Field Notes

I’m jazzed about NASA’s latest venture to the moon, which was launched last Thursday afternoon June 18. The main mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), is a robotic spacecraft with the primary objective of surveying lunar resources and identifying possible landing sites for the next, long-overdue human mission, slated for 2020. LRO is a sophisticated […]

Pilot Rock is the outermost of Trinidad Bay’s scattering of sea stacks, located half a mile south of the tip of Trinidad Head. Half an hour of hearty paddling will get you there from Trinidad beach. Depending on the sources I found online, the top of the rock is either 93 feet or 103 feet […]

Human eyesight is a wondrous mechanism. On the one hand, we can see an object whose light takes over 2 million years to reach us (M31, the Andromeda galaxy, twin to our own Milky Way). On the other, we can see something a mere molecule thick! Want to try to guess how, before reading on? […]

By automatically offering my right hand when I meet someone new, I’m betraying my right-handed bias — and that of my culture, since the hand that I shake is also the right one. In fact, almost all the world favors right over left. For instance, soldiers universally salute with their right hands. Tools are generally […]

"Whatever created this hole was one scary mother," I thought, two weeks ago, standing on the rim of what’s billed as "the first proven, best-preserved, meteor crater on earth." It’s so obviously formed by a meteorite (a meteorite is a meteor that makes it to earth before being vaporized) — perfectly round, steep sided — […]

As for mankind, numbered are their days/Whatever they achieve is but wind. — Babylonian clay tablet Three different styles of writing numbers can be found within half a block of the gazebo in Old Town Eureka. "Regular" numerals — 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 — abound, while the two clocks […]

There’s stargazing and stargazing. One way is with telescopes and sky charts. I’m pretty good at that. Another is the way I’m really good at is lying on my back on a summer’s night and just gazing. It only takes a few minutes of this to realize that the dome of the night sky is […]

A few weeks ago in this column, I mentioned that, contrary to local lore, the Mad River Slough was never an outlet for the Mad River. The Mad has always flowed west into the Pacific, not south via the slough into Humboldt Bay. However, from 1855 to 1888, the Mad River and Humboldt Bay were […]

I happened to walk into the middle of a conversation in my local coffee hangout the other day. Two of the regulars were engaged in an animated discussion about alien abductions, psychic surgery and the end of the Earth (we’ve got three more years). As I got up for a refill, one of the participants […]

Next time you’re standing in front of the dairy section at the Co-op deciding whether to buy two percent or whole milk, you might think about how adult milk-drinkers are in the minority. Most of the world’s non-infant population is lactose-intolerant, while a minority of us have a mutant gene that allows us to ingest […]

I was about to send off this week’s column (an erudite look at the curious genetic connection between Garberville gophers and Arcata aardvarks) when my visiting Russian cousin Evan S’bov rushed in. He’d been taking a last walk on the boardwalk before I was to drive him to the airport for his long flight back […]