Ten years ago, blogs were still new enough to be exciting. A small group of science writers thought they’d like to see what this blogging thing was about. On May 20, 2010, the Last Word on Nothing was born. Ten years later, the blogging landscape has changed. As has the world. A lot. But LWON […]
Thomas
I need you to know this: I had my name before he was famous. And though my family moved from Detroit to Saskatoon during the Vietnam War years that made him so, I need you to understand that my father was never a draft dodger. I have no quarrel with the decisions, to flee conscription […]
This week at LWON we’re digging into the archives to celebrate the uncelebrated: inanimate objects. Many of them aren’t very impressive inanimate objects. And yet we love them. I was inspired to propose this week of reruns by a piece former LWONer Tom Hayden wrote back in 2011 about the various functional, non-fancy things he […]
As of tomorrow, May 20, LWON will have been alive for five years. LWON is a little surprised at this and entirely pleased with itself. In celebration, two of our brilliant alumni have agreed to write guest posts listing the Top Five Things They Want to List the Top Five Of. We are, and always […]
Tom Hayden, an ex-LWONian whom we miss beyond measure, posted this on Nov. 2, 2011. At the time it seemed to hit a national nerve, but knowing Tom, we bet every detail of it is still true. I’ve been thinking about my Zune a lot since Steve Jobs passed away. You know, the revolutionary portable […]
Tonight, if we can remember the words, we might be singing about auld acquaintance. And we have many: several People of LWON–Heather Pringle, Erika Check Hayden and Thomas Hayden–moved on in 2013 (and Virginia Hughes just before that). We miss them all. So I thought I’d try to bring at least one of these fine […]
Neither one of us is good at good-byes. Tom, who abhors leaving a party, prefers to remain until every other guest has departed, the host has passed out or gone to bed, and he’s holding forth to the household pets and/or appliances. That way, he knows he won’t miss out on any of the fun. […]
When I think back on the formative moments of my youth, it’s hard to top the Canada-Wide Science Fair of 1980. It was there, in Thompson, Manitoba, that I first truly experienced the transformative power of science to make daily life richer, better, more rewarding. No, it wasn’t my own engagement with the scientific method […]