A few weeks ago, the Human Brain Project announced that it had been selected as a finalist in a competition whose winners will get €1 billion worth of funding from the EU. The Human Brain Project (HBP) plans to use the prize money to build a simulation of the human brain on a supercomputer. HBP […]
Month: May 2011
Late Saturday evening, I was cutting jalapeños for the salsa for the next day’s barbeque party. I had a few other things on my mind — like my bean salad, and cleaning the bathroom, and figuring out what to write for this post — and so I forgot the lesson learned the last time I […]
Tyler Hamilton has finally confessed. I am not inclined to give him another hug. In 2007, I wrote a Bicycling magazine feature about Tyler, his supporters and why I don’t believe. (You can read the story here.) While writing the Bicycling story, I spent a lot of time with Tyler and his fans. Tyler— a […]
I will never forget the last time I got serious food poisoning. I was a teenager, and my family went out to eat one sunny Saturday morning. Soon after we returned home, I was grasping the toilet bowl, retching in agony. I could still taste the omelet I had eaten for breakfast. To this day, […]
Fifty years ago today, President Kennedy, speaking before a joint session of Congress, said, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Love that “the.”
I see two problems here. Number 1 is that no squirrel ever slipped and fell off a tree. Squirrels’ understanding of gravitational physics is hard-wired and mathematically immaculate. Number 2 is with AG’s mouse-overed comment, “Not even an insatiable thirst for knowledge can compete with our innate affinity for cute fuzzy little animals.” I agree […]
As part of LWON’s first birthday celebrations, Ginny set a question for me: Your upcoming book is about experiencing time in different cultures. I can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, could you tell us which country/city/village, in your opinion, has the best conception of time? (However you’d like to define best.) In other […]
One year ago today, the People of LWON published their first post. It was by Josie Glausiusz, it was on flesh-eating algae, and we thank her for setting that tone. Writing LWON — that is, writing what we want to and in the way we want to write it — turns out to be a […]