American Language, Time, Science

"Rip you a new one"--is an interesting American phrase. It suggests violence and pain--but also anatomy and excrement. A testament to American lingusitic creativity?

Yet my guess is that 90-95 percent of what people say, maybe even closer to 99 percent, is mundane, even pointless.

There will be human beings 2000 years from now--in some form. They'll probably look at us the same way we look at Anthony and Cleopatra--as somehow oddly ancient.

I read Patricia Fara's Science: A Four-Thousand Year History in which every male scientist is a racist imperialist who exploits women and other ordinary people and every female scientist is a unacknowledged or underacknowledged heroine. Some, even much of what she says, is undoubtedly true, yet is science so hopeless compromised?