Today I have the pleasure of introducing the latest addition to LWON: Christie Aschwanden (ASH-wand-un), a writer who shares not only my fondness for the term “bull honkey,” but also my intense dislike of liars. Yes, we are two peas in a pod. Except Christie, a serious athlete and professional ski racer, is really buff. […]
Miscellaneous
Before I left for England, a surprising number of people pulled me aside for a frank talk about The Accent. You know the one. It’s that slightly off, trans-Atlantic dialect acquired by expats; the one whose distracting inauthenticity annoys you during otherwise decent period dramas. Fortunately for me, I was never in any real danger: […]
Pambamarca isn’t a household name, not like Machu Picchu. Few backpackers trek its steep slopes each year seeking out the elusive Inca past. There is no sleek Vistadome train, no fleet of gleaming Mercedes-Benz buses whisking crowds to the ruins, no luxury lodge at the top. But Pambamarca bristles with the ruins of Inca ambitions. […]
A few weeks ago, the Human Brain Project announced that it had been selected as a finalist in a competition whose winners will get €1 billion worth of funding from the EU. The Human Brain Project (HBP) plans to use the prize money to build a simulation of the human brain on a supercomputer. HBP […]
Tyler Hamilton has finally confessed. I am not inclined to give him another hug. In 2007, I wrote a Bicycling magazine feature about Tyler, his supporters and why I don’t believe. (You can read the story here.) While writing the Bicycling story, I spent a lot of time with Tyler and his fans. Tyler— a […]
Fifty years ago today, President Kennedy, speaking before a joint session of Congress, said, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Love that “the.”
As part of LWON’s first birthday celebrations, Ginny set a question for me: Your upcoming book is about experiencing time in different cultures. I can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, could you tell us which country/city/village, in your opinion, has the best conception of time? (However you’d like to define best.) In other […]
On April 4, the physics department at Columbia University held an unblinding party. For 100.9 days between January 13 and June 8, 2010, a detector 4,500 feet underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, in central Italy, had been collecting data. Following the protocol of a “blind” analysis, the data had instantly disappeared into […]
