Back in early 2018 I was trying to drive a start-up in the ammonia synthesis business. It was one of those strange gigs in my later career that is hard to explain in hindsight, but seemed to make sense at the time. The technology we were championing was potentially earthshaking. I do not make that statement lightly. Ammonia is arguably the most consequentially important industrial chemical in human history… the case for that is strong.…
When I was just clicking into my teens and living in Maine, noted academic and author, J.R.R. Tolkien was about the age I am now. Besides being an Oxford Don (twice over), he had already written The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in the following 17 years after that. Tolkien’s Rise to popularity developed in waves with his early reception through the war years for The Hobbit thought of as a…
I used to say that my autobiography, if I ever wrote it (which I doubt I ever will since this blog is already enough about me, as they say), would either be called The Hole in My Pocket or Living XXXXLarge. I feel like the first title would still be in contention since I haven’t gotten any more frugal or less generous in my old age, but the second title is now out of contention…
As a continuation of my physical trauma of last week, I will start by declaring that after a week of my new thumb reality, I have seen some minor improvement in the strength of my left thumb, but it ain’t back to anywhere near 100%. I am using a very simple test every day to track the situation and since I do not have any strength calipers, I am using my ability to touch each…
Today we are enjoying what I would consider be a very different kind of day. Because of our train ride on the California Zephyr, we ended up in Emeryville, which is just across the Bay bridge from San Francisco nestled between Berkeley and Richmond. I’ve spent very little time in the East Bay, so I took the path of least resistance, which was to book a hotel near the train station. And because our objective…
We wound up our California Zephyr train ride yesterday by chugging through Roseville, where the largest rail yards in the western U.S. are located, and then through Sacramento (the yellow/Golden bridge seems to have been the highlight…at least from the train), and eventually down to San Pablo Bay and the northeastern part of San Francisco Bay that fronts Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland. The East Bay is very much the working side of this great bay…
I am siting in the observation car of the Amtrak California Zephyr train, hurtling along at 78mph across the barren Northern Nevada desert between Winnemucca and Reno. It’s 6:50am and I have spent the last 8 hours onboard since Salt Lake City. So far, its been an adventure. We flew up to SLC yesterday and spent the day with our dear friends Deb and Melissa, mostly just hanging out and chatting the afternoon away until…
As I keep listening to The Better Angels of Our Nature, I have been fascinated by the devolution of violence, both historically and culturally. It’s a fascinating listen/read and I will again highly recommend it to anyone who has a curiosity like mine for sociological and cultural issues and trends that both explain aspects of our universe and help me understand why the world isn’t as genteel as I wish it were…or why maybe I’m…
It’s a popular myth, or at least an oversimplification, that opposable thumbs are uniquely human and separate us from other animals. That’s simply not true. Virtually all primates have opposable thumbs…chimps, gorillas, orangutans, baboons and bonobos. Many also have opposable big toes, which humans have largely lost through evolution. Bonobos are particularly interesting in this context because they’re one of our two closest living relatives (along with chimpanzees), sharing roughly 98.7% of our DNA. Their…
During my four years of high school Latin, I’m not sure I ever ran across the name “Ranunculus”. The name is derived from the Latin word “rana,” which means “frog”. The diminutive suffix “-unculus” was added to create “ranunculus,” literally meaning “little frog.” That name was given to these flowering plants because many Ranunculus species grow in moist or wet habitats where frogs are commonly found. You may have recall that our hilltop is not…