It’s a Redux week here at LWON as we take a short summer break. My holiday reading is Tales From Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, by Michael S. Gazzaniga. It’s a memoir of the amazing discovery of split-brain phenomena in patients whose left and right brains have been separated. It put […]
August 3 – 7, 2015 Produce from our lovingly tended gardens is communal property, whether we like it or not, finds Ann. The tragedy of the commons never sounded so joyful. Erik Vance wishes his sequenced genes could explain everything about him and predict the course of his unborn son’s life. Alas, the crystal ball of […]
When Michael Jackson died, it came to light that he had been receiving an IV drip of the anesthetic Propofol throughout the night for the previous two months. His death was attributed to cardiac arrest, brought on by an overdose of the drug. Clearly, this kind of treatment is a bad idea, and I don’t […]
On twenty minutes’ notice, I was recruited as a judge for this year’s middle school science and heritage fair. The numbered displays were set up in rows in the gym, where model volcanoes smoked near replicas of Sir John Franklin’s ships. We judges chose score sheets affixed to a clipboard and roamed the aisles looking […]
July 6 – 10, 2015 That about wraps up our Snark Week 2015, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other seemingly adorable animals that want to tear you limb from limb, and we’ll tell you about them next year (if you survive to read about them). To recap this year’s horror show, we […]
Another Canada Day has passed, eclipsed in my part of the country by the festivities of Aboriginal Day, which falls just a week beforehand. Bizarrely, it was the Google Doodle this year that most roused my patriotic spirit on July first. In the image, a woman kneels up in the bow of a canoe — possibly […]
June 14 – 18, 2015 We begin with a backward glance to a favorite post of Christie’s about the distance between email and postcard on the spectrum of serendipitous stumblings-upon. I make a case against the multimedia approach to long form writing. It’s spectacular but it invites superficial reading. Cassie plans a camping trip to […]
There are two ways of reading, according to my local primary school teachers. You can sound out the words or you can just look at the pictures and infer a story. Of course, this position encourages exposure to text for non-readers, but the idea pervades adult culture too. Scanning photos and skimming headlines passes for […]
