Harry Baig & the Electronic Battlefield

This is a war story.  It does have a little math, physics, and technology in it, but the real reason I’m writing about it is that Harry Baig got under my skin.  Baig was a Marine, and in 1968, during the Vietnam War, he was among those trapped in a siege at Khe Sanh.  Baig’s […]

Science: The Never Ending Adventure!

Who is a scientist? Well, there’s the reality. And that has been nicely documented recently under the #iamscience hashtag on Twitter. (Storify version of its origins here.) But then there are the perceptions. The preconceptions. The stereotypes. And because scientists are nearly as prone to mirror gazing as journalists are, it’s perhaps no surprise that […]

Spoetry

It’s commenter appreciation day here at Last Word on Nothing. If you’ve ever wondered why there’s a delay when you leave a note in the comments section, it’s because live human beings monitor them. We reject spam and nastygrams. But those poor spambots try so hard that today I think it’s time to recognize their […]

In Search of the Secret Garden

When J. Allen Williams, Jr., was a boy in Chapel Hill, N.C., his mother loved to read the children’s classic The Secret Garden to him and his brother. The story, about an orphaned girl and her friends who restore an abandoned garden on an English estate, led Williams and his brother to dig and plant […]

Leaving a Mark

“Because it’s there.” Not good enough. The traditional explanation for our species’ imperative to go to the ends of the earth no longer holds, and it hasn’t held for a long time. An isolated population or two might still be lurking out there, somewhere, in a jungle or on an ice floe, harboring a “Because […]

There are two primary types of scientist (science music, part II)

Science or music, music or science? Too often when it comes to science-inflected tunage, that’s the choice one has to make. The best songs, usually, are only tangentially about science. The Low Anthem’s “Charlie Darwin,” for example, is stirringly beautiful, and improves with each listen well into the hundreds. But poor old Darwin doesn’t ever […]

Making a Renaissance

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one above: In 4 November, […]