As we creep up on Valentine’s Day (yes, still a couple of weeks away–don’t panic), we found ourselves writing about subjects having nothing whatsoever to do with love. Instead, it was a week about crimes, population, medicine, and lichens. Oh my. Rose Eveleth discusses what makes a copycat crime, and why defining that term matters. I […]
Month: January 2016
In the early fifteenth century, a new artistic tool spread rapidly throughout Western Europe. Single-point linear perspective – a geometric technique that involves a rectangular grid stretching toward a central vanishing point – was a coup in the quest to represent three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces. Art had never looked so realistic, and the technique was ubiquitous for […]
Yesterday: Urban Lichens, Part 1: OMG! Urban Lichens!, in which we learned that there are lichens in the city. So I’d established that lichens can, sometimes, live in cities. The next step: round up a lichenologist. On a sunny December afternoon, I met up with Manuela Dal Forno, a lichenologist. To be precise, she’s a […]
It was the big new concrete transit center that brought the lichens to town. In September, a huge new structure opened next to the metro station closest to my office. It has three levels, for buses, more buses, and taxis. It was held up by construction delays and disputes. The county and the transit authority […]
Just recently, the Chinese government ended its one-child policy, telling married couples they could reuse their nurseries one more time. It wasn’t out of the goodness of officials’ hearts. The original policy, put into effect in the late 1970s, was about demographics, an attempt to control the pull on the flailing economy. The change is still about […]
On July 31st, five women robbed a bank in Olympia, Washington. While one stood watch outside, four of them entered the bank wearing hoodies and dark stocking caps and wielding handguns. Inside, one stood guard, another called out the time in in five second intervals, while the remaining two leapt over the counter and stole […]
January 18 – 22, 2016 Pity the eastern LWONians, in fact the whole American eastern coast, tunnelling through the snow in a direction they hope is up, looking for some blue sky, some sun again. I thought maybe, yes maybe, I could do my bit for STEM education and connect up that kid who’s so […]
Behold, the majestic white cliffs. They form ghostly canyons that stretch into forbidding fog. Swallows build mud-daub nests on their walls. Falcons dive from their precipices to eat the swallows. Some say people have vanished here without trace, back during the first days of exploration. Limestone? you ask. The incised and sculpted leavings of an […]
