You Can’t Make Up Shit This Good

Nora, over at Escape Pod, captures something remarkable about the Manhattan Project: [T]he more I learn about the Manhattan Project the more it feels like a fabricated story. Oppenheimer is said to be the father of the atomic bomb, but really he’s just the only person in the world that rolled high enough Intelligence, Wisdom …

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Endangered species grow pals – the climate change connection

While shopping recently at the Dollar Store, Nora and I came across the new frontier in climate change communication – inexpensive toys. The Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition, is apparently collectible, and was a bargain at just $1. (It’s the Dollar Store.) Its package includes this helpful background: Penguin populations have decreased by nearly …

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It’s Albuquerque. We do balloons.

There’s something endearingly goofy about hot air balloons. Which is what makes the Dark Lord, sort of puffed up and laying on his side in at dawn in an Albuquerque park, so charmingly counter-intuitive. It is the season of our city’s annual hot air ballon fiesta, nine days of a gobzillions (OK, hundreds, but literally …

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If I May Brag

In which my daughter makes an appearance in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req): Nora Heineman-Fleck, social networking liaison for the University of New Mexico and a frequent user of online networks, has learned to tailor her personal networks like Facebook to make them more useful. “I very rarely actually ‘unfriend’ people,” she says. “I usually …

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January Bird List: the Bewick’s Wren

I think of our backyard as a little ecosystem, but like most such ecosystems in our 21st century world, it’s impossible to think about them without understanding the effects of human interventions, both accidental and intentional. We’ve got a pond, a metal stock tank Lissa gave me for my 40th birthday. Cattails found their way …

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