Early in my pregnancy, a research assistant sat down next to me in the waiting room of my doctor’s office, where I was scheduled to undergo a routine checkup. She asked me if I wanted to take part in a research study and described the study’s goals, risks and benefits. After I agreed to join […]
Month: March 2013
It started two Christmases ago. That’s when I learned that beer is the new wine. My nephew, a film student, came home from McGill expounding on the finer points of Belgian Gueuze and German Dunkelweizen. And since then, foodie-friends have all but abandoned the pleasures of the grape for the more arcane delight of hops. […]
Data mining. Maybe the term makes you think of tapping out facts out with a pickax, or of scary algorithms and programming. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With this handy guide, I’ll show you how to do (rudimentary) data mining from the comfort of your desk, no computer science degree necessary. All […]
Alex Wellerstein is an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics with an obsession about the atomic bomb and in particular, about the patents taken out on it. Patents on the atomic bomb seem odd: apparently the government wanted to be sure it owned the rights, and not the “private contractors, private scientists, […]
March 11 – 25 Abstruse Goose looks at tired, cynical teachers and BS-ing students and finds the who business depressing. If it’s ok to write about astronomers’ whose motivations were that as children, they loved stars, is it also ok to write about sex researchers whose motivations were that as teens, they had problems with […]
Warning: This post isn’t so much about penises as it is about sex. Apologies to all you Thank God It’s Penis Friday purists out there. Sex. It’s a difficult topic for grownups, but the conversation can be downright excruciating when a child is involved. (Don’t believe me? Watch this.) Perhaps because my parents were uncomfortable, […]
Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. […]
Today LWON is proud to announce a new intermittent series, ala TGIPF. Every so often our writers will choose a common trope in movies and television – something based at least loosely in science – and pick it apart. If you have any suggestions for topics, drop them into the comments or send them to @erikvance […]
