Monday 19 June 2017

BLOODY MIAMI (TOM WOLFE) AND THE DETRITIVIS

The maggots! . . . Once, when she was six or seven, Magdalena had come upon a little dead dog, a mutt, on a sidewalk in Hialeah. A regular hive of bugs was burrowing into a big gash in the dog’s haunch—only these weren’t exactly bugs. They looked more like worms, short, soft, deathly pale worms; and they were not in anything so orderly as a hive. They were a wriggling, slithering, writhing, squiggling, raveling, wrestling swarm of maggots rooting over and under one another in a heedless, literally headless, frenzy to get at the dead meat. She learned later that they were decephalized larvae. They had no heads. The frenzy was all they had. They didn’t have five senses, they had one, the urge, and the urge was all they felt. They were utterly blind.
Let´s deal today with a nasty topic. Science sometimes stains and it is disgusting. Even the ugliest creature  with a nasty job is important for the ecosystems. Detritivis ( named in this way because they eat detritus) are fundamental to the food chain.
Every child has some time found a earthworm digging the soil. This moment is very important for the later man, because  he can react in two different ways to this discovery. The boy with Animal Fisiology Aptitudes gazes with attention and even tries to touch the earthworm with a little stick. The boy without Animal Fisiology Aptitudes doesn’t play again with the sand for a long time.
Earthworms are able to concentrate the snake´s revulsion but without their majesty

Monday 5 June 2017

LIBRA (DON DELILLO) AND AN EXCESIVE CASE OF CONSERVATION OF LINEAR MOMENTUM

The thing he could not forget was the way the hat jumped from the slim man’s head. The heavy thudding surprise, the sudden insult. Even after you think you’ve seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined. How much force do bullets have to exert if they can hit a man in the chest and make his hat fly four feet in the air, straight up? It was a lesson in the laws of motion and a reminder to all men that nothing is assured




We are in favour of a thorough compliance  of all kinds of laws, including the scientific ones, because  otherwise everybody knows that chaos overcomes. But the opposite can also have drawbacks, just like that Spanish student who, in doubt , writes more tildes than necessary. We also know from science that there are errors by defect and excess. The  Principle of Conservation of Linear Momentum explains curious phenomena, but we believe the incident that is narrated in the text is impossible from a scientific point of view