That photo there was a lucky shot. I was sitting on the couch minding my own business and looked up, and the sunlight had hit the glass vase and the water in it and had gone nuts with optics. It went right through the tulip petals so that for me, sitting there, they were translucent…
This post originally appeared April 19, 2019 My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit…
Our mother died on August 7, 2010, quite a while ago now. Our father had already died way back in 1978. Last Monday, I noticed the date, thought it was probably their wedding anniversary, and then thought, “Oh, Mom will be sad today.” Then I thought, “No, she’s dead too.” Everybody does this, deaths never…
I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the…
My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws…
Science, every now and then, interrupts its usual flow of thick, painful jargon to speak in metaphors that reveal the poetry at its soul and lay out a clear path to meaning in life. I’m serious here. I twitter-follow an author named Robert Macfarlane, whom our Michelle also likes, and who posted his phrase of…
The Svalbard archipelago, midway between continental Norway and the North Pole, is famous for its polar bears, but it is also home to the distinctive (and distinctively adorable) Svalbard reindeer. Shaggy-haired and stubby-legged, the Svalbard reindeer is not only the world’s smallest subspecies of reindeer but also the world’s northernmost herbivorous mammal, and its survival…
A neighborhood kid, maybe 10 years old, doesn’t have the usual relationship with gravity. I know it’s her even when I can’t see her clearly by the way she moves through space: even when she’s not running, just walking, she looks like she might re-connect with the earth but also she might not. She reminds…