The cliché, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, creates a conundrum. You go to a bookstore (no, not surfing Amazon) and pick up a book with an appealing mountain scene on the cover. It looks interesting since you are a naturalist and love to camp. You’ve never heard of the author. You compare [...]
Last night I saw Aquarius, a Brazilian-French film about an elderly lady, Clara, who wouldn’t sell her apartment to developers, even though every other apartment in the building had been sold. There were no occupants left and the building was decaying. The developers tried every trick to get her out, but she stood firm. She [...]
Last week I went to the NIH, where I did research for over 40 years, to retrieve a bunch of my books to bring home. I put them in a duffle bag, which turned out to be very heavy, and dragged the bag down from the ninth floor of building 10, the hospital. I put [...]
Halloween is about ghosts and goblins and scary sounds of spooky beings in dim corners. There’s a movement to Halloween: skeletons are alive and goblins pop up in the shadows, as the kids hop around their neighborhoods in funny costumes collecting candy. Some older teenagers get in on the action too. “Trick or treat,” they [...]
This butterfly on display at the botanical gardens of Asheville, N.C. is constructed out of 60,549 Lego pieces. Here’s irony worthy of thought: there’s truth in numbers. Really? Maybe. We consider numbers objective – 8 is 8, not 7 or 9 – an expression of reality, a substitute for making our relative [...]
Like millions of people, I watched the Trump/Clinton presidential debate the other night. I learned very little new, but was happy to see, in my opinion, boorish Trump scrunched in every category, starting from the first sentence when he asked permission to call Clinton Madame Secretary to his last-incoherent rant about trade as an answer [...]
