Wes Phillips

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Wes Phillips

Zombie Roaches

Wes Phillips First Published: Feb 06, 2006

Ampulex compressa is a wasp that uses its stinger to temporarily paralyze and then hot-wire a cockroach so that the wasp can "drive" the larger critter home, where it can lay its egg on the roach host and seal it into a nursery. When the egg hatches, the larva chews its way into the host, where it feeds itself and then spins a cocoon.

Wes Phillips

Who You Calling Savage?

Wes Phillips First Published: Feb 06, 2006

Hilarious rant by anthropologist Roger Sandall over Lynn Truss' Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life. I have to confess I haven't read TTTH, not least because I didn't enjoy her hectoring Eats Shoots and Leaves. Geeze, if you're going to write a book about the failure of everybody to observe proper grammar, wouldn't you want it to be copyedited to a fair thee well? Ms. Truss didn't proof her proofer—and all I could think as she wagged her finger was that she should have washed it first.

Wes Phillips

Alan Turing

Wes Phillips First Published: Feb 03, 2006

A good read from The New Yorker. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.

Wes Phillips

Language Affects What We See

Wes Phillips First Published: Feb 03, 2006

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks affects how he or she perceives the world. It has been a lightning rod of controversy ever since it was proposed. A new paper suggests that it's half true—sort of.

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