I do seem to keep referring to Freeman Dyson, even writing whole posts about him. The reason, I think, is that I want to write a profile of him, even though 1) profiles of him have been done and done and done, the most recent being a full-blown biography; and 2) he’s way above my pay grade. The closest I can come to describing him is to say that he’s not like anyone I’ve met before. He just turned 90 and his long-time home, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, gave him the kind of party scientists give each other: a day of talks on the subject on which the scientist has spent his/her life – like, say, low-mass stars. For Dyson, the Institute needed two days and four different subjects and even then I don’t know how they narrowed it down. Continue reading
September 30 – October 4
This week — on the off chance that you haven’t heard — Christie won the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award for last year’s dynamit post about pink ribbon cancer denialism.
Cassie sets out to do a story on how Bolivia can have a navy without a coastline — and finds herself needing to execute some defense maneuvers of her own.
Runner’s high, we’ve heard of. But runner’s itch? Roberta explains.
Guest poster Bryn Nelson ruminates on shared memory, stored knowledge and tractorpalooza.
Ann and Abstruse Goose realise that an internet without back doors and side channels is probably not an internet.
“So, this goes…under the bra?” I stare dubiously at the hard plastic bowls.
“Yup,” says the 27-year-old Black Irish firefighter who somehow strikes me as unlikely to know, even though it is he who handed them to me in a sealed package upon which he has printed my name.
The trouble is I already have my heavy white canvas straightjacket zipped up to a high neck line in the back and the strap between my legs buckled to the rings at the middle of my back. I retreat to the ladies’ room with the only other lady present and we insert the domes. They feel decidedly unergonomic. Like if I were to take a hard hit to them they might spare the nipple but completely crush my lymph nodes.
I am in my first fencing class for a few reasons. First of all, my deep interest in combat sport has long been grappling with a deep lack of interest in injuring myself. Secondly, the Municipal Recreation Guide offered only a few other alternatives, such as scrapbooking and home-buying, for adults seeking new skills.
I have visions of springing about with my non-sword arm cocked, scorpion style behind and over my head – a throwback, it turns out, to a time when duels were fought with the visual aid of lanterns. Dueling died out after the First World War, and aristocrats stopped inoculating their children with fencing techniques, but the sport has lived on. In fact, it’s one of only four sports that has featured in every modern Olympics.
When I was young, my brother and sister and I caught salamanders in my grandparents’ garage and chased cats through the barn. The family farm was a big private playground, where we could poke at tadpoles in Nelson Lake (more like a large pond) and occasionally ride around on a giant lawnmower.
More often than not, though, we would spend our time on the other side of rural Highway 32, at a far more public and imposing place called Steamer Hill. Since 1954, this tract of rolling farmland donated by Grandpa and his siblings has been home to an annual festival called the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion, or WMSTR. Every Labor Day weekend, the unincorporated community of Rollag, with a population hovering around 30, swells to the size of a small city as tens of thousands of visitors and volunteers descend upon the Hill to experience what we now jokingly call “Tractorpalooza.”
For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die in the reporting trenches. This is one of those stories.
In 2001, I moved to Bolivia to become a Peace Corps volunteer and fell deeply in love with the country. In 2010, I returned. I wanted to visit friends and family, but, like any intrepid freelancer, I also hoped to do some reporting. Although Bolivia has been landlocked since it lost its coastline to Chile more than 130 years ago, the country still maintains a navy. This is their motto: “The sea belongs to us by right, recovering it is a duty.” I find this sentiment simultaneously ridiculous and sort of commendable. So why not do a story on Bolivia’s navy, I thought. (Well, lots of reasons. But I didn’t let details deter me.) Continue reading
I haven’t gone for a run in more than a year. The main reason I dislike running is that I’m lazy. But I have a second, slightly better excuse: Every time I run, my legs get unbearably itchy.
It starts as a tingling in my thighs and calves. After several minutes, right around the time when I’m supposed to be settling into a nice rhythm, it erupts into full-blown, supremely annoying itchiness. My runs usually end with me clawing at my legs on the side of the road, while passersby give me weird looks.
This subject is dear to me at the moment: I’ve been working forever on a short, cheap news story on the National Security Agency. One thing I’m learning — or I think I’m learning, with this stuff you can’t be sure — is more or less what AG is saying, that an internet without back doors and side channels is probably not an internet. Now that I’ve said that, I’m not sure what it means.
I hate this subject.
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23 – 27 September
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to attend a wild horse and burro auction? This week, Mary Caperton Morton reports.
Christie tried her hardest not to eulogize newsprint.
Helen ate whale. Verdict? Underwhelming.
“A lot of us hoped that once we had the Internet we might have more information about the world,” Ethan Zuckermann tells guest poster Amy Maxmen. But our persistent, insistent misperceptions about Africa illustrate that we only ever know what we think we know, no matter how connected we are.
And finally, did you know Queen guitarist Brian May has a doctorate in astrophysics?! This and more in Cameron’s post on music and physics.
