A while ago I was on a panel for the local science writing association, and each panel member was assigned to talk about writing about science in a way that’s both literary and beautiful. I gave my talk and a few days later, it was posted on the association’s website. Much social media ensued, all […]
Notice from the People of LWON: We’ve run into problems with the outfit that handles our email subscriptions, i.e., we have too many subscribers to qualify for free emails. So in line with our policy of spending as little $$$$$ as humanly possible, we’re taking the liberty of having those emails sent, not daily, but […]
April 14 – 18 Our boy, Abstruse Goose, becomes as one with his electronic devices. Truer than he knows. Well. I don’t know what he knows. Truer than you might think, anyway. Poor Jessa, age 35, thinking about losing her math abilities. And yes, mathematicians do have the reputation of topping out young. But Jessa, […]
AG’s mouseover says, “When I forget to charge my phone at night, my existence feels incomplete in the morning,” meaning I guess that he’s become as one with his electronic devices. But as I know because I’ve been writing an interminable story about insomnia, AG’s identity as an electronic device is just the God’s truth. […]
April 7 – 11, 2014 This week we say a sad but temporary ciao to Sally and a delighted ecco! to Craig Childs, and no, I don’t have a clue what he’s doing in that photograph. Sports programs measuring themselves by winning instead of by kick-ass players who also know how to lose are, says […]
Garwin: the Movie opens with an old, steady, precise hand on a computer keyboard, scrolling through now-declassified* documents. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower make announcements, and newspapers flash headlines about our splendid new hydrogen bomb. Then the blossom of a mushroom cloud unfolds; and John F. Kennedy talks about Russian missiles in Cuba; and the […]
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 […]
