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
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, […]
