In keeping with the “unpopular opinions” theme of this issue, I want to make a case for nuclear power. Not nuclear power as we normally think of it — vast generating stations (and equally vast price tags) with their domed reactor buildings and shapely cooling towers — but small modular reactors, or SMRs. Comparing SMRs […]
Field Notes
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Measuring our Lives
Hodgepodge. Mishmash. Dog’s breakfast. How else to describe the many and various systems we blithely use to measure everything from time to gasoline to dress sizes to Starbuck’s coffee? We divide our pounds into sixteenths, pizzas into eighths, dollars into hundredths, hours into sixtieths, weeks into sevenths, whiskey into fifths, days into twenty-fourths (but clocks […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
It’s About Time
When English novelist H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, the novel’s plot device uncannily presaged Albert Einstein’s 1905 Theory of Special Relativity. In Wells’ yarn — since copied, adapted and butchered hundreds of times in books and movies — the unnamed Time Traveller simply adjusts the dials of his titular steampunk contraption to […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Puzzling
Once again, for your edification and amusement, 10 puzzles. You’ll find the answers on page 49 of this issue of the Journal. Let’s start with the lovely “checkershadow” by Edward Adelson (who kindly refuses to copyright his highly original illusions): 1. In Figure 1, which square is darker, A or B? 2. Easier than it […]
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Bad Sea Rising
Last week, we looked at predictions for Global Sea Level Rise, GSLR, which average out to between 3 and 8 feet by 2100. The scientific consensus is that all contributions to GSLR can be traced back to increasing air temperatures, caused by the release of vast amounts of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Carrying […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Bad Sea Rising
As our climate warms, one of the more under-recognized consequences for future generations is global sea level rise (GSLR), especially considering that nearly 4 billion people on Earth live within 100 miles of the coast. In this and the following column, I’ll try to answer some questions I keep hearing, starting with the obvious … […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
It’s Nothing. Really.
“Nothing” is about as slippery a concept as you can — or rather can’t — imagine. Try to picture absolutely nothing at all. Is your nothing black, empty, soundless? Sorry, that’s something. Those are all qualities, that is, you’re imagining a something, located, perhaps, in space and time (something!) that happens to be black, empty […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Weirdness of English
Last time, we saw how the precursor of English, Proto-Germanic, was an oddball among other languages derived from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) spoken by nomads in present-day Ukraine around 6,000 years ago. Proto-Germanic is odd because its verb and noun forms are much simpler than those found in its sibling PIE tongues. In addition, it uses […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Weirdness of English
English is a mutt of a language, the bastard tongue of a bastard tongue, to use popular linguist John McWhorter’s phrase. He was addressing the fact that the language you’re now reading isn’t just the odd man out of its northern European siblings, but that their parent language ‘Proto-Germanic’ is itself an oddball in the […]
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Sheep Dates
The chronology of sheep, aka sheep dates, starts around the same time as the great change from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, around 10,000 years ago. Sheep were the first animals to be domesticated for meat, thus occupying a special place in the history of humankind. Archeological sites in modern-day Turkey, Iran and […]
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Dawn Redwoods: Alive and Kicking!
“If a man has to have a memorial or a monument to commemorate his life and his work, nothing could be more fitting than a living Dawn Redwood.” — Andrew Genzoli, Times-Standard, March 18, 1971 Just south of Pepperwood on the Avenue of the Giants, at the start of the 2.4-mile-long Drury-Chaney trail, a plaque on a […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
How Sweet It Ain’t
Right about the time the U.S. government issued its first dietary guidelines in 1980, obesity and its evil twin, Type 2 diabetes, took off. In 1950, 12 percent of us were obese; 30 years later, that figure had increased marginally to 15 percent. But between 1980 and 2000, the rate shot up to 35 percent. […]