Happy New Year, for what a year is worth given the light of Betelgeuse fading from the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Thanks to Ann for pointing that out last week, and that it may have gone supernova hundreds of years ago and no longer exists. Beginning of January, heart of winter, is a good […]
Month: January 2020
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up […]
If you stand around an airport bathroom a little longer than necessary, you may witness a few steps toward the fall of human civilization. Because nobody, and I mean nobody, washes their hands well enough to kill off the funk we humans pick up and carry around. I did this experiment on a recent trip. […]
If you were to think about it, where would you think the first eyewitness account of one of the Wright brothers’ flights would have appeared in print? I’d guess the New York Times, maybe. A local newspaper in North Carolina or Ohio. Perhaps a venerable old science magazine like Scientific American. Well, I would be […]
It has been brought to my attention that I know very little about tornadoes. There are only two things that I know about them, in fact. They are a corkscrew of wind, and they helped Dorothy get to Oz. But do they start from the bottom or from the top? Can they travel over a […]
This past summer, an ecologist named Erik Beever sent me a new paper he’d published on a class of critters you might call charismatic invaders: introduced species that are at once ecologically disastrous and deeply beloved. Erik and his coauthors offered a few examples, some you’ve heard of — like wild horses — and some […]
As we entered the third decade of the third millennium, many of the science and tech words and phrases in popular circulation had lost all meaning. “AI”, “machine learning” and their newer synonym, “cognitive technology”, for example, had joined the pantheon of synonyms for “snake oil“. Or at least they were becoming placeholders for anything […]