From olden days of secrets, lies, conspiracies, Russians spies, bad things going on in a good world, and increasing numbers of people FOIA-ing the hell out of things, I bring you the case of a science historian going about his business of looking behind walls and under rocks and finding a story called Dead Atom […]
Month: May 2019
Recently I visited Japan for the first time in more than 16 years. I lived in the southwestern city of Kumamoto from 1998 to 2000, and other than a visit in December of 2002, I’d never been back. So, on April 16, there I was, finally back in Japan, and I was happy. So happy. […]
This post originally ran March 22, 2016. But it deals with a truly timeless topic: male masturbation. Gents, are you prone to fainting fits and epilepsy? Are you lacking “balmy and vital moisture”? Do you have weakness in the penis? Has your seed spawned sickly babes that either die quickly or always complain? Then you […]
In rural central Pennsylvania, in a long narrow valley originally named Kishacoquillas, now nicknamed Big Valley, the Amish buggies are not black and grey but white and yellow. You might think these unusually bright buggies might signal a more laid-back Amish population, but it’s just the opposite: the two sects represented by the two buggy […]
Being married to an economist means many things. For one, it means losing a lot of arguments. Economists are like the physicists of the social scientists. They insist that, when you boil off everything else, their discipline is the one the perfectly describes how everything works. It also means that you get to hear a […]
When a society uses a suite of technologies that a single adult can master in his or her lifetime—building a house from scratch, farming, spinning cotton, making medicines, having babies, hunting, fishing, singing and dancing—then it is possible to attain a high level of competency in nearly every major task an adult may be called […]
Millions of years ago, there they were. Floating around, taking in the sights as much as a single-celled organism can, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, supporting the food chain—diatoms did all the things that they still do now. And then, they died. When they died, they drifted down to the bottoms of lakes and […]
Our boy, Abstruse Goose, has gone missing again. We sympathize: anyone posting anything on the regular is bound to run dry sooner or later. (The exception of course is the People of LWON.) Anyway, luckily AG has left an archive of cartoons, some of witch turn out to be timely.