This isn’t one that lends itself to an easy description, or a slick way of introducing it, so I’m struggling here. But I’m on the mailing list for The Oatmeal, which is either a webcomic or the nom de plume of the guy who writes and illustrates them, maybe both. If you’re not familiar with the site, you should
Category: Science & Evolution
Can confirm
On Monday, we had clear enough skies for me to go out and check on the condition of the sun, or more specifically, the sunspots thereon. I could not actually make any out in the viewfinder, nor on the monitor when I had unloaded the card.
I considered myself a victim of bad timing, since we’ve been having so much activity in this form for the past couple of years, and the reason
Not dead? Then it’s working
Once again, we find ourselves (that’s the royal “we,” not [necessarily] including you) on Darwin Day, without anything prepared to show for it. I have long maintained that we should be celebrating the scientist on some other day than his birthday, since the dead of winter is a hard time to find topical content. The fictional readers that I insist are real shoot back that I’m
Ahhh, that’s better!
Did the rounds tonight, counting how many juvenile Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) I could find, and actually reached fifty this time, in fact, fifty-one. That one is shown below, doing its best to avoid being counted:
While certainly not an overriding, driving desire, I felt compelled not only to break the previous record, but to reach the nice round number of fifty –
Thinking like that
Because I’m a supporter of George Hrab’s Geologic podcast, I receive his weekly newsletter, and the one from July 5th [yes, this sat in editing limbo for a bit] contained an article on superstition that he’d written for the James Randi Educational Foundation back in 2008. I’d done a post myself
Errors of omission
Recently, I came across a link to an article on Aeon, which may be titled either “Incredible testimonies” or “The short, dramatic history of alien abductions in the US,” depending on whether you go with the title in the opening graphic or in the meta tag for the page
Persistent illusion
Every once in a while, as I’m perusing old posts (because the ego knows no bounds,) I come across this image and, just about every time, I interpret it entirely incorrectly – which is bonkers because not only am I the one who photographed it, I had the subject right in hand and know exactly how it looks. The last two times, I reminded myself I should revisit it as an optical
Another attempt
I’d found the website transit-finder.com last year, which takes a given location and lists the upcoming transits of the sun and moon for the International Space Station (as well as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Tiangong Space Station.) Last September I’d
Numbers game
Several days back, The Girlfriend found a potted blue lobelia for me, which I’ve been intending to get for a while, because they’re blue, and I mean, seriously blue – more blue than any flower I’ve seen, more blue than almost any thing I’ve seen. Note that this is not the US native great blue lobelia, or blue cardinal flower, but an African
But how? Part 31: What game is this?
First off, we’re not really answering any religious questions with this one, but asking a lot of them instead. Second, while I have tried (with varying success) to avoid going on the offensive with posts within this topic, this one is disregarding that restriction entirely, because we’re going hard on the offensive now. I’ve broached aspects of this in one form or another several