Lately I’ve been reading my way through the series of Oz books. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only the first in a series of 14 books, and it’s not remotely the best. It’s fascinating to reread books I loved as a child. Some are still great. Others have inexplicably morphed into poorly-written, preachy duds. […]
History/Philosophy
I received an email the other day from Nicholas Suntzeff, the director of the Astronomy Program at Texas A&M as well as a friend. (Readers might remember that he has published two guest posts with LWON.) His email was in fact a series of emails that he thought I might enjoy. It started with a […]
About a month ago, the science writing community found out that one of its leaders was sexually harassing his younger female colleagues. The young women, especially those looking for networks and jobs, took to the internet and named him in front of his own community. The internet got its shorts in an uproar which eventually focused on […]
For most of my life, I’ve been obsessed with plane crashes. It began when I was in first grade, and my dad and his squadron went to Turkey on TDY (temporary duty assignment — the military equivalent of a business trip). They were there to practice dropping bombs from their fighter jets. Dad qualified […]
First, do no harm. It’s a commandment often incorrectly attributed to the Hippocratic oath yet it provides an ethical foundation for modern medicine. The American Medical Association’s principles of medical ethics begins, “A physician shall be dedicated to providing competent medical care, with compassion and respect for human dignity and rights.” But what happens when a […]
A couple of months ago astronomers reported the discovery of an unusual six-component “gravitational lens”—six images of the same object coming at us from slightly different positions in the sky. As light traveling across the universe passes a large mass, the gravity from the mass will serve as a kind of lens, bending the rays. […]
I love museums, and my hometown, Washington, D.C., is full of them. You’ve heard of the big ones—the Air and Space Museum with the Wright Brothers’ plane, the Natural History Museum with its elephant and dinosaurs. We’ve got privately-owned tourist bait, like the Spy Museum and a branch of Madame Tussauds. Then there’s a pile […]
The sidewalk astronomer – usually a star-haunted amateur setting up a personal telescope on city sidewalks for both money and love – is familiar with doubt. Mr. Tregent, 1856: “Sometimes when I have been exhibiting, the parties have said it was all nonsense and a deception, for the star was painted on the glass. If […]