Life + Outdoors

The story goes that The Lakota holy man Black Elk took poet John Neihardt to the top of Harney Peak in the Black Hills to pray, explaining that it was the center of the world. When Neihardt asked how he knew that, Black Elk chuckled at the white man’s innocence and with patiently explained that […]

Anthropologists have yet to find a society that didn’t hold a belief in an afterlife: most of us humans think that something awaits us after death. Often the choice is binary: you’ll either end up in purgatory ("Where can I get a cold beer?") or paradise ("Enough with the harps, already!"). If not heaven or […]

The deforestation of the cedars of Lebanon happened much as these elegant trees grow: slowly but surely. Five thousand years ago, cedar forests covered huge swaths of the central mountain range of this pocket-sized country (smaller than Connecticut), a land squashed between Syria, the Mediterranean Sea and Israel/Palestine. Today, after millennia of exploitation, three reserves […]

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a psychiatric disorder affecting between three and five percent of children worldwide, many of whom continue to have the symptoms into adulthood. An estimated eight million adults in the United States suffer from ADHD, which manifests primarily as inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. This, at least, is the official view […]

C-bill. World War I. Pope Benedict XVI. Super Bowl XLIII. Final Fantasy II. Although we normally use so-called Arabic numerals, their Roman counterparts are far from dead. In addition to the above examples, they’re used to date movies; to identify book volumes such as encyclopedias; to mark off the front matter in books from the […]

Take a deep breath. Notice anything special? Did you catch a whiff of Shakespeare, a dash of Socrates, a trace of Cleopatra? No? They were there, just the same. You just inhaled millions of molecules which each of them once exhaled. Let’s take a look at just one historic breath: Cleopatra’s last. This came, if […]

I was surprised to learn that Eureka was once home to a half-mile long railroad tunnel. OK, so "tunnel" is glamorizing what was basically a covered railroad, situated between what is now the County Library and Carson Mansion, and Halvorsen Park on Eureka’s waterfront. Today, all that remains is the retaining wall on the south […]

We know the Earth goes around the sun. That’s what we were taught as kids, and we have no reason to doubt it … unlike the ancient Greeks. Like us, they saw the sun rising in the morning, swinging overhead and setting in the evening. The Earth felt as rock-solid to them as it does […]