Benjamin Franklin is usually depicted as a grandfatherly fellow, portly and genial, who would be at home by the fire of an 18th-century tavern, with a long-stemmed pipe in one hand and a tankard of porter in the other. In the familiar portrait of Franklin by his contemporary Edward Fisher, the great man seems fixed to his chair by a kind of weary contentment.
Geology
Benjamin Franklin at his desk • Mezzotint by engraver Edward Fisher, ca. 1763
Photo by Andrew Malone (CC BY 2.0)
Winter’s coming and stones are on the march
December. Green plants have rolled up their awnings and closed shop. Even the mushrooms, November’s ragpickers, hunker down to that invisible life that mushrooms live for 11 months of the year.
Gondwana rainforest, New South Wales, Australia • Image by Cgoodwin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A world dreamed up, yet real
“If man had not encountered dragons and hippogriffs in dreams, he might never have conceived of the atom,” wrote the American social philosopher Lewis Mumford, who died [in 1990] at age 94.
A typical New England stone wall • Photo by Sean (CC BY-ND 2.0)
New England’s long rocky road
One recent weekend I dug post holes for a patio fence. Five holes, each one foot in diameter and two feet deep. How many cubic feet of dirt were removed? Zero.
Sodium chloride crystals • Photo by Christian V (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The realm of trolls and gnomes
The [1991] Gems exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science begins as gems begin — deep underground.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Home is where the heart is
Remember this old riddle? A man leaves his house for a walk. He walks a mile due south, a mile due east, and a mile due north, and finds he is back at his house. What is the man’s name?
Photo by Brina Blum on Unsplash
Big quake prediction wasn’t completely silly, but don’t hold your breath
Are you ready for the Big One?
Yosemite Valley • Photo by Aniket Deole on Unsplash
‘Unknown nobody’ outfoxed the expert, solved a riddle
In the early morning hours of March 26, 1872, an earthquake shook Yosemite Valley in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
Garnet lherzolite • James St. John (CC BY 2.0)
A sliver full of history
In an essay published after her death, novelist Virginia Woolf wrote about special “moments of being” that sometimes interrupt the gray, nondescript “cotton wool” of everyday life. One of those moments occurred as she was looking at a flower in a garden at St. Ives, in England. It was an ordinary plant with a spread of green leaves. She looked at the flower and said, “That is the whole.”
The underwater topography of the world's oceans (Public Domain)
In 25 words or less
What is science?