Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Judging by the numbers There is a branch of biology called allometry animal shape related to function and the mathematics of scale Scaling is also imperative in graphics and film making and is critical when engineers and architects describe the details necessary for the realization of something they have modeled An amusing example is to picture a mouse blown up to the size of an elephant Imagine a huge creature resembling a mouse standing on four spindly legs All four of them  would be broken instantly  unless they had been scaled up to the size of a real elephant's to bare all that weight For creatures alive today the weight of the brain is more or less proportional to the weight of the body the encephalization quotient In this context it is worthwhile to note that a 12,000 pound T. Rex probably had  a brain weighing 0.33 pound the ratio of brain to body weight about 1 to 136,000 The fruit fly which weighs 0.000003 pounds has a 0.0000000009 pound brain ratio about...

                      Fire and life The universe in which we live is 13.8 billion years in the making post big bang plasma coalescing into hydrogen and helium supernovea during the first hundred million years presaging more chemically complex  stars and galaxies present by about ten billion years ago and the planets and moons  asteroids and comets  forming from the interstellar dust When the earth was young four billion years ago it was a place devoid of life methane and carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere promoting a hotter planet but a place devoid of fire A billion years passed before life began  before the evolution  of metabolic processes capable of capturing energy and structural molecules from the harsh environment cyanobacteria transforming the planet into the fledgling world These unicellular organisms captured carbon dioxide incorporating it into their carboxylic acid cycles releasing fre...