My friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger, has a new book out called The Imagineers of War. It’s a history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Agency, an agency with which she has had, as a journalist, a long and storied history. One of DARPA’s proposals was for a wearable jet pack. Just let that sink […]
I have a mild case of fatal familial obsessive-compulsive disorder. (At least, if that were real I’d have it.) Today’s obsession is the Fall Line. It’s the line that runs through the big east coast cities — New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, all the way down to Columbia SC and […]
June 19 – 23, 2017 “I imagine the zucchini plant at the end of the summer, lying back on the couch, an ice pack on its head, its eyes closed. Good work, I want to say to the zucchini. You made it.” Now, says Cameron, will somebody please take some of it please? Who besides […]
I had dinner the other night with, among others, a graphic designer. He said he liked looking at contemporary photographs but to be honest, he didn’t know why he liked looking at them. He knew they were better than snapshots, he said, but he didn’t know why they were. I’m certainly the last person to […]
May 22 – 26, 2017 Lots of reduxes this week — “redux” in this case meaning posts that were posted before but would be nice to reread, if for no other reason than that the authors liked them. Christie on the line between dryness and drought: “How much contrary evidence do we need before we […]
Back in 2012, I wrote about falling and gravity’s terrible vengeance when we don’t perfectly obey and how, if we’d just learned our physics, all this wouldn’t be so surprising. Re-reading the post now, it seems also to be a nice science metaphor. That is, physics says the best way to not let gravity hurt […]
Chris Whitaker, a neighbor, retired with a plan. Most retired people’s plans are to travel or to follow up on a hobby or to have no plan at all – all of which seem to make these people happy — but as one self-educating photographer said to me, “You can show your wife just […]
For someone who’s not interested in planets around other stars, exoplanets, I write about them a lot. But exoplanets have been hot news for some time now and they’re not cooling off any time soon.* The planets are big or little or in between; they’re made of gas or rock or maybe some combination; they […]