It’s been a while since we had a roundup of children’s books. So long, in fact, that the last time we had one, I wasn’t yet interested in children’s books. Now, it’s situation critical. My town has one little bookstore, and our library is accessed through several flights of dingy staircase at the back of a […]
June 9 – 13, 2014 This week Michelle convinces us that cryptozoology has never known a stranger — nor more adorable — creature than the moose-like hugag. It is the creation of William Cox, and surely the ancestor of the heffalump. Richard kickstarts a memetic phenomenon with the phrase, “telling the fire by its ashes” […]
The manned craft negotiates entry into the thin Martian atmosphere and lands in some sort of ingenious fashion in the three-eighths gravity. This is it. My generation’s very own “One small step for a human” moment. Real live people are inside, ready to hop out and get to work. The fifteen-minutes-delayed camera feed zooms in […]
May 26-30, 2014 I have been in the back of a London taxicab in the small hours with Sally, and after what seemed like days of nausea-inducing back-alley turns I loudly suggested we might be faster just taking a main road. This was met with scorn and derision from said co-blogger. Now I know why. When […]
April 28 – May 2, 2014 This week the people of LWON congregated loosely and coincidentally around the theme of truth. A guest post by Jennifer S. Holland finds a myriad of health benefits to yoga, but evidence for its power to trigger emotional release eludes her search. Michelle introduces an excellent Bullshit Prevention Protocol, […]
Last week when NASA Administrator Charles Bolden addressed the sparsely-attended Humans to Mars Summit in DC, he moved the institutional goalpost past space exploration and toward space settlement.
In playwright David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work Proof (later adapted into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal) there’s an exchange between a young mathematician and the daughter of his recently-deceased mentor. They’re at a party and discussing the use of amphetamines by older mathematicians: Hal: There’s this fear that your creativity peaks around […]
Engineers and architects have been facing the question for years. “When we were designing the Tate Modern, there was a moment when someone said, ‘What will you do when the water is a metre or two higher?’” remembers Stuart Smith, a director at global engineering firm Arup. “As an individual building, there’s not much you […]