Not resign, re-sign. Some electrons went wrong and our RSS feed broke and our subscribers washed away in the flood. Is that enough metaphors for now? We’ve got a new and improved RSS feed but please, if you’ve subscribed in the past, could you kindly and patiently re-subscribe? With love, from the People of LWON […]
Nothing is entirely trustworthy. Friends are inconstant; presidents and professors are making it up; your grandmother didn’t always know what she was talking about; your very senses can fool you; and one of these fine days even the sun will blow up. Where is the touchstone, the standard, the fundamental reference frame? Where is the […]
You understand the joke, right? that high-energy physics learns the nature of subatomic particles by hurling them at other subatomic particles and when the particles collide, studying the debris? So this is funny. Also disturbing. http://abstrusegoose.com/156
The latest alien planets hit the news like fireworks, I write about them a lot, and I’ve always found them boring. I’d been convinced early on by an eminent astronomer who said flatly that finding extra-solar planets wasn’t, as he said, interesting. In the first place, observations were nearly impossible and decades of claims turned […]
I read a nice essay saying that scientists make their advice to politicians too simple. What scientists over-simplify, said the essay’s author, is their uncertainties. I thought the author might be right: surely politicians don’t believe flat statements like, say, “climate change is making the world warmer and we’re all going to die.” Not that […]
Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons. And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers. The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the […]
What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is. His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes? Dyson is hard to describe: he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say. He’s spent his […]
This picture is what the sky really looks like. Click on it. It’s the biggest digital color picture of the sky, the part called the Northern Galactic Cap, and it’s taken years to produce; it’s a trillion pixels, a terapixel and — says the press release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — to see […]
