Oregon State University memoirs
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. Kilgore Trout -Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, Ch 1.
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. -Charles DarwinEvolutionary zinger: Bats, moths and mites
When Fred Rickson taught his section of General Biology at Oregon State, I made sure to attend all of his lectures, as he opened them with his evolutionary zingers, hoping that his students would would be enticed to be more prompt than usual. My favorite was his zinger about the three-way symbiotic relationship between a bat, a moth, and a mite.Evolutionary zinger: Ants and acacia trees
I treasure the science education I obtained at Oregon State University. One standout class was General Biology, a portion of which was taught by professor Fred Rickson. He did not like people slipping in late, so he gave short teasers promptly at the start of the hour, which he entitled evolutionary zingers, hoping that his students would enjoy the stories sufficiently to show up on time. It definitely worked for me. I was not in the habit of attending a lot of lectures, but the intricate stories of complex life told by professor Rickson were as attractive to me as nectar "fountains" are to acacia ants, the subject of one of his zingers.Book review, Title Flora of the Pacific Northwest, Author C. Hitchcock, A. Cronquist, Rating 4.0,
Flora of the Pacific Northwest
C. Hitchcock, A. Cronquist
Book review
Of ovules and ovaries
Flora of the Pacific Northwest is an excellent dichotomous key of indigenous regional flora. It served as one of my texts for a college class in Systematic Botany, which I feared would be deathly dull, and so proved the lectures, but the laboratory unexpectedly turned out to be a rewarding journey exploring the world without and the world within.
Thanks to my favorite professor, Dr. Kenneth Krane
I recently stumbled across the path of my favorite professor from my college years, Dr. Kenneth Krane, after lo these many years; he was describing his approach to writing Physics textbooks. I was happy to discover that he has been given awards for teaching excellence, and has written textbooks of his own. In particular, he was invited by the authors of the best general physics textbook, Halliday and Resnick, to co-author their extended version of General Physics so as to include those topics of modern physics that he taught me so long ago; this version is also held in high regard.
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