January 23-27, 2017
Hey, you. Yes, you. You are underestimating chickens. They’re more like us than we imagined, says Jennifer. Chickens are rarely given the benefit of the doubt. No one goes to a chicken for advice. No one expects a chicken to do its own taxes. Chickens babble a lot while saying very little. Or so we thought.
Guest Ivan Amato has a beautiful old oak table in his new living room, and remembers the philosopher who used to sit there. To Sol, my dad, oak was one of nature’s finest gifts to civilization. Adding to his adoration was the table’s lock-and-release mechanism for inserting and removing leaves. With every swivel of the mechanism’s handle, a reverberant metallic clack advertised a marriage of steel, wood, and good design.
A new documentary about Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, aired this week. Perfect–and poignant–timing, says Michelle, when the week started with the Trump administration freezing EPA grants and contracts. While it’s easy to see Carson as the archetypal lone warrior, the David to the chemical industry’s Goliath, her story is more complicated. Carson was a brilliant synthesizer, translator, and writer, but her case against unregulated pesticides would not have been heard if the country hadn’t been ready to hear it.
Erik writes about a pair of scientists who, in the 1970s, conducted an experiment that started the placebo craze. What had been missing was the promise of relief. In all the other studies, it had been a choice between the same pain or more pain. But as soon as you added the possibility of morphine, some of the people would start to expect it and their brains would begin kicking out painkillers.
Truth and beauty. We need these things. In patterns of nature, Ann finds both. My favorite is convection. It begins with the simple rule: heat rises, cold falls. Follow that rule with liquid and in three dimensions and you get columns, called cells, of rising, cooling, falling.
Hope you find more truth and beauty over the weekend. And chickens, too.
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Photo via Wikimedia Commons