Like a Moth to a Flame Thus hath the candle singed the moth. –Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice Many of the oldest similes and metaphors feature an elemental timelessness. The notion of “a moth to a flame” connects us to our ancestors around fire rings before the advent of artificial light. Watching an insect inexorably drawn to […]
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Snowshoes Central Ohio, where I grew up, traditionally received a good amount of snow each year. The area did not garner as much as zones on the Great Lakes or farther north, but it snowed much more than locations just a few hours south. In Cincinnati, an inch of snow might shut down the city
Ginny On 30 July 2020, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V launch vehicle lifted off from SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral. Aboard this rocket was a payload with a special destination: Mars. After more than 29 weeks in space, on 18 February 2021, the rover named Perseverance touched down in a crater on the red planet. Nicknamed Percy,
Timeline of the Far Future This article features the first new content for this project after its fourth birthday. Anniversaries inherently elicit exercises in tense: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? I tried to envision what an episode of The Mountains Are Calling might look like in a year or five.
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Hair Ice/Frost Beard Documentarian Ken Burns called the National Parks “America’s Best Idea.” The splendor conserved within the boundaries of the park system features some of the planet’s greatest scenery. The humans who serve within the National Park Service also deserve plaudits. They oversee the pragmatics of the units and contain a wealth of knowledge to share
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The Walking Sticks of Ball’s Pyramid Today’s topic might win an award for the most misleading title. Given our penchant for hiking, one might surmise we’ll explore a special cane used on trails to a majestic pyramid crafted by humans (or aliens, amirite?) to look like a sphere. I’m not exactly sure how a spherical
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The Whitest White We learned the Blackest Black has some incredible applications, beyond turning objects into mind-melting black holes. A substance that can absorb nearly all the light that hits it can work marvels on telescopes or solar cells. The secret to carbon nanotubes – the structures that make the serious blacks possible – is to bounce
Eigengrau Close your eyes. What color do you see? Disregard any of the artifacts that linger from light sources that impacted your eyes before you closed them. Those kaleidoscopic blobs are fascinating, but they’re not what we’re after here. They should fade relatively quickly. Some people experience these light shows all the time, thanks
The Blackest Black Color is a prismatic subject, if we can strain an adjective to its limits. Are black and white colors? Open your box of crayons; white and black will likely nestle in the neat rows. So, they’re colors, right? In physical optics, however, black and white are not treated as colors. Check a
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