On the second Tuesday of October, a small subset of humanity celebrates Ada Lovelace Day in honour of the 19th Century computing pioneer. There are film screenings and museum visits, and bloggers are encouraged to write about women’s achievements in STEM. Most distinctive of the events is a Wikipedia Editathon to set the record straight […]
Miscellaneous
Some of the best hiking and biking trails run along abandoned railroads, logging roads, and canals. It’s like beating swords into ploughshares, only for recreation.
Dueting with animals will always be thrilling for me, and I’ll always envision our melodic conversations filling a sound gap somewhere up there. Enjoy this memory along with me! I had a conversation with an owl the other night. It was a barred owl, a pretty common species in the woods around our cabin in […]
And here we are enduring another wet blast of late summer’s hot breath, a last gasp before fall blows in. This imminent transition of seasons is always a thoughtful time for me, for many of us. Here’s how I was thinking about it a few years ago. Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new […]
This post came out a few years ago exploring anxiety and big, wild cats. At that point, there had been no deaths this century from mountain lions in Colorado where I live. New Year’s Day this year that statistic changed when a woman was attacked while alone on a hiking trail not far from the […]
Two days after I moved with my family to the middle of Alaska I learned about the earthquakes. Every 15 minutes or so, monitoring stations in the state detect one. Most aren’t large, or even felt far beyond their epicenters. Some begin far out to sea and appear as barely more than a tiny spike […]
Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. This instalment originally appeared in August 2017. Nothing says interstellar travel like a hibernation pod. The heroes of the 2016 holiday blockbuster Passengers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, embark on a century-long journey to an planet […]
