I finally finished Anna Karenina, which means I now understand how gentleman farmer Konstantin Levin felt when, after spending far too much time thinking about farming, he finally just grabs a scythe and starts mowing hay, real hay! That, gentle reader, is how I felt last week when I talked to Leif Nelson, senior author of […]
Miscellaneous
It’s something that some orb spiders do, a web embellishment whose purpose is debated. It’s called a stabilimentum, and arty spiders named Shea or Absinthe (Charlotte is just too on the nose) spin it out aciniform silk — different material than they use for the surrounding web. Typically its done in concentric circles or an […]
Some things I seem to write about over and over, year after year, far into the night. One of these things is the situation of women in science, usually physics and/or astronomy. The subject bores me until I start thinking about it, and then I get sort of irate. Enraged actually. Well, flame-throwingly furious. The […]
I was bitten the other night. I would have taken a picture of the turgid, blood-filled bug that stuck its rostrum inside of me for a liberal helping of hemoglobin, but my girlfriend smashed it with a rock and spattered the thing while I cheered her on. It was hard to resist the killing. Normally, I try and treat other […]
I love to count, and as a student of ecology I have counted many things over the years: sandpipers, whales, ducks, deer mice, penguins, internodes on eelgrass rhizomes, to name just a few. In part I love counting’s essential mundanity. It is so central to any ecological question, but my god can it be boring. […]
In 1861, a 45-day-long rainstorm hit California, causing the largest flood in our state’s recorded history. It created an inland lake 300 miles long in the Central Valley, and drowned roughly 200,000 cows. Governor Leland Stanford had to attend his inauguration by rowboat, and the state went bankrupt. In an effort to escape future flood […]
There is a much-fêted relationship between a writer and his editor. Less often is it mentioned that a writer often keeps up a second backchannel with folks from the business side of a publication, dealing with invoices and working out logistics. With smaller pubs you may actually be talking to the publisher, as is the […]
