April 24-28, 2017 This week at the Last Word on Nothing: There is magic in the ambiguity of a number given in place of your identity, says Rose. Huge bureaucracies inadvertently set the stage for serendipitous mistakes. Cassie goes for a relaxing run only to witness a disturbing instance of littering. Plastic bags on the […]
Month: April 2017
When Charles Darwin compared the beaks of his finch specimens from the Galapagos, he saw that each had been shaped differently by evolution, depending on the natural history of the island on which that finch made its home. Many evolutionary biologists see life through this natural history lens, and while they are right to declare […]
The robins are BACK, they don’t intend for you to miss them, flying like bats out of hell, tearing up the mulch, yelling at everybody and stalking around, sticking their tummies out. Wherever they’re going, they need to get there fast so they take a shortcut through my porch. I was out one morning trying […]
On Saturday, Earth Day, I went for a run. About a mile in, I came upon a bald, middle-aged man. He wore a leather jacket and a Bluetooth headset. I was perhaps twenty feet from him when he chucked a crumpled plastic bag on the ground. Then he got on his bicycle and started peddling […]
In 1938 a wallet manufacturer called the E.H. Ferree company had a genius idea: to show people just how well cards would fit in the wallet, by using a placeholder. This was before credit cards and before many drivers licenses were small enough to fit into wallets. So the thing they used to showcase the […]
April 17 – 21, 2017 My neighbors, of whom I was exceedingly fond, moved away and I was sad. So I made a list of things to do to be a neighbor whose neighbors are sad to see you go. The People of LWON apparently live on different planets and their community listservs reflect that […]
This post about honeybees originally appeared May 2015 here on LWON. I still love bees and they’re still in trouble, so I figured I’d draw attention back to how amazing they are. So, here’s your big buzz for the day. Enjoy! ——– Early the other morning, I woke up to a strange humming noise. My […]
This post first appeared on April 24, 2013. Unfortunately, the problem of dust on snow has not gone away. Since I wrote this post, NASA has gotten involved in studying snow on the Grand Mesa. I wrote about the NASA project for FiveThirtyEight. Spring is a nervous time for skiers and farmers. I’m both of these, […]
