Some years ago now, excellent birder and bird photographer Richard Ditch and WC co-authored a couple of articles on bird identification for bird photographers. Richard did most of the work, and made an excellent point: a bird’s bill is a good starting point for identifying the bird’s species and figuring out how the bird makes…
All of the mainstream media outlets are trumpeting the news that gravitational and electromagnetic waves have been detected from the collision of two neutron stars. Two failed black holes, solar masses of neutronium, the densest stuff in the universe, slammed into each other at relativistic speeds. It’s something you’d want to watch from a safe…
The last concert WC attended at the outdoors venue Outlaw Field it was 100° F. At the end of David Grey and Allison Krauss’s show on Sunday night, it was 37°. It’s all right, the music kept us warm. At least until WC’s bicycle ride home. Neither Gray nor Krauss is on WC’s list of…
Some years ago now, excellent birder and bird photographer Richard Ditch and WC co-authored a couple of articles on bird identification for bird photographers. Richard did most of the work, and made an excellent point: a bird’s bill is a good starting point for identifying the bird’s species and figuring out how the bird makes…
Some years ago now, excellent birder and bird photographer Richard Ditch and WC co-authored a couple of articles on bird identification for bird photographers. Richard did most of the work, and made an excellent point: a bird’s bill is a good starting point for identifying the bird’s species and figuring out how the bird makes…
Roy Moore is a defrocked Alabama supreme court justice,1 a virulent racist and a Christianist. Oh, and the likely new U.S. Senator from Alabama, replacing Jeff Sessions. Moore is also a liar, and a tax cheat. He’s a liar, because he claimed he did not take a “regular salary” from the Foundation for Moral Law, a small…
In the summer of 1967, WC worked for the Institute of Marine Science as a deck technician. The job included stringing Nansen water sampling bottles on a line. The duty station – the “hero’s platform” – stuck out from the starboard rail. In rough water, the ship would roll and anyone on the hero’s platform…
It was in the mid-1960s when the story joke went around, about passengers of a jet flight who are told, shortly after take-off, “Welcome aboard America’s first fully automated aircraft flight. Under the control of advanced computer systems, this aircraft is perfectly safe. Nothing can possibly go wrong <click> Nothing can possibly go wrong <click> Nothing…
Alaska became a state partly because of salmon. It wasn’t just the famous fight over the use of fish traps and the increasing damage the fish traps were causing to Alaska’s wild salmon runs. It was also a fight over who got to fish, Alaskans or national and international canneries. One of the first actions…
Great Horned Owls are an exceptionally widely distributed, highly variable species of owl, and one of the largest owls in the Western Hemisphere. Currently, ornithology thinks there are some 15 subspecies, and countless color morphs. This handsome lady (judging by size; females are noticeably larger) has very little brown coloration. She’s mostly grey and white,…
One of Alaska’s boondoggles is back in the news: the Mat Su Borough’s hugely expensive, still incomplete railroad to Port MacKenzie. So far, Alaska has invested more than $180 million on a railroad spur from the existing main line of the Alaska Railroad to Port MacKenzie. The money has run out with at least $125…
William Magear Tweed (1823 to1878) – Boss Tweed – was a New York politician and arguably the most corrupt man in the history of American politics, Through his control of the New York state Tammany Hall political machine, he exerted iron-fisted control over political patronage in New York City through Tammany, and his ability to ensure the loyalty of voters…
