Hibernating swallows

Humans create ideas to explain natural phenomenon. Most of these explanations are worth little more than the cinders that Beachcombing nightly sweeps up from the fire. These explanations are then superseded by other explanations – that typically bear as little relation to truth – and so knowledge marches heroically on… Inevitably, though some branches of humanity can’t keep up – memos from central office cease to get through - and these relicts cling quaintly to the ideas of yesterday.

Read on

SWALLOW SCIENCE

Richard Freeman has a habit of wandering about the Internet and sending me diverse URLs of things he thinks might interest me. This is a perfect example. Jonathan Corum writes:

'After spending some time last month trying to develop alternate graphic presentations for kinematic ratios in winged flight, I decided to try to answer one of the timeless questions of science: just what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?'