Certain resources can be exploited without lessening their quantity. The idea is to mine with your eyes, to reap with your nondisruptive presence. What might one of these resources be? The forest comes to mind. No matter the number of times one stands at the edge of a neatly groomed crop field, stealing glimpses through…
Of all the dual-width alphanumeric combinations possible, my Anchorage-bound flight departed from the explosive gate C4. Still, I felt that if death by aircraft was to be my obligatory end, I would rather go out at once in a big bang than plummet to earth in a nauseous descent. It is important, especially on longer…
Why is it so satisfying to break the ice layer that forms over puddles during cold nights? It’s like Amélie shoving her hand into a bin of beans. Maybe it’s the fun of breaking molecular bonds with the clean knife precision of cracks. It’s also the rarity of opportunity. The visual, auditory, and tactile senses…
Yesterday marked the first lawn mowing. I much prefer the simple push reel mowers to mowers with engines because rather than your sense of smell being assaulted by gaseous fumes, it is instead offered the organic green scent of fresh cut grass. I was pleased to see that the moss survived the winter and is…
I’ve been getting interested in parasites lately. I watched a couple vids of some remarkable behavioral changes that occur in the host. For instance, whipworms, after having matured inside a grasshopper, will influence the grasshopper’s brain chemistry to the extent that the grasshopper will make a suicide plunge into water. Then the whipworms burst out…
Do/are/is broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, beans, carrots, tomatoes and the like found in the wild? If not, how is it we have them today? Did they all have ancient ancestors which were domesticated over thousands of years of crop growth to become what we have now? I would like to see primitive lettuce. Probably thick leathery…
Sometimes I’ll perform an action, like advancing lead in a mechanical pencil, and I’ll wonder how many ants it would take to accumulate as much force as my thumb exerts on the pencil cap.
It’s sometimes practical to make a distinction between something natural and something man-made, but such a distinction is also a bit ludicrous. Most people could come to a consensus that humans are natural, and from there it would only take one person to put forth the argument that since we are natural, everything we do/make…
It’s very close-minded of scientists to think that all life in the (as far as we know) infinite universe is as water dependent as life on earth. Yet this is exactly what the scientists who get excited with evidence of water having been on mars are saying. Yes, all life on earth needs water to…
I want to live in the middle of a large cumulus cloud for one day. If I like it, I’ll make it my weekend home.