Archive for November, 2010

Looking For Rarities In The Darkening Days: Guest Blog By Nick Rhodehamel

Was Kepler a bad mathematician? He apparently made lots of computational errors. What aids he used in his ciphering I don’t know. Sliderules were available in his day, but there were not even HP programmable pocket calculators and certainly no supercomputers, so it was all paper and pencil stuff. In fairness, his mind was surely […]

Slugging It Out: Guest Blog By Nick Rhodehamel

It’s probably imagination, but it seems that most snail or slug attacks occur after a recalcitrant seed has finally germinated or a weak plant is showing signs of vigor. Everyone who’s ever had a garden is well aware of the damage snails and slugs wreak. They can be incredibly destructive, decimating rows of seedlings, disfiguring […]

Mithraism: A Good Time

Three friends of forty years standing get together about twice every decade. This has been my experience. We met in our teens—boarding school and first year of college—and are now squarely in middle age. Boarding school is either a benign or toxic form of neglect, but neglect in any case. This has little to do […]