This was posted September 24, 2015. I go later to the coffeeshop now and don’t run into Larry and John, its chief scientists. I do have an update on neighborhood-kid questions though. “Why does this blue flower have a yellow dot in the center?” “Why do birds poop?” “Why are there ants going up the […]
UPDATE, 10/27/2020: This post is about, among other things, Peter Ganz, a German philologist with an unlikely personal history. One of his sons, Adam, just wrote telling me about a centenary at Oxford University that celebrates Peter’s accomplishments. I thought you might like to know. I mean, the man left Buchenwald, then helped spy on […]
November 27 – December 1, 2017 Michelle, hoping to inoculate her daughter and everybody else’s daughter against rampant and pervasive patriarchy, compiles a girl-centric list of bedtime reading. After all, the holidays loom, presents will be given. Erik kills plants. He doesn’t mean to, though to be honest he doesn’t love them all that much. But […]
Years ago, talking about the persistent rumor that the Hubble Space Telescope was an off-the-shelf spy satellite retrofitted for astronomy*, I told a NASA employee that I was pretty sure academic astronomers were culturally anti-military and they wouldn’t be crossing lines and dealing with spies or the defense department. The NASA employee looked at me […]
November 6 – 10, 2017 Somebody killed a wolf named OR 28. Is this to be seen in the context of populations and therefore a slight matter? Is this to be seen in the context of individuals and their families and therefore a terrible thing? Emma presented the argument, didn’t take sides. The Humanities 110 […]
October 23 – 27, 2017 Guest Rebecca Boyle takes issue with Cassie’s attitude about neutron star mergers. Argument sounds a little abstruse but it ends in humane charm: “I’ll stay on Team Neutron Star, and you can watch from the sidelines, and we’ll still be friends.” Craig finds a woman attractive, reflects that not all #MeToo’s […]
So. Everybody got excited about gravitational waves coming from the mergers of neutron stars and black holes. My Facebook feed which is full of scientists and science writers got further excited about a newish phrase everybody used, “multimessenger astronomy.” My Facebook feed agreed that “multimessenger astronomy” is an all-around dreadful phrase. Not only does it sound corporate and […]
Last week I had a couple of snakebit days, the kind that are my fault entirely – like leaving (almost) the house with no makeup and no shoes. On one of these days I took a package to an UPS store, found out I would pay $50 to send a $50 present, decided what the […]