A few years ago I had the immense pleasure of visiting the Louvre, tempered only by the immense annoyance that the choir I was touring with had to be somewhere else that afternoon, leaving us with a grand total of 45 minutes to spend in the world’s most famous art museum. Among the few paintings …
Category: Blog
Aquarius
We’ve heard a lot recently about the Russian space station Mir and the new International Space Station. But most people don’t know about a third station designed to allow humans to live and work in a hostile environment–not space, but the sea. It’s called Aquarius, and recently a team of six “aquanauts” completed an eight-day …
Casting bronze
Recently, the MacKenzie Art Gallery has been offering “Twilight Tours” conducted by local artists. We visited Vic Cicansky’s studio, Joe Fafard’s foundry in Pense, and even toured back lanes with Wilf Perrault. Of all the tours, I found the one to Fafard’s foundry most fascinating, because it shed some light on one of the oldest …
The science of the midway
I realized early on that I was never going to have as much fun at the midway as some people do. I was seven years old, and the county fair had come to Tulia, Texas. The tiny midway only had a half-dozen rides, but I rode them all. Then, on the way home, I threw …
Fruit
just came back from a vacation that included a brief stay in the Okanagan. Among the treasures from that visit were two containers of delicious fresh apricots and cherries, courtesy of a friend who owns an orchard near Oliver. The amount of fruit produced by the trees of the Okanagan Valley alone is staggering: everywhere …
Con-Version XV
I just returned from a conference where the topics discussed ranged from the discovery of feathered dinosaurs to the Mars Sojourner mission to artificial intelligence. Presenters included Dr. Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Bridget Landry of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a micropaleontologist from the University of Saskatchewan, a medical doctor, a linguist and …
Forest fires
As a kid, I read lots of stories in the “Bambi” genre, tales of young creatures growing up in the forest. All those books seemed to feature a forest fire at some point, which terrified both their animal heroes and me. With people living in and exploiting forests more and more, forest fires have begun …
The science of summer
Ah, the lazy, hazy days of summer. Time to kick back, relax, and ponder the big questions, the ones humans have asked themselves from time immemorial. Questions such as… What causes sunburn and tanning? Red skin is inflamed skin, and inflammation is the body’s effort to speed the healing of damaged tissue by rushing …
Black smokers
Deep beneath the oceans, continental plates grind together. Sea water seeps into the ocean floor, contacts superheated rock and roars back out through hydrothermal vents. Surrounding those vents, darkness, pressure, poison gas and heavy metal, acidity and temperatures ranging from freezing to hot enough to melt lead create a zone that would instantly kill most …
Sunscreens
Considering our winters, it’s not surprising we love the summer sun. Unfortunately, too much sun isn’t good for us: the thinning ozone layer is letting in more ultraviolet radiation than it used to, and as a result, skin cancer is on the increase. That unhappy fact has made sunscreens, concoctions that keep ultraviolet radiation …
Bridges
On June 6, 4,000 people walked across the Northumberland Strait from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island. No, it wasn’t a miracle: it was a celebration of the first anniversary of the 12.9-kilometre Confederation Bridge, one of the longest multi-span bridges in the world. Impressive though it is, Confederation Bridge is really just a modern …
Nuclear testing
With the explosion of “nuclear devices” (aka “bombs”) in the past couple of weeks, India and Pakistan have joined the “nuclear club,” and also, alas. brought nuclear weapons into the forefront of the news for the first time in years. So perhaps it’s time for a little refresher course on just how a nuclear bomb …
My latest live walk and vlog
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