Life + Outdoors

Ready for your holiday geography quiz? Cover the bottom of this column, and we’re off: 1. What’s the closest foreign land? To avoid Eureka-Arcata favoritism, we’ll measure from ACV, a.k.a. McKinleyville airport. How far away is it, to the nearest 100 miles? 2. How about the second- and third-closest foreign countries to ACV? 3. What’s the highest point in […]

Most serious photographers I know worship at the altar of the pentaprism, the key component of a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera, and its digital equivalent, the DSLR. One look through the viewfinder of an SLR usually suffices to convince the most loyal “point and shooter” that the image they’re seeing is richer, more accurate […]

Do I have free will? Do you? How did you decide to read that title? Are you going to keep reading? How are you making these decisions? From the ancient Greeks to David Hume, John Dewey and William James, the issue of why we act the way we do has usually been framed as a […]

LASIK, that is, laser surgery to precisely reshape the cornea — the outer transparent part of the eye — has become commonplace, with over a million procedures performed each year in the U.S. Instead of wearing glasses (in front of the eyes) or contact lenses (on the eyes), many people can now have poor vision […]

We think of a die (plural: dice) as a six-sided cube, but there’s no reason to limit the toss of a die to one of six possibilities. As any Dungeons and Dragons aficionado will tell you, dice can be made with five possible number of faces: four (tetrahedron); six (cube); eight (octahedron); 10 (dodecahedron) and […]

I’m a Leo, honest. I was born on Sept. 6, 1942, when the sun was firmly in the constellation Leo. Another couple of degrees to the west and it would have eclipsed Regulus, Leo’s brightest star. Yet, as my wife (born Aug. 2) happily — smugly, even — points out, any newspaper horoscope classifies me […]

What do Dale Earnhardt, Britney Spears and Alexandre Dumas have in common? The number “three” would nail it: stock car number, hit song and musketeers. Good luck, we’re told, comes in threes. As does bad luck, along with Wise Men, Cups of Tea and Little Pigs. What is it about Earthlings (inhabiting the third planet […]

The sign on the counter of a local sports equipment store read, “Kayak classes Fridays 9-12 p.m.” “Isn’t that rather late for a class?” I asked. The clerk did a double take, then assured me that the class ran for three hours in the morning, ending at noon. “But 11:59 p.m. is a minute before […]