I never watched mad scientist movies, except maybe Dr. Strangelove, and I don’t have a clue what biologists do. But Abstruse Goose here just seems to be describing real life. Sad. Not very. Much sadder: our AG hasn’t been seen or heard from in a month of Sundays. Has he retreated from this world? ______ […]
June 23 – 27, 2014 Guest Christine Grillo wonders whether, once climate change hits, California will get tired of sending Baltimore avocadoes. Turns out the last Baltimore winter killed her fig tree. “Stunata,” her uncle says. Science writers had a meeting about actually Doing Something about this eternal gender bias crap. Christie reports, and I […]
When I can’t sleep, my brain thinks it’s fun to enumerate all the things I’m afraid might happen. I’ve taken to thinking about the derivations from the same Latin root — application, complication, explication, implication, replication — but sometimes get hung up on not knowing what “plicare” means. I do think the Yorks and the […]
I’ll go home tonight, I’ll open the front door, I’ll yell, “Hey sweetie, hi!” Then Sweetie will yell, “Hello, young Ann.” I’ll look at the mail, then I’ll yell again, “Did you pick up the salmon?” And he’ll say, “Yep, it’s in the refrigerator.” And then I’ll look over the mail and start to throw […]
I was interviewing an astronomer for a story about planets outside our solar system, extrasolar planets. Exoplanets have names like Kepler-11 e, or HD 106906 b, or HAT-P-54b. (Googling those names will get you some satisfyingly weird planets and in fact, most exoplanets are satisfyingly weird. I mean, 51 Peg b is 150 times more […]
You get this, right? that light travels at a certain fixed rate so TV programs (yup, light) leaving Earth in, say, 2010 would have gotten 4 light-years away and any star 4 light-years away would just be getting the program now. I’ve understood this idea for decades and I still get confused by it. __________ […]
*NOW WITH UPDATE: See below The neighbors came over, maybe a year ago now, and one of them, a Hungarian physicist, brought along candied orange peel he’d made from his grandmother’s recipe. The physicist is the nicest human on earth, but his grandmother is the one I love; I’d love anyone who thought up those […]
Yup. Absolutely. No doubt. AG speaks for us all, or at least for many or us, or at least for me. I have a friend who loves to sit and do nothing, and I’m still studying her to see how she does it. No clue yet. http://abstrusegoose.com/554
