Yes it is weird – Donald Trump discusses Kamala Harris’ looks! “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands...

Continue reading

Last week the Wall Street Journal were first to report that the US Department of Energy, Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, had produced a classified report concluding with “low confidence” that the Covid virus most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China. FBI had earlier come to the same conclusion with “moderate confidence”, while...

Continue reading

I wrote this blog for the Nature Nanaimo newsletter published July 10, 2022. This is a slightly modified version. Photo Neil McDaniel, https://blueocean.net/glass-sponge-reefs-living-fossils-found-off-canadian-coast/ An excellent article by Sheila Byers about the unique glass sponge reefs that occur in the Salish Sea and the Hecate Strait appeared in the spring 2022 of BC Nature Magazine, and...

Continue reading

A blog about senses. Doesn’t that look good? It was a meal I ordered in Port Hardy a few years ago. It looked good, and it tasted good. To determine that, you would use four of your five senses. We mostly take our senses for granted as we grow up. Once in a while I have given some thought in passing about how much more difficult life would be if I lost my sight or…

Continue reading

Photography used to be a rather hit and miss affair for several reasons. When I first started trying my hand at photography, skill requirements were light years more demanding than with today’s digital cameras. An average iPhone today takes better general photographs than many of the SLR’s I used as a teenager. Back then, the number of times I received developed photographs that were all under- or over-exposed, or out of focus is something I…

Continue reading

In these Covid times, I get what little inspiration I can muster from reading books. I admire the skill of authors who dive deep into old documents to find information for their stories. Most of what I read is non-fiction, so the information I gain is either directly from quotes by someone from a letter or other written document, but more often a mix of quoted text and the author’s interpretation of what happened. Natural…

Continue reading

Linnea borealis, the twin flower which Carolus Linnaeus named for himself, apparently. Reading is a good pastime during the isolation most of us experience due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Recently I have been reading books that grapple with evolution, the species concept, and the naming of species (I also have read about wolves and cougars, making me much more attentive when in the great outdoors). As a student, I always thought of a species as…

Continue reading

A book review “There’s an important distinction between management of wildlife and management for wildlife” Paul Paquet I have long had a strong interest in wolves and consider myself fairly knowledgeable about them. I have read a lot about wolves, starting with L. David Mech’s “The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species”, which at the time (1970’s) was probably the definitive work on these fascinating animals. I also wrote a term paper…

Continue reading

“In the last few years, a number of studies and books…. have suggested that luck and opportunity may play a far greater role than we ever realized, across a number of fields, including financial trading, business, sports, art, music, literature, and science.” Scott Barry KaufmannBy Joe Papp – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26473455 I recently read an article by Scott Barry Kaufmann discussing “The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than…

Continue reading