many languages have failed to keep pace with new developments and discoveries. In many l...

 Tyrrany Sets Up Its Own Echo Chamber

I think it was Utz who first convinced me that history is always our guide for the future, and always full of capricious surprises. The future itself is a dead land because it does not yet exist. When a Czech writer wishes to comment on the plight of his country, one way open to him is to use the fifteenth-century Hussite Rebellion as a metaphor. I found in Prague Museum this text describing the Hussites' defeat of the German Knights: ''At midnight, all of a sudden, frightened shouting was he...

 Teleporters Homogenize the World

In Munich he walked. The air was warm and clean; it cleared some of the fumes from his head. He walked the brightly lighted slidewalks, adding his own pace to their ten-miles-per-hour speed. It occurred to him then that every city in the world had slidewalks, and that they all moved at ten miles per hour. The thought was intolerable. Not new; just intolerable. Louis Wu saw how thoroughly Munich resembled Cairo and Resht ... and San Francisco and Topeka and London and Amsterdam. The st...