Dance of Conquest

This is the kind of story that I love, a story about an ordinary person doing something perfectly ordinary, digging out the last of the potatoes from the garden, say, or chasing off after a dog that’s bolted into the woods, and suddenly stumbling on something wonderfully unexpected, something almost magical, something that abruptly, almost […]

Physicist Makes Movie

As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan.  He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe.  As such, he was involved in […]

The Pursuit of Balance

My neighborhood, as I’ve mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money’s on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a […]

The Oracle and the Monkey

For nearly five decades, a scientific loner guarded a great labyrinth of lines on the desert floor near the small Peruvian town of Nazca. Day after day, until she was too elderly and too ill for such solitary work, Maria Reiche set out into the barren vastness with camera, compass, and papers, mapping thousands of […]

Abstruse Goose: A Walk on Mars

__________ This reminds me of that idiot, Walt Whitman,  who thought his appreciation of the stars was so superior to the learn’d astronomer’s.  The guy needed a pie in the face. But here’s the question:  is good poetry (not AG’s) as enlightening, meaningful, or interesting as a walk on Mars — or any kind of […]

Portrait of the Archaeologist as Young Artist

On the taxi ride there, I felt a little ill. The long, sleepless flight to Lima, a dodgy lunch that was coming back to haunt me, and the abrupt swerving and lurching of the taxi through the congested streets of the Peruvian capital—all seemed to be taking their toll.  By the time I and my […]

Abstruse Goose: The Infinite Canvas

Abstruse Goose’s little mouseover says, Please credit the original artist.  And he’s right, it’s nice to look at the world as though it’s art.  You can’t help but notice the original artist had great taste in color and in which colors to put together.  Like, the night sky is the original setting for diamonds against […]