March 31 – April 4, 2104 Richard: “But in a way, Kepler had beat him to it. By imagining the universe from the point of view of someone on the Moon, he’d discovered a new planet: Earth.” Guest Stephen Ornes: “The theorems, proofs, and equations of mathematics are Big Ideas distilled to their naked cores. […]
As a literate but functionally innumerate person, I hate AG’s title. I think it’s dumb and silly. But I thoroughly get why he feels the way he does about that equation. Really. What an odd pattern. Why would it happen? Would figuring out why it happened help you understand anything else? No? You couldn’t even […]
March 24 – 28, 2014 Richard’s redux post: he went to the real true South Pole, had a chance to stand on it and didn’t but it changed his perspective anyway. Erik went to Tulsa, met a bookseller who had gone to the third world and done the best thing he ever did, better than most […]
Ann: Will Storr is a phenomenon.* His specialty is writing good stories about people in bad places. He’s got a story in Matter about an extremely unpleasant disease called Morgellons. People with Morgellons have terrible itches, then tiny fibers creep out of their skin and make oozy sores. The disease sounds like a horror story out […]
The latest snowstorm was only somewhere around 5 inches, depending where in the yard I stuck my ruler, and as usual the Capital Weather Gang had nailed it. I’d written them asking if I could interview them for this post, but at the time they didn’t answer, so intent they were on predicting the upcoming […]
I just don’t have anything to add to this. Though I’m pretty sure if the NSA put their massive minds to it, they could figure out how to hear us thinking, let alone typity-typing on our computers without an internet in sight. Did you know that NSA is the country’s largest employer of mathematicians? It […]
February 24 – 28, 2014 Cameron, trains, and writing: “I watched until it grew so dark that the only things that seemed to exist were the fire and the man’s illuminated hands.” Christie, death, and grief: “Such platitudes offered me no comfort. The truth is, Pia died far too young, and I wish she hadn’t.” […]
My God but the veneer of civilization is thin. Baltimore had one of its whomping good snowstorms last week – I stopped measuring at 14 inches – and the next day it had another 3 inches or so, plus sleet, and the day after it had only an inch, plus more of that sleet, and […]