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Charismatic Microfauna: Honey Bees
“Should Colony Collapse Disorder worsen, and we lose the bees, an engineering lab at Harvard is perfecting tiny drones, neither male nor female, that will pollinate our crops. Lamentably, the drones will gather…
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Beer Goggles vs. Rose-Colored Glasses: Optimism
“Life is a river of incalculable length, width, depth, and direction. Like the Biblical Jordan which rises in the Syrian hills before crossing the Sea of Galilee, life ultimately dribbles into the Dead…
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Tried & Found Wanton: The Language of Sex (Revisited)
“So, exactly how do humans reproduce if we don’t bifurcate, pupate, or molt? I’m glad the answer to the overwhelming question of my adolescence was not left entirely to my parents.”—Skip Eisiminger Skip…
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Music of the Spheres: The Glass Harmonica
“In Italy, Gaetano Donizetti scored the mad scene in his opera Lucia di Lammermoor for a glass harmonica, but a flutist had to be hired when no ‘ghost fiddler’ could be found.”—Skip Eisiminger…
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Cool Summers & Warm Winters: Seasons
“While Emily Dickinson found ‘a little madness in spring,’ I used to find this lunacy in the fall. Faced with a half-acre of wet leaves, many of which slid between the tines of…
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Balancing the Saddlebags: Equilibrium
“Now, enter Goldilocks on a planet that was finally just right. Observing the nearly universal presence of bilateral symmetry in the plants and animals who shared her magnificent planet, Goldilocks embarked on a…
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The Varieties of Dontopedology: Misspeaking
“In 1975, the parents of a 13-year-old girl were relaxing in New York’s Central Park, basking in the glow of a Broadway-musical matinee. In the distance, Dr. Bill Bruehl, the father, spied the…
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World Without End: Infinity & Eternity
“My high-school plane geometry teacher once told a class that only God can draw a triangle with more or less than 180 degrees. When someone asked him how God could do this, he…
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Easter Eggs & The Spheres of Spring: Political Correctness
“Ravitch had gained access to a vast glossary compiled from ‘bias guidelines issued by major educational publishers and state agencies’ for any writer preparing texts or tests for K-12 students. Presumably, with this…
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What Hath God Wrought? Email & Texting
“On the other side of the Facebook coin, there’s ‘online validation’: buying 500 ‘likes,’ for example, for $6.99. According to one validation provider in an odd effort to reassure customers, their ‘likes’ are…