Our neighbors of ten years moved away about a month ago. They were an older couple; L., the husband, was the one we interacted with the most. He was a commercial contractor and drove a big black pickup, but he also made sure to let my wife and me know he had never once voted […]
Science Metaphors
Last Friday, Sarah used “touchstone” as a metaphor. I think she uses the metaphor — you touch a stone and see its landscape in time — in a way that’s poetically off-center from touchstone’s usual meaning. Which is a thing that’s solid, grounded, and reliable and which is the way I’ve used “touchstone,” because I […]
That photo there was a lucky shot. I was sitting on the couch minding my own business and looked up, and the sunlight had hit the glass vase and the water in it and had gone nuts with optics. It went right through the tulip petals so that for me, sitting there, they were translucent […]
This post originally appeared April 19, 2019 My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit […]
I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the […]
My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws […]
Science, every now and then, interrupts its usual flow of thick, painful jargon to speak in metaphors that reveal the poetry at its soul and lay out a clear path to meaning in life. I’m serious here. I twitter-follow an author named Robert Macfarlane, whom our Michelle also likes, and who posted his phrase of […]
The Svalbard archipelago, midway between continental Norway and the North Pole, is famous for its polar bears, but it is also home to the distinctive (and distinctively adorable) Svalbard reindeer. Shaggy-haired and stubby-legged, the Svalbard reindeer is not only the world’s smallest subspecies of reindeer but also the world’s northernmost herbivorous mammal, and its survival […]
