This fall, I did something that I’ve done only once before in three decades of writing: for two whole weeks I booked off work and took a real vacation. Freelance writers can rarely afford half-month-long holidays. But I had spent a good part of 2010 in cardiac wards, tending to my visibly failing father and watching […]
History/Philosophy
Last Sunday, the day before the world’s population hit 7 billion, I went to a scientific meeting on the future of contraception. I had expected to hear, and did hear, about a slew of labs trying to develop a birth control pill for men. What I did not expect: one pill was shown to work in […]
I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder! The poet: Richard P. Feynman. The occasion: an undergraduate philosophy term paper at MIT. A great work of poetry? Perhaps not. An example of profound thinking and the ability to render a complex […]
Dear WWGD: I am a postdoc working on an important scientific problem, one that I find rewarding and challenging. But a month before the end of the funding cycle, our team had a budget surplus, at which point my supervisor suggested that I find a way to spend it. Otherwise, he sighed, we’ll never […]
As someone preoccupied with odd, mysterious places, I have a longstanding appreciation for an odd, mysterious organization called The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Equal parts arts organization, archive, and amateur detective agency, the Los Angeles-based CLUI (rhymes with gooey) runs bus tours of the Nevada Test Site, mounts exhibitions of hurricane-racked vacation properties on Gulf […]
The news of a detection of faster-than-light speed neutrinos by the OPERA experiment stunned the physics and astronomy community last week. I read the paper, and I listened to the talk from Geneva over the Web. This is seriously weird stuff! Faster-than-light speed neutrinos!? The talk was filled with wonderfully arcane geodetic methods for measuring […]
Bear with me, I want to talk about my grandparents. Hilda was my mother’s mother. Thomas was my father’s father. The difference between my mother’s and my father’s families was enormous. My mother’s family was large and blue-collar — farmers, mechanics, truckers – and not much money or education; not much use for the fine […]
My mother is spunky and smart and I love her very much. But she’s got this one trait that drives me crazy: she believes everything she sees on The History Channel. I visited her in Michigan a few weeks ago. One night at a local brewery, with my sister, Charlotte, and her boyfriend, Greg, in […]
