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 […]
Ann
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
