Romantic Zoology
Time Magazine’s 60 year-old review of Willy Ley’s The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn; an Excursion into Romantic Zoology.
Evil Kraken. Another mythical beast, says Ley, has really come to life: the kraken, a gigantic octopus that flourished in the imagination of medieval Scandinavians. Evidence has been accumulating, he says, to prove that there are several species of giant squid or octopus which come to the surface only rarely. Ley thinks that Scylla, of the Odyssey, must have been a kraken, with her six toothy necks reaching out of a sea cave. So was Medusa, with her “snakes” (octopus arms) writhing around her face.
Ah yes, how far science has come:
Modern scientists know, Ley points out, that the horn buds of a calf can be transplanted to the middle of its forehead, where they develop together into a “unicorn” (single horn). The bull with such a horn becomes the leader of the herd. Confident of his strength and position, he can afford to be as gentle as a unicorn.
Note that this book is an expansion on an earlier work, with a title sans “Dodo”, but “became a war casualty when published in 1941.”
Sadly, The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn seems to be out of print.
Sadly, this doesn’t explain why they are not called “uni-horns”, which is far more logical.
"But you always say you want me to be more data-driven!"
Gilbert said the finding prompted him to go home and propose to the woman he had been living with: “I always thought love causes marriage, but my data said marriage causes love,” he said. “When you lock yourself in something you cannot get out of, you will find ways to be happier… . I do love my wife more than I loved my girlfriend, and they are the same person.
I always wonder if the guys who do these psychological studies have the sack to use the results on themselves.
Sandia’s Z machine normally works like this: 20 million amps of electricity pass through a small core of vertical tungsten wires finer than human hairs. The core is about the size of a spool of thread. The wires dissolve instantly into a cloud of charged particles called a plasma.
The plasma, caught in the grip of the very strong magnetic field accompanying the electrical current, is compressed to the thickness of a pencil lead. This happens very rapidly, at a velocity that would fly a plane from New York to San Francisco in several seconds.
At that point, the ions and electrons have nowhere further to go. Like a speeding car hitting a brick wall, they stop suddenly, releasing energy in the form of X-rays that reach temperatures of several million degrees — the temperature of solar flares.