I’m riddled with anxieties and have no faith whatever. My book is dopey and nobody’s reading it and I have no ideas for another one. Print publishing is dying anyway. And the deader it gets, the less likely it is to publish anything I write, even if I did have an idea. I could […]
Nature
The last time anyone proclaimed the end of science — at least, this is what I hear — was just before the arrival of relativity and quantum theory. Abstruse Goose’s brave new islands, quantum gravity and dark energy, are going to require new physics, and new physics is like seeing outside the optical, hearing outside […]
Metastable: Down the block, along the street, is a steep bank on which trees have taken root and grown, slanting off the bank and over the road, balancing their holds in the ground with increasing height and occasional high winds and of course gravity. One day sooner or later a good rain slightly liquifies the […]
Maybe it’s the advent of the rainy season here on the Northwest Coast, the time of all things mouldy and green. Or maybe it’s just the battle I wage every morning to crawl out of bed when it’s still so bloody dark. But sloths strike me as very simpatico these days. Ok, if you watch […]
It’s a little-known fact that many more tigers live in private captivity in the U.S. than in the wild. As I wrote in my article, Far From the Forests of the Night, published in the February 2008 issue of Natural History magazine, between 7,000 and 15,000 tigers are held in private roadside zoos, circuses, sanctuaries, […]
Something astonishing happened on Canada’s west coast in late August and early September, something that took my breath away. The sockeye salmon returned to the Fraser River in such vast numbers that fishery scientists could scarcely believe what was happening. In July, they predicted a run of 11.4 million salmon. Four weeks later, when the […]
Heat rises, cold falls, and like a pan of soup on a hot stove, the earth boils, exceedingly slowly. The boiling is called convection: columns of heat rise from the earth’s hot core, move up through the viscous solidity of the mantle, cool at the crust, roll over and fall back down. The crust that […]
Last summer, I wrote an article for the magazine New Scientist about a bold new initiative to provide low-cost in vitro fertilization—for as little as $300 per cycle—to poor women in developing countries. The article, entitled Cheap IVF offers hope to childless millions, described initiatives by the Swiss-based Low Cost IVF Foundation and the European […]
