Dave Baumler is my pepper guru. (see my previous posts on his exploits The Brave New World of Not So Hot Peppers and Peppers in History and in Your Garden ) He grows an amazing collection of peppers from around the world by starting them in his house and raising […]
Popey would be proud of us. We have had a bumper crop of spinach this spring in our second season of growing food in our greenhouse.
A lot of things happen to you when a parent dies. You may find yourself dealing with their lifetime accumulation of possessions which can give you unexpected insights into your parent’s life. As we are cleaning out Doug’s dad’s house, I keep asking myself – What the heck was he […]
Last week at the UW-Madison Weston Lecture Series, I listened to Julie Lundquist, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at University of Colorado-Boulder, explain how meteorologists are going to help usher in the age of wind. (More precisely, 20% Wind – there are some serious people […]
Have you ever heard of Dengue fever? If not, you will soon. I was reminded of it as I listened to science writer Dan Ferber talk about a book he has written with Paul R. Epstein, Associate Director of the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. […]
Where can you get the low down on climate change these days? The media seem to drop the ball right and left. TV coverage or your favorite newspaper can seem willfully blind. What can we do? Glad you asked.
Paul Murtaughis a professor of statistics at Oregon State University, and he has brought his number skills to bear on environmental issues with papers like, “The Statistical Evaluation of Ecological Indicators,” and “Performance of Several Variable-Selection Methods Applied to Real Ecological Data.” When he and M.G. Schlax published “Reproduction and […]
I just had an article published in Odyssey Magazine this month. This is a very cool, science magazine for middle school kids that I have loved for a long time. Each issue has a theme, and April’s theme is trees. I wrote a piece about how whole tree building can […]
Several of my posts lately have been short because of family health issues. One of those issues concluded last Saturday when my father-in-law succumbed to a long, wasting disease. This man was part of my life for 33 years. He was a hard man for me to like – politically […]
Do you love the first sight of snow drops or crocus or scilla? Are you watching the grass green up and watching willow branches turn yellow green? Have you got geese nesting on a pond near you? Senior citizens in Miami and Phoenix aren’t the only ones who venture north […]
Digging in the Driftless 