Kitabı oku: «Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist», sayfa 8

People are not the only creatures who lie. Species from squids to chimpanzees have been caught doing it from time to time. But only Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. Call it diplomacy, public relations or simple good manners: lying is one of the things that makes the world go round.

He was a socially dangerous warm.

The old saying that where there's muck, there's brass has never proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, received wisdom was that most of the human genome – perhaps as much as 99 % of it – was "junk". If this junk had a role, it was just to space out the remaining 1 %, the genes in which instructions about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the cell nucleus. more than a century and a half after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species", biologists do not fully understand how species actually do originate. Work like this suggests one reason for this ignorance may be that they have been looking in the wrong place. For decades, they have concentrated their attention on the glittering, brassy protein-coding genes while ignoring the muck in which the answer really lies.

No other season quite captures the imagination as winter does.

Among the mysteries of evolution, one of the most profound is what exactly happened at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Before that period, which started 541m years ago and ran on for 56m years, life was a modest thing. Bacteria had been around for about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the Earth to themselves. Seaweeds, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance a few million years before the Cambrian begins. But red in tooth and claw the Precambrian was not – for neither teeth nor claws existed.

Using Viking epics, whaling and pollen records, log books, the debris shed by melted ice rafts, diatoms (silicon-armoured algae found in marine sediments), ice cores and tree rings, scientists have constructed a record of the Arctic past which suggests that the summer sea ice is at its lowest level for at least 2,000 years. Six of the hottest years on record – going back to 1880 – have occurred since 2004.

The rhino horn, which is merely agglutinated hair, the same stuff as finger nails, has no pharmacological value. Yet its street price has soared to over $60,000 a kilo, more than for the same weight of cocaine or gold – a proven aphrodisiac.

New Zealand still has seven times as many sheep as people.

The 15 litres of semen from South Africa, from assorted males, would be enough to inseminate some 324 elephants and thereby freshen up the gene pool. But the elephant semen painstakingly gathered for America has been sitting in Pretoria for well over a year because of bureaucratic red tape. South African officials have been slow to grant a permit to export the semen to America simply because they have never done it before.

You know what Washington said when he crossed the Delaware? It's fucking cold.

If jelly is so fortifying, why does it wobble so much?

Cod hate cages – they don't like being handled, are very sensitive to changes in their environment and are very hard to breed.

Most commercial species have been reduced by over 75 % and some, like whitetip sharks and common skate, by 99 %. For all the marvellous improvements in technology, British fishermen, mostly using sail-power, caught more than twice as much cod, haddock and plaice in the 1880s as they do today. By one estimate, for every hour of fishing, with electronic sonar fish finders and industrial winches, dredges and nets, they catch 6 % of what their forebears caught 120 year ago.

Many shallow-water species have highly evolved visual cortexes and their eyes can contain up to eight different light-absorbing photopigments, compared with the paltry red, blue and green which humans possess. These extra light receptors give fish increased sensitivity to other wavelengths; some species can even see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to humans.

In Africa it is said that "even the jackal deserves to drink".

It was a Unicorn poop.

A hen is merely an egg's way of making another egg.

Before locusts fly, they march. Millions of juveniles crawl up to 500 meters a day, munching everything in front of them, in bands that stretch for kilometres. This is when the Australian Plague Locust Commission tries to reduce their numbers, by laying strips of insecticide in their path. But often a swarm changes direction without warning. The university group, led by Jerome Buhl, suggests that such changes of movement are mathematically similar to the behaviour of a magnetic material like iron – which, if heated above a certain temperature, known as the Curie temperature, loses its magnetism. In both of these examples interactions between individual particles (magnetic domains in the case of iron, individual insects in the case of locusts) drive sudden changes in group dynamics. The iron stops being magnetic. The locusts change direction.

Lobbyists are swarming over Capital Hill like locusts.

As the researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Biology, compared with other flying animals the fish score well at 4.4:1. This makes them more efficient than swallowtail butterflies (3.6), fruit flies (1.8) and bumble bees (2.5). Flying fish are just as effective at gliding as birds that are known for being strong flyers, like red-shouldered hawks (3.8) and petrels (4). Nighthawks (9) and black vultures (17) make more impressive gliders. When the shape of a wing creates more lift from the air passing around it than it does drag (air resistance), an aircraft will fly. And the higher the ratio, the farther the aircraft will glide. This means if you cut the engine on a small Cessna with a lift-to-drag ratio of 7:1 it would fly seven metres forward for each metre of descent.

Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.

What is bad news for rodents, though, could be good news for primates.

Whale meat is still occasionally served to schoolchildren in Japan as a reminder of their culture, though large-scale whaling only really began after the war, on the orders of General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw America's occupation. The aim was to provide cheap nourishment for a famished nation. Masayuki Komatsu, Japan's former IWC negotiator, who is notoriously blunt and once called minke whales the "cockroaches of the sea".

Why did the turtle stick its head in a bucket?" sounds like the sort of riddle asked by ten-year-olds in school playgrounds. But it was also asked recently by Yuen Ip of the National University of Singapore. And his answer, it has to be said, is precisely the sort that would appeal to a ten-year-old. It is that turtles pee through their mouths. The question was, why?

Primates apart, few mammals employ tools. Sea otters use rocks to smash clams open, dolphins wrap sponges around their noses to protect themselves while they forage on the seabed, elephants swat insects with branches and humpback whales exhale curtains of bubbles to trap schools of fish; the grizzly bear, seems to be the only species other than humans to have invented the comb.

He starts at their beginning with a weighty introduction that looks at fossils dating back to the dinosaurs, the structure of feathers and the evolution of birds. From there on, the remaining chapters are captivating natural history, arranged in neatly named sections: "fluff", how feathers keep birds warm and dry; "flight", how they take to the sky; "fancy", the myriad beauty of feathers for sexual selection in birds and decoration for humans; and "function", how feather structure can inform new technologies.

Nor does anyone know how to breed eels in captivity. Mr Prosek tried to keep some in a tank but they banged their heads against the sides until they had seizures and died.

It is old, rather than young, mosquitoes that are infectious. Only females can transmit malaria (males suck plant juices, not blood) but they are not born with the parasites inside their bodies. They have instead to acquire them from humans already carrying the disease, and that takes time. Once a female does feed on infected blood, the parasites she ingests require a further 10 to 14 days to mature and migrate to her salivary glands, whence they can be transmitted to another host when she next feeds.

He was a harmless gecko – a nocturnal and often highly vocal lizard which has adhesive pads on the feet to assist in climbing on smooth surfaces.

See that live in numbers too large to count in ways too numerous to imagine. In that context, the discovery by Curtis Suttle of the University of British Columbia and his colleagues of a critter they propose to call Cafeteria roenbergensis virus, or CroV, should not be surprising. But for those brought up on a textbook definition of what a virus is, it is still a bit of a shock. For CroV is not a very viruslike virus. It has 544 genes, compared with the dozen or so that most viruses sport. And it may be able to make its own proteins – a task that viruses usually delegate to the molecular machinery of the cells they infect. CroV, as its full name suggests, is a parasite of Cafeteria roenbergensis, a single-celled planktonic organism that was itself discovered only in 1988. Despite the recentness of its discovery, C. roenbergensis is one of the commonest creatures on the planet. It is also reckoned by some, given that it hunts down and eats bacteria, to be the most abundant predator on Earth. It is found in every ocean.

This month the White House appointed a carp tsar to oversee the campaign. But government moves slowly. Fish do not.

In any case, though dinosaurs have left no usable DNA, other more recently departed creatures have been more generous. Imagine, say, allying synthetic biology with the genome of Neanderthal man that was described earlier this year. There is much excitement at the idea of comparing this with the DNA of modern humans, in the hope of finding the essential differences between the two. How much more exciting, instead, to create a Neanderthal and ask him?

The Cretaceous equivalent of zebra and antelopes – the victim species in every wildlife documentary about the dramas of the African savannah – were herbivorous dinosaurs called ornithopods.

Such tales had to be saddled like horses, and ridden for all they were worth.

The British empire is the Indian elephant in the living room and the tiger under the dining table.

I'm not aware of any vegetarian tigers.

"At the approach of the rain and the wind the swallows are busy."

Fingers are integral to art, communication, touch, love, fashion and counting. Using complex gestures the Romans could count to 1m: the word "digit" – the numerals below ten – originates from digitus, the Latin for finger. The phraseology of fingers is rich: we can have a finger in every pie, pull our finger out, twist someone around our little finger, let things slip through our fingers and, if unlucky, get our fingers burned.

Fire creates evidence as well as destroys it.

He combined the cold logic of Darwinism with a military ruthlessness.

"Female baboons clearly have some Lady Macbeth issues," observes the writer. "They all have male baboons that they want to become more alpha."

Coca-Cola was also bitten by a charitable bug.

Bat testes range from 0.11 % of body weight in the African yellow-winged bat, to a whacking 8.4 % in the generously endowed Rafinesque's big-eared [sic] bat. (The largest primate testes by contrast, those of the crab-eating macaque, are a mere 0.75 % of body mass.) And the small balls were indeed found in species where females were monogamous (though they might be members of harems), while the large ones were found in species where females mated widely.

Fifty million years ago there was no ice on the poles and crocodiles lived in Wyoming. Eighteen thousand years ago there was ice two miles thick in Scotland and, because of the size of the ice sheets, the sea level was 130m lower.

All lagoons sooner or later become either land or sea. If we fail, then sooner or later Venice too will become either land… or sea.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary: "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying… The dinosaur disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers – and thermonuclear weapons."

What name a genuinely new species is given, though, is entirely up to the discoverer. Hence the existence of Anophthalmus hitleri, a blind cave beetle named in 1933 after Adolf Hitler. In this context, the recent naming of another beetle after the American president is hardly a hanging offence, although Mr Bush may not be flattered by the company. But when the scientific underpinning of taxonomy itself is threatened by politics, different questions arise. Last year, for example, there was a nasty row in Turkey between Kurdish and Turkish taxonomists over whose names should apply to some local animals. The Kurds accused the Turks of renaming several species to remove any trace of Kurdishness.

The scientific name of the beetle comes from a German collector, Oscar Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in 1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Adolf Hitler, who had recently become Chancellor of Germany. The genus name means eyeless, so the full name can be translated as "the eyeless one of Hitler". The dedication did not go unnoticed by the Führer, who sent Scheibel a letter showing his gratitude.

“ Philosophy, religion, thinking, wisdom, languages, truth, morality

«You must do the things you think you cannot do," said Eleanor Roosevelt.

Spellbound after visiting Constantinople in 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany wrote to his friend Tsar Nicholas II, «If I had com there without any religion at all, I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!»

The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller «Eats, Shoots and Leavers» comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.

In Ireland people ask St Anthony to help them find parking spaces.

How did Hobbes make so many enemies?

Human ignorance is more fundamental and more consequential than the illusion of understanding.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

William Faulkner, the South's great novelist, wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past".

Nobody thinks a novel can be translated by a machine. Sales of translated fiction rose by more than 600 % in Britain between 2001 and 2015, and have been growing strongly in America too.

Time is such a slippery thing. It ticks away, neutrally, yet it also flies and collapses, and is more often lost than found. If scientists agree on anything, it's that nobody knows enough about time.

Crowds are often mad rather than wise.

English is the language on which the sun never sets.

Reality is less whiter than white.

Those of Norse descent who lived through the events of the 820s, would not, of course, have feared the anger of a god they did not believe in. But they might have feared they were witnessing Fimbulwinter – three summerless years marking the onset of Ragnarok, the twilight of their own gods.

Troublemaker was his middle name.

As a Harvard philosopher, he might have no idea how to tell an elm from a beech.

INTHEBEGINNINGWASTHEWORD, and the word was run together. Ancient texts (like the Greek of the Gospel of John) had few of the devices that tell readers where words begin and end (spaces), which words are proper names (the upper-lower case distinction), where breaks in meaning come (commas, dashes, semicolons and full stops), who said what (inverted commas), and so on.

Who can say what order should be used to list adjectives in English? Mark Forsyth, in "The Elements of Eloquence", describes it as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and then Noun. "So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac."

Whig histories typically focus on the progress that the state and evangelicals made in forging a Church of England: a history of the winners.

In Mark Forsyth's marvellous book, "The Etymologicon", and largely corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary, feisty, in the sense of "spirited", is derived from "fist" or "feist", meaning a small dog. This in turn comes from the phrase "a fisting hound", where "to fist" means to fart.

The price of being on the wrong side at the wrong time was terrible.

To win an argument, Roman orators taught, first win the goodwill of your audience.

One of the grammarians, Lindley Murray, wrote in 1795, in a hugely influential grammar book, that a semicolon signalled a pause twice as long as a comma; that a colon was twice as long as a semicolon; and that a full stop was twice as long as a colon. (Try that next time you read a text aloud.)

A business traveller in Istanbul may pop by the kuafor for a haircut ahead of a randevu with a client, board a vapur (steamship) to beat the afternoon trafik and finish the day relaxing in a sezlong on her hotel teras.

The Gregorian calendar has a number of problems. It is based on the birth of Jesus, which is not a universally relevant event; the years before Christ are counted backwards; and there is no year zero: 1BC is followed directly by 1AD.

A famous story tells how, in a previous life, the Buddha took pity on a starving tigress, who might otherwise have had to eat her newborn cubs. He sacrificed himself instead. The agonising question, however, is whether these brave acts do anybody any good at all.

Alas, just because something is irrational does not mean it will not happen.

The Prophet Muhammad is even said to have shied from entering Damascus, otherwise called al-Fayha, "the fragrant", for fear of entering Paradise twice.

Sherlock Holme's maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.

But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

That wraps the maple syrup of truth in the waffle of propaganda.

There's a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

Any truth, it is said, passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and finally it is taken as self-evident.

A decent man with some liberal instincts and a lot of personal courage was just what the doctor ordered.

This Anonymous, the publishers claim, is someone who has been in the room with Barack Obama, though whether that's the men's room or a ballroom, they are not saying.

There is nothing worse than a know-all who is sometimes right.

Play the players, not the cards, he would say. Watch them from the minute you sit down. Play fast in a slow game, slow in a fast one. Never get out when you're winning. Look for the sucker and, if you can't see one, get up and leave, because the sucker is you.

He wants to sell the family silver.

At the University of Missouri at Columbia a petition drive calls for the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, which has been adorned with sticky notes reading "racist" and "rapist", in a reference to his ownership of slaves, with one of whom he fathered a child.

How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, a game and (for those who think have more fun) hair. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square.

There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of politeness. The first is a "bald, on-record" approach: "I'm going to shut the window." The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: "I'm going to shut the window, is that OK?" The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the window." The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at all: "Gosh, it's cold in here."

If you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral standards.

This is the land of smiley faces and the "have a nice day" greeting – Americans like to be liked.

There is life in the old dog.

Hacking is, nevertheless, a useful reminder of an old adage: if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

But being right and being seen to be right are different things.

Sherlock Holmes once remarked that: "It is my business to know what other people don't know".

Ask people what they think of statistics, or try to use some in an argument, and you will often get the quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli that lists them alongside lies and damned lies.

Odd that a meaningless phrase can be used so meaningfully by so many people.

The Cyrenaics, or egoistic hedonists v. egoistic hedonists, the Epicureans and universalistic hedonism.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one.

Bharat Mata's iconography remained vague. Did she have four arms or ten? Was she accompanied by a lion, or a map of India? And which map at that?

A man invents a new game, chess, and presents it to hi ikes it so much that he offers the inventor a reward of his choice. The man asks for one grain of rice for the first square of his chessboard, two for the second, four for the third and so on to 64. The king readily agrees, believing the request to be surprisingly modest. They start counting out the rice, and at first the amounts are tiny. But they keep doubling, and soon the next square already requires the output of a large ricefield. Not long afterwards the king has to concede defeat: even his vast riches are insufficient to provide a mountain of rice the size of Everest. Exponential growth, in other words, looks negligible until it suddenly becomes unmanageable E (18 446 744 073 709 551 616 grains).

Not that The Economist does not occasionally face linguistic problems: a cover story entitled "The meaning of Lula" (see article) in October 2002 resulted in a huge mailbag, not from Brazilians who were impressed at our analysis of the recent election, but from Pakistanis eager to tell us that the meaning of lula in Urdu is penis.

It's the old philosophy of buying straw hats in December.

If Noah took two of every animal on his ark, he must have had dinosaurs. Could dinosaurs have fitted into a boat only 300 cubits (about 135m) long?

Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.

And yet the institution the caliphate had been in decline long before Turkish republicans deposed Abdul-Majid II, the last Ottoman sultan and titular caliph, who ended his years in Paris painting and collecting butterflies.

A Bible in a bedside table drawer does not constitute a state establishment of religion.

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Victor Hugo supposedly said, "He who opens a school door closes a prison."

One of the contractors in question is Aker, a listed Norwegian firm no more related to Reliance than Roald Amundsen was to Gandhi.

The world's 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West. In the ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi laid down the principles of algebra, a word derived from the name of his book, "Kitab al-Jabr".

The sight of a southerner in the Vatican will be as important, in its way, as the arrival of the first black man in the White House.

"Atheist" has many negative connotations: irreligious, ungodly, unholy, graceless, sceptic, doubter, and so on. But ask a question about what atheists subscribe to – rationalism, logic, science and positivism – and a majority of people will admit that they adhere to such principles. Then ask an alternative question covering the prevalent aspects of most religions: "Do you subscribe to metaphysics, superstition, bigotry or dogmatism?", and the majority will deny such practice.

The rulers of ancient Rome were ruthlessly pragmatic in matters of religion. When a tribe was subdued and its lands added to the imperial realm, Rome would appropriate the subject-people's gods and add them to an ever-growing pantheon of exotic divinities.

There's something for everybody, which means there's something for everybody to hate.

The Mormon church is probably the best-organised in the world and certainly the most cost-effective. The president and his 12 advisers sit at the top like the board of a multinational. Below them, the church depends on a throng of lay volunteers. Church members begin to perform in public at the age of three. They become "deacons" at 12 and are given more demanding jobs as they grow older. The faithful are expected to give 10 % of their pre-tax income to the church. No one knows how much money it has, but unofficial estimates are in the billions.

Beast, a clothes shop, makes T-shirts celebrating local speech that are famed city-wide (and sold to homesick Bristolians worldwide). Top-selling shirts proclaim "Gert Lush" (slang for "good"), "Ark at ee" (look at/listen to that) and "Cheers Drive" (used when stepping off a Bristol bus).

Wanted: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.

After all, as most of those who have been bitten by the philosophy bug will know, philosophers philosophise mainly because they cannot help it.

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound. The real root of wisdom is this: do not assume, little grasshopper, that your prejudices are correct.

The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.

Old jokes are often the best jokes, and many of the most amusing examples are of terrible errors that can be made in different languages: there is fart (Turkish for talking nonsense), buzz (Arabic for nipple), sofa (Icelandic for sleep), shagit (Albanian for crawling on your belly), jam (Mongolian for road), nob (Wolof for love), dad (Albanian for babysitter), loo (Fulani for a storage pot), babe (SisSwati for a government minister), slug (Gaulish for servant), flab (Gaelic for a mushroom) and moron (Welsh for carrot).

Scores of native speakers of around 50 languages, including Arabic, Dari, Persian, Urdu, Pushtu and Bengali, have been hired – some say the NYPD has more Arabic speakers than the FBI. It has, at times, irritated both the CIA and the FBI, who are jealous guardians of their turf.

Three Egypt's Coptic Christian bishops will be elected 40 days after Shenouda's death and then a blindfolded child will select the new patriarch from among the three, as ancient tradition dictates.

But being right and being seen to be right are different things.

English has a tendency to absorb foreign words and then neutralise them – ad hoc, feng shui, croissant and kindergarten are all good examples – which may be why English-speakers often fail to realise quite how wonderfully subtle and evocative other tongues can be.

It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.

Adam Jacot de Boinod, a BBC researcher, has sifted through more than 280 dictionaries and 140 websites to discover that Albanians have 27 words for moustache – including mustaqe madh for bushy and mustaqe posht for one which droops down at both ends – that gin is Phrygian for drying out, that the Dutch say plimpplamppletteren when they are skimming stones and that instead of snap, crackle, pop, Rice Krispies in the Netherlands go Knisper!

Now for the first time he had become conscious of the terrible mystery of Destiny, of the awful meaning of Doom.

Translation into Spanglish of the first few pages of Cervantes's "Don Quixote". It begins: "In un placete de la Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase."

Thirteen languages in Germany are on UNESCO's endangered list.

Mr Ellemann-Jensen explained the idea by reference to Hamlet: "To be or not to be, that is the question. To be and not to be, that is the answer."

Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess – his jealous wife, Deianira.

I scoff at Tuyuca and Kwaio for having only two words for "we", inclusive and exclusive. In English we have three: the regular we meaning you and I, as in "we had dinner together"; the royal we meaning I, as in "we are not amused"; and the marital we meaning you, as in "we need to take out the garbage."