We’re sorry, we should have introduced you to this sterling new Person of LWON before he posted his first post but to our dismay, we’re now doing it late and to our pleasure we’re doing it now. So please, meet (have met) Neil Shea. He started out as a photographer and when all that equipment […]
This first ran on August 17, 2022. Three years later, August 20, 2025, same. Except this year we also have infrastructure, (it’s like measles: you get it, you suffer, it goes away) which we have often enough that I know code for the street markings: gas is yellow, electric is red, sewer is green, water […]
Last Monday, 7/14/2025, NPR ran an interview with a woman who lived through the flood on Texas’s Guadalupe River, a terrible story and I paraphrase: The flood blew down her back door and filled the house, water pressure wouldn’t let her open the door to her 95-year old mother’s bedroom, so she had to get […]
I first wrote this July 2, 2018, a time of high stress nationally and personally – personally because I had to make life-changing decisions that I didn’t have the information to make. And that was even before the pandemic. The pandemic is now putatively, intermittently over but the executive function problem is only marginally better. […]
Richard L. Garwin died this week on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. He was born April 19, 1928, you can do the math. He lived a long time but I still don’t see how he did everything he did. I interviewed him a lot over the years, and stayed in touch even after his health made […]
I am honored to introduce a new Person of LWON, Laura Helmuth, who probably doesn’t need introducing at all, given that she has done everything (editing mostly, but also editing-in-chief and giving encouraging talks and getting a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and winning awards and being on every science writing committee and institution known to […]
The repetition of this post, which first ran on April 5, 2021, and then again almost exactly a year ago, is out of my hands. I go outside for my morning walk, brooding on my bad habits; I look around the garden to see what’s not working now; and oh glory, oh sweet child of […]
Well this story is just a pure delight. In 2017, the Chinese said that by 2030, they were going to be the world champions of AI. So in 2022, the U.S. put export controls on the fancy computer chips, especially Nvidia chips, that AI needed. Then in 2025, the Chinese announced an AI entity called […]
