Sometimes friends will be over, everybody talking, and one of the little kids will get antsy so I’ll pick up a book and start reading, quietly so as not to disturb conversation. But pretty soon nobody is talking any more, everybody’s listening to Winnie the Pooh and Piglet track the Heffalump. I’ll bet you can […]
Ann
This post first ran May 28, 2012. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him, but still — and when I think about soldiers and Memorial Day I always think about him, I’m not sure why: he didn’t talk about the war, maybe because he stood so […]
As of yesterday, May 20, LWON has been alive for five years. LWON is a little surprised at this and pretty pleased with itself. In celebration, two of our brilliant alumni wrote guest posts listing the Top Five Things They Wanted to List the Top Five Of. Today, Five People of LWON announce the best […]
April 13-17 Ann on a recent Nature study linking dragons and climate change: “The authors recommend the obvious — increasing research in consumer-friendly fire-resistent clothing — and further suggest that monarchs desist from running around conferring knighthoods.” A sharp-eyed commenter notes publication date. Michelle on a disease affecting couples living in tipis and other small, off-the-grid […]
In keeping with the brave tradition of gullible, single-source reporting, here’s an astounding science news report. It ran in the News and Views section of the prestigious journal, Nature, a couple weeks ago, I don’t know how I missed it, and it surely deserved more than the brief flurry of attention it got on Twitter. […]
April 6 – 10 Have you ever had to endure the smug cocktail party contention that “biology is just chemistry, chemistry is just physics, and physics is just math” (and so all of life is reducible to math)? Abstruse Goose demolishes that glib noise with a thought experiment that reverses the formula. Michael Balter’s brontosaurus story […]
I suspect this isn’t really a science metaphor, but I got caught up in the word. I had a friend who’s married to a hospital doctor, and he brought home many work-related words of interest: “mother-of-record,” for instance, meant that he wasn’t going to be the one taking cupcakes to their kid’s class in the […]
The Hubble Fellows are — forgive me — young stars: young PhD astronomers granted the money to go to whatever astronomy-doing place they want to go to and do whatever astronomy they want to do. And once a year, the Hubble Fellows give public talks about what they’re up to, so any astronomy writer with […]
