August 18 – 22
We reduxed a post by our beloved ex-LWONian, Tom Hayden, about all the shiny new multiplexing gadgets he’s bought and broken. Turns out the old stupid crap technology? it never breaks, it always works, it stays your friend.
Helen bought an ice cream maker as a present but the recipient of the present moved out and took the ice cream maker along. Helen does the only possible thing: first makes one last batch of mint-chocolate chip ice cream with real mint that tastes like summer. Then she considers, Shall I just buy my own ice cream maker?
Guest Adam Ganz, a playwright, wrote a play about the Nobel chemist, Dorothy Hodgkin, and her student, the politician Margaret Thatcher. The two remained friends; they both saw patterns but opposite ones, and Ganz sees a pattern in their patterns.
Jessa’s grandfather made oil-burning furnaces. His granddaughter worries about peak oil, fracking, price crashes, economics, and human nature. She’s not excessively hopeful about any of them, particularly the latter.
Cameron’s California ocean is warm this year, warm enough for unusual ocean life to come close to shore, warm enough for Cameron herself to join them, floating between the salt waves like a sunfish.
Right now the ocean is glorious. In the evenings, even if the day hasn’t been too hot, you can throw yourself into the saltwater and float between the waves for a while without your teeth chattering.
About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin the long process of assembling from the shadows cast by an X-ray beam the complex three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the molecule. Hanging on the wall outside was a Henry Moore drawing of 
