The title is a little joke about a math term, “convergent sequence.” No way on earth can I understand convergent sequences and I doubt if anybody can explain it to me. “Converging consequences” — now that makes a kind of horrible sense, like maybe an east coast snow storm. Anyway. I hope this will be […]
Art
The subtitle of the show is “Art and Magic,” but the word that haunted me when I visited “Houdini,” an exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Art in New York City, was science. The magic was certainly there. The handcuffs that couldn’t hold him. The straitjacket that couldn’t contain him. The thrilling films of Houdini […]
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 […]
Earlier this week I was tickled by a study about dancing insects. European honey bees perform a rump-shaking ‘waggle dance’ in order to tell their hivemates where they’ve found food. The new research showed that when the bees don’t get any sleep, their dance moves become spasmatic and repellent; they clear the floor like a […]
Last Wednesday night, in a swanky hall at Sotheby’s in New York, auctioneer Hugh Hildesley opened bidding for a sculptural masterpiece from the Roman world. Art collectors knew this statue as A Marble Portrait Bust of the Deified Antinous, and Hildesley and his staff expected that it would sell in the two- to three-million dollar range. […]
This happens. An astronomer said that he found, as astronomers do, something that looked unusual and that turned out to be an unusual form of a usual thing. But before he figured that out, a reporter happened to ask him what’s new, and the astronomer said he’d found this unusual thing, couldn’t figure it out, […]
When I first saw the magical, Harry-Potter-like images taken by the folks at the Nottingham Caves Survey in England, my jaw clunked on my desk. Archaeologists have enthused for some time now over the potential of laser scanning for recording ancient sites, but until now the results looked merely brisk and workmanlike. But these new […]
Cameras are nifty. They take a slice of the hustle and bustle of real life and dip it in liquid nitrogen, preserving it for eternity (or as long as our hard drives last). But they can’t do everything. Try taking a picture of the moon or the stars or a particularly lovely sunset. If you’re […]