I really like the latest “Green” thing in the form of these stainless steel water bottles people carry around with them rather than buying “Spring water” in throw-away plastic. I want to talk about spring water, but first I want to address the bottle issue. These bottles are marketed by Sigg out of Switzerland. For…
Back in 2009 I was on several pretty long-distance business trips with the result that, in that inevitable state of boredom and frustration one always experiences while burrowing through the labyrinth of store-encrusted tunnels in the many indistinguishable airport stop-overs which are part of every post-modern flight plan, I found myself, inexorably, speed reading the titles…
Before the age of global exploration the edges of the then known world were annotated on maps with one or both labels: “Terra Incognita” and/or “Here there be monsters.” I really like the optimism of the “Terra Incognita” label. It implied that there were, quite literally “Unknown lands” beyond the edges of the map. Up…
Hesitantly, reluctantly, Helen slipped out of a slim, tight-waisted leotard and stood naked in the moonlight before me. Somewhere a clock chimed three. An owl hooted in the nearby copse. No wind stirred the casement window as she stood in the pale, translucent light on the Persian carpet. A minute passed – then another. Then…
“OMG!!!! I’d NEVER date THAT guy? He’s positively Neanderthal!” Meaning, I always presumed, oafish, low IQ, bestial, low-brow, crude, illiterate, ill-spoken, boring, cloddish, unmannered, unskilled, unteachable, a loser…. in a word, a dodo. So who were the Neanderthals anyway? Do (did) they fit the caricature? What do we know about them? Why did they become…
OOOOH! OOOOOOOOOOOH!!!! Look at ME!! Call on ME!!!!! Pick ME!!!! The collective bastion of anthropocentrism has pooled its brain power into a tiny puddle of an idea – and not a particularly good idea. In fact, a perfectly foul idea. This is it: We will commemorate humanity, in all our self-loathed glory, by establishing an official Geologic Epoch of the human endeavor…
Genetic engineers are going to have to figure out how we can all be born with a ‘best by’ birth mark dated for about 80 years following our nativities. Otherwise, they will be sent to prison for not telling us that we are going to die. Idiotic? Too stupid to even be worth a chuckle?…
It’s no wonder I decided to study rocks! People are just so frustratingly inconstant. Despite a wide variety of inclusions and accessory minerals, I can be reasonably self-assured that a hand specimen of granite will most definitely contain quartz, muscovite mica and orthoclase feldspar, and that it looks and feel very different than a specimen…
Why Wind & Solar Power Options Fall Short of Viability In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, living organisms on Earth actually organize energy. More specifically, they concentrate energy and leave it in a concentrated form after they have died. Of course, this is not an abrogation of the second law or anything hyper-impossible…
At what point does something become an actual, bona fide controversy. In the strictest sense of the word a controversy is essentially the opposite of a conversation. They are two words built on the same two roots: con and versa. When you discuss a topic WITH someone you converse with them; literally, to have a…
In Suspect Terrane 