February 2008

A Lot More Fun Than Watching Paint Dry
February 28, 2008

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, a professor of applied mathematics at Harvard, “practic[es] the old-fashioned method of scientific inquiry called natural philosophy, where one wonders about everything,” writes Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine, where he takes a deliciously leisurely ramble through Mahadevan’s “Physics of the Familiar,” complete with video clips of demonstrations.  more

More Terrible News for Tigers
February 26, 2008

India was regarded as a success story of tiger and tiger habitat conservation and comeback during the 1970s and 1980s, under the vigilance of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. Now, an incomplete census suggests a shocking result: is the country really down to its last thousand and a half tigers? What happened?  more

Cool, Inuit? 
February 24, 2008

While I’m holding my breath waiting for the captive-tiger debate to start, I’d like to point you to two more places where traditional Arctic life is making a complicated, often ironic interface with the twenty-first century.  more

This Terribly Endangered Species  [New Update]
February 10, 2008 (updated)

To continue yesterday’s theme, that all six remaining subspecies of the tiger, Panthera tigris (down from eight) are in critical danger of extinction in the wild is not news. Perhaps five thousand remain. . . . But a compact and compelling presentation of the facts, dangers, and hopes can make the issue new again.  more

Stars & Stripes
February 9, 2008

I’m curious: does the following design strike you as:

1. Disturbing & offensive (ugh!)
2. Thrilling & beautiful (ah!)
3. Weird & indifferent (meh... )
4. None of the above?

Go to image

They Know Snow
February 5, 2008

You’ve heard the cliché, meant to reflect a larger truth about how a language reflects its speakers’ experience, environment, expertise, and cultural preoccupations: “Eskimos have dozens of words for snow.” (And “Germans have as many for bureaucracy.”) Or fifty. Or twenty-eight. Or over 100. (Nope, that was a hoax—a funny one, too.)

Well, no, they don’t. . . . more

Little Worms-In-The-Pocket
February 1, 2008

If not for the eleven-year-old mean girl who gave me that nickname when I was nine, I might not remember that on the way home from school after a Chicago thunderstorm, I used to fill my raincoat pockets with live earthworms that had crawled out onto the sidewalks seeking oxygen.

I don’t remember why I collected them . . . . What I do remember, besides getting teased, is the way the worms felt in my pockets: a damp tangle, like live spaghetti. . . . more