My wife suddenly decided I should be a Good Dad (TM) and take the kids sledding. (I said okay, as long as she was coming along, too. There she is at the bottom of the hill, way in the background.) Our hilly campus was almost deserted, since we’re starting our three-day spring break.
A neighbor invited us over to help feed the lambs they are raising in their garage. (The mother sheep died, and her lambs needed more care than the owners could manage.) The lambs are Piccolo and Brown Sugar.
This is my “Super Earth,” about 2.75 times the volume of our planet, orbiting very close to a wimpy Class M star. (Thanks for the link, Jefe.)
As my 12-year-old son gets ready to surpass my six-foot height any day (his lip needs a third shave, but he’s apparently in no rush to graduate away from calling me “Daddy”) and as my 8-year-old navigates a peer community that includes mean girls and true friends, gallant young gentlemen (thank you, little boy who…
A bacterium discovered in a Californian lake appears to be able to use arsenic in its molecular make-up instead of phosphorus – even incorporating the toxic chemical into its DNA. That’s significant because it goes against the general rule that all terrestrial life depends on six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. These…
My class was doing small group work, focusing on a challenging passage in Emerson’s Nature, when a student called my attention to a fiery red sunset outside the tall 19thC windows. I turned out the lights, and in the glow of their iPads, I could see the looks on the students’ faces as they took…
Emerson burst onto the American intellectual scene by more or less inventing that American intellectual scene. Emerson collected around him a group of like-minded intellectuals who played out, in their own careers, this same search for American identity. His first publication, Nature, calls for a distinctly American way of looking at the enduring questions of human existence. You…
Literary questions aren’t really worth exploring if there’s an obviously “right” answer, so let’s explore a thorny question. Near the end of Chapter 13, in the third paragraph from the end. Hawthorne tells us of Hester, “At times a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl…
Dr. Mary Crone Odekon In today’s Academic Minute, Dr. Mary Crone Odekon of Skidmore College’s physics department discusses how studying fractals can help our understanding of structures in space. WAMC
“I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain…
I’ve been blogging about the climate change issue for some time now. Here’s the latest, which responds to the exposure of private e-mails in which a climatologist is accused of acknowledging deliberately tweaking the data in order to make a stronger environmental case. [N]ot only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center…
Very cool little story that also involves a Frederic Church painting and newspaper archives. Following a trail that began with a 19th century painting and led to hundreds of newspaper reports, the researchers discovered that the “strange huge meteor-procession” mentioned in Whitman’s noted collection “Leaves of Grass” indeed refers to a rare procession of earth-grazing…
I suppose that my face-blindness has made me the person I am. I don’t much like movies or People magazine, not because I’m above caring about movie stars, but because I don’t recognize most of them. I became an addictive reader, an author and an English professor because, in the world of words on paper,…
There are no sidewalks where I live, but if there were, my sidewalk, and my conscience, would be clear. Here’s the first stanza of a five-stanza poem by TImons Esaias. Originally there were eleven CommandmentsMoses, perhaps confused by the unfamiliarsnow, ice, and sidewalk,botched one, and left it out.
Interesting examination of role-playing, illusion, identity, and power in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, one small branch of which was the inspiration for the 1976/7 computer game Colossal Cave Adventure. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave was a popular tourist destination for travelers from around the United States and beyond. The cave…
There’s a dissertation in here. All I have the energy to do today is imply a connection. Using a police state to market technology in 1984: Using a police state to market technology in 2010:
The Jurupa Oak tree first sprouted into life when much of the world was still covered in glaciers. It has stood on its windswept hillside in southern California for at least 13,000 years, making it the oldest known living organism, according to a study published today. —Independent Reading this story reminded me of a story…
These dandelion children–equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes–do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care…. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got…