Such is the power of synchronicity in life that no sooner had I gone through this calculation than I got an email from my alma mater, Swarthmore College, mentioning that a professor there is an expert on language extinction. So I thought I would ask him for his opinion on the question: how many words are there in the world?

Swarthmore College | News | Swarthmore Linguist Calls Attention to Dying Languages

Speakers of thousands of the world’s languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate. What is lost when a language dies? And what are the implications?

“Languages are the repository of thousands of years of a people’s science and art - from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths,” says Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison (right),

Technorati Tags: linguistics, Swarthmore, language extinction

The US has lost its position as the world’s primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

The US is now ranked seventh in the body’s league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations.

A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said.

Let’s take a closer look:

1: Denmark
2: Sweden
3: Singapore
4: Finland
5: Switzerland
6: Netherlands
7: US
8: Iceland
9: UK
10: Norway

Aside from the skepticism-inducing source of the report (what does a rich people’s thinktank know about technology innovation?), these are all little tiny countries. Scale matters.

Technorati Tags: innovation

DILLON BURROUGHS is a staff writer for the award-winning television and radio program The John Ankerberg Show, which is broadcast into over 185 countries. He is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, including the best-selling book What Can Be Found in LOST?, the revised Facts On series (with John Ankerberg and John Weldon; over 2 million sold), and the Comparing Christianity series (over 1 million sold). Dillon is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and lives with his wife and two children in Tennessee.

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Paul C. Lauterbur, who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 for developing magnetic resonance imaging into a way to look inside living organisms, died yesterday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 77.

This guy’s life work, which saved thousands, if not millions of lives (and made HOUSE, M.D. possible), should be front page news everywhere.

Technorati Tags: House M.D., Lauterbur, MRI, heroes