In a few weeks, the back fence by the elementary school with be a place where migrants gather themselves before they leave. The fence is popular because of its temperature and the protection it offers. The sun hits the fence from mid-morning until late afternoon in May, and so many years of sun has turned […]
Curiosities
The repetition of this post, which first ran on April 5, 2021, and then again almost exactly a year ago, is out of my hands. I go outside for my morning walk, brooding on my bad habits; I look around the garden to see what’s not working now; and oh glory, oh sweet child of […]
I’m in my office. It is snowing lightly outside, and suddenly I hear them — a flock of sandhill cranes flying overhead. So I step outside for a moment to observe their formation and remember that the world is still a beautiful and wondrous place. This realization is what is keeping me grounded amidst the […]
Decades ago when I was hoping to become a scientist, I got a master’s degree dealing with the actions of water in the desert, part of which was studying the hydrology of flash floods on unvegetated bedrock. One term for the result is a “slot canyon.” When people died in a flash flood in a […]
The forecast for Friday above five thousand feet called for more than a foot of snow, high winds, and temperatures well below freezing. So dire were the models that the National Weather Service had issued a Winter Storm Warning for much of the southern Cascades in Washington, and around Mount Hood in Oregon. “Why exactly […]
“The spherical alga Volvox swims by means of flagella on thousands of surface somatic cells. This geometry and its large size make it a model organism for studying the fluid dynamics of multicellularity. Remarkably, when two nearby Volvox colonies swim close to a solid surface, they attract one another and can form stable bound states […]
I wrote this post in 2018, and I’m happy to still be leaving on the same . . . road? * Let’s call the thoroughfare I live on Lemon Grove. There are two signs for it, one at each end of our block. Until very recently, one of the signs read, “Lemon Grove Avenue”. The […]
This post began with a question from my dear friend, the novelist and documentary filmmaker George Lerner. Looking over two years of footage from South Texas, I noticed something striking: I have lots and lots of glorious images filmed around sunset, but scant few decent shots at sunrise. Why is this, I wondered — is […]
