I am a man of science. Okay, perhaps not of science, but certainly near it. I’m science adjacent. But regardless, I consider myself to be bound, in the end, by logic and facts. As such, I like to think that I eschew my beliefs for what the facts tell me. As a very young man, I was […]
Month: May 2017
One evening this month I was coming back from the library. The pollen was at its worst, but I was sick of being indoors and thought I’d sit down on the grass in front of my building for a few minutes. I opened up one of my books, then felt guilty about choosing the […]
May 22 – 26, 2017 Lots of reduxes this week — “redux” in this case meaning posts that were posted before but would be nice to reread, if for no other reason than that the authors liked them. Christie on the line between dryness and drought: “How much contrary evidence do we need before we […]
Despite the occasional tragic outcome of such encounters—and they truly are occasional relative to attacks by other wild animals—I love meeting sharks in the wild. So, dive in with me as I recall this experience with Emma the tiger shark in the Bahamas. I don’t know that she was as intrigued with me as I was […]
Whenever I talk to students or aspiring journalists there is one question I dread. It’s also a question I can almost guarantee someone will ask. And it’s this: “Where do you get your ideas?” I usually answer first, with a performative groan. I hate this question, I say. It’s a good one of course. It’s […]
When marine biologist Julia Lowndes started graduate school in California in 2006, she expected to spend the next several years learning about the behavior of the Humboldt squid, which had recently—and dramatically—expanded its range north along the California coast. But before she learned anything about the squid, she discovered, she had to learn to code.
Back in 2012, I wrote about falling and gravity’s terrible vengeance when we don’t perfectly obey and how, if we’d just learned our physics, all this wouldn’t be so surprising. Re-reading the post now, it seems also to be a nice science metaphor. That is, physics says the best way to not let gravity hurt […]
This post first ran on January 26, 2012. We now have three years in a row that have set records for the hottest year on record, and it comes after a string of previous records. Today’s post began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote: At what point does a […]
