The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

The Simplest Answer

By: Erik Vance | June 4, 2015

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an old friend of mine named William of Occam. You know the guy I’m talking about, right? Skinny little kid in the monk’s robe who doesn’t say much. Sure you do. Some guys call him “Sharp Willy” or “Billy the Knife.” I’m not sure why, I assume it has something to do with the fact that he’s so skinny.

If you don’t know him, man, you’ve missed out. He’s quiet guy, keeps to himself unless he’s drunk. But once he gets going he’s hilarious. “Why say something if silence will accomplish the same thing?” he used to say to me. He was full of those kinds of quotes, which were awesome once you got him to stop saying them in Latin.

Anyway, in college Will and I would go drinking together and shoot pool every Thursday. I remember he was careful and fastidious – a real Type A, you know? He hated wasting anything. Time, words, pool cue chalk, all of it had to be just so. No more, no less. Continue reading →

Poo Detective

By: Sally Adee | June 3, 2015

shutterstock_222828910 — *Time is a flat circle*

I don’t remember where I heard this story. A mincey woman and her Very Small Dog were walking through an airport when the dog dropped a No. 2. The woman pulled a tissue out of her bag, crouched down… and wiped the dog’s butt. The twosome clacked off, leaving the little brown pile (and the tissue) to its fate.

Few people are that brazen. But the streets and parks of London speak for themselves: when no one’s looking, plenty of dog owners are abdicating their doody.

Not for long! If the borough of Barking gets its way, soon concerned citizens might start carrying little test tubes around to collect the lawn sausages. Barking wants to do “paternity tests” on street poo so they can send the dog’s parents the bill. This breed of forensic scatology has worked elsewhere, but can it take on London? Continue reading →

Wolves at the Door

By: Jessa Gamble | June 2, 2015

Four years ago when I had a powerful encounter with a healthy wolf pack just meters from my home, I knew it was a quintessentially Northern experience. The million-odd square kilometers of the Northwest Territories are so sparsely populated by humans and so well-stocked with wolf prey that wild canids have fewer problems than their brethren to the south in Alberta. There, habitat loss is part of the issue, as with any threatened species, but the main determinant of wolf survival is whether or not we want them dead.

It’s a question we still can’t seem to decide on. Ranchers around the Rockies successfully wiped out wolves near Banff at the turn of the century and to this day, anyone can shoot a wolf in Alberta if it’s within 8km of their property. At one point, 80% of the province’s wolves were exterminated by a strychnine campaign aimed at rabid skunks and foxes. In Yellowstone, the birthplace of the national park idea, conventional wisdom included regular predator culls under the bottom-up theory of ecosystem regulation. Continue reading →

Where the Wind Has No Name

By: Michelle Nijhuis | June 1, 2015

Of all the evocative place words humans have come up with, the words for local winds may be the most varied and most charming. There’s the Albrohos of Portugal, the Gilavar and the Khazri of Azerbaijan, and the Shamal of Iraq. There’s the Cape Doctor of South Africa, the Hawk of Chicago, and the Wreckhouse winds of Newfoundland.

I live in the Columbia River Gorge, a place famous for its wind. The wind blows mostly from the east in winter and mostly from the west in summer, and every spring it lifts the boarders’ bright polyester kites above the water like so many tropical birds.

What do we call this glorious force of nature? We call it … the wind. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Jessa Gamble | May 30, 2015

May 25 – 29, 2015

Ann’s Uncle Bundy had the kind of raw competence that solves problems with elegant ingenuity. We revisit him on Memorial Day.

Helen sings songs about songbirds in Washington, D.C. and in so doing brings a piece of the English countryside to America.

LWON alumnus Heather says the slave trade has a centuries-long history along the Nigeria-Cameroon border, and Boko Haram is only its latest incarnation.

Bees, individually, are insects. Collectively, however, they are basically mammals. So saith Jenny.

Story telling is hardwired and serves as the conduit of history in oral cultures. Ann investigates the designated historians, the listeners and the cultural mnemonists.

Image: CSIRO [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Storia

By: Ann Finkbeiner | May 29, 2015

Sometimes friends will be over, everybody talking, and one of the little kids will get antsy so I’ll pick up a book and start reading, quietly so as not to disturb conversation. But pretty soon nobody is talking any more, everybody’s listening to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet track the Heffalump. I’ll bet you can sit in any small coffee shop, open a book, start reading aloud “Once upon a time,” and by the third paragraph, the whole coffee shop will be dead silent.

Stories. I’ve always thought of them as addictive entertainment for which – for some reason – we happen to be hardwired. Continue reading →

Bees Are Us

By: Jennifer S. Holland | May 28, 2015

Early the other morning, I woke up to a strange humming noise. My first thought was the ceiling fan motor was petering out, but it turned out the sound was coming from outside. So I stepped out onto my little balcony for a look, and listen. The hum hummed louder. It took a minute before I could focus on what was in front of me, but then suddenly I saw them. Bees. Thousands of bees. Maybe tens of thousands. The massive swarm hovered just there, not terribly far from my face, a full-on cyclone of insects.

It was an awesome thing. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Deep Roots of Boko Haram

By: Heather Pringle | May 27, 2015

Nearly a year ago last May, the mercurial leader of Boko Haram announced the fate of 276 schoolgirls that he and his men kidnapped from a secondary school in Chibok, Nigeria. Standing in front of a video camera and tugging at a red hat, Abubakar Shekau laughed as he read from a prepared statement. “I took the girls and I will sell them off,” he declared. “There is a market for selling girls.”

Shekau’s chilling announcement startled many observers in the West. But as archaeologist Scott MacEachern of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, reported in a paper presented in April at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in San Francisco, the proposed sale of the girls came as little surprise to people living along the northern Nigeria-Cameroon border. For centuries, a local slave trade bought and sold captives with impunity, and little seemed to have changed. “The slave raiders are back,” the modern inhabitants told MacEachern. Continue reading →