It never fails. Whenever we have any fruit in the house, not five minutes following the missus pouring herself a glass of her favorite pinot, I hear her utter a mild oath under her breath and notice that she’s playing lifeguard to a floundering Drosophila melanogaster. “Why do these things have to exist?” she exasperatedly exclaims […]
The first time I saw a firefly I was stopped dead in my tracks by it. The sudden appearance of this small glowing ember hovering before me as I walked along a forest path made me momentarily suspect that there might indeed be faeries in the world (not saying that there still might not be…).
For those who like a bit of fun with their education, I am delighted to report on a recently arrived book that melds very clever, lovely imagery with a remarkable collection of information on the history of botanical history: the Explorers’ Botanical Notebook: In the Footsteps of Theophrastus, Marco Polo, Linnaeus, Flinders, Darwin, Speke and Hooker from Firefly Books.
Despite years with Leupold developing sports optics for bird watching and other terrestrial pursuits, prior to my taking over the product portfolio of binoculars and spotting scopes for Celestron, it never occurred to me that anyone would use binoculars in astronomy. Yet there they were; massive Porro prism models with enormous objective lenses and magnification levels far beyond what could be steadily held merely by hand.