Hi there.
We’re Robert Krulwich and Aatish Bhatia, and this is our little patch of the web, which we’re calling “Noticing”. It’s for folks who like to look around. Who can’t not. Who find it hard to get anywhere on time because there’s always something — an oddly behaving raindrop (is it going up? How can it go up?) — that we can’t not notice, not puzzle over. That’s us. Badly over-puzzled.
Plus, we’ve discovered we love puzzling together. We don’t know a lot. And what Aatish knows best (physics, math, geeky meanderings) and what Robert knows best (storytelling, imagining, giggling) are not the same, but it turns out our minds are strangely complementary. And once we start, we expect to pull in other noticers (which by definition includes YOU — we don’t know how you got here, but you must have noticed something to lead you down a crooked path to this obscure corner of the web, so hey, welcome! You’ve already got what it takes.)
So here’s our notion. Each time up we’re going to take you on a journey, one that starts with an observation, something curious, something odd, something that caught our eye and made us go “hmmmm…” And then, the two of us will bump along through the “Woah”s and “Huh?”s, all the way round, if it’s a really good day, to an ”Aha!”
On some days.
But however it goes, we’re glad you’ve found “Noticing” and we’re oh so happy to have you along in this journey to look closely, to delight, and even to obsess about the little things that sometimes, if you stay on their trail and are willing to go where they lead you, can take you to wonderfully big places. Like, for example, our opening story, which begins with a totally naked man standing alone in a subfreezing Tennessee forest. Why, you ask? Well… that’s how this puzzler starts. You’ll find it here.
