It’s crazy, this business of living on a planet. We go around and around the sun, blundering into bits of asteroids that cross our path. We burn them with our atmosphere, melt the outsides til they’re black and shiny, and catch them with the floors of our doctors’ offices. Then they get to go around and around the sun with us, maybe even – if they’re lucky – with their own unique registration number.

Hi, rock! Welcome to Earth!

UPDATE, 1/22: An online discussion on the Post’s website about this story – hosted by two people I met on this day.

Read more about the silky sifaka – that website is by Erik Patel, the main source for my story.

I’m not sure I’m quite ready to visit these friends in Liberia. It’s settled down a lot since the civil war ended in 2003, but it’s still more adventurous travel than I feel ready for right now. This article is a great read – it’s a story from the Washington Post travel section by a former aid worker who traveled across the country recently by bush taxi, motorbike, and foot.

Liberia was settled by freed slaves in the 19th century. A taste of the social dynamic, from the story:

Gentlemen!” a voice suddenly boomed from the back seat. “I am Samuel Jefferson.”

I turned to see a distinguished man of about 60, with glasses and a graying Afro. He said, a little boastfully, that his ancestors had arrived from North Carolina in 1842.

With this, a hush of respect blanketed the bush-taxi. In Liberia, slave blood is blue blood; here, saying that your ancestors picked cotton is akin to letting it casually slip in the United States that your forebears had founded Princeton.

Well, it turns out all that rain earlier in the summer was good for someone: fireflies. There’s a nice article by David Fahrenthold in today’s Washington Post about the local firefly glut. With lots of science! And amusing quotes like this from scientists:

“Some males are better than other males,” Copeland said. “And they advertise something in their flashes that says ‘My name is Joe, and I’ve got . . .’ ” Here, Copeland described part of the male body in a way rarely seen in scientific journals.

I have noticed more fireflies than usual this year – in fact, I even saw some one night in the parking lot of my apartment building, a non-firefly-friendly patch of asphalt wedged between the train lines and some kind of construction company. So, yay for rain!

Art copyright: 2009, FCIT

Here’s a Washington Post article about it. (Kari Lydersen was at the same press conference and got a different version of that quote. Hm. She’s probably right, but I’m sticking with the version in my notebook. Maybe he said it differently in his science talk.)

Then this afternoon I went to a session called “The Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice,” so I knew I was in for a good time. Jean-Claude Gascard summarized all the data. Guess what: There’s less ice. He had graph after graph showing that there’s less ice every year, and it’s thinner than it used to be, too. He’s from the Universite Pierre et  Marie Curie in Paris. His very nice French accent didn’t make the news sound any better.

The talk after his, by Paul Wassman of the University of Tromsø (yay Norway), was even more depressing. He was talking about how the Arctic may have reached a point of no return with warming. Someone asked if that’s it, if people have lost the battle. “Yes, it looks not good,” he said.

Maybe next year the climate people will follow the example of the fisheries people and start telling us good news about carbon.