In the summer of 1993, just weeks before bulldozers began rolling in for the largest transportation project in Boston’s history–the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel–archaeologists discovered what appeared to be two 19th century privies and a cistern along the old waterfront. Unable to come up with funding to dig them, Boston archaeologist Martin Dudek and his […]
Month: November 2010
The procedure, developed in the late ’50s, is called fecal transplantation. Those of you who watch Grey’s Anatomy will have heard of it. And, yes, it is what you think it is. A physician takes poop from one person, and then he puts it into another. Don’t worry. The recipient doesn’t have to swallow the […]
Time flies; it passes; it marches on. Time can be hard, ripe, rough or sharp. It can be saved, spent, managed. I make dinner reservations ahead of time, and push back deadlines. I look forward to Christmas in New York. My teenaged years are over (woohoo!). ‘Time’ is the most common noun in English, and all of […]
Galaxy Zoo — the citizen science project with hundreds of thousands of citizens classifying galaxies, catching supernovae, mapping the moon, finding solar storms, and so on far into the night – has sprouted a new project called Old Weather. The reason old weather is more interesting than, say, old socks, is that yesterday’s weather is […]
If you listen, you can hear them talking. Sometimes the conversation is loud and clear. In On the Heavens, Aristotle argues that the Earth has no motions. It neither orbits the Sun nor turns on an axis. Just under two thousand years later, Galileo upbraids him. In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he […]
