A few months ago I found myself south of the border working on a story for Scientific American about the glories of really small brains. When I say south of the border, I mean south of the Mexican border and when I say small brains I mean really really small brains. Like those of a […]
Month: April 2017
Emily Underwood, Friend of LWON, posted on Facebook a collection of topics from her community listserv. Lions (mountain lions) Free blue heeler Sick chicken Ann doesn’t know exactly where Emily lives but it sure isn’t Baltimore. Ann’s community listserv looks more like this. 2nd Quarterly Citizen’s Decision-Making Training (formerly known as “Shoot Don’t Shoot”) […]
I have neighbors who were also friends who have just moved away. I look at their house now and they’re not in it, it’s empty, they’re gone. I’m sad. Why should I care so much? It’s what urban America does, it moves away — stays a while, then moves somewhere else. I’m used to it. […]
April 10 – 14, 2017 The word was, DC’s famous cherry blossoms had died untimely deaths due to cold and ice. Wrong, says Helen, and proves it, sepal by sepal, petal by petal. The music behind the math in movies, says Guest Stephen Ornes, can sound just like the math: doubling back, laying down patterns, […]
In 2007, while a researcher at Oxford, astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski co-founded what would become the largest online citizen science project to date. Galaxy Zoo involved several hundred thousand volunteers pouring over images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to classify galaxies. Significant discoveries were made, dozens of journal articles published the results, and another site, […]
It was a standoff in my own living room. The stranger and I faced each other, both completely still. I could almost hear that eerie whistle from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The stranger was dressed in black. I was dressed in black yoga pants. I towered over my challenger, who was only […]
I wrote this post less than 24 hours after the U.S. presidential election. It’s been a long five months since then, but I’m still finding this metaphor useful, in work and in the rest of life. I hope you will, too. Dear readers, dear friends, As I write this, on the afternoon of November 9, 2016, […]
Let’s be real: Watching someone doing math is only slightly more exciting than watching metal corrode. That may be why we’ve never seen a naturalistic depiction of math in the movies; such a snoozer would show someone hunched over a desk or a computer for hours, maybe with a few coffee refills and bathroom breaks. […]
