On Saturday, 38-year-old Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan won the gold medal in the men’s Olympic cycling road race. Not everyone was cheering. As one cycling fan commented on twitter, Vinokourov’s win was, “Not good for cycling, sport or “Olympism.’” The reason for this grumbling? “Vino” is a former doper, and an “unrepentant” one by […]
Miscellaneous
July 16 – 21 So what do we do about invasive species? Exterminate ’em, right? and feel holy about it. And when the invasives are goats on the Galapagos, we still exterminate ’em, right? Only it doesn’t feel so holy, says Virginia. Ann, in her obsessive search for the metaphors of science, finds another one: […]
I slept through the Higgs boson announcement on July 4. Whatever the news that the Large Hadron Collider physicists would be trumpeting in the middle of the New York night, it wasn’t going to change by 9 a.m. No, what I would be monitoring throughout the day were the press releases and media coverage. Would […]
July 9 – 13 On this week’s episode of Galapagos Monday, Ginny explained how conservation biologists tried to make a gigolo out of a 60-year-old virgin. Michelle explained Tianamen Sid. Abstruse Goose raged against the assault of jargon. Christie told us about the two kinds of thinking it takes to do science And TGIPF continued […]
My rural Colorado town, pop. 1,500 on a good day, is in many ways a laboratory-scale model of the U.S.A. We worship both community ties and unfettered independence. We’re gossipy and private, inclusive and provincial, divided by class and dogma even as we gather under our purple mountains majesty. Our community stew comes to a […]
July 2 – 6 This week, Tom wondered why one of the greatest mental capacities our outrageously successful species possesses hardly works at all. Faced with parenting in a region “where a high school diploma confers a solid elementary school education”, Jessa weighed her home schooling options and whether they could guarantee a prodigy. Cassie’s […]
Marriage is like a sweater. A yellow sweater you bought, and couldn’t return. So says Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, and one of the 20 outrageously accomplished behavioral scientists who spoke at a 1-day summit at Stanford last week. Gilbert studies happiness, not knitwear. And his main point is that we humans are terrible […]
Sally, who usually posts the week-end summary, had a massive failure of an unspecified nature. And Ann, who does the backups, had a massive failure of modern conveniences due to excessive heat and no power for the foreseeable. We’re sorry. We doubt that this concatenation will happen again.
