Baltimore has a hard-core drug problem. The evidence is unmistakable. Head down an alley in the wrong part of town and you’re liable to find a discarded needle, some broken vials, and maybe even a shell casing or two. Why, yes. That was a gunshot. See that guy on the corner? No, he’s not tired. […]
Art
You understand the joke, right? that high-energy physics learns the nature of subatomic particles by hurling them at other subatomic particles and when the particles collide, studying the debris? So this is funny. Also disturbing. http://abstrusegoose.com/156
For the last five or six days, I’ve been searching the web for good, reliable news about what is happening to Egypt’s antiquities as the turmoil deepens in Cairo. Are Egyptian artifacts safe in the country’s many museums, protected by soldiers perched on tanks or by human chains of young Egyptians? Or are gangs of […]
Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons. And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers. The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the […]
It was a great moment, maybe one of the greatest that any Egyptologist has ever experienced. Peering into the newly breeched tomb of Tutankhamun, Howard Carter gazed in rapture at all the wondrous objects lining the pharaoh’s tomb. There were “strange animals,” he later wrote, “statues and gold–everywhere the glint of gold.” As Carter held […]
Ants’ most anthropomorphous characteristic is the facility with which they go to war with their neighbors.
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 […]
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 […]
