My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing. Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What […]
Ann
This post is a re-run from 7/15/2010. The situation hasn’t improved. I grew up noticing what a writer notices — stories and how things are said — and educated myself accordingly. So I never learned much science and now, after I’ve unexpectedly turned into a science writer, my questions to scientists are generally English-major questions. […]
Take up where the last review left off: “. . . and if nonfiction writers are so entranced by the techniques and effects of fiction, why don’t they for chrissakes just write it?” Well, they do, they just do it cheesily. Fiction about reality – about history or, say, science — often follows the cupcake […]
Some of the characters of Thomas McMahon’s novel, Loving Little Egypt: Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make […]
Science, so useful to our lives in so many ways, also usefully supplies metaphors from which we may find comfort or edification. An astronomer told me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, was surrounded by a tenuous halo of hot gas. “How can gas stay hot, out there in space?” I asked. […]
Science is known to be fatal; it kills people — this is all but a cliché. World War I was the chemists’ war: chemists developed chlorine as a bleach and a disinfectant, then turned it into chlorine gas, which flooded (along with other gases) into enemy trenches. World War II was the physicists’ war: physicists […]
Happy Birthday to us, we’ve just turned two. We’re bigger: we’ve added three new Persons of LWON. And we’ve matured, that is, we stopped looking so much at our own bellybutton and are more aware of the intelligent, thoughtful Commenters of LWON. So for our birthday celebration, we’ll look back at the year and not […]
April 23 – April 27 This week, Ann does what put Ann on the map: she tells us about spy organisations and what they like to do in space. And then tells us about the citizen scientists who use binoculars, stopwatches and math to figure out what they’re up to up there. With the help […]
