Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a masterpiece of subtlety, belying the fascination to be found in one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus is a small frozen satellite, actually a thick crust of ice over what is believed to be a global ocean atop a rocky core. In other words, a hard center suspended in a ‘water’
Category: Science & Evolution
Let’s hope they’re cute
For one or two posts a year, I have to touch on the idea of extra-terrestrial life, and this particular facet of the topic I’ve mentioned before, but I’m going into it a bit deeper this time. Given the extremely low likelihood of such an event coming to pass, this post counts as far more attention than is warranted, but if I only tackled relevant and important topics, I’d lose
Go NASA!
Just in case you haven’t heard the news…
Yes, I know the Mars Rovers had nothing to do with the finding, that being accomplished by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But I don’t have a model of that one…
Convenient mediocrity
“Convenient mediocrity.” I mentioned it in an earlier post, and while it can be found in use here and there, it is not (yet) a common phrase, even if it is a remarkably common property. What it means (for my purposes here, anyway) is maintaining lowered standards because higher ones take too much effort. More specifically, it means accepting lower quality as long as it’s in a cool,
Stick with fashion
So, right outside the same porch mentioned in the previous post has been a pair of large orb webs occupied by barn spiders (Araneus cavaticus), both females – it was only one for a few days, then another moved in. And curiously, their webs were almost stacked while the centers
Making change
One of the most confusing things to attempt is self-evaluation. It might be easy to think that if there’s one person we’re intimately familiar with, it’s ourselves, but when it comes down to it, we realize how hard objectivity is in such situations. Ego is such a loud voice in our minds, it’s hard to hear the little things which might be much more accurate.
Thus, I cannot
Looking back, part four
We continue our quest to catch up with these images from only nine days ago – yeah, make any comments you like – when a torrential rain came through not long before sunset, followed immediately by a break in the clouds. Knowing what that meant, I trotted outside and, sure enough, there was a prominent rainbow, probably the best I’ve ever seen. It was the classic full-on
Occam’s stubble
There is a concept, a meme if you will, that shows up a lot in critical-thinking circles, and I’ve even tackled it a few times before here. Commonly known as “Occam’s Razor” but also by the less folksy term of parsimony, it provides a very simple measuring stick: if multiple explanations can be advanced for any given facts or events, the simplest
On capital punishment
Capital punishment yet remains a contentious topic, even while we’ve found comfortable positions on many of the moral issues we struggled with for centuries – slavery and racism, women’s rights, legal adulthood, and so on. Perhaps the biggest reason behind this is, there are too many factors that motivate a response, most of them emotional, and most of those have been
In old New York
So, in the recent trip to New York (the state, not the city,) the schedule was tight and there were several obligations, so I had only tentative plans to get out to a couple of areas to do some exploring and/or photography, and they never came to pass. One of those plans was fossil hunting, since there are several areas close to where I was that were surprisingly easy to find fossils within.
However,