May 27 – 31, 2013 Heather’s last post is a case-in-point for why we’re going to miss her so much. It’s something you’ve never heard of before, told expertly and with great empathy: India’s great population explosion is being calmed by — who knew? — soap operas. Come back soon, Heather, and tell us another […]
About ten years ago, doing research for a book, I asked Freeman Dyson about a study he’d helped do about whether we would have lost the war in Vietnam a little less if we’d used tactical nuclear weapons. Dyson and two colleagues, all members of a scientific advisory group called Jason, were doing this study […]
Outside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again. They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around. They’re […]
AG is citing a riposte to intelligent design’s argument that a watch implies an intelligent watchmaker. And yes, I know it’s not a Penis Friday. As Cassie says, you can’t have penises every Friday; and a codicil would be, some penises come on Thursdays. AG is also offering his own, more tasteful, riposte to Cassie’s […]
#1. Couldn’t you use post-menopausal hot flashes to warm up cold people? Hot flashes are better warm-uppers than, say, heaters because they happen from the inside. Something in you lights up and you become radioactive; you glow, you emit. I won’t tell you why I was thinking about that because some of you get snide. […]
March 25 – 29, 2013 Thomas does his own (gasp) statisics and finds that journalistic attention to the environment sharpens up and fades out, if not with sunspots, then with the normal journalistic attention span. London’s institute for making stuff with your hands (manu-facture, right?) is so intriguing, energetic, and adventuresome, that Jessa considers sitting […]
Alex Wellerstein is an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics with an obsession about the atomic bomb and in particular, about the patents taken out on it. Patents on the atomic bomb seem odd: apparently the government wanted to be sure it owned the rights, and not the “private contractors, private scientists, […]
March 11 – 25 Abstruse Goose looks at tired, cynical teachers and BS-ing students and finds the who business depressing. If it’s ok to write about astronomers’ whose motivations were that as children, they loved stars, is it also ok to write about sex researchers whose motivations were that as teens, they had problems with […]
