“It’s a wild ride. It’s completely unlikely and should not be taken as a model for how scientific discovery ever happens. It’s completely ridiculous.” — Craig Kaplan, co-author of the recent paper on aperiodic monotiles Sometimes, from the simplest of beginnings, emerge whole worlds of complexity. Einstein’s general relativity can be expressed in a compact […]
Field Notes
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To Run is Human
“In the ancient Olympics, nobody competed with shoes, you would run barefoot.” — Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist Forget the invention of sex, fire, toolmaking, language, agriculture. The real turning point in the four-billion-year saga from the origin of life on Earth to bacon-flavored dental floss occurred 7 million years ago, a blink of a geological eye. That’s […]
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Vulcan: Missing in Action
Vulcan was the Roman god of fire; he was also ugly. The good news is that he somehow got to marry the goddess Venus, who was something of a catch. The bad news is she was constantly unfaithful. Although sounding like a bit of a loser, Vulcan had the last laugh, giving us our word […]
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Summer Puzzles
Every year at this time, I check what I’ve dumped into my “puzzles” folder over the past 12 months. Hope you enjoy them as much as you enjoy the one or two hours when the sun shines here in coastal Humboldt. I think it’s called “summer.” The first is about as counterintuitive as any puzzle […]
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Answers to Summer Puzzles
Surviving the Toss: Either the two tosses come up the same (two heads or two tails) or different (one head, one tail). So one of them, say Alice, always says that Bob’s toss will be the same as hers, e.g. she sees heads and guesses that Bob will get heads. Bob does the opposite, e.g. […]
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Aliens vs. Alien Life
Aliens: Intelligent creatures from a distant star who have traveled to Earth. Alien Life: A necessary precursor to those aliens, simple self-replicating molecules, such as cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Earth is one of eight planets with an assortment of smaller bodies in thrall to our star, the Sun. The Sun is one of about a third […]
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Drones in Rwanda
“You now see much bigger and wealthier countries like the U.S. using Rwanda as a role model.” A surprising statement given that Rwanda, a landlocked country in the heart of Africa with a land area twice that of Humboldt County, was the scene of a brutal massacre 29 years ago: 1 million dead in 100 […]
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Humboldt’s Lagoons
Of the four lagoons claimed by Humboldt Lagoons State Park, only two would pass muster with any self-respecting dictionary. A lagoon is usually defined as a shallow body of brackish water separated from the ocean by a shoal, having a regular source of fresh water. Big Lagoon and Stone Lagoon (the latter being Chah-pekw O’ […]
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Multi-messenger Astronomy and Gold Rings
Astronomers glean information about distant objects from four types of energetic signals: electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light, radio waves and gamma waves); gravitational waves (subtle “ripples’ in spacetime, first detected in 2015); neutrinos (electrically neutral elementary particles having almost no mass); and cosmic rays (high energy particles, mostly protons, that, like neutrinos, travel at […]
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Lava Beds, Lava Tubes, Modoc War
A geological hotspot deep underground in the northeast corner of California has been sending molten rock to the surface for over half a million years. It’s a reminder that we live out our brief lives on a geologically active planet that counts the passing of time in millennia, not months and years. Medicine Lake volcano, situated […]
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Table Bluff Cemetery
Seeing today’s sparse scattering of a few homes and farm buildings, Table Bluff’s two cemeteries — one Catholic, one “Other” — might seem like overkill. But the Table Bluff community was once a going concern, a lively stage and wagon stop atop the ridge for which it’s named. Raluaka, its Wiyot name, is a gnarly […]
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The Rosetta Stone
When Napoleon Bonaparte set his sights on clearing the British out of Egypt in 1798, he took with him 160 savants in his 400-ship invasion fleet. These worthies were scientists, artists and historians who, supposedly, would bring the lost civilization of the Egyptian pharaohs to light, thus ensuring Napoleon’s legacy not only as a conqueror, […]