These should give your brain a work out. First correct answers e-mailed to me wins you a Humboldt Mud at Old Town Coffee and Chocolates — with me along for company. (Be still, my heart!) Four Triangles: Arrange six wooden matches, without breaking, so they form four triangles, each side of which is equal to […]
Life + Outdoors
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Seeing the (Cape Mendocino) Light
The invention of the Fresnel lens in the early 19th century, and its subsequent installation in lighthouses around the world, was responsible for preventing countless shipwrecks. It’s a simple idea. A point source of light can be focused into a parallel beam using a convex lens (Fig. 1, right), but an equivalent Fresnel lens (Fig. […]
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Native Rushes
Caveat lector: Though I’m familiar with the handy mnemonic. “Sedges have edges; rushes are round; grasses are hollow right up from the ground,” I’m no botanist and I’m evaluating these plants from the point of view of a gardener. It has taken me years to clear the stodgy, banal nursery plants out of our yard. […]
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The Coriolis Effect
Despite popular belief, you really can’t predict which way your bath water will swirl when you pull the plug by knowing which hemisphere you’re in. Because the Earth is spinning counterclockwise (as seen from above the North Pole), it’s reasonable to assume that your bath water spirals counterclockwise when you’re north of the equator, and […]
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Aug. 16-31
August 16: British scientists recently used radar to measure the number of insects flying around in a column of air one mile high. In addition to the expected butterflies, moths, and flies, they found termites, aphids, and spiders drifting about on air currents quite high above the earth. In one month, three billion insects passed […]
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The (Near) Death of a Sea
These aerial photos of central Asia’s Aral Sea show the disappearance of most of what had once been the world’s fourth largest lake. Since the diversion of its feeder rivers by Soviet Union irrigation projects in the 1960s (making Uzbekistan one of the world’s largest producers of cotton), a volume approximately equivalent to the combined […]
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Serendipity in Science
Years ago, while my morning London bus was stopped outside St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, my eye was often drawn to a small plaque reading, “Here in 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.” Discovered? Well, yes. And no. Truth is, the Scottish scientist (and Nobel Prize laureate) didn’t so much discover the antibiotic as stumble upon […]
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August 1-15, 2010
Aug. 1: This is how gardeners in Anchorage grow pumpkins: Submerge a seedling heat mat just underground, plug it into an outdoor electrical outlet, and plant a pumpkin next to it. Cover the plant with a plastic hoophouse frame and drape it with floating row cover, which must be anchored down with bricks. To avoid […]
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The Fisherman’s Terminal Map
The problem facing the designer of the new northern hemisphere map at Eureka’s Fishermen’s Terminal was no different from the one that ancient Egyptian mapmaker Ptolemy faced: How can you accurately transfer the curved surface of a sphere onto a flat surface? In 2,000 years the answer hasn’t changed: You can’t. No flat map can […]
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Natural Time (No Additives!)
The story goes that a newly arrived immigrant to London lost his watch, so he walked up to someone who happened to be a scientist and asked, “Please, what is time?” “I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask a philosopher,” was the reply. “I’m just a physicist.” Despite, or perhaps because of, our inability to understand […]
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July 15-31, 2010
July 15: It is a new tradition among garden bloggers to photograph the garden in bloom on the 15th of every month and post the photographs online. In honor of Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day, try this trick: Stand on a ladder and look down on the garden to take your photograph. You will soon regret […]
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Our Neanderthal Connection
Calling some obnoxious dude a “Neanderthal” no longer has the insult value it once had, since a team of German researchers discovered that most of us carry between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA in our genes. This wasn’t news to many archeologists, who have been arguing for some time that fossil evidence shows evidence […]