Getting It Wrong, Not Minding One Bit

As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question. Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way.  It was supposed to […]

Science Metaphors (cont.): Critical Opalescence

I’m aging.  I love too many people whose health and wellbeing is too uncertain.  I want to write about too many things, each one requiring too much time and too many brains.  I take on too many assignments and some of the most important are outside my talents and over my head.  I can’t keep […]

Math, Artists, and Crop Circles

Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s.  A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.”   They seem to have no larger meaning, […]