When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, or even two or three. It was always 17. No lie. Each sneeze began with this strange little sucking in of air, a pause, and then from his bent body and contorted face flew ah-YESH-ah!
Seventeen times. He was very consistent. (He says he’s now down to seven.)
October 5 – 9, 2015
We look for water on Mars not just for scientific evidence of life, Craig says, but because our species is predisposed to look for water everywhere.
Helen revisits her experience eating whale meat and exploring culinary taboos.
Ann loves everything about her local restaurants but the cacophony that fills them. Commenter Peter Apps has a grand solution.
Cameron introduces the difference between a rainfall year and a water year, then admits she rigs it to feel wetter.
How will we know when it’s Autumn? Helen has a list of clues.
Image: Shutterstock
The equinox is past. At last, fall has come to the northern hemisphere.
Some of the ways the new season shows up are obvious. The sunset creeps earlier and earlier as we race toward the winter solstice. The air cools. Pumpkin spice is in every product imaginable.
Others are subtler. There’s the spooky Halloween decoration store that opened near my office, and the equally scary specter of potential government shutdown.
Here are some of the nicest ways that the world has let me know we’re tilting away from the sun.
It’s October, the start of a new water year. A water year is one of several ways to measure rainfall. This way, water year 2016 starts now–when we hope the rain will begin–and will end in September. A rainfall year runs from July to June, a buffer of dry season on either side of when the rain might come. Other places just use a calendar year, from a cross-your-fingers-that-its-rainy January, to summer dryness, then rain again, we hope. We hope. Continue reading
The world is full of iniquity. Guys shoot up college classes; they also shoot up churches, malls, and elementary schools. Little kids get shot playing on their front porches. A hospital gets bombed and its doctors die. Drug companies raise prices of drugs for sick people by obscene amounts. Gun advocates keep the country locked and loaded. And that’s just in the past week and the good Lord knows what’s going to happen between the time I write this and the time it’s published. It’s so depressingly unsolvable out there, no redemption possible. So the counter-balances to iniquity are precious. Which is why I’m all irate about the small-scale, silly, stupid problem of noisy restaurants. Continue reading
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about eating meat–as in, whether it’s a thing I still want to do–and thought now was a good time to revisit this post from two years ago about whale.
Whales are impressive, enormous, beloved animals. Whaling has been banned since the 1980s, but it still goes on in a few pockets of the world. I spent three years of my life in two of those pockets, Norway and Japan, but somehow had never eaten any whale meat. Until this spring.
Over the 17th of May, Norway’s national holiday, I visited my friend Veronica and her family in the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago that extends into the Norwegian Sea north of the Arctic Circle like a cyclist signaling a left turn. It’s a rugged place, an unbelievably beautiful land of green fields and craggy peaks, exposed to the ocean’s storms. It’s a center for fishing and whaling. Continue reading
The first memory I know for sure is the smell of rain. I remember a screen door with holes in it big enough to let in a hummingbird, and outside I could see blue bellies of clouds over a dirt road. I can only figure it was somewhere in Arizona where I was born.
I’ve always been a water person. Even though I partly grew up in the desert — or because of that — I am mesmerized by its presence. At the root of what I know is rain.
Whenever a new discovery arrives, liquid water found on the surface of Mars or a shell of water vapor found around a quasar at the far end of the visible universe, I send up a private hooray! We’ve done it again, we’ve found more water. The media usually celebrates these finds along with me, which I take as proof that I am not alone.
Last week, NASA confirmed evidence of liquid water on Mars. Fluid erosion and deposition patterns appear to be ongoing, increasing during warm seasons, decreasing in cooler seasons. It is a melt and flow pattern, evidence that Earth is not alone in the solar system with liquid water. Continue reading
Sep 28 – Oct 2, 2015
Ok so Jennifer’s face looks a little older. Does anybody have a problem with that? Do babies? potential mates? Does natural selection? Anybody? No? Then screw it.
New Person of LWON (oh joy!) Rose Eveleth got a new puppy. So cute. So energetic. So barky. So depressing. What can be wrong with Rose, sitting on the kitchen floor with her new puppy and crying?
Guest Krista Langlois follows the boardwalk to the inside of Bowen Falls. She’s soaking wet, can’t breathe, can’t see, is all-but-knocked flat, and is strangely comforted.
We’re killing cormorants right and left, says Michelle. Supposedly we’re culling them, we certainly have good reason to. Or maybe we just don’t like ’em.
Erik has a splendid idea: instead of describing other countries by stereotypes, why not figure out their keywords? My vote for Italy would be “connection.”
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puppy: Ângela Antunes
