Hummingbirds Are Such Jerks

The two of us, my husband and I, took our breakfast toast, melon, and coffee out to the porch last Sunday morning, with late summer hanging on by its teeth.  It was early, so the neighbors’ ACs were still off, and nobody was out yet.  “It’s so quiet,” my husband said. Traffic out on Charles […]

Boobies Behaving Badly

In my last post I made the case for why we are not, in fact, slaves to nature and our genes. Today allow me to do the opposite. First let me set the stage. You are on a tiny island – maybe the size of a few city blocks – looking out to sea. You could […]

Bad Things Happen

This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection.  That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides:  a cell of convection.  This convective cell is called a supercell and […]