Oct. 22 – 26 This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny. Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to make a movie about solving a math problem. Junk food everywhere = epidemic in obesity. “We don’t know which […]
Cameron
When Iben Hove Sørensen flew to Ghana for her work with Dansk Ornitologisk Forening, a partner of BirdLife International, she couldn’t help but think about the birds. The passerines that she was headed south to study follow a similar course that her plane took to their wintering grounds–over the Mediterranean, sometimes through cloud-choked skies, for […]
24 – 28 September In which Cameron informs us that gull poop carries drug resistant bacteria that infests beaches, lakes and even dumps. Delightful stories abound of the falcons and dogs that have been dispatched to chase them off. But that makes me wonder: after they’re chased off, where do they take their pestilent cargo? […]
I have been trying to discourage my older son from chasing birds. For a while it worked—he couldn’t say much and was easily distracted by food (a family flaw). But now he’s a better conversationalist than I am, and of course the first thing he asks is, “Why?” I tried to explain something about how […]
September 10 – 14 Virginia says drinking to forget doesn’t work. What does work is pot. Maybe good cooks are really, sneakily good scientists, says Cameron. Whether city living makes you itchy and cranky, Science is not sure. Cassandra is. Autumn is so lovely, says Christie, but what with global warming you might not […]
The other day I was sitting in the bathroom, lamenting the decline of my bathroom reading material. At its zenith, the back of my toilet was heavy with Nature. (I inadvertently impressed one of my grad school classmates, who didn’t know that I thought I was subscribing to a magazine with lots of photos of […]
A friend recently took his kids on a much-anticipated trip to Disneyland. When I saw him afterward and asked how it was, he shook his head. “We went on Space Mountain,” he said, by way of explanation. He has two kids under six, so I figured they’d gotten scared. Later, my husband told me what […]
I know I’m supposed to be thinking about science, but I can’t stop thinking about bikes. Last month, I was in Copenhagen, and being on a bike there seemed like more fun than it was anywhere else. Part of it was the bike—the family we exchanged houses with had a cargo trike, complete with a […]