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 […]
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 […]
