I had occasion the other day to take down from the shelf of the college library a tattered copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I found there the inconspicuous marks I made in the margins 40 years ago (and failed to erase), when I first read the book.
V838 Monocerotis • NASA/STScI
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
They don’t know neither do I so there you are
In his 1977 book The First Three Minutes, big-bang physicist Steven Weinberg famously concluded: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
The Ultimate X
Spry little x, with its feet planted firmly on the ground and its arms uplifted in surprise, is our emissary to the unknown.
Walden Pond • Photo by Pablo Sanchez Martin (CC BY 2.0)
The little green book
In 1992, Shambhala Publications issued an abridged edition of Thoreau’s Walden in their Pocket Classics series.
Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
Through a glass darkly
Pascal’s Pensées is a grab bag of platitudes, nonsense and substance, a disorganized sketch of the book Pascal might have written had he lived long enough.
Photo by Erik Karits on Unsplash
Knowledge and love
Foraging Saharan desert ants roam hither and yon from the nest looking for food. When they find a source, they head straight back to the nest along a beeline, in an environment devoid of landmarks.
The Eastern equine encephalitis virus (colored red) • Image by CDC (Public Domain)
Cell wars
Last week our part of southeastern Massachusetts was sprayed from the air with insecticide. The target: mosquitoes that carry the virus for Eastern equine encephalitis.
The M33 Galaxy • Image by ESO (CC By 4.0)
Seeing what we want to see
A Newsweek magazine poll some years ago found that 87% of Americans believe in a God who answers prayers.
The Prime Meridian at Greenwich • Photo by Kris Arnold (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Walking the line
In the fall of 2003, I walked the prime meridian — the line of zero longitude — across southeastern England.
Photo by Vinicius "amnx" Amano on Unsplash
Occam’s razor
In the introduction to my book Skeptics and True Believers, I defined two frames of mind.