Ambiguity often gives a certain piquancy — and humor, per Groucho Marx — to our lives. Cover up the text below this paragraph and let’s start off with a puzzle: You’re handed a balance and 27 identical coins, except one is a little lighter than the others. What’s the fewest possible number of weighings you […]
Field Notes
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Grow and Die
Until now, “grow or die” has pretty much summed up capitalism. A company that only maintains its present output and profitability will be outgunned by young, flexible, hungry upstarts. Not just in business, either. Larger, expansionist and innovative conglomerations of states and countries out-match smaller ones — the United States is a case in point, […]
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We’re All Above Average
Most of us consider ourselves better and smarter than average. According to sociologists who study “illusory superiority,” 94 percent of U.S. college professors rate themselves superior to their colleagues, while 87 percent of Stanford MBA students think their academic performance is above the median, and 80 percent of us think of ourselves as better drivers […]
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Life: The Long Game
Last time, I made the case that life on Earth started on Mars. Now, 4 billion years later, that life has evolved to the point where we can start thinking about spreading it farther afield, that is, into the galaxy. Because of the near-miraculous sequence of steps required to get from inanimate to animate — […]
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Kickstarting Life
How did life start here on Earth? Ever since Darwin, scientists have been struggling with that question. (Before him, there was nothing to explain — God did it.) When Darwin posited that species evolved from prior species, he implied there once was a single organism from which all species are descended. We can now say […]
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Halloween, Samhain and Jack o’ Lantern
The Christian celebration of Halloween (holy evening), like its predecessor, the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, is that liminal time of year when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead become thin. For our ancestors, that’s when ghosts and spirits needed to be propitiated with offerings of crops, milk and wine. […]
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Candelabra Trees
Ten miles south of the Humboldt County line, the insanely steep cliffs of the coastal range mellow into Shady Dell, a half-mile-wide oasis set back from Usal Beach. Unless you’re a hardy backpacker heading south through the 7,800-acre Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, you’re probably going to reach Usal from U.S. Highway 1, on a steep […]
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Language: Innate or Invented?
Is language innate to humans? Are we born “pre-wired” to spontaneously speak whichever language we hear in the first months of our lives? That is, are our brains equipped — at least metaphorically — with some sort of language organ, the hardware on which the software of our parents’ and tribe’s language runs? Noam Chomsky, […]
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The Cooking Ape, Part 2
Last week, I discussed how cooking morphed us from ape to human by increasing the amount of energy we obtain from food, according to anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham. Before cooking was invented, he says, we were essentially apes. After, we were on our way to becoming who we are today, with our comparatively small […]
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The Cooking Ape, Part 1
Ape. That’s what you’d have thought if you met one of our ancestors two million years ago: short stature, low brow, massive jaw and mouth housing huge teeth, small brain, flared ribs enclosing a big belly, slouching gait, tree-climbing anatomy — all the hallmarks of a bipedal ape. Fast forward to 1.7 million years ago, […]
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Shots, Shots, Shots
“Every year, thousands undergo this operation, and the French Ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries.” — From a 1717 letter from Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey Lady Montagu was writing from Adrianople (modern Erdine) in […]
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A No-Win GMO Label Law
An unprecedented flurry of bipartisan activity followed the July 1 implementation of Vermont’s genetically modified (GM) food labeling law. Superseding individual state laws (which would have brought chaos to the food industry), a national GMO labeling law passed both houses in just a week. The president will probably have signed it by the time you […]