“What happened to Franklin is, in its way, a trivial question. He had a wooden ship in the Arctic and no idea what he was doing – what do you mean, what happened to him? But we still ask why. “ – Adam Gopnik, Winter (2011) As of a week ago, we have an […]
August 25 – 29, 2014 The week began with a flight of fancy from Richard. Or was it his lived reality? Only YOU can know the truth. If you never saw a toy robot shape-shifting into a toy vehicle, you might think a movie called Transformers was about this. Cameron follows her nose up to […]
August 4 – 8, 2014 Richard and Ann disagree informatively about the nature of a science writer’s duty toward truth and its embellishments. There is a glimmer of hope when Richard strikes on the thought that science writers share subjective truths, whereas scientists have a duty to be objective. Ann disagrees. The debate rages on in […]
The teetering, hundred-year-old collection of wooden buildings that form my father’s fishing club in backwoods Quebec is arranged in a row like a Wild West town, where mosquitoes are the hostile locals. To reach his favourite fishing spots, Dad sometimes has to stop his motorized quad in front of downed trees and change into Kevlar trousers to chainsaw […]
July 21 – 25, 2014 Helen traces the Hebridean history of the Lewis chessmen, with a technical note on walrus tusk carving. Erik had difficulty focusing throughout childhood, and that was before fast-paced animations and iPads. Where will the new generation find their focus? Forget retro-chic and steam-punk – Craig likes to rock it ancestral […]
July 7-11, 2014 This week Richard finally lets slip what he was doing on his trip to Italy – communing with the shriveled remains of Galileo’s body parts – and Abstruse Goose sets himself a Sudoku-style plot challenge. Craig recounts some lengthy discussions with E.O. Wilson, who reminds us that dying species don’t look […]
It’s been a while since we had a roundup of children’s books. So long, in fact, that the last time we had one, I wasn’t yet interested in children’s books. Now, it’s situation critical. My town has one little bookstore, and our library is accessed through several flights of dingy staircase at the back of a […]
June 9 – 13, 2014 This week Michelle convinces us that cryptozoology has never known a stranger — nor more adorable — creature than the moose-like hugag. It is the creation of William Cox, and surely the ancestor of the heffalump. Richard kickstarts a memetic phenomenon with the phrase, “telling the fire by its ashes” […]