Life + Outdoors

…on average, that is. In these strange times of online social networks like Facebook and Twitter, you can actually count your online friends (or followers on Twitter), and even count their friends. I don’t recommend it, if you’re at all anxious about your popularity. Chances are, you’ll discover that your own roster of friends is […]

“Huge Meteor Plunges Into Sea Narrowly Missing Tug,” reads the page one headline of Eureka’s old daily, the Humboldt Standard, for Sept. 13, 1930. “Tug Humboldt was towing the Norwegian motorship Childar out to sea on a 300-yard line when the flaming missile, comprising several tons of molten rock, dropped between the two vessels … […]

“Radio Sweeping Country: 1,000,000 Sets in Use”-Variety headline, March 10, 1922 The history of commercial radio in the United States began when the Department of Commerce licensed KDKA Pittsburgh on Nov. 2, 1920, just in time for the Harding-Cox election results. Within a few years hundreds of transmitters were broadcasting to millions of receivers, as […]

I’m a later-comer to pedometers, and probably would have been a no-comer if not for my iPod Nano. Who knew it had a pedometer function? I’m easily seduced by gadgets, and now carry it in my pocket from the moment I get out of bed in the morning. Ten thousand steps, that’s my daily goal, […]

Feed me — more data, that is. My insatiable brain hungers to see and understand more. Minutes after getting out of bed in the morning, I’m online, checking my computer for emails, responses to my column and fresh blog posts; guiltily reading favorite comics (my love affair with Opus is undying); and printing out the […]

You’ll find us kayakers all over the place in this part of the world — bouncing down the Mad or the Trinity, cruising on the Bay, playing in the rocks around Trinidad harbor. While we all have our favorite type of boat, paddle and other equipment, one thing we can all agree on is our […]

So you’re a Great Egret and your home is the rookery on Indian Island — which you share with a few dozen of your kinfolk — and you’ve got it made. The fishing’s good, you’re safe from humans (who thoughtfully located your pad within the jurisdiction of a National Wildlife Refuge), and the future looks […]

The π of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity. –– from Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, by Alan Sokal, Ph.D. Come again? Pi is a variable? You might have thought the ratio of the circumference to […]

How old will you be when you die? You may not worry too much about this (I hope you don’t), but life insurance companies sure do. They stay in business by figuring out the survival chances of their policyholders beyond a certain age. They’re experts at this because they have to be. If their insured […]