Sometimes friends will be over, everybody talking, and one of the little kids will get antsy so I’ll pick up a book and start reading, quietly so as not to disturb conversation. But pretty soon nobody is talking any more, everybody’s listening to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet track the Heffalump. I’ll bet you can […]
This post first ran May 28, 2012. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him, but still — and when I think about soldiers and Memorial Day I always think about him, I’m not sure why: he didn’t talk about the war, maybe because he stood so […]
May 18 – 22, 2015 Erik started the week off by offending bee scientists with a wasp scientist whose object of study is solitary and sleek, definitely not just an ant with wings. The scientist has some issues, don’t we all. LWON turned five this week and in joyous celebration, alumnus Thomas Hayden lists the […]
April 27 – May 1, 2015 LWON’s own Mr. Cosmology does standup, launches new career. Q: Why does the moon look larger when it’s closer to the horizon? A: Because it is. Roberta’s last post (and LWON is sad): why are her dreams so boring? does the boringness have anything to do with age? Bye, […]
In keeping with the brave tradition of gullible, single-source reporting, here’s an astounding science news report. It ran in the News and Views section of the prestigious journal, Nature, a couple weeks ago, I don’t know how I missed it, and it surely deserved more than the brief flurry of attention it got on Twitter. […]
I suppose somebody could actually think these things. I doubt that person would be in comp lit, though. I suppose reductionism comes in here somewhere but in spite of having it explained 100000 times, I don’t understand it. I don’t know, I’m just so depressed that Abstruse Goose seems to have fallen down. Oh Abstruse […]
March 30 – April 3, 2015 Cameron manages to build a story about the dove trapped in her house around a Karen Carpenter song, and that IS the first time in the history of humankind that anyone’s done that. Helen pursues her small obsession with museums, this one a bone museum at which she misses […]
I suspect this isn’t really a science metaphor, but I got caught up in the word. I had a friend who’s married to a hospital doctor, and he brought home many work-related words of interest: “mother-of-record,” for instance, meant that he wasn’t going to be the one taking cupcakes to their kid’s class in the […]
