In the part of your mind that is still animal, still wild, you remember fight or flight; the possibility of paws holding you down, and the hinge of jaws upon you. The thought no longer goes through our minds the way it must have long ago. Sometimes, though, the memory returns. I was considering such a scenario years […]
Miscellaneous
LWON came out of its redux mode this week with a crop of fresh posts. A mourning dove laid an egg in Cameron’s house while she was away. The LWON commenters confirm it: mourning doves will lay their eggs anywhere and may need a little more attention from Mother Evolution. Craig returns to the Grand […]
Few species are more frustrating to taxonomists than the North American caribou. Ranging from the Canadian Arctic to the Great Lakes, caribou vary enormously in size, color, antler shape, habitat, and behavior. Some aren’t much bigger than domestic dogs; others are almost big enough to rub shoulders with a moose. For more than two centuries, […]
I leave today for a backpack with my two kids off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Per our usual, we are going without maps, compass, gps, or a trail. This is how we do it together, traveling by line of sight, letting geography show us the way out and back. I used […]
This week on LWON we dug into the archives and appreciated things. Things. Stuff. The material objects that surround us and give us something to look at, or use, or remember people by. We kicked off the week with Former Person of LWoN Tom Hayden singing the praises of all sorts of not-very-impressive-technology that gets […]
July 11 – 15, 2016 Jessa updates a post about the Berger Inquiry, the time that the Canadian government actually asked the people who were here first what they wanted to do with the land that belonged to them in the first place. Rose’s backyard in Brooklyn is full of squirrels fighting, not just the […]
If you read my post earlier this week, you’ll know that I did this fantastic science fair project back in the 7th grade. In fact, when it comes to science, I might have peaked in middle school—which is pretty sad. But I peaked in a big way with that bone-growing experiment. Please go back and […]
In this month’s issue of National Geographic, I lay out a simple question. How many great white sharks are there on Earth? It seems simple enough – we’ve found some 3,500 planets outside our solar system and 400,000 species of beetles on Earth. This is the modern world of crowdsourcing and big data. We can […]
