Life + Outdoors
Posted inLetters + Opinion
I Love Fall and COVID is Not Ruining It, Dammit
The scent of leaves, crisp air, it’s fall — my favorite season and roughly a third of my personality. Oh, you like fall, too? That’s cute. I keep a dedicated room in my house a brisk 58 degrees with a crockpot of hot cider going 24/7 and a Bath & Body Works Pumpkin Crème Brûlée candle […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Darwin’s Bulldog
“I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours.” — T.H. Huxley, following his debate with Bishop Wilberforce At 25, Thomas Henry Huxley returned from a four-year stint in the Royal Navy — he was assistant surgeon on a Royal Navy corvette exploring the South Seas from 1846 to 1850 […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Equinoctial To-Do and Native Plants
As we approach the autumnal equinox, there are plenty of things to do in your garden. Sure, the calendar says that summer is coming to an end, but we often get some of the nicest and warmest weather in September and October here on the coast. What things should you think about as the days […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Birding with Dogs
One of the things I enjoy most — besides birding and Giants baseball, of course — is spending time outdoors with my dog Aggie. In a perfect world, I’d be able to combine two out of the three and look at birds with Aggie by my side. But our attempts thus far have been, well, […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Einstein Problem
“It’s a wild ride. It’s completely unlikely and should not be taken as a model for how scientific discovery ever happens. It’s completely ridiculous.” — Craig Kaplan, co-author of the recent paper on aperiodic monotiles Sometimes, from the simplest of beginnings, emerge whole worlds of complexity. Einstein’s general relativity can be expressed in a compact […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
To Run is Human
“In the ancient Olympics, nobody competed with shoes, you would run barefoot.” — Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist Forget the invention of sex, fire, toolmaking, language, agriculture. The real turning point in the four-billion-year saga from the origin of life on Earth to bacon-flavored dental floss occurred 7 million years ago, a blink of a geological eye. That’s […]