A week with the winter coming, a week with some excellent words. Guest Colin Norman started the week with his final post in his thorough, smart, and elegant series, Affair of the Heart. He’s been through the medical system and come out the other side, more or less intact, certainly better than when he went in. Now, […]
You’ve probably done this already or if you haven’t, you will: you sit in your doctor’s office and look at your doctor, your doctor sits at a desk and types on a computer. Your doctor apologizes for the lack of eye contact and explains something about health records now being electronic and tied to reimbursement. […]
Last week, Lockheed announced it had a small team working on what it calls a Compact Fusion Reactor. Fusion is the opposite of fission that’s used in nuclear plants today; it can produce enormous amounts of energy; the fuel for itis cheap and plentiful; a small fusion engine would solve the world’s energy problems. I […]
October 6 – 10 This week was devoted to being Off Our Meds, looking calmly and as rationally as possible at scary issues in medicine. Ebola is about as bad as it gets, and no vaccines or drugs. Guest Robin Mejia suggest we learn some R numbers: “for each day that we’re not effectively isolating […]
September 29 – October 3, 2014 You think a place like L.A. just happened to sprawl like that? that our various civil and environmental messes just happened? Nope, says guest Erika Schoenberger, a lot of times we planned ’em like that. An evocative argument over whether Native Americans came over the land bridge, as the […]
Over the years, I’ve met a number of physicists who had direct or indirect connections with the Manhattan Project and who then spent the rest of their lives trying to get the nuclear weapons genie back into the bottle and the bottle corked. I think of these physicists as the old arms-controllers. They’re impressive people. […]
My first interviews for this current astronomy story were with the astronomers I’ve known and known of for decades — whose research I’ve followed, whose talks I’ve attended, whom I’ve interviewed, as I said, for decades. The astronomers were what they have been likely to be: men. Astronomer: Werk looked at other metal lines. She […]
I’m pretty sure that a Transformers™ movie came out a few years back, and I’m dead certain that the neighborhood kids regularly call on me to admire their transformable Transformers™ toys. And I think a Transformers™ movie came out just recently but I don’t know anything about it. It’s probably all explosive and apocalyptic. I’m […]
