Their Tomorrow: It’s All Up in the Air
Our eldest grandchild, Abby, is in the 8th grade now. I was in the same grade in 1962. I marvel at how much life on Earth has changed since then–not just human lives but the state of all life on…
Category Science
Blue By You? Colored Contrails Conundrum
The first time I saw a metallic blue contrail I thought it was just some odd play of light at that particular angle and time of day. The second time I saw blue razor-thin lines across the sky they existed…
Future Fuels for Free?
There are enough possibilities for this topic that are based on solid science to warrant a longer look for me, and then there is some over-statement and razzle-dazzle as well. I will let you wander and browse the links and…
Shifting Baselines: Visible with Age
I have not said much about my time with the visiting students a few weeks back. I was only with them as a central figure for a couple of hours, and it was an eye-opener. Granted, most of them were…
Creek Jots 25 March 15
SITTING IS THE NEW CIGARETTE SMOKING: If I was still advising patients about lifestyle choices, I’d most likely advocate that many of them cut calories but also reduce their sitting by half. “But my job requires computer work” they’d counter.…
Bless the Beasts and the Children
You may remember the lyrics from the song made popular by the Carpenters. The lyrics come to mind, painfully to an aging BoZo (part botanist, part zoologist) as I witness the winking out in my lifetime the extinction of life…
Gene Swapping: The Next Old Thing
I count myself among those back-nine science-watchers who see both the threat and the promise of our blossoming talents for engineering in a realm that once, not long ago, was the domain of nature and genetic “random chance.” Among us…
Kissing Under the Dung Twig
In the deep south the stuff is everywhere. I remember this time of year heading out with my .22 and shooting it out of the tops of oaks. Back inside, we taped or tacked sprigs of it over doorways before…
Chasing a Livable Future in Floyd
Someone in last night’s audience for the 16th SustainFloyd Movie Series event–the presentation of the movie, Chasing Ice–suggested that perhaps things would go differently in our actions towards personal change in the light of climate chaos if all politicians were…
James Inhofe: The Greatest Hoax
I’m reminded of the well-known cartoon showing the primordial ooze evolving ever upward. It becomes a salamander that becomes an ape that becomes a caveman who becomes a modern man in the age of science. As of the last election, we can now…
Phenom
I tried to imagine what the ancients must have made of a perihelion. It is one of the strangest celestial “omens” you might witness in the daytime sky. I took a picture, but not this one. Mine just shows an…
Small Wonder, Large Appreciation
For Friday shoppers who want to jump to the punchline and avoid the punch, I give you the Nikon winners of the 2014 MicroPhotography competition that spawned this thread today. I’ve been devoting some thought lately to my idiosyncrasies–those unique and perhaps…
The Blob That Ate Toledo
Sorry, the title is from a weak resonance from an old B-grade sci-fi movie (in black and white, most likely) from the deep past. Â In Toledo’s case, the blob is a known entity: cyanobacteria. In their earliest remnant forms, cyanobacteria–or…
My Water Is Our Water
There is NIMBY. Understandably, that is seen as an “all about me” attitude, dismissive of the harm done to others as long as I or my interests are not directly damaged. But in Floyd, there is NIMWS. Not In My…