IT’S THE NOVELTY. IT”S TRYING to see new places through the eyes of their long-time residents. It’s the road-trip soundtrack, whether CDs, tapes or new-to-me radio stations. If flying, it’s seeing the landscape from a different perspective; it’s the tiny…
Tag: …wow.
I mean “wow.” Just … wow.
First Graf: Fringes of Reason
REMEMBER THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOGS? Mostly subtitled “Access to Tools,” they were popular mainstays of the late 1960s-1970s’ DIY culture, spanning a variety of subjects from computers to home gardens. One of them, 1989’s Fringes of Reason: A Field Guide…
The Treachery of Elections
Click image to enlarge; if you need an explanation of the punchline, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images.
And now, suitably inspired, GO YE FORTH AND VOTE. (This charade has gone on long enough.)
You Too Can Be a Citizen Scientist!
IT’S CALLED ZOONIVERSE — AND IT’S revolutionizing science as we know it. Modern scientists (like the rest of us) live in an age of Big Data: zillions and zillions of units of information, too many for one person to effectively…
Why I Love: Torah Study
IT’S THE ENDLESS INTELLECTUAL PUZZLE. It’s that Hebrew writing closely resembles Klingonese (well, it does; come to think of it, so does some of the sentiment). It’s belonging to the 3,000-year-old Permanent Floating Book Club. It’s the spectra, vagaries and…
PS:
So: We’re at CVS just now, about an hour after I wrote “And On, And On,”, waiting our turn at the pharmacy, when this woman sits down next to me and says, “I’m very sorry about what happened in Pittsburgh.”…
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
― Isaac Asimov
Out of the Ashes, Endlessly Turning
A YEAR AGO THIS WEEK, Ann, Geronimo and I fled the then-largest wildfire complex in California history. We were voluntary evacuees who came home to find everything relatively intact, so our story had a happy ending. My niece and nephew-in-law…
Why I Love: Geology
IT’S THE SMELL OF THE rocks. It’s knowing what everything on the surface is sitting on. It’s the finding of hand-samples. (It’s also the finding of fossils.) It’s the divisions of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. It’s the appreciation of Deep…
Brillat-Savarin’s Hot Chocolate
AS AUTUMN TURNS COLDER THE nights and days, a young (or old) cook’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of hot chocolate. And what better hot chocolate can there be than that described on page 88 of the Leete’s Island Books…
Live Long and Proffer
THE FIRST SOLO BAY AREA excursion I made after my mom and I moved to Walnut Creek in August 1977 was a trip to the aptly named Federation Trading Post, a Berkeley specialty store selling all sorts of Star Trek…
Are We (still) Not Men?
FORTY YEARS AGO THIS WEEK, my friend Ralfh came over to my apartment, held up an album cover, and said, “You have to hear this.” He slid out the vinyl disk, put it on the stereo, lowered the tone arm,…