September 10-14, 2018
Sarah starts off the week with a Tinder stand-in: a 1972 guide to the outdoors at night. The challenge is identifying just which kind of nocturnal creature you are encountering’ This may not be the same kind of creature you thought you had swiped right on. . . If he’s wearing a suitcoat with no tie, an open-collared button down and a dissatisfied expression, he may turn out to be a tech-industry refugee who talks for thirty minutes about intellectual property while you drink two beers in complete silence.
Craig explores a dry creekbed near where he lives, and contemplates how crayfish and other creatures survive drought. I’d been expecting to find a creek bottom strewn with baked, stinking exoskeletons, their claws pointing this way and that. Now I could see these were cunning little buggers. This wasn’t their first rodeo.
Ann has been talking again to Richard Garwin, who has talking to politicians about science ever since Eisenhower. The old guy gets out of the cab, slowly, creakily — he’s 86, after all — and walks past a group of anti-nuke demonstrators, stops and looks at them for a second, then walks on. He’s seen them before.
Abstruse Goose, how did you know that science writers have invisible scientists that follow them around and make comments like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppet Show?
Rose has been thinking about the similarities between the internet and the lead pipes of ancient Rome. The pipes were connective, they boosted the standard of living—and they carried both status and sickness. I think about this analogy a lot now. Some days it feels way too alarmist to me. And other days, it feels just about right.
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Image: Sarah Gilman