Life + Outdoors
Posted inLife + Outdoors
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 […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Comet C/2023 A3 and Bioluminescence
The human family was treated to comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) during October, a visitor from the outer reaches of the solar system. Here in Humboldt County, it graced the western skies after sunset for several weeks, but it is fading fast now as it recedes from our planet on its journey back out from the […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Through the Electoral Fog
As I write this in the limbo of Election Day, I know I’m not the only person who’s gone through the past week or longer feeling off. This day has loomed on the horizon, growing as it neared, and its shadow seems directly over us at last. I have found it hard to make plans, […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
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 […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Embracing Monsterpause
Are you between the ages of 42 and 55 and staring down the barrel of perimenopause/premenopause/menopause? Does each new quirk in your ever-slower, ever more confounding body send you directly to the internet to research whether you’re feeling the effects of your nosediving progesterone or simply old age? Was that a hot flash? Or a […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Salp Cycle
My neighbors were having another loud argument. This time she was chanting “vagina” in his face, and he was chanting “penis” at her. I didn’t understand their logic, but the dispute reminded me of a commonly washed-up animal called the vagina salp (Thetyes vagina). People who are perhaps vagina-squeamish call it the giant salp or […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Fall in the Redwoods
As days get shorter, I get more eager to spend time outdoors. In September, I hiked in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park on the James Irvine Trail to Fern Canyon and back via Gold Bluffs Road and the Miners’ Ridge Trail. It is almost a loop, as Miners’ Ridge merges into James Irvine less than […]