Garwin: the Movie opens with an old, steady, precise hand on a computer keyboard, scrolling through now-declassified* documents. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower make announcements, and newspapers flash headlines about our splendid new hydrogen bomb. Then the blossom of a mushroom cloud unfolds; and John F. Kennedy talks about Russian missiles in Cuba; and the […]
Month: April 2014
It was a long winter in North America. The kind of winter where you think, well, that must have been the last snow storm, and then it snows three more times. It seemed like this might be the year when, Narnia-style, winter never ends. Here in Washington, we gauge spring by the cherry trees. The […]
A few years ago, I was driving back exhausted from a rock climbing trip in the mountains. My buddy Bryan Fong, was bored and feeling a little punchy. When he gets like this, he tends to bring up politically sensitive topics and starts looking for buttons to press. In this case, he honed in on […]
Traveling in the north country, the open-skied Arctic of North America, you can’t help thinking of the first people and their journey across the Bering Land Bridge to this side of the world. They would have arrived in what is now Alaska and the adjoining Yukon Territory. The landscape has not changed much in the […]
Today, we bid temporary adieu to Sally Adee, who is going on hiatus for a while. We are trying not to mourn, because she promises to return to LWON at a later date. In the meantime, it’s my pleasure to welcome Craig Childs as the newest person of LWON. I first met Craig backstage at a […]
As I’ve followed the NCAA basketball tournament (join me and some folks from Radiolab tonight, as we live tweet the final game), I’ve been thinking about the value of collegiate sports. My first experience with sports in college came as an NCAA division I cross-country runner. I lettered in cross-country at the University of Colorado […]
March 31 – April 4, 2104 Richard: “But in a way, Kepler had beat him to it. By imagining the universe from the point of view of someone on the Moon, he’d discovered a new planet: Earth.” Guest Stephen Ornes: “The theorems, proofs, and equations of mathematics are Big Ideas distilled to their naked cores. […]
As a literate but functionally innumerate person, I hate AG’s title. I think it’s dumb and silly. But I thoroughly get why he feels the way he does about that equation. Really. What an odd pattern. Why would it happen? Would figuring out why it happened help you understand anything else? No? You couldn’t even […]
