Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to watch what they said. @AnnFinkbeiner: Do NSA people really need that much reminding? They’re not reminded, they run around singing like birds? @father_kipz: To be honest, humans are social animals and easy to hack. The constant reminders probably do […]
Month: June 2018
A man and his well-traveled family came by the house the other night, friends of friends needing a place to stay. He was a gray-bearded mountain climber, tall plank of a man 70 years old, one eye squinting, the other permanently closed from some accident in his youth that I didn’t ask about. He came […]
June 4 – 8, 2018 What with skepticism, inability to write, being wrong about stuff, and beautiful digressions into tying shoes and power outages, this week seems quintessentially LWONian. LOSE WEIGHT FAST! BY FASTING! Restrict your calorie intake to 500 per day! You’ll be slender and willowy and extraordinarily attractive! But, says Cassie, probably not! […]
Ok, I thought, I’m an astro writer, I got this. For one thing, you wouldn’t use astroseismology to look at the pulses of a pulsating white dwarf: pulses are relatively long, astroseismology looks for little jitters. For another, AG spelled it “asteroseismology,” laughably wrong. After further investigation, the astro writer learns a lesson: never second-guess […]
The hail was the first thing to wake me up. First a light patter, like pennies falling off the counter and onto the floor, but then it got worse. Thunk. It sounded like someone had thrown a rock at my window. For a second I thought it might shatter, spilling wind and rain into my […]
I usually avoid talking to people at the gym. But a few weeks ago, the man next to me had his shoes untied, and I couldn’t help myself. The laces were bright red, and extremely long. He was doing side steps that looked like they had high trip potential. And I was extra-sensitive to falls […]
This story was originally published in 2013. Since then, evidence for the benefits of fasting has mounted. See here, here, and here. But so many questions still remain. What is clear? Dieting is hard. For example, this study, which examined an every-other-day-fast regimen and a more traditional calorie-restriction diet, lost 31% of its participants. […]
