Nature: September 2003 Archive Page

Here I was in a place where the jungle goes all the way to the ocean, with only a strip of beach dividing the two. Sand crabs, hermit crabs, and crab crabs skitter across the path, and lizards are pretty common. If you look up you likely see white faced monkeys, and iguana are common here. I set up my spot and quickly got into the Pacific only to find it gentler and warmer than I expected from a childhood of going to Malibu and Costa Mesa beaches.| The dilemma? Well, how does a world view contain a place this nice? There is nothing that I know of in Martin Luther or John Calvin about tropical paradise (though it is true I don't have my Institutes of the Christian Religion along to check on this). You can kind of fit original sin into a landscape like northern Europe in winter. I comforted myself by thinking that minus malaria meds, this might be pretty inhospitable. But it was an exercise of rational thought of a kind that I haven't been doing too much of since arriving in CR. --John Spurlock --Costa Rica 5 (John Spurlock)

This is my favorite passage from John's blog, which is about 12 hours old and already full of his travel musings from a recent trip to Costa Rica.

In December, 1990, Galileo began its “Earth-1” maneuver: the first Earth flyby. This happened to coincide with the buildup to the first Gulf War. nasa had to inform the North American Aerospace Defense Command that the blip that would appear on its radar screens on December 8th—an incredibly fast-moving object that might well seem to originate from the Middle East—was not an enemy missile but a robotic spacecraft coming from Venus. -- Michael Benson --What Galileo Saw (New Yorker)

NASA can use a booster story like this, especially due to the critical reception of the findings of the Columbia investigation. There are some sad notes in this story, like the fate of Randy Tufts's Europa explorer.