According to his discharge papers, he stood five feet, eight inches tall. He had a pale complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, two moles on his back, his sole distinguishing marks. In June 1918, he was discharged from the British Army with a disability received in the Great War–a sadly innocent term that people used before […]
Month: November 2012
I should never argue about anything whatever with someone who understands math, especially someone who understands it as well as our boy, AG, here. But I wonder whether “disproportionate” isn’t confusing statistics with neuroscience. Let’s say AG is 30 years old, meaning he’s lived for 10,800 days, so finding the spider one day out of […]
This is my puppy, Conan, and the reason I’ve been buying a lot of dog books. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, dog books are for skimming, not reading. They’re hokey, repetitive, poorly written and peppered with pseudoscience. But Friday I found an exception: Inside of a Dog, a fascinating, science-rich story of how dogs […]
5- 9 November In the most heartwarming post of the week, Cassie considered post-election bitterness and wondered what would happen if we treated politics less as a competitive sport, and more as an expedition. Ginny wrote an amazing examination of the fundamental mismatch between stories and science. Cameron noted that owls are trending. Michelle pondered whether the $300,000 […]
So the election’s over, the days are getting shorter, and it’s about time for a nice long nap. May I suggest an 80-foot-long concrete chamber, tucked neatly into a hillside in Tennessee? Clean, cool, and cozy, it’s the perfect winter hideaway … if you’re a bat, that is. Yes, The Nature Conservancy of Tennessee has […]
Owls are trending. At least that’s what a grumpy barista told my husband when he tried to get his owl coffee mug filled up. I used to like them before, she sniffed. We do seem to have accumulated a fair amount of owl paraphernalia in the last few years. Before, our house was an owl-free […]
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 […]
The end of the world has been preying on my mind lately. Not in a religious, horsemen-of-the-apocalypse way ‒— but in a more surviving-the-failure-of-modern-amenities way. One reason for this preoccupation is my generation’s fascination not only with zombie film and literature1 but with interactive zombie games, like elaborate tag variation humans vs zombies, races with […]
