Some of the characters of Thomas McMahon’s novel, Loving Little Egypt: Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make […]
__________ This reminds me of that idiot, Walt Whitman, who thought his appreciation of the stars was so superior to the learn’d astronomer’s. The guy needed a pie in the face. But here’s the question: is good poetry (not AG’s) as enlightening, meaningful, or interesting as a walk on Mars — or any kind of […]
July 16 – 21 So what do we do about invasive species? Exterminate ’em, right? and feel holy about it. And when the invasives are goats on the Galapagos, we still exterminate ’em, right? Only it doesn’t feel so holy, says Virginia. Ann, in her obsessive search for the metaphors of science, finds another one: […]
Science, so useful to our lives in so many ways, also usefully supplies metaphors from which we may find comfort or edification. An astronomer told me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, was surrounded by a tenuous halo of hot gas. “How can gas stay hot, out there in space?” I asked. […]
Maybe I’ve just been reading too many scientific journals and too many memos from academics but I swear to God when I’m declared empress, my first edict is going to be, “Signal-to-noise! Raise the signal! Lower the noise!” ___________ http://abstrusegoose.com/380
Sally, who usually posts the week-end summary, had a massive failure of an unspecified nature. And Ann, who does the backups, had a massive failure of modern conveniences due to excessive heat and no power for the foreseeable. We’re sorry. We doubt that this concatenation will happen again.
Science is known to be fatal; it kills people — this is all but a cliché. World War I was the chemists’ war: chemists developed chlorine as a bleach and a disinfectant, then turned it into chlorine gas, which flooded (along with other gases) into enemy trenches. World War II was the physicists’ war: physicists […]
It was a usual week at LWON: questions and opinions shot off like bottle rockets, unexpectedly and in all directions. Virginia gets on the phone to interview neuroscientists and realizes that most of them are men. Then she gets on the phone about a hot new neuroscience and realizes that almost-most of her interviewees are […]
