If you don the glasses included with the book and look through the final chapter, strikingly sharp 3-D images of Mars, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite will spring out at you. Although the 3-D images are striking, nothing was more startling than the string map of the Marshall Islands. With nothing but shells and cord, nonliterate cartographers created a navigational chart to nearby islands. The shells represented islands, the threads between them the direction of waves that a boat would encounter. The sailors navigated their course to an island by matching the boat's angle into the oncoming wave to the angle dictated by the fibers.
Cockroaches are humankind's uninvited, desperately unloved houseguests.
Behind our walls, beneath our floors, and in our kitchen cabinets they court and mate, eat and excrete, live and die. Their abundance, coupled with our compulsion to eradicate them, has made roaches common research subjects. And our morbid fascination with them has spawned reams of roach-related lore. As Schweid relates, the familiar domestic cockroaches that we know and loathe are merely the tip of this pestiferous clan. To date, more than 5,000 species have been identified, and scientists believe that about as many remain to be discovered.