Year: 2018

For October 17, 2018         Hi WN@TL Fans, I first heard of ‘The Wisconsin Idea’ from Prof Jim Holler, my mycology teacher at UW-Platteville, in a conversation with him in Room 303 Boebel Hall in about 1978.  He was incredulous:  had I never heard of the Wisconsin Idea, that the boundaries of the university …

For October 10, 2018         To paraphrase Ted Sorensen:   Ask not what the flu can do to you, Ask what you can do to fight the flu.   Actually, it’s a good idea to ask what the flu can do to you.  As with the age-old old-age question of “Boxers or Briefs?”, the answer …

For October 3, 2018 I can’t remember when I first heard that along with the Great War which killed some 20 million people came a Great Plague—the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919—that killed an estimated 50 million.  The pandemic was certainly part of Professor Marilyn Tufte’s bacteriology class at UW-Platteville in the spring of 1977. That was the class in …

For September 26, 2018         “Mosquitoes troublesome” is one of the most frequently-repeated phrases in the journals of Lewis & Clark.  Things have not changed much since 1804:  mosquitoes still suck. And therein lies the rub. For mosquitoes are more than trouble: they’re deadly. They carry diseases like yellow fever to humans and encephalitis …

For September 19, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, When I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois I read “Arrowsmith”, Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel dwelling on the medical research enterprise.  I was smitten by this pivotal passage early in the book. For me, there in one page were nearly all the bafflements of gradual …

For September 12, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, Plants are stuck in one place, pretty much.  Seeds & pollen & spores can move, and if you’re a roadside daylily or a chicory then corms and bulbs and roots can hitch a ride on the blade of a road grader.  But mostly plants are sessile, …

For September 5, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, My Dad taught high school history, and our shelves at home included the Time Life series on Great Ages of Man.  My internal timeline was already primed for the tomes on Mesopotamia and Egypt and Greece and Rome and all that—the kind of stuff that a good …

For August 29, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, In January 1610 Galileo turned his 20x telescope towards Jupiter and discovered  moons in orbit around Jupiter—notably, the moons were not orbiting Earth.  That was a big deal, and a dagger in the intellectual gut of the geocentric system. The discovery also is still a prime …

For August 22, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, In my hometown there’s a street called Artesian Place.  It runs down a hill called Bootlegger’s Knob and meets with River Road that runs parallel to the Rock River. Near here an artesian spring once bubbled up and flowed into the Rock. Alas, the spring was …

For August 15, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, Right after  last week’s WN@TL by Dan Young on the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection, I drove over to Monona to visit my friend Ken Smith on the occasion of this 70th birthday.  While sitting around the kitchen table, his wife Roberta asked me if I knew much about …