I asked my husband, who’s a physicist and a pilot, how airplanes stay up in the air. A question like that makes him happy. “It’s the wings,” he said, “They provide lift.” “What’s lift?” I said. “It’s Bernoulli,” he said. “The faster air moves, the lower its pressure. ” I’m used to these answers that are […]
Ann
Turn right at Alamogordo, pass High Rolls, and 9000 feet up into New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains, turn right again and go 15 miles along a narrow switchback two-lane, turn off on the Apache Point road, pass a pond, and hit the dead end at Apache Point Observatory, a cluster of utilitarian buildings. Inside one building […]
Galaxies are the universe’s basic units. (True, they’re made of stars, but all the stars are in galaxies.) So if you understood why galaxies look the way they do and how they’ve changed with time, you’d probably understand the history of the whole damn universe. Oh boy. And astronomers believed they sort of did but […]
Christie wrote a post about the suckiness of power-point presentations and of scientific conferences in general. Conferences are an occupational hazard for science writers: walk into a big-city convention center; find Session 425B which is in a narrow, fluorescent-lit room with sliding walls, little chairs in rows, a podium, and a screen; sit down; the […]
Last week Jessa wrote about psychiatric diagnoses moving from the quantum to the continuum, from neat little packages to subtleties that include shades of gray and something called “a quantifiable baseline of life functioning.” The same week, Ginny published a story about the same diagnostic changes but applied specifically to pathological grief – the problem […]
Heather asked about the SETI telescope at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, whether having its budget zeroed out mattered in any way. Had it ever found anything? Could it be re-purposed? No it hasn’t and yes it can, but I don’t care because, ma’am, I am seriously running out of patience with the whole enterprise. […]
One year ago today, the People of LWON published their first post. It was by Josie Glausiusz, it was on flesh-eating algae, and we thank her for setting that tone. Writing LWON — that is, writing what we want to and in the way we want to write it — turns out to be a […]
In the continuing quest to find meaning in life, or if not meaning, at least a few good rules, I turn as usual to science. Science offers the phrase, “running open loop.” Open loop is an engineering term meaning a system that runs without feedback, without a self-governor, without correcting itself. A closed-loop sprinkler system […]
