Status Updates From Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil...

If fish were scientists, suggests our colleague T. F. H. Allen, the last thing they would discover would be water.

Diocletian introduced a silver-covered, copper coin, called follis. It started out weighing 10 grams, but quickly began to shrink in size. Roman emperors were often brilliant politicians and generals, but they were naïve economists. They did not understand that the amount of money in circulation affected prices. The continual debasements were inflationary, and the figures that have survived read like 1920s Germany.

Thanks to various films, our image of the Roman Empire is that it was immensely wealthy and powerful. In fact it was more like a third-world economy of today. Only a few people were wealthy and powerful, and only some major cities were opulent. Everyone else lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and many people were in danger of hunger.

Here is how to boil a frog. Place the frog in a pan of tepid water. Raise the temperature so gradually that the frog does not realize it is being cooked. It may even fall into a stupor, as a person might in a hot bath. Eventually it will die. According to experiments done in the nineteenth century, you can indeed boil a frog this way. Biologists today claim that you can’t. Either way, please don’t try it.

A quick Google search on January 14, 2011, yielded the following results: “global warming,” 23 million hits; “climate change,” 34 million hits; “Paris Hilton,” 37 million hits; and “iPod,” 262 million hits.