In case you missed it last week, a fantastic new campaign video went viral, from the senate primary campaign of former HP executive Carly Fiorina. I’m not sure which high-profile, expensive PR firm came up with this, but it’s the kind of thing that maybe worked better on the white board:
The first two and a [...]
Archive for the ‘Nature’ category
Beware the demon sheep
Bonus playlist Wednesday: Best of 2009 edition
All 72 counties in Wisconsin are officially in a state of emergency. The National Guard is helping people off the highways. A blizzard warning is in effect until midnight tomorrow. We’re getting over a foot of the white stuff. Gusting winds, up to 50 MPH, are expected to cause some crazy-dangerous [...]
Wow
It’s important, I think, to be completely amazed from time to time. Check out this image from the Hubble telescope:
It’s a tiny patch of sky, and each point of light is another galaxy. There are 10,000 of them in this photo. You can read about the experiment that produced the photo here.
Here’s a video [...]
Wild Kingdom
If you ever go kayaking in a mangrove swamp in Thailand, here’s what could happen to you:
It turns out that the monkey who joined us was rather well-behaved, all things considered. After I posted that video on YouTube, we found a few others where the monkeys were a bit more aggressive:
You’re not supposed to feed [...]
The Beautiful Glimpsed in Unexpected Places
People give me a strange look sometimes when I tell them that I used to be a computer games programmer. The idea that a poet might have a technical background seems odd at first — in large measure because we’ve been brought up to believe that there is a great divide between the sciences and [...]
Stella and the sheepdog trials
After the excitement of the fell race, Stella arrived at the sheepdog trials.
Besides the competition, there were many other forms of entertainment, including spinning,
a farmyard petting zoo,
ice cream,
beer,
and the North West Stickmakers.
But the main attraction was the sheepdog trials.
The judges watched from a special van,
while the contestants brought the sheep from across the field and [...]
Stella and the fell race
Stella was back in Blighty in August–a month for country shows and summer sports. The tiny village of Langley hosted the Macclesfield & District Sheepdog Trials, which begins with a fell race. A fell is a hill. A fell race is a race up and down many hills. Stella cannot foresee participating in a fell [...]
In-body experience
The morning starts with a fluttery feeling in your midsection, somewhere between a stomachache and seeing the object of your junior-high crush in the hallway between classes—excited, but kind of nervous, too. Then the anxiety dissipates until it’s just a low electrical hum buzzing through your limbs, making you want to get up and [...]
