Easier to reach than expected, but stranger, too. For years, my wife and I have wanted to visit the Racetrack in Death Valley National Park. It’s a smaller closed drainage basin, a playa, northwest of Death Valley (DV) itself. While it’s quite beautiful, it’s famous for the mysterious rocks on the playa surface with tracks showing the rocks…

Dr. Rick Johnson’s The Fat Switch, which I read in 2013, was a remarkable discussion of the mechanism by which excessive sugar consumption could cause weight and health problems that are common in our society. No one else had proposed that mechanism. Rick also introduced comparisons between humans and other…

Visiting Lake Manly, the deepest space in North America It was getting close to 10 PM on Friday, August 30th, 2021. My wife Pam and I were in the last mile of the drive to Lake Manly from Tucson, Arizona. We had gotten off late, then had a tire go…

The stairs at Makena Beach and Golf Resort on Maui threw me for a loop in September of 2012. The now demolished seven story resort had a lot of stairs, arranged in interesting patterns. My wife and I don’t use elevators if we can avoid them. I found myself getting…