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The Irish Calendar

The Irish Calendar And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night of our solemnities.   — Willam Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream We recently explored the differences between the typical, astronomical reckoning of seasons and the meteorological method. The former employs celestial geometry cues, while the latter depends on average […]

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Shivanasamudra Falls

Shivanasamudra Falls Though we’re big proponents of experiencing the outdoors in all seasons, most people go through stretches when they cannot travel or don’t have the time to be in nature. In these spells, encountering the beauty of the physical world virtually can benefit one’s mental health or take the edge off of bubbling wanderlust.

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Small Brains & Gunshots

Small Brains & Gunshots Some critters have all the luck. The platypus might be the strangest animal on the planet, or, at least, possess the highest number of bizarre traits. But the duckbill doesn’t have a monopoly on interesting attributes. In the project’s early days, we investigated the snapping shrimp, also known as the pistol shrimp. This Lynchian

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The website logo, featuring a string of black mountains, capped in snow, with a setting sun behind the range. The title "The Mountains Are Calling" across the bottom.

Seasonal Lag

Seasonal Lag In the previous article, we learned multiple ways exist to demarcate seasons on Earth. The traditional method of observing the change from one season to the next depends on the interplay between our planet’s axial tilt and the sun. One of the interesting aspects of this method presents at the solstices. The longest day

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The website logo, featuring a string of black mountains, capped in snow, with a setting sun behind the range. The title "The Mountains Are Calling" across the bottom.

Leap Day

Leap Day The rarest date on the calendar is February 29. If we assume all days of the year are just as likely birthdates, a human has a 1 in 4,161 chance to enter Earth on leap day. That’s about 0.07% of the population, which would mean approximately 232,000 Americans were born on 29 February. Why

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Odysseus

Odysseus Few literary characters rise to a level of timelessness in which their stories survive millennia. Still, fewer characters see their names become eponyms folded into multiple languages. One such gargantuan of the page is Homer’s Odysseus. If you’re into the Romans or the Irish, you might know him better as Ulysses. Though the champion

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The website logo, featuring a string of black mountains, capped in snow, with a setting sun behind the range. The title "The Mountains Are Calling" across the bottom.

Nature FOMO

Nature FOMO As hard as it is to believe, the era of social media is already 20 years old. Life before (the)Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and MySpace seems a distant past. Two decades is more than enough to have shown us that the technology is a mixed bag. It has an undeniable allure and

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Pico de Orizaba – Mexico’s High Point

Pico de Orizaba – Mexico’s High Point Mexico does not often garner the reputation of a nation with a lot of mountainous splendor. The sandy biomes – deserts and beaches – yes. Soaring peaks – not so much. As we learned when Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston visited the Sierra Madre, however, perhaps that non-mountainous stature

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