Ann: May I introduce my friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger. She once wrote a book about her trips to the world’s various nuclear test sites and it sold reasonably well, probably to boys. But recently somebody else’s book, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold History of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, […]
Ann
About ten years ago, doing research for a book, I asked Freeman Dyson about a study he’d helped do about whether we would have lost the war in Vietnam a little less if we’d used tactical nuclear weapons. Dyson and two colleagues, all members of a scientific advisory group called Jason, were doing this study […]
Outside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again. They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around. They’re […]
Richard and Temple Grandin have co-authored a book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, which is just out and which you should definitely and immediately buy. Before you do, Jessa and Ann have some questions. Ann: Richard, this subject is a departure for you. What is the subject, anyway? Richard: The immediate subject is the […]
#1. Couldn’t you use post-menopausal hot flashes to warm up cold people? Hot flashes are better warm-uppers than, say, heaters because they happen from the inside. Something in you lights up and you become radioactive; you glow, you emit. I won’t tell you why I was thinking about that because some of you get snide. […]
March 18 – 22 FOLWON* guest poster Brooke Borel introduces the world to the bed bug hockey stick graph. Read it and you will understand why data journalism is about to change the world. That’s highly relevant for Erika’s post, because as she tells us, you only have control over your data until you become […]
Alex Wellerstein is an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics with an obsession about the atomic bomb and in particular, about the patents taken out on it. Patents on the atomic bomb seem odd: apparently the government wanted to be sure it owned the rights, and not the “private contractors, private scientists, […]
I swear, I heard the short version of this just a little while ago. Graduate student X: I hate that one kid in our class. Graduate student Y: You mean that undergraduate? The one who always talks? The kid who never says anything, he just talks? Graduate student X: That’s the one. I really hate […]
