Year: 2018

For August 8, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, In Fall 1977 I took Professor Harold Willis’s course in entomology at UW-Platteville.  It was a lecture/lab class, but Dr. Willis also required each of us to gather, pin, label and identify a collection of insects.  So off to the fields and ravines and rivers of …

For August 1, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, In February 1994 I moved in to 210 Campbell Street, about four blocks south of the UW campus and three blocks north of Henry Vilas Zoo.  It’s next to 216 Campbell Street.  I found out later that 216 Campbell is where Governor Doyle grew up.  It’s …

For July 25, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, Biochemists get to work with at least four types of polymers:  proteins, carbohydrates (eg, starch, cellulose), lipids (eg, long chain fatty acids), and nucleic acids. Figuring out the order of the different monomers—the building blocks—of the polymer is a big deal.  It’s like to learning to …

For July 18, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, It is High Summer.  We drive through betasseled corn canyons and past wheat fields ready for the combine or spotted with golden bales worthy of Rumpelstiltskin.  The alfalfa is busy working up the next cutting.  Our cups runneth over in bucolic gemutlichkeit.  It could be a good …

For July 11, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, My personal sample size is pretty small—two kids of my own, plus about a dozen nieces and nephews I’ve known since they were born—so I will stake no claims to deep insights into this week’s topic:  the emotional world of infants. I will venture to say …

For July 4, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, This week, for the 4th of July: a hiatus, a break, a pause.  WN@TL goes dark on a day when little towns all over the country light up the night as these United States of America celebrate the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence and its dedicated proposition that all men …

For June 27, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Madison is about 850 miles from the closest salt water—the Inner Harbor at Baltimore—and about 1000 miles from the warm sea water of the Gulf of Mexico.  So one might expect that hurricanes play little parts in our lives. And yet, in August 1992 I was in Tadoussac, …

For June 20, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, As I mentioned two weeks ago, the story of my hometown is driven in no small part by the changing tides of energy production.  Dixon was founded in 1828 as a ferry across the Rock River on the wagon road between Peoria on the Illinois River and Galena on the …

For June 13, 2018       Hi WN@TL Fans, I don’t know how many trees were in the Garden of Eden, but for me the two with names — the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life — have long been icons of the scientific enterprise.  To learn to discern between Good …

For June 6, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, I grew up at 118 College Avenue in Dixon, Illinois, two blocks south of Commonwealth Edison’s coal-burning electric power plant on the Rock River.   A spur of the Illinois Central Railroad brought the coal by the carload and heaped a huge black pile along the river. My Mom …