Is That a Comma, or a Fly Speck?

A joke about punctuation. "Our country's founders were passionate lovers of freedom." means something entirely different if a fly leaves a deposit between "passionate" and "lovers"

Seemingly insignificant details can be wonderfully important.

Two historic figures born two hundred years ago today paid attention to details.

The story is told of Mr. Lincoln how he used the moon-rise / moon-set tables in an almanac to discredit the testimony of a witness in a murder trial.

The same attention to detail marked his term as our President when his analysis of weapons tests and the reports of individual military engagements led him to select general officers whose strategy seemed most likely to win out in the end.

As a young man, Mr. Darwin noted lots of details about landscape and landforms, and details about barnacle bodies, bird beaks, etc. He spent most of his life trying to make sense of what he observed.

Darwin's barnacle study slides, at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge

After a quarter century of study and research he published his results in a book that still challenges us today.