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 […]
“Did I ever tell you about the time I got charged by a moose?” We were at the point in our camping trip where everyone was dusting off their close-encounters-with-wildlife stories. “Now, Davis, don’t tell that story or we’re going to get into an argument,” warned his wife. “She was downwind of the bear spray […]
In the late 1960s, when North America was first wising up to pollution, a group of progressive farmers resolved to do their part. Phosphate levels in nearby lakes were promoting blue-green algal blooms, excessively nourishing the cyanobacteria. The blooms consumed oxygen in the lakes, and massive fish kills followed. While it was easy to […]
In the autumn of 1996, my daily walk to school took more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. It brought me from the shores of Ramsey Lake in Sudbury, Ontario, through a bright birch forest where everything was whishy and dappled and stripy-white. Blueberry bushes lined the path. A birch tree alone is a […]
When we deposit our money at the bank, when we drop our kids off at school, when we prepay for a future service, we are exercising the trust that has been encouraged in human nature by thousands of years of fruitful cooperation. But not every human we encounter will be trustworthy. According to The Truth […]
