The Volumetric Approach to History

You will be thinking that we are coming to the end of this book: we’ve dealt with eight centuries, so there are only two to go. You may be surprised to learn, therefore, that in historical terms we are not even halfway. The reason for this discrepancy is that history is not time, and time is not history. History is not the study of the past per se; it is about people in the past. Time, separated from humanity, is purely a matter for scientists and star-gazers. If a previously unknown uninha...

 Simplified Spelling is Good for Americanization of the World

Foreners, when brought into personal association with those who speak English, easily learn to speak English themselvs. Its grammar is simple. It has great flexibility, due to its richness in terminology and its abundance of sinonims. It has an unsurpast litera- ture, making a knowledge of it desirable by those who hav no call to speak it. In every respect, except one, it is best fitted to be the language of sience, commerce, and international communication. The desirability of havi...

 The Difference Between Vegetable and Animal

Thus it might be said, that the vegetable is only the sketch, nor rather the ground-work of the animal; that for the formation of the latter, it has only been requisite to clothe the former with an apparatus of external organs, by which it might be connected with external objects. From hence it follows, that the functions of the animal are of two very different classes. By the one (which is composed of an habitual succession of assimilation and excretion) it lives within itself, transforms i...

 Our Sinuses are Upside Down

Another consequence of our own shift from quadruped to biped concerns the sinuses, which give such grief to many of us (including me at the moment of writing) because their drainage hole is in the very last place a sensible designer would have chosen. Williams quotes an Australian colleague, Professor Derek Denton:* 'The big maxillary sinuses or cavities are behind the cheeks on either side of the face. They have their drainage hole in their top, which is not much of an idea in terms of using...