I’ve been thinking about Lewis Thomas.
Articles with 1993
Illustration of red blood cells (Pixabay)
Detail of red-tailed hawks from J. J. Audubon's “Birds of America” (Public Domain)
The slaughter of the innocents
A still November morning. Brittle, transparent, like glass. Suddenly shattered.
Image by Les Meloures (CC BY-SA 3.0)
There’s much more going on here than play
Years ago, when my children were young, we lived for a year in London, not far from the famous Harrods department store. A favorite family outing was a visit to the toy department. While the kids busied themselves with dolls, trains, scooters, and skip ropes, Dad focused on the construction sets.
Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
On the first day, there was a big…
The universe began with the Big Sneeze. A creation myth from Egypt of the third millennium B.C. has God bring the world into being with a sneeze. It’s not a bad image for the Creation as currently described by astronomers.
One method of getting around • Photo by Steve (CC BY 2.0)
The nature of the wheel is just not in our nature
Inchworms inch. Whirligigs whirl. Sidewinders wind. Grasshoppers hop. It’s called getting around, and the animal kingdom has devised a thousand ways to do it.
The Coma galaxy cluster • ESA/Hubble (CC BY 4.0)
Does ‘dark matter’ really matter?
The hunt is on. The scent of the prey is in the air. The hunters are working themselves into a frenzy of excitement.
Dictyostelium discoideum • Photo by Usman Bashir (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Sing a song of slime mold
I sing of slime electric. The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, they will not let me off till I respond to them, and discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Ganson's "Machine with Concrete" • Photo by Shervinafshar (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Machines that have a funny bone
Imagine this. A machine made of pulleys and levers that spends its time scooping machine oil from a pool at its base and pouring it over itself. The oil glides sensuously down over the mechanism, back into the pool. Ahhh!
Photo by Zachery Perry on Unsplash
No stuffed moose could get in the way of his story
This is the story of the moose that went to Paris. It is the story of how Thomas Jefferson got stiffed for a stiff.
Chickamauga Dam and Peter Palchinsky (Public Domain)
Martyred by technology run amok
On a cold night in April 1928, Stalin’s secret police knocked on the door of Peter Palchinsky’s Leningrad apartment.