I’ve been a bit of a slave to trends recently. Everybody else has a Facebook page, so I guess I need one too–even if I don’t quite know what to do with it. Myspace? Uh, okay…

As with so many things in the human experience, great or small, we are not quite alone when it comes to trend-following–as I explain in my latest column for Forbes. Check it out.

Per usual, here are some of the sources I used for the piece:

Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups [free pdf]

Continue reading “Everybody’s Doing It” →

Here is a lovely little creature from Sri Lanka, Pettalus cf. cimiciformis, a member of the same lineage that includes the daddy longlegs we’re all familiar with. You could call it a daddy longlegs too, but its legs aren’t particularly long (plus it’s tiny–the size of a sesame seed.)

It may not seem like much, but it poses a fascinating riddle. It belongs to a family of daddy longlegs called Petallidae. Below is a map of where other species of Petallidae can be found. They seem to be scattered randomly across the world.

Continue reading “The Mystery of the Wandering Daddy Longlegs” →

As I’ve mentioned before, my brother Ben also blogs. An editor at Oxford American Dictionaries, he writes about words over at “From A to Zimmer.” Not surprisingly, our blogs usually don’t overlap. But Ben’s latest entry–on very, very long words, has prompted me to pose a question of my own here.

In his post, “Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism!”, Ben points out that a lot of the longest words are, as he puts it, “stunt words.” They’re cobbled together from prefixes and suffixes, but never actually used in real life. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism is a case in point–a word that is used to describe long words.

Continue reading “I see your hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism and raise you a ribulosebisphosphatecarboxylaseoxygenase” →