Would you be surprised if I told you Frank Fish was a marine biologist? Or that Carla Dove is the director of the Feather Identification Lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.? These are examples of aptonyms, –people with names that fit their careers. This concept shouldn’t be too surprising,
To those who are concerned about the impact of waves of immigrants upon this country, we’ve been there before. In 1845, the Irish potato crop was attacked by a plant disease. Spreading rapidly, this mold-based scourge ruined as much as one-half of the crop that year; about three-quarters of the crop over the next seven
If you’re not tired of articles giving advice on how to approach the new year, I’ve found something that has caught my eye. I receive an email from The New York Times entitled “The Morning”. On Saturday, December 30, it published “the best advice that readers of “The Morning” received this year,” with the logic
This is an exciting time of year if you’re a professional football fan. In this, the season’s 17th week, the playoff picture is coming into sharp focus. I have been a fan all my life; during my formative years, the Cleveland Browns were the only Ohio team and star running back Jim Brown was in
Christmas is fast approaching, so it’s time to repost my Christmas story. This was inspired by a friend who works as a department store Santa. He once described meeting a little girl with a special wish, and I took it from there. This is included in my book, Stories: Short and Strange, available on this website, and
Occasionally I find an article in a major publication about a new way of growing food, perhaps announcing a new technology, or an indoor facility for producing vegetables closer to their markets to save transportation costs and energy. These ideas always sound promising and I wish them well. But let me cite some statistics to
One of the unforeseen hazards of the space age — what happens when an astronaut drops a tool? In this case it was letting go of an entire tool bag. To quote the story from the Earth Sky News (https://earthsky.org/human-world/orbital-oopsy-a-tool-bag-is-now-orbiting-earth/?) — “A tool bag is orbiting Earth, and night sky observers might catch a glimpse
If you have any interest in astronomy, you know there is a profusion of satellites being launched by both public and private entities. Lots of satellites make life miserable for Earth-bound astronomers. Worse, it leads to another problem — who takes out the trash? Satellites have a fixed lifespan and, like all things mechanical, they
How often do you travel? This is a marvelous age; we can be almost anywhere in the world (outside the Arctic and Antarctic Circles) in under 24 hours. And yet… I travel internationally about once a year, and in three of my last six overseas trips I’ve been delayed by the airlines; twice I’ve lost
If you were observing Earth from an alien planet, how would you know if life really existed here? The renowned astronomer Carl Sagan wondered the same thing. Then he got an opportunity to find out. In October 1989, NASA launched the Galileo spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. But because of the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986,