I was drilling titanium in my basement when my wife called me up to see what the grackles in our sycamore were complaining about. I barely had time to grab my camera and get a snapshot before he gave up on his latest kill, a pigeon lying in the street.…
A friend from Kentucky recently sent me this local newspaper column about the soon-to-be-opened Creation Museum in Covington, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio). This museum aims to counteract the secular lies about how old the Earth really is, and to show that only the Bible has a…
The first years of living in a new home are filled with surprises. Our new home in the burbs (I had to go, the family went first!) has a large wooden deck in the backyard. Large wooden decks are fun for outdoor dining, entertaining, repairs, power washing, staining, sealing, AND carpenter bees. The bees are big and sound like low flying helicopters.
Carpenter bees bore into the wood, create tunnels where they make more carpenter bees and then more tunnels and more bees, you get my drift? Carpenter bees are the size of golf balls and very aggressive in posture (although none of us has been stung by one yet). The bees buzz at you about a foot or less away and follow you as you flee until some as yet undetermined distance is traveled away from where they first confronted you.
Needless to say, the kids are afraid of the bees and won’t play in the backyard. I sprayed the bees with water from my high powered nozzle on my hose. Unlike honeybees which die from too much exposure to water, carpenter bees drink the stuff up and zip by the spray to let you know they are still around.
Next, I put out lots more birdseed to draw more birds to my deck area. I hoped birds were natural predators of the bees and would decimate their population. I looked up what might eat a carpenter bee and seeded the deck according to the directions on the back …
A significant difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the innate ability to abstract ideas. That is, we can manipulate symbols as though they were things. We do this so well that most people are unaware that the symbols aren't actually the things they represent. If…
Those who have followed discussions concerning religious belief & non-belief know that it's never safe to say you've seen it all. Surprising and worthwhile new positions come along at predictably unpredictable intervals. Biologist Lewis Wolpert has now entered the fray with a new book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, reviewed…