This morning, mid-January, sandwiched between the past few days of fog and rainy gloom and future days of cold and snowy mix, the sun did this. I’d been having the flu, not getting 5 feet away from the couch, and the sun was so stunning I walked out on the porch and stood in it. […]
Dateline: mid-January, 2020. Location: Baltimore, MD. Meterological conditions: first snow of the season, 1 inch max. Early that evening, rumor apparently came of an imminent invasion. So the local militia began work on fortifications. They packed cold-certified plastic cubes with snow, then pushed the cubes of snow out and stacked them without reference to engineering […]
That’s a somewhat newer mission patch from the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite outfit which is clearly still at the top of its game. The amateur NRO watchers are still watching. I follow some of them on Twitter. Lately they’ve also been watching: the Starlink satellites, the launch of international asteroid probes, pretty pictures […]
*Now with UPDATES, below: Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice) is a star, the red one on the left shoulder of Orion. You’ve seen it. One of the whole points of stars is that you can just look up and count on seeing them. The earth turns underneath them so it’s true that depending on time and geography, […]
You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it. “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its […]
Because Sarah wrote about grief on Monday and because today my son would have been 51, so then what else would I bother writing about except grief or rather grief as love’s subset or corollary or unavoidable consequence. Love → grief, love ꝏ grief. That little ꝏ sign, that side-ways 8, that’s the math/astro symbol […]
This first ran on Sept. 6, 2012. My nephew was then a biology graduate student; he is now a fully-functioning scientist. He is confident, self-collected, easy to talk to, curious — in short, he made it through his education in one piece. But the education itself has not changed — not the advice, not the […]
This post first ran on June 12, 2018. The need to think about predation and empathy — equal but opposite responses to vulnerability — is alive and kicking. But the online magazine referred to at the end is dead. Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to […]