(no subject)

Reading Material:	I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould
	+ asst. romance novels and children's books

I notice when people of good will are talking about folks with little or no formal education they often say, "Well, Bob here is fluent in 4 languages." (I'm pretty sure I even caught my hero, Dr. Gould saying something like this about his immigrant maternal grandmama recently.) It's like giving them credit for independent study or something. The thought is nice and all, but the statement is pretty meaningless. It's my understanding that if you are exposed to languages during the proper developmental period, learning them is pretty effortless. How can this be equated with our largely futile drudgery as young adults towards the acquisition by rote of even one additional language? This may be followed by, "and he can name all the flora and fauna in the forest." Well, uh, most of us can name the objects in our environment. I'm not saying Bob is necessarily inferior, and his environment may indeed by more challenging to get a handle on than our own, I'm just saying that evaluating Bob in the context of our own culture says pretty much nothing about Bob either way, whether you give him big points for languages and taxonomy, or call him an imbecile for not not knowing how to order from a restaurant.

(no subject)

from the preface of I Have Landed

"Thus, when I realized that my three-hundredth monthly essay for Natural History ... would fall fortuitously into the millennial issue of January 2001, the inception of a year that also marks the centenary of my family's arrival in the United States, I did choose to read this coincidence of numerological "evenness" as a sign that this particular forum should now close at the equally portentious number of 10 volumes (made worthy of mention only by the contingency of our decimal mathmatics. Were I a Mayan prince, counting by twenties, I would not have been so impressed, but then I wouldn't have been writing scientific essays either). When I then felt the double whammy of an exact and notable twenty-five years ... between two odd and fortuitous conjunctions in life's passage--the yoking of my first essay and first technical book in 1977, followed by a similar duality in 2002 of this tenth and last essay book from Natural History and my life's major technical "monstergraph" (as we tend to call overly long monographs in the trade), well then, despite my full trust and knowledge of probability, how could I deny that something must be beaming me a marching order to move on to other scholarly and literary matters (but never to slow the pace or lose an iota of interest--for no such option exists within my temperment)."