Stress Factors

At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, two decades after he served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, Lance Johnson felt the tremors of San Francisco’s Loma Prieta Earthquake from his apartment in Marin County. He took his cup of coffee to the couch, switched on the news and saw a live feed of the [...]

The Newest of the People of LWON

(“People of Last Word on Nothing” doesn’t sound as exciting as People of LWON.)  We are pleased and proud to introduce Virginia Hughes.  One of her early stories was about why Hagia Sophia doesn’t fall down in earthquakes, which was impressive because not just anyone can get you interested in the structural loads of cathedrals.  [...]

What to Wear on an Ice-Age Sea Voyage?

Several superb posts on one of my favorite blogs, Elfshot, got me thinking recently about the attire of the earliest migrants to the Americas. Despite all the festering debate over exactly when these hardy travelers set foot in the New World, most evidence suggests that they landed here during the last Ice Age, somewhere between 20,000 [...]

Abstruse Goose: Many Worlds

Abstruse Goose seems preoccupied with life paths and choices.  This time instead of math, he’s talking about physics, specifically about a theory that the many worlds which according to quantum uncertainty (thus Schrodinger’s cats) can possibly exist, actually do co-exist side by side, maybe in different universes or something.   I don’t know.  It’s pretty arcane. [...]

People Standing in Lines

ZapperZ is a physics blogger who worries about people believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, that ghosts are real and evolution isn’t; and in short, that the public knowledge of and interest in science is thin as a dime.  He met a scientist, a woman, who said the only way to explain science to politicians [...]

Christie’s and the Roman Helmet

Last May, a man armed with a metal detector stumbled on something almost magical in a farmer’s field in the Eden Valley of northwestern England. Buried under the earth were 74 metal fragments, some large, some small, but all clearly part of a Roman helmet. And not just any Roman helmet. When the conservators at [...]

In Defense of Sloths

Maybe it’s the advent of the rainy season here on the Northwest Coast, the time of all things mouldy and green. Or maybe it’s just the battle I wage every morning to crawl out of bed when it’s still so bloody dark. But sloths strike me as very simpatico these days. Ok, if you watch [...]

Outright Gifts

I drove up to an auction in the Pennsylvania hayfields, parked in the field to the left because the lot to the right was reserved for buggies and horses. Maybe five auctions were going on in different parts of the fairground and everywhere were Amish in black and dark jewel-colored clothes, Mennonites in black and [...]

Abstruse Goose: Life Paths Integrated Over Time

Abstruse Goose sure has it in for athletes, doesn’t he.  Fine with me.  I’m less happy that he doesn’t arrange a life path for people who are born modestly, live modestly, work like dogs (actually not like any dog I’ve ever met, friendly mooches), have modest success and a gratifying life.  Boy, is that ever [...]

Save the Wild Tigers

It’s a little-known fact that many more tigers live in private captivity in the U.S. than in the wild. As I wrote in my article, Far From the Forests of the Night, published in the February 2008 issue of Natural History magazine, between 7,000 and 15,000 tigers are held in private roadside zoos, circuses, sanctuaries, [...]