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 […]
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 […]
May 21 – 25, 2018 Sarah’s ingenious new way of measuring the heat index: a finely-calibrated, exquisitely-sensitive dogmometer. You won’t know how you lived without one. Jenny’s guide to the healthiest ingestion of insects (it’s called entomophagy, but you already knew that) includes nutritive value and the all-important assessment of flavor. Former Person of LWON, […]
We live surrounded in time by unavoidable, uncontrollable catastrophes. Depending on where we live, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and wildfires are just a matter of time. When they happen, they’re all over the news and for good reason, those of us who are not wiped out like to ignore those of us who are. Here’s […]
Our boy is back! Abstruse Goose was our go-to back-up for 100 years, then he unaccountably disappeared for another hundred. And now, with no explanation (and we don’t need one), he’s back amongst us and our hearts rejoice. This one you can figure out without knowing what Bayesian priors are. I know a little because […]
I grew up near stands of what passes in northeast Illinois for old-growth forest. The definition of “old-growth” is apparently a work in progress. I take it to mean a forest that was there before a particular part of the country was cleared and settled, and in northeast Illinois that was pretty late, around the 1830’s.* […]
April 30 – May 4, 2018 Sorry, this is late today. But I finished a hard story, the lilacs are going for world domination, the robins think they own the place, and I was unable to stay inside and type. Why is it that writing about people who are normally-good is so much easier than […]