What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is. His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes? Dyson is hard to describe: he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say. He’s spent his […]
Ann
This picture is what the sky really looks like. Click on it. It’s the biggest digital color picture of the sky, the part called the Northern Galactic Cap, and it’s taken years to produce; it’s a trillion pixels, a terapixel and — says the press release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — to see […]
The older I get, the more people I know who have lost what they could not afford to lose. I’ll repeat: lost means gone, unrecoverable, not coming back; and what these people lost, they still need and want. The problem is nearly universal and has no obvious solution, or rather, the solution is idiosyncratic and […]
We’re sorry, but Thomas Hayden, the New Person of LWON, will be unable to post today as promised. Instead we present for your delight and edification, Heather. Tom will be back as soon as possible and in the meantime, we send him our best wishes for recovery. Credit: Jehan Georges Vibert
Please meet Thomas Hayden, a new Person of LWON. And let’s get this out of the way early: he is not and never has been married to any movie star whatever. He writes about ecology, energy, environment, and evolution and though he’s entirely a peaceable, friendly fellow, he writes a lot about war. And sex. […]
The last Zooniverse project I spent time on was also their first, Galaxy Zoo 1. You looked at pictures of galaxies and decided whether they were shaped like spirals or ellipticals. I could do that, it was fun, and better yet, it was citizen science, 350,000 citizens doing real science with real scientific results, so […]
Virginia wrote one of Nature‘s (very prestigious outfit) ten best features last year. Nature‘s editors said so. The feature, “Science in Court: Head Case,” was about the dicey use of MRI in death sentences for psychopathic murderers. Fascinating science, real-world implications. Go read it. Photo: Gabriel Pollard
UPDATE: I woke up, looked at the clock, then looked out the window at the moon — no eclipse. “They must have gotten it wrong,” I thought. I looked at the clock again, saw I had misread it, and realized with a little shock of joy, they never get this wrong. Other phenomena of nature […]
