Yesterday our long planned three week road trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to my hometown, and then to South Carolina began. On I65 running north and south, in Indiana farmland we passed this sign prominently installed by the side of the road. The message communicated with unmistakable clarity. I was reminded…
Sunday morning is gray. There is a damp heaviness in the air. It is supposed to rain. Today if we do not receive a good rain, will some of the trees in my neighborhood, trees in my yard die? The drought has been prolonged, for most of the summer. Fall, a season of falling…
Today I purchased a vehicle. The Suzuki SX4 that has faithfully served me and afforded enjoyable driving has reach its end of service. After fourteen years and 170,000 miles, I offer my respect to the designers, engineers, and manufacturing workers at Suzuki Kabushiki-Kaisha, Hamamatsu, Japan. The product speaks eloquently for the company. Yesterday upon…
Religion, Part II. I should say more should I not? There’s always evidence around of our sense of a “greater” reality. Walking through a graveyard is the easiest way to get an idea of what is thought, or better, the nature of what some of us believe about the greater or deeper or hidden…
I suppose this is a good place to start. The Latin word means “to tie, to bind” and is related to the word religio which means “respect,” “awe,” or “sanctity” suggesting that the soul is bound to god. Well – ok. The notion that one is inherently, inevitably, innately “religious” works as long as…
I walked north along the Fox River trail from Batavia to Geneva yesterday. In my estimation this is not a long walk, about two miles round trip. I could not fail to notice how low the river is presently. Due to a lack of rain you could walk across the shallows bank to bank,…
I wonder if life would be better as a “lower” mammal, rather than as a human being? A non human mammal, without the facility of language would be equipped with efficient senses, better sight, hearing, smell along with instinct honed as a serrated blade. The mammal would not be burdened with the paradoxes of…
Could the second law of thermodynamics be the least abstract of all scientific principles? I am thinking of entropy, the arrow of time. Left to itself, a system, or a human being, or a city, a whole society, a solar system will reach a state of equilibrium. The principle was first formulated in 1824. Heat…
Many months ago it felt right to use “Plague Journal” in the title line for these posts. I assumed that fighting the virus would be a process, that the work of research with the public’s self-interested cooperation would reduce the corona virus to a minor inconvenience. A two year anniversary is approaching since our…
How to begin. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary, of the September 11th, 2001 suicide attack on the twin towers in Manhattan, on the Pentagon, and the fourth passenger jet plowing into the earth at Shanksville Pennsylvania. Four occasions of mass death were memorialized yesterday by ceremonies at the sites where they occurred. I paid…
