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Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.This is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.

In Mandarin Chinese, for example, you can express If you had seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant with the same sentence you would use to express the more basic If you see my sister, you know she’s pregnant. One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than in English.

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.

The idea that money is available for the taking defies economic logic. But sometimes it’s true.

The opportunity is investing in energy efficiency. “The returns are tremendous, and there’s virtually no risk,” said Mark Orlowski, the founder and executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute,

Although no one is refusing to consider the idea, he explained, “People say, ‘We’re overloaded and this isn’t a fire that needs to be put out now.’ But if they actually did an energy audit, they would find millions of dollars in savings — and that money could be used for all sorts of things: scholarships, new faculty positions, even more pay for the university president.”