Midlife Meditation

There are two talks every parent dreads having with his or her young adult children. The first--the "where babies and STDs come from, and how to prevent those things from happening" talk--really only needs one good, awkward run through, and frequently that's just to confirm what you've always suspected, namely that your kid knows plenty about penises, vaginas, intercourse, procreation, sexually transmitted diseases, and the pros and cons of all the various prevention methods. The second talk is the one that really matters. It's also the one you're going to have to repeat over and over again, possibly as long as you and your child are both taking up space on the planet. It's about breaking up. I recently attained a milestone in my life as both a parent and step-parent: all my kids have been through breakups. They've managed it with varying degrees of success. Sometimes they've been the dumpers, sometimes the dumpees. They've manifes...

I called this "Madonna of the Mutant Broccoli" when I posted it on Facebook, but those two bizarre vegetables are, in fact, romanesco. They're striking natural examples of fractal design, made up of patterns that repeat down to a very small level--though in romanesco the pattern doesn't extend into the micro-range. After spotting them at the farmers' market, Amy had a vegetable crush on romanesco for a couple of weeks. And then she had her fill. But they (and she) are something to behold! I just looked up chaos theory, something I first heard about in the original Jurassic Park movie, only to find out I was completely wrong about what it is. Please don't ask me to define the real thing; I would need far better mathematical credentials than my miserable showing in freshman calculus 34 years ago to have a shot at it. As best I can determine, chaos theory is about how estimates at the data level lead to apparently random results at the other end of a calcul...