This post first ran on Dec. 31, 2010, though with a different main image, and it has run just about every New Year’s Eve since then. Back in the day, the lead image was a close-up of the crown of the 2009 pole. That image still appears as part of this essay, only farther down. […]
Antarctica
This sampling of doggerel originally appeared in 2015. It was one of a series of such samplings from the journals of Bad Science Poet. Just remember: “It’s not the science that’s bad—it’s the poetry!”™ ODE TO AN ANTARCTIC FRIEND Penguin, oh penguin, you’re so black and white. Your colors remind me of both day and night. […]
By the time you read this post, 2020 will have already arrived at the South Pole. Even if you read it the instant it pops up on the Internet, at 7 a.m. EST December 31, 2019, the New Year will already be an hour old. You don’t have to go to the South Pole to […]
I love that graduation speeches are now posted on the internet. Listening to them, the good ones, I can’t help but feel a little bit of that helium of opportunity and promise that I once had, in early summer, when I was the one who got to walk across the stage. One of my favorite […]
I love museums, and my hometown, Washington, D.C., is full of them. You’ve heard of the big ones—the Air and Space Museum with the Wright Brothers’ plane, the Natural History Museum with its elephant and dinosaurs. We’ve got privately-owned tourist bait, like the Spy Museum and a branch of Madame Tussauds. Then there’s a pile […]
Hello world. Yesterday was election day in America. One guy won and another guy lost. But the race was hard fought, and our already divided country remains as polarized as ever. Did you listen to the last episode of This American Life? We don’t just disagree, we barely see each other as human beings. And […]
“Because it’s there.” Not good enough. The traditional explanation for our species’ imperative to go to the ends of the earth no longer holds, and it hasn’t held for a long time. An isolated population or two might still be lurking out there, somewhere, in a jungle or on an ice floe, harboring a “Because […]
As far as obscure ecosystems go, the outer edge of expanding sea-ice sheets has got to be near the top of the list. Not algae-living-in-sloth-hairs obscure, I suppose, but then the algae that grow inside the sea ice have a significantly greater impact on just about everything else in the world, other than sloth hair. […]