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 […]
Abstruse Goose’s little mouseover says, Please credit the original artist. And he’s right, it’s nice to look at the world as though it’s art. You can’t help but notice the original artist had great taste in color and in which colors to put together. Like, the night sky is the original setting for diamonds against […]
This is a war story. It does have a little math, physics, and technology in it, but the real reason I’m writing about it is that Harry Baig got under my skin. Baig was a Marine, and in 1968, during the Vietnam War, he was among those trapped in a siege at Khe Sanh. Baig’s […]
At 4:12 p.m., Pacific time, on April 3, 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office – the 50-year old spy satellite agency whose existence the government didn’t admit until 1992 – launched a “payload,” a classified radar satellite, NROL-25. The launch was webcast live but the NRO didn’t want to reveal sensitive information about the satellite’s eventual […]
