The older I get, the more people I know who have lost what they could not afford to lose. I’ll repeat: lost means gone, unrecoverable, not coming back; and what these people lost, they still need and want. The problem is nearly universal and has no obvious solution, or rather, the solution is idiosyncratic and […]
We’re sorry, but Thomas Hayden, the New Person of LWON, will be unable to post today as promised. Instead we present for your delight and edification, Heather. Tom will be back as soon as possible and in the meantime, we send him our best wishes for recovery. Credit: Jehan Georges Vibert
Please meet Thomas Hayden, a new Person of LWON. And let’s get this out of the way early: he is not and never has been married to any movie star whatever. He writes about ecology, energy, environment, and evolution and though he’s entirely a peaceable, friendly fellow, he writes a lot about war. And sex. […]
The title is a little joke about a math term, “convergent sequence.” No way on earth can I understand convergent sequences and I doubt if anybody can explain it to me. “Converging consequences” — now that makes a kind of horrible sense, like maybe an east coast snow storm. Anyway. I hope this will be […]
The last Zooniverse project I spent time on was also their first, Galaxy Zoo 1. You looked at pictures of galaxies and decided whether they were shaped like spirals or ellipticals. I could do that, it was fun, and better yet, it was citizen science, 350,000 citizens doing real science with real scientific results, so […]
Virginia wrote one of Nature‘s (very prestigious outfit) ten best features last year. Nature‘s editors said so. The feature, “Science in Court: Head Case,” was about the dicey use of MRI in death sentences for psychopathic murderers. Fascinating science, real-world implications. Go read it. Photo: Gabriel Pollard
UPDATE: I woke up, looked at the clock, then looked out the window at the moon — no eclipse. “They must have gotten it wrong,” I thought. I looked at the clock again, saw I had misread it, and realized with a little shock of joy, they never get this wrong. Other phenomena of nature […]
I swear, you could get a good start at being a practicing geologist, just from looking at maps. These lovely looping patterns are a satellite’s view of some mountains in southeastern Oklahoma. They are the Ouachita, pronounced Wachita and mispronounced Wichita. I’m fond of the Ouachita – they’re sleepers. And given what went on underneath […]
