The first woman to get a Ph.D. in oceanography in the United States—and in North America, and, perhaps, in the world—was Easter Ellen Cupp. She received it from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1934. I learned this because I have been reading about one of Cupp’s supervisors, a man named Harald Sverdrup, for a […]
Miscellaneous
In 2019, a forest caught fire in Sussex, England. This would not have made international headlines, except that the forest in question was Ashdown Forest, the real-life inspiration for Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin’s beloved Hundred Acre Wood. As the fire spread, dry-eyed forest rangers explained to reporters that the blaze and the little […]
There is a lake not far from where I live now. I’m not a person who has ever invested deeply in place; I am a child of immigrants and I have always been somewhere temporarily. I don’t know the place where I was born, and as much as I love my hometown, I always knew […]
What parent hasn’t felt this grim determination at some point during the marathon that is modern, village-less childrearing? I instantly fell in love with this statue on a visit to Moscow (en route to the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic to visit a physics lab under a mountain). I can’t seem to find any information about the sculpture […]
This post originally appeared April 19, 2019 My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit […]
Helen: Hello! It is I, Helen! Let us have another vicious fight/discussion/debate about…pandemic life? Cameron: Yes! Let us! Although I don’t know if it will be a real fight this time, like all of our other very vicious fights. Would it be fair to say we are united in feeling slightly beaten down? Helen: Oh […]
Somehow I always knew there was something about my dad’s heart. I’m not sure exactly what I knew, but I did know that he didn’t eat certain things, like eggs and bacon, and ate other things, like canned tuna and low-fat cheese and margarine. (It was the eighties.) He enrolled in a cholesterol study. Bottles […]
Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got […]