In the olden days of innocence, I used to ask my doctor about curing my various compelling anxieties and he said not to worry about it, most accomplished professionals were a little obsessive-compulsive. I wasn’t an accomplished professional so I assumed he was talking about himself and his friends, one of whom must have been […]
I’ve kept an eye on neutrinos ever since I heard, back in the mid-1980’s, that not enough of them were coming out of the sun; this sounded serious. It turned out that the sun was behaving itself but the neutrinos weren’t. On its way out of the sun, any given neutrino was changing into three […]
If you remember from our last episode, Abstruse Goose: Moment of Clarity 1, our plucky hero has had a moment of clarity about quantum mechanics. The clarity was brief and, sadly, it passed. He tried again months later and this time, he hung onto his moment long enough to begin fretting about quantum spin. The […]
The Chesapeake Bay was born as the Susquehanna River. Around 35 million years ago, an asteroid apparently smacked into what is now eastern Virginia and left a 50-mile-wide crater, a sink into which all the rivers – mainly the Susquehanna but also the Potomac and lesser rivers — coming east out of the Appalachians naturally […]
Re: Heather’s post on people who’d lost people in recent, godawful earthquakes and found them again via Google technologies. I’d watched another high-tech-mediated search and though it doesn’t really bear thinking about, I’ll tell you anyway. On February 1, 2007, I got an email from an astronomer named Alex Szalay saying in case I hadn’t […]
You doubtless remember quantum mechanics: the deeply incomprehensible chain of reasoning about how particles are also waves; and the waves aren’t physical but waves of probability; and any given thing about which you’re certain means you’re uncertain about something else. And so on, far into the night. The worst thing about it is, apparently it’s […]
“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a good night to murder the king. Even a century earlier, the collective noun was “a murder of crows.” Three centuries later, a poet watches a horse that’s been shot: “gorged crows rise ragged in the wind. […]
Abstruse Goose adds, in a sneaky little popup, that this is his best argument for intelligent design. Given the finely-honed excellence of BLT’s, Darwin might want to back down. http://abstrusegoose.com/339
