Q & A

I'm kind of insatiable with questions.  I find them far more interesting than answers.  Trouble is, you need to already know some answers in order to ask good questions.  Luckily, they feed off each other in a rolling snowball effect.  I've been stopped in my tracks by a cool answer- like a photon particle can have a wavelength several miles long.  But cool questions make me stop in my tracks and repeat the question and think about the answer and wonder why no one ever though of that question before.

I think it has to do with points of view.  Answers tell you something about a point of view that already exists.  But questions define that point of view, and can create totally new points of view.  Questions frame answers.  You can have a whole bunch of data points, but until you ask "What am I looking at?", you don't have any answers.  (Just ask Seurat.)

In my first year at BL, I've busied myself absorbing answers.  I've listened to what the Nancys, Patricia and Bill tell the hiking groups.

What's that called?


I've googled more answers on my own.
Why is it called that?
Why is the blackfoot daisy called that?  Does it have black feet (roots)?  Was there a Mr. Blackfoot?  A Chief Blackfoot?

And now, buttressed and bouyed by those answers, I'm starting to be able to ask more interesting questions.
What's the difference?
That's a yucca. That's a grass.  That's a sedge.  What makes the difference?

How does it work?
I hear at least two kinds of frogs chirping & bellowing this spring.  I imagine the chirps are from small frogs, and the bellowing from large ones.  Is that right?  And do they correspond to the big and little tadpoles I saw last spring (and expect to see soon this spring)?  (And that would explain that the big tadpoles I saw weren't small ones that had been born earlier and grown, but actually a different species, born at the same time.)

The algae growing in Dry Creek gets washed away by the rains.  This is good for Dry Creek- it brings back clear water for awhile, until the algae takes over again.  But there is no such place as "away".  It gets washed into Lake Austin.  This makes me ask - Are the small stream tributaries of a lake the major source of algae?  So the algae washed into lakes after rain thrive and are responsible for lake blooms?  Or is the algae growing in very small, shallow streams of running water a different species from that growing in lakes, which are deeper and don't flow, and so they don't thrive when they're washed into lakes?