Back in 2012, I wrote about falling and gravity’s terrible vengeance when we don’t perfectly obey and how, if we’d just learned our physics, all this wouldn’t be so surprising. Re-reading the post now, it seems also to be a nice science metaphor. That is, physics says the best way to not let gravity hurt […]
Ann
Chris Whitaker, a neighbor, retired with a plan. Most retired people’s plans are to travel or to follow up on a hobby or to have no plan at all – all of which seem to make these people happy — but as one self-educating photographer said to me, “You can show your wife just […]
For someone who’s not interested in planets around other stars, exoplanets, I write about them a lot. But exoplanets have been hot news for some time now and they’re not cooling off any time soon.* The planets are big or little or in between; they’re made of gas or rock or maybe some combination; they […]
The robins are BACK, they don’t intend for you to miss them, flying like bats out of hell, tearing up the mulch, yelling at everybody and stalking around, sticking their tummies out. Wherever they’re going, they need to get there fast so they take a shortcut through my porch. I was out one morning trying […]
I have neighbors who were also friends who have just moved away. I look at their house now and they’re not in it, it’s empty, they’re gone. I’m sad. Why should I care so much? It’s what urban America does, it moves away — stays a while, then moves somewhere else. I’m used to it. […]
[UPDATE: see links below* for the titles of predatory journals] In honor of the posts of Michelle Nijhuis and Christie Aschwanden, too many posts to link to, about the detection, prevention, and treatment of bullshit. I hate being lied to. I purely hate it. I hate it with a cold, hard hate. I understand that […]
Dear Reader: the above is a sketch of an Individual Mobility System (IMS) proposed by a very special agency in the Department of Defense. The sketch was unearthed by my friend and much-admired colleague, Sharon Weinberger, who generously shared it on Twitter. You could call this an IMS. Or you could call it a jet […]
Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard. Writing about good people is close to impossible. I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good. He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to […]