Miscellaneous
My daughter had her braces removed a couple of weeks ago. This was a big occasion for her and to mark it I told her she could have whatever heretofore verboten food she wanted. She asked for gum—her first in about two years. I handed her the pack when she came out of the orthodontist’s […]
Artificial Intelligence historian Pamela McCorduck has died. Author of Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence and other seminal works, I had a request in to interview her for a number of projects but never heard back. Now I know why. In a pitch for a Netflix show, […]
I finally finished Anna Karenina, which means I now understand how gentleman farmer Konstantin Levin felt when, after spending far too much time thinking about farming, he finally just grabs a scythe and starts mowing hay, real hay! That, gentle reader, is how I felt last week when I talked to Leif Nelson, senior author of […]
It’s something that some orb spiders do, a web embellishment whose purpose is debated. It’s called a stabilimentum, and arty spiders named Shea or Absinthe (Charlotte is just too on the nose) spin it out aciniform silk — different material than they use for the surrounding web. Typically its done in concentric circles or an […]
Some things I seem to write about over and over, year after year, far into the night. One of these things is the situation of women in science, usually physics and/or astronomy. The subject bores me until I start thinking about it, and then I get sort of irate. Enraged actually. Well, flame-throwingly furious. The […]
I was bitten the other night. I would have taken a picture of the turgid, blood-filled bug that stuck its rostrum inside of me for a liberal helping of hemoglobin, but my girlfriend smashed it with a rock and spattered the thing while I cheered her on. It was hard to resist the killing. Normally, I try and treat other […]
I love to count, and as a student of ecology I have counted many things over the years: sandpipers, whales, ducks, deer mice, penguins, internodes on eelgrass rhizomes, to name just a few. In part I love counting’s essential mundanity. It is so central to any ecological question, but my god can it be boring. […]
