This happens. An astronomer said that he found, as astronomers do, something that looked unusual and that turned out to be an unusual form of a usual thing. But before he figured that out, a reporter happened to ask him what’s new, and the astronomer said he’d found this unusual thing, couldn’t figure it out, […]
Big problems for astronomers: the just-launched zillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t be focused; a Mars probe got to Mars and then lost contact with the earth; the 300-foot Green Bank radio telescope collapsed one night into lacy rubble. Smaller problems are below. An amateur astronomer, after observing on his back porch one night, locked his […]
This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection. That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides: a cell of convection. This convective cell is called a supercell and […]
Abstruse Goose added a mysterious little tag that says something like, “Now, how many pop culture references can you find?” None for me, not one, geezer that I apparently am. But I did get the astronomy/physics references. The stardust one: maybe you already know this but most every element — the lithium in our batteries, […]
I haven’t had anything to do with biology since I wrote an article years ago about sleeping pills. I found out that the drugs used by 60-gazillion insomniacs to put themselves to sleep are not the chemicals the brain uses to put us to sleep naturally. Can’t neuroscientists just find those brain chemicals and sell […]
This one’s going to take a little explanation. Maxwell was James Clerk Maxwell, famous 19th century physicist. He made up his demon as a way around a then-new and depressing law of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law said that when things are left alone and nothing’s done to them, hot things […]
I’m riddled with anxieties and have no faith whatever. My book is dopey and nobody’s reading it and I have no ideas for another one. Print publishing is dying anyway. And the deader it gets, the less likely it is to publish anything I write, even if I did have an idea. I could […]
I think this is funny because it explains a problem I’ve had with math all along, which is that math just makes stuff up: makes up number, and space between numbers, and relations between numbers, and I’m not even mentioning zero. Also I know that the horizon problem went something like, the universe shouldn’t have […]
