Twitter, 11/15/2021, 7:42 a.m. [Time zone? Who knows.] A German satellite watcher says Russia hit one of its own old spy satellites, Kosmos 1408, with a missile and blew it to bits. I wanted to say “blew it out of the sky” but the satellite was of course in orbit so the exploded bits don’t […]
Month: November 2021
My daughter had her braces removed a couple of weeks ago. This was a big occasion for her and to mark it I told her she could have whatever heretofore verboten food she wanted. She asked for gum—her first in about two years. I handed her the pack when she came out of the orthodontist’s […]
In 2019, some science writer friends and I took a trip to Whidbey Island, just north of Seattle. I spent the drive there bargaining with my chronic illness, calculating how much I’d be able to do, and how much I’d have to miss. My need to survive grated against my need to actually live, as it […]
For as long as I’ve known her, my best friend has written a poem each day and then sent it out into the world. For more than a dozen years, she wrote a daily poem. On the day her teenage son ended his life, she stopped. I’d grown accustomed to opening Rosemerry’s poems in my […]
Artificial Intelligence historian Pamela McCorduck has died. Author of Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence and other seminal works, I had a request in to interview her for a number of projects but never heard back. Now I know why. In a pitch for a Netflix show, […]
I finally finished Anna Karenina, which means I now understand how gentleman farmer Konstantin Levin felt when, after spending far too much time thinking about farming, he finally just grabs a scythe and starts mowing hay, real hay! That, gentle reader, is how I felt last week when I talked to Leif Nelson, senior author of […]
The last time I wrote for this blog, I mentioned the black walnut close to my window. It wasn’t the closest tree to my apartment – that’s a catalpa that grows long beans and screens the morning light for me – but it was the second closest, and the walnuttiest. I wrote: I just recently […]
This week, I was reading a story from a few years ago about what the last snow on earth might look like. Snow algae, which occur naturally in the snowpack, rise to the surface during the spring; when they emerge, they turn red. This “watermelon snow,” these days, could be seen as a warning. The […]
