OK, I’ll admit it. I didn’t need a new laptop.
Articles with 2003
Who gets to have the new smart pills?
“I am a little world made cunningly of elements and an angelic sprite,” wrote the poet John Donne in about the year 1609. He meant, of course, that he was a creature of matter and spirit, body and soul. Today, we would amend his lines to read: “I am a little world made cunningly of elements.” Full stop.
To see stars, let’s turn off the lights
I first became familiar with the stars on the sleeping porch of my grandmother’s house on Ninth Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the early 1940s.
The spinning Earth keeps time for us
Just back from Europe. I’ve reset my watch, turned the small hand back five hours. Reset the clock in my laptop. There’s one clock I can’t reset so quickly — the one inside my body, the tick-tocking proteins that tell my body when to wake and sleep.
Early Irish surveyors cast long shadows
On the summit of Mount Brandon, near my summer home on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, is a square concrete pillar about 4 feet high.
This mussel man is digging deep
There is no more delicious meal than a mess of saltwater mussels steamed in white wine, accompanied by a stick of just-baked French bread and a crisp green salad. And, of course, a carafe of chilled white wine.
Biodiversity thrives on the planet you
Imagine for a moment that a spacefaring crew of extraterrestrials is approaching Earth. From a distance of a thousand miles, they see a globe dappled with clouds, water, land patchy with color; no unambiguous signs of life. They speculate about whether the planet is inhabited.
Faith-based science is not really science
Now that we have been introduced to the idea of faith-based social programs and faith-based public-education (vouchers), surely it is time for the administration in Washington to make its move on faith-based science.
Viruses can help us understand ourselves
All human knowing is metaphorical.
Conclusive science is the best kind
Fifteen thousand years ago, most of northern North America was covered with a continent-spanning glacier a half-mile or more thick. The ice reached south to the valleys of the present Ohio and Missouri rivers, and extended from coast to coast.