Summertime, when the livin’ is buggy.
Articles from January 2022
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
“Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru” by John Everett Millais (1846)
Two diplomats of the IQ wars
Some nations are rich, others are poor.
The Earth and its abstraction
Secret of not knowing
Twenty-two hundred years ago, in the city of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile River, a fellow named Eratosthenes drew a circle on papyrus and said, “This is the Earth.”
Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash
Looking for ET online
It is a marriage made in heaven. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and personal computers.
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash
Fact filtering in the pursuit of truth
Last week this column took note of two explanations for the fossils known as ammonites. These animals in stone look like serpents curled upon themselves, or the tightly coiled horns of miniature rams.
Fossilized Hildoceras ammonites • Photo by Petr Hykš (CC BY-NC 2.0)
The ammonite’s fossilized legacy
A round gray stone sits on the window sill by my desk. The stone is cracked across the middle. It opens like a jewel box to reveal an ammonite, a fossilized sea creature shaped like the tightly coiled horn of a miniature ram.
The future Harry Hawker imagined • Photo by Thirdman from Pexels
Reach out and touch a cellular phone jerk
You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.
Leafcutter ants • Photo by Pjt56 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
No cartoon world for leafcutter ants
roots. Matchboxes for beds. Bottlecaps for tables. Thimbles for bath tubs. Postage stamps for carpets.
Photo by Pavel Herceg on Unsplash
Can a body meet a body coming through the wire?
There is a now-famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner that has come to define the age of electronic communication. It shows two dogs sitting in front of a computer. One pooch says to the other: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
A statue of Thoreau at Walden Pond • Photo by Chris Devers (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
An unvarnished look at Thoreau
In recent years we have seen a spate of books on Henry David Thoreau — his writings, his life, and the landscape in which he lived. The best of the lot is David Foster’s “Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Harvard 1999).”