Two weeks ago today we were anxiously looking at the weather radar to confirm that yes, we would be able to get home from Sarasota between winter storms. And in that look ahead, the story was that March back in…
I have run across several articles lately about mankind’s next venture off the planet. I mean way off: to visit distant stars, convinced as astronomers are that there are, intoned in Carl Sagan’s gushing manner, “billions and billions” of planets…
Today’s the Ferrum Thing day. (See you there?) So I won’t be fancy here. Surprised? I’ve been following weather events, of course, since we’ve been recurrent recipients of some recent extremes on Goose Creek. The weather is finally getting almost…
There is perhaps more reason now to hope. It’s a pity it took a dope slap like superstorm Sandy to make us open our eyes and look our FrankenStorm future in the eye. No small number of journalists, scientists, and…
Civilization has become vastly complex, data-and-energy hungry and precariously balanced. We’ve put very many eggs in this basket. But we walk the tightrope of the future with that basket, blindfolded in a howling wind, hoping somehow to maintain our footing…
Someone said “God made time to keep everything from happening all at once.” Whatever time is and where ever it came from, our concept of it stumbles when we try to grasp time in chunks longer than the breadth of…
Even after being a biology watcher for decades, I learned something very interesting a few years ago when I chanced upon a group of hawk watchers one September afternoon at Saddle Gap on the Blue Ridge Parkway here in Floyd…
Apologies if you were never a Duck’s Breath Theatre listener; Doctor Science was an old favorite of ours. And making fun, as this radio skit did, of the puffery of science and the gullibility, incredulity or scientific ignorance of the…
Winding down the day, I was doing some casual browsing over daily events before bedtime (never a good idea these days unless bad dreams are your thing) and read the headline article on Google News: Nature Journal of Science Discredits…
Nope. It’s a robot seagull. This is truly amazing. What a powerful driver of technology warfare has been. How can we even consider a peaceful world that would deprive us of robot spy-birds, laser pointers and kevlar! BTW, don’t be…
I’ve contended for years that, until we learn to work with and even mimic the economies of the natural world (biomimicry) rather than wield the bigger-hammer nature-be-damned approach, we will continue to make a mess of things. The holy grail…
The argument, by chance alone, and reinforced by the unblinking faith of Carl Sagan, holds that among billions and billions of stars, there has to be more quasi-intelligent star-stuff in the cosmos than what resides inside the human cranium. To…
I had a flashback the other day. I was carried back to the month I spent on clinical rotation with the burn unit in a University of Alabama Medical Center hospital as a physical therapy student. Thankfully, I don’t remember…