Year: 2018

For March 28, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, When my wife was in the third day of her prodromal labor in delivering our first-born, when the days of pain and the nights of sleeplessness had drained her out, her doc decided to give Kristen a shot of morphine to let her rest before inducing labor. I had …

For March 21, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, On March 13, two days after the NCAA announced the brackets for the men’s basketball tournament, Tom Oates of the Wisconsin State Journal gave this advice for building a better bracket:  “Pick no seed worse than a No. 12 in the first round: Don’t touch the No. 16 seeds; they …

For March 14, 2018  Pi Day Hi WN@TL Fans, Yesterday I enjoyed a stroke of serendipity:  the latest survey from the National Science Foundation reported that in 2016 UW–Madison ranked #2 in the number of earned PhD’s awarded.  We clocked in with 823, only 4 ahead of Michigan and 26 behind the University of Texas at Austin. …

March 7, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Geographers and cartographers divide the world into northern hemisphere and southern.  The dividing line is the unseen equator.Brains are among the few other objects with hemispheres, left and right.  The dividing line is a clear cleft right down the middle. This coming week is Brain Awareness Week.  It is a …

For February 28, 2018 Starting our 13th Year Hi WN@TL Fans, I can think of only a few domesticated animals that provide us daily food without slaughter. If the squeal were a meal, we could count on the pig;  but it’s not.  Perhaps the bee and its honey, although daily collection of honey would require …

For February 21, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, One of the most impressive scientific outcomes of the Lewis & Clark Expedition was the hand-drawn, hand-annotated map William Clark made in 1810 of part of the continent of North America, especially the Missouri and Columbia River basins. That map was the bedrock for this printed version produced in 1814. Clark’s 1810 …

For February 14, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Wow.  Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday on the same day.  Celebrating the carnal on the day after Carnival. Sometimes even the most familiar stuff can surprise you. And what can be more familiar than meiosis, our reduction-division friend we all met back in high school biology? Metaphase I, Crossing Over, Anaphase …

For February 7, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, John Muir, our university’s leading light among its pantheon of drop-outs, spent much of his adult life working to save some of our nation’s most splendid places.  Among his greatest achievements was the creation in 1890 of Yosemite National Park. Yet the status of Yosemite as a national …

For January 31, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, In my next life, perhaps I’ll come back as an otolaryngologist of cranes.  Between the beak and the neck, I’d have plenty to work with. But there’s more to the health of a crane than any particular part, just as there’s more to the well-being of a flock …

For January 24, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Prometheus gave great gifts to humanity, including fire, hope, and forethought.  His generosity so pissed off Zeus that he had Prometheus chained to a rock. Every day an eagle came to dine on Prometheus’s liver and, marvelously, every night the liver grew back. It’s astonishing to me that …