Following the death of his great friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, the poet Alfred Tennyson began writing In Memoriam AHH, perhaps the greatest elegy in the English language. It would take him 17 years of composing, writing and editing until he finally published it — anonymously — in 1850. While the long (2,916 lines […]
Barry Evans
Posted inLife + Outdoors
30 Minutes that Made All the Difference
Thirty minutes. That’s all it took, 66 million years ago, to put the future on track for you to be reading this. Had the Manhattan-Island-size asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico arrived 30 minutes earlier or later, we wouldn’t be around to unravel the consequences of that mighty collision. We know very little […]
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AMOC and the Inevitable Climate Threat
Like other acronyms that slowly seeped into our consciousness — think COVID — I predict that you’ll soon be familiar with AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. We and our children may — with a great deal of luck and statesmanship — dodge such potential global catastrophes as another pandemic (thanks to the magic of […]
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Guns, Germs and Steel
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — First sentence of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy This is the second of two discussions about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, published in 1997. Last time, I focused on the role of “Eurasian” diseases (to which European invaders had […]
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Guns, Germs and Steel, Part 1: Lethal Diseases
“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we Black people had little cargo of our own?” — Yali, a Papua New Guinean politician, in conversation with Jared Diamond. “Cargo” here refers to inventions and manufactured goods. When Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of […]
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Cancer and Me
“Congratulations!” “Er, thanks — what for?” “For beating cancer!” Congratulations are certainly due but not to me. I was just the patient; all I had to do was be on time for my many medical appointments, follow my oncologist’s instructions and avoid crowds following my chemo infusions while my immune system was recovering. The real […]
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From the Occult to Modern Science
Today, science is so well established as the path to knowledge via observation, experimentation and the weighing of evidence that it’s hard to credit its roots in the occult alchemy and astrology of times past. But just a few hundred years ago, many of the pioneers of modern science — figures such as Isaac Newton, […]
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Year End Potpourri
Mazda: I drive a 1990 Mazda Miata, whose reliability and near-perfect 50/50 weight distribution between the front and rear axles give me hope that it will “see me through,” to borrow a phrase from my late father-in-law. Why “Mazda?” In 1931, cork manufacture Toyo Kogyo was looking for a new company name to celebrate the […]
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Will Returning to the Moon Prepare Us for Mars?
“If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?” goes the old joke. Fact is, we probably can put someone on the moon but without the threat of Russia getting there first (as was the case in the 1960s), the motivation just isn’t there anymore. Today, […]
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Subway Maps
“Beck introduced the idea of abandoning geography entirely in order to present the ever-expanding underground network as a circuit diagram.” — Scott Christianson, 100 Diagrams that Changed the World Here’s a tiny version of the BART map that you’ll probably use when you travel around the Bay Area. Note that it’s far from geographically accurate […]
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Cosmic Distances
Looking up and around during the day, it’s easy to understand why the ancients believed that we live under a great dome of sky. Extrapolating to the night sky with the stars apparently rotating overhead, the sixth century Greek philosopher Anaximenes may have been the first to imagine that we live under a vast, rotating […]
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Our Late Neanderthal Cousins
“Some Neanderthal populations died out, some got massacred, some interacted [with humans] and some only exchanged ideas.” — Sang-Hee Lee, biological anthropologist at the University of California. What caused our hominid cousins, the Neanderthals, to die out some 36,000 years ago? Ever since the first skeleton was discovered by quarrymen in Germany’s Neander Valley in […]