I’ve had occasion in these pages before to write about searches for alien planets and alien life and for both, to register the loftiest disdain. I mean, crissakes, the universe is jam-packed with philosophy-shattering freakshows, and we’re looking for things we already know exist? Planets and life are not news. I learned this outlook from […]
My mother was an old lady, she’d lived a good and useful life, and she died a year and ten days ago. I hadn’t been keeping track of her death’s anniversary but I didn’t need to; I only had to figure out why I was walking around feeling, for no good reason, sad. One of […]
AG’s sneaky caption this time is “. . . we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. — Delenn or Carl Sagan.” It’s apparently a quote from Delenn who is apparently some scifi character who says portentous things. Carl Sagan was real; also said portentous things; and undoubtedly said something like that, […]
I asked my husband, who’s a physicist and a pilot, how airplanes stay up in the air. A question like that makes him happy. “It’s the wings,” he said, “They provide lift.” “What’s lift?” I said. “It’s Bernoulli,” he said. “The faster air moves, the lower its pressure. ” I’m used to these answers that are […]
You remember Bees – Part 1, right? The waggle dance they do to show other bees where the flowers are? If not, go back there and click on those links, which explain everything. I’ve just looked through LWON’s archives and we apparently are preoccupied with bees. Them and corvids. Meanwhile, AG poses another little mystery, […]
Turn right at Alamogordo, pass High Rolls, and 9000 feet up into New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains, turn right again and go 15 miles along a narrow switchback two-lane, turn off on the Apache Point road, pass a pond, and hit the dead end at Apache Point Observatory, a cluster of utilitarian buildings. Inside one building […]
A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food. An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out. To distract you from making a judgment about whether AG is a dick or […]
Galaxies are the universe’s basic units. (True, they’re made of stars, but all the stars are in galaxies.) So if you understood why galaxies look the way they do and how they’ve changed with time, you’d probably understand the history of the whole damn universe. Oh boy. And astronomers believed they sort of did but […]
