Ann, I see your crows and raise you ravens. With a beak like a Swiss army knife and an intellect to match, the raven is an icon, mascot and pest, as mysterious as it is ubiquitous. For me, as for most people up North, these winged scavengers hover just below my conscious radar. They steal […]
Nature
“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a good night to murder the king. Even a century earlier, the collective noun was “a murder of crows.” Three centuries later, a poet watches a horse that’s been shot: “gorged crows rise ragged in the wind. […]
Captain Matty is a brilliant storyteller. I know because earlier this month I went on his famous tour through the rainforest of Far North Queensland, Australia. As he drove our orange bus up petrifyingly narrow, sinuous roads, Matty told tales, tall and short: about the legendary ‘drop down‘, wicked cousin of the koala, so named […]
Let’s get this out of the way first: Ancient Alexandria, it’s not. Still, the library of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, is the closest thing the marine sciences have to a central repository of books, periodicals and documents. And like that original Alexandria, this one is threatened by, […]
Abstruse Goose adds, in a sneaky little popup, that this is his best argument for intelligent design. Given the finely-honed excellence of BLT’s, Darwin might want to back down. http://abstrusegoose.com/339
Nothing is entirely trustworthy. Friends are inconstant; presidents and professors are making it up; your grandmother didn’t always know what she was talking about; your very senses can fool you; and one of these fine days even the sun will blow up. Where is the touchstone, the standard, the fundamental reference frame? Where is the […]
It feels right to offer a tribute to Darwin today–St. Valentine was a martyr too, after all.
Fleas suck. They also bite. But feeding strategies and a millennia-spanning role in the spread of disease and misery aside, the parasitic insects also happen to be quite remarkable little biomechanical machines. The very definition of minuscule, these wingless wonders can easily jump 100 times their own body length, a skill that scaled to human […]
