At 4:12 p.m., Pacific time, on April 3, 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office – the 50-year old spy satellite agency whose existence the government didn’t admit until 1992 – launched a “payload,” a classified radar satellite, NROL-25. The launch was webcast live but the NRO didn’t want to reveal sensitive information about the satellite’s eventual […]
Ann
April 9 – April 13 Oh, are you having a bad day? JUST BE GLAD YOU’RE NOT A BIRD. Because if you were a bird, as Ann points out, you would go through puberty every single year of your life. Nature, Ann correctly summarises, is one mean mother. Maybe you’re just irritable because people keep […]
The granddaughters came to visit for the weekend. They’re hitting puberty hard. One of them suddenly has a throaty voice, long magenta hair that she wants to cut all off, just leave the bangs, and is currently grounded for injudicial actions. The other one’s glasses slide down her nose; she’s wearing white cut-off leggings with […]
I know Erika already covered the Mike Daisey/TAL/Apple story and so did a lot of other people as smart as she is. But I’m a slow thinker, so I’m coming in to this a little late and out of left field. The left field in this case is epistemology, which is “the study of knowledge and justified belief.” […]
February 20 – 24 This week, Michelle bestowed upon a grateful universe the phrase “probably unpleasant but non-lethal chipmunk ear punches” Cassie wept as a doctor sang to her awkwardly in Spanish Ann showed us that up close, cosmological dark matter looks like poppies Tom found the sole heir to They Might Be Giants’ science […]
This is the universe at present. You’re seeing not the light but the dark — you knew that most of the universe’s matter is dark, right? — and its motions. Not until the far right end are you seeing the light. Go ahead and clickety click all over this; zoom it in and out, drag it around. […]
In 2008, I published a book about the evolutionary origins and cultural development of warfare throughout human history. John Horgan, about as distinguished a science writer as one is likely to find, graciously invited me to share my thoughts on war’s deep past and possible futures on a web video show he hosted. It was […]
Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct […]
