Some time ago in an American airport a man came up to the man in front of me in a line. He had a packet of white powder in his hand. He showed the man in front of me a very official looking badge (although he wasn’t in uniform or anything) and asked the man to put the bag of white powder in his bac...

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Here's a nice, sprightly, startling lede from the review of a new book about pandas.

It is one of the more startling revelations in Henry Nicholls’s sprightly history that we still have no idea how many giant pandas there are currently living in the wild. Fewer than 2,000? More than 4,000? Perh...

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I was momentarily distracted while listening to Lord Bragg on Women in Enlightment Science trying to recall whether I had ever seen the famed double-portrait of the Lavoisiers. So as soon as I got to the desktop I went looking, and I don't believe I had. My original intention had been to just ni...

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The wonderful brouhaha over the idiocy at Cooks Source ¹ shows no signs of dying down. For new readers, a foolish editor at Cooks Source -- described by the Washington Post as “a formerly obscure food magazine based in Sunderland, Mass.” -- stole an article from the internet, offered a less th...

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Friend Derek's website is so bleedin’ cool ¹ that I have to have this discussion on my own premises. I’m not even sure it’ll work, but here goes.

In a recent daily ² he notes that:

¢ 1 cosa non mi riCordo menTioned in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ... is the i...

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