You feel lousy. Some old lady sneezed on you in the subway. Now you’re achy and tired and feverish. Face it, Bud. You’ve got the flu. Better just crawl back into bed. What’s that? You have to fly to London? You’ve got an important meeting with a client? Well, I guess I can’t stop you. […]
Month: October 2010
Nature certainly works in dark, mysterious ways. A few weeks ago, we marveled here at the seemingly miraculous return of 35 million sockeye salmon to Canada’s Fraser River, after many people feared that the run was nearing extinction. As Canadians were rejoicing, however, fisheries scientists were frantically working their chalkboards, trying to figure out what on […]
Scattered around the periphery of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are upwards of 150 odd creatures called globular clusters. They’re little agglomerations of stars that are bound by gravity into a sphere and that inside it, are buzzing around like flies. They’re odd because 1) most stars come in singles or pairs, and globulars have […]
It’s the end of October—a dark time, and not only because of Halloween ghouls. Today in New York City, we won’t see the sun until 7:19am, and we’ll have to say good-bye at 6:00pm. Each passing day will be distressingly shorter than the day before, until December 21, when the sun will set at 4:31pm, […]
Q: What happened before the Big Bang? Mr. Cosmology: If I told you, God would have to kill you. Q: What is time? Mr. Cosmology: Is 9:30. Q: I just bought a telescope. Do you have any advice for a first-time sky watcher? Mr. Cosmology: What happens in Vega, stays in Vega. Q: How many […]
The Italian press recently had a field day in its coverage of the sad decline of one of Italy’s greatest tourist draws: Pompeii. In early October, a prominent Italian newspaper ran a front-page editorial on the subject, calling the crumbling Roman ruins a “symbol of all the sloppiness and inefficiencies of a country that has lost […]
The coordinate grid was laid against the sky to fix the stars and for centuries it seemed to work as planned. Recently, slowly, almost asymptotically, the grid begins to move with respect to itself — abrading, degrading — and therefore deteriorates. In fact, Declination -14 now sags along its whole length so that Declination +14 […]
Allison F. can pinpoint the exact day she fell ill. She was at work talking to her boss. “I suddenly felt like a truck hit me. I was weak, dizzy, achy, nauseous and feverish. It felt similar to the onset to the flu, but exceedingly more intense,” she writes. She went home, thinking she had […]