February 16 – 20 Helen: “Why, 18 degrees isn’t bad, I thought to myself. All you need is…I did some math in my head and realized I was wearing about $350 worth of specialized clothing, while occasionally passing some poor soul hunched down in a hooded sweatshirt.” Cameron reduxed, updated: “I must confess now that, […]
Charles Hard Townes died a week ago, aged 99. He was a physicist at Berkeley who came up with the principle of the laser; at age 98, he’d stopped coming into the office every day. His obituaries are thorough and their praise is justified. I’d met him for reasons the obituaries don’t mention. He helped […]
I’d add Astronomy: Planetary System Formation to the shelf at around the 2-18 months mark. Anybody else? __________ http://abstrusegoose.com/531
January 19 – 23 Cassandra explains why the flu shot is ineffective this year, what H and N stand for, how the virus outevolved the statisticians, and why to get the shot anyway. A magisterially thorough explanation, and one feels better for it already. Cameron has always liked maps, all kind of maps, maps that […]
Q: Oh, you’re a doctor! Oh good! I need a doctor. I had the flu shot but I’ve got the flu anyway. I feel like roadkill looks. A: You do know, don’t you, that since this year’s flu shot is only 23% effective, you had an 89% chance of getting the flu. Q: Is that […]
Part 1 is here. While Murph was still at Princeton, in his first years there, he was spending summers consulting, sometimes for defense contractors, sometimes for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (A lot of physicists did this: academic scientists’ salaries run for nine months; they needed summer money.) Then a little later, during the post-Sputnik years, […]
The day before Thanksgiving, Murph Goldberger died. He was old, he’d been born in 1922; and in those nine decades, he’d collected an extraordinary amount of life. He was drafted right out of college into the Manhattan Project’s brilliant and very young Special Engineering Detachment, where he met his wife, Mildred; and ever after if […]
I’ve just finished a story about gas and galaxies. You’re bored already, aren’t you. After I’d sent the editor a query about it, he took months to respond and then wanted several rewrites of the query; I think he was bored too. If gas and galaxies are so boring, why did I want so much […]
