I have had occasion to mention January before, once with hard eyes and grit and once with faith and hope. I mean, it needs both, doesn’t it. Another option is always to become one with the cold, dark skies. You finally get through the infinite holiday season, think you can relax for a minute, and […]
I first wrote this November 29, 2021, but I could have written the same take-home many times since and I could write it now. I mean, Elon keeps putting his Starlinks all over space, plus OneWeb and Planet and Jilin-1 keep putting all their satellite constellations all over space, plus the National Reconnaissance Office just […]
I’ve been interviewing an archeologist who’s famous for “sticking close to the data,” that is, not saying anything he can’t back with actual evidence. Reminding me of what I learned in my first year as a junior high school teacher: don’t make threats you can’t carry out, and that’s not as much a digression as […]
This ran July 10, 2020. Over the intervening few years, the kids have tapered off and finally stopped doing this, though they’re still uncontrollably attracted to those little red winterberries that they call birdberries. But on the whole, they’ve moved on to other things and currently it’s perfecting cartwheels (the older one is finally doing […]
I’ve rerun this post before, I think the last time was 2019 and the time before was 2014. I rerun it again now because 1) my Hungarian neighbor/physicist/co-obsessive and I have just shared our nearly decade-old Google doc of orange-peel data with another neighbor/chemist/neutral party because 2) in spite of my fearlessness below, my last […]
This first ran Sept. 22, 2010 — the same time of year as now. It’s not clear that the auction is still going on, and maybe it’s been replaced by a 5K race, and maybe by a bunch of other auctions in different places. The clinic is building a new home and has a lot […]
I’ve written books and didn’t find the experience pleasant: I’d go underground for 2 or 3 or 4 years, maybe 5, and when I’d stick my head up into the light of the world again, the world was changed. Like, during one of my underground sessions, the internet took hold and when I surfaced, the […]
Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer to the week of the anniversary of Trinity, the first test of the first nuclear weapon. (Another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born, but that’s not what this post is about right […]