Browsing the archives for the symbol tag
My mother sent me a link to a fascinating Scientific American article about zoologist Emily Baird’s research on dung beetles. Egyptologists give these poo-pushing champions the more dignified name of “scarab,” after an ancient Greek word for beetle. Dr. Baird’s specialty is insect vision, flight and navigation (see her profile at Lund University). She wrote her thesis [...]
A Time magazine article this week notes that traditional ink-and-paper paper books are seeing a surprising spike in sales this year, as they did last year, despite the meteoric rise in popularity of ebook readers. The article flails for causes: “The holiday spike may reflect this year’s partial lifting of economic gloominess.” If that’s true, why was there one [...]
The Shoe Tree is dead. Long live the Shoe Tree. I learned about Nevada’s Shoe Tree on the “Loneliest Road in the World” from a touching article in the Los Angeles Times. In December 2010, this modern-day sacred tree was cut down by vandals with a chainsaw, after serving as a curious and cryptic symbol in [...]
The Cornucopia, or Horn of Plenty, is actually the horn of the goat Amalthea, the nurse of baby Zeus in Greek mythology. Zeus, ruler of the Greek pantheon, had a rough upbringing. His father Cronos knew that a son was destined to depose him, just as he had deposed (and castrated!) his father Ouranos. Cronos, [...]