An Appetite For Wonder. Richard Dawkins. Ecco Press. 2013. $25 Had I been the publisher, I might have suggested the title, “A Career in Science was a Foregone Conclusion.” Or, perhaps, “How My Genes Forced Me Into Evolutionary Biology.” Either would have been a more appropriate title and truer to the author’s own admissions. “I’m…
Needless to say, the weather this weekend proved beyond any shadow of doubt to be dangerous, destructive, and deadly. On Saturday, I spent some time and put together an animated GIF to demonstrate how we could see the potential for bad weather developing. The animation is a collection of ten gifs I downloaded from weather.unisys.com.…
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy; by Kip Thorne; Norton Press; Paperback; $19 I’ve read so many books on black holes, space-time warps, wormholes, the universe, membranes, event horizons, riders on trains looking at stationary candles, people on platforms looking at moving candles, red-shift, blue-shift, Doppler shift, and the like, I think I’ve…
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust to Living Planet; by Robert Hazen. 2012. Viking Books. $28. The first post/book review I failed to provide any maps. And, there are lots of maps I could have posted. Many places around on our planet illustrate the changes our planet has undergone in…
The Story of Earth, by Robert M. Hazen. Viking Press. Hardback. $28 I’m writing this review early. I think it is important I do so. I learned something almost immediately, within the Introduction, in fact. Not even did I reach the first chapter before I realized how ignorant I have allowed myself to become. And,…
Voodoo River. Robert Crais. Hyperion Paperback. Suspense. 1995. $8 I use a combination of tape flags and mechanical pencil to take notes in the margins when I read. I read crime/suspense novels for fun (and no profit, other than my own benefit), and to help people realize the geography they are being exposed to in…
One of the over-arching themes of weather and climate surrounds “when” weather happens. “When” means morning, afternoon, evening. “When” also means the season, referred to at times as “seasonality.” The United States, east of the Rocky Mountains, has been in “tornado season” since March. Tornadoes can occur year-round in the United States but they become…
One of my favorite weather resource web sites is Unisys Weather (weather.unisys.com). I’ll explain why. First, below is a current weather map for North America. If you examine the color bar at the bottom, you’ll notice a color gradient from black (-100dBZ) to light blue (250dBZ). The color is based on the energy returned to…
Bow Echo Thunderstorm systems are exciting :^) This is a screenshot taken on an iPad using the Intellicast app and which I have annotated using Paint.Net. Bow Echo thunderstorm systems for quickly and move fast. They form from large differences in pressure between the surface and winds aloft creating wind shear. Bow Echo thunderstorms can…
Technology use in the classroom, whether for K-12 or Higher Education, should not be the exception but the rule. I should point out technology should never replace good, solid teaching or the promotion of good, solid skills, such as working math problems using pencil and paper, or writing using pen and ink. Certain fundamental skills…
Constant Geography 
You must be logged in to post a comment.