I know Erika already covered the Mike Daisey/TAL/Apple story and so did a lot of other people as smart as she is. But I’m a slow thinker, so I’m coming in to this a little late and out of left field. The left field in this case is epistemology, which is “the study of knowledge and justified belief.” […]
March 19 – 23 This week: Sally has profound doubts about technology, choice, freedom, and those things on her lawn. Heather grieves her lost stories and admires a young writer who reclaims one of them. Erika says that nonfiction writers who lie hurt the causes for which they lie. Virginia argues with her charming […]
Back at the end of the 19th century, when scientists were just discovering radioactivity and Marie Curie was trying to isolate radium, nobody knew what the effect of radioactivity on the human body might be. Radium was a new element, just a pretty blue glowing thing. Curie also wrote: “One of our joys was to go […]
I don’t have anything to add, except that I remember the day I learned that being where I was at that exact minute was highly improbable. I mean, I was there, right then, I was 100 percent probable. But if I’d calculated it ahead of time I’d have been as AG says, 0.000312 or something. […]
This is the universe at present. You’re seeing not the light but the dark — you knew that most of the universe’s matter is dark, right? — and its motions. Not until the far right end are you seeing the light. Go ahead and clickety click all over this; zoom it in and out, drag it around. […]
Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct […]
To be honest, I’m not sure whether AG meant this to be about the loneliness of an over-specialized molecular biologist whose best friends are alcohol and a ficus plant; or about the reasons for that loneliness. If the latter, then he’d need look no further than the recent hoo-ha about research into terrorist viruses, or […]
One bright day last December, certain science bloggers who had happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers, all wrote synchronous posts about the science in mystery books. These books, we thought, have a surprising amount of good science in them. So we’re doing it again (for titles, see bottom of post). This post […]
