Month: March 2018

The Danish Poet (Short) – Torill Kove – 2006

Winner of the 2007 Oscar® for Best Short Animation Can we trace the chain of events that leads to our own birth? Is our existence just coincidence? Do little things matter? The narrator (Liv Ullmann) of The Danish Poet considers these questions as we follow Kasper, a poet whose creative well has run dry, on…… Continue reading The Danish Poet (Short) – Torill Kove – 2006

How South Africa’s Wine Industry Plans to Survive the Water Crisis – Brendan Lowe

From the article:South Africa’s Cape Winelands are limping through the third year of a drought whose severity is estimated to occur only once in 311 years. Experts expect vineyard yields in parts of the region to be reduced by as much as 50 percent. But at Paul Cluver Wines, a 2,000-hectare estate in the Elgin Valley,…… Continue reading How South Africa’s Wine Industry Plans to Survive the Water Crisis – Brendan Lowe

One Town, Four Elements – Tom Scott

There’s a small town in Sweden that has not one, not two, not three, but four elements named after it. Those elements–yttrium(Y), terbium (Tb), erbium (Er), and ytterbium (Yb)–were discovered by part-time chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius in the gadolinite, a black stone that’s also referred to as ytterbite, in Ytterby Mine on the Stockholm archipelago. From wikipedia:In addition, three other lanthanides, holmium (Ho, named after Stockholm), thulium (Tm, named after Thule, a mythic analog of Scandinavia), and gadolinium (Gd, after the…… Continue reading One Town, Four Elements – Tom Scott

My Mom’s Favorite Geologic Feature – Transgressive Regressive Cycles

My mom was also a geologist – I have a lot of memories as a kid of her pointing out different features in the land around us, though I didn’t appreciate it very much when we would stop somewhere on vacation to pick up rocks.  How times have changed!What are Transgressive Regressive Cycles?When a river…… Continue reading My Mom’s Favorite Geologic Feature – Transgressive Regressive Cycles

How the student activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High demonstrate the power of a comprehensive education – Dahlia Lithwick

As someone who received an above average education, I know that everyone deserves the same opportunity.From the article:Part of the reason the Stoneman Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to the fact that they are in a school system that boasts, for example, of a “system-wide debate program that…… Continue reading How the student activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High demonstrate the power of a comprehensive education – Dahlia Lithwick