Oh, Spring

Outside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again.  They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around.  They’re [...]

Temple Grandin & a Neurotypical Write a Book

Richard and Temple Grandin have co-authored a book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, which is just out and which you should definitely and immediately buy. Before you do, Jessa and Ann have some questions. Ann: Richard, this subject is a departure for you. What is the subject, anyway?  Richard: The immediate subject is the [...]

I Have Just Two Questions

#1.  Couldn’t you use post-menopausal hot flashes to warm up cold people?  Hot flashes are better warm-uppers than, say, heaters because they happen from the inside.  Something in you lights up and you become radioactive; you glow, you emit.   I won’t tell you why I was thinking about that because some of you get snide. [...]

The Last Word

March 18 – 22 FOLWON* guest poster Brooke Borel introduces the world to the bed bug hockey stick graph. Read it and you will understand why data journalism is about to change the world. That’s highly relevant for Erika’s post, because as she tells us, you only have control over your data until you become [...]

A. Wellerstein & the Death of a Patent Clerk

Alex Wellerstein is an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics with an obsession about the atomic bomb and in particular, about the patents taken out on it.  Patents on the atomic bomb seem odd: apparently the government wanted to be sure it owned the rights, and not the “private contractors, private scientists, [...]

Abstruse Goose: In the Classroom

I swear, I heard the short version of this just a little while ago. Graduate student X:  I hate that one kid in our class. Graduate student Y:  You mean that undergraduate?  The one who always talks?  The kid who never says anything, he just talks? Graduate student X:  That’s the one.  I really hate [...]

The last word

25 February to 1 March This week, Ann blew all our minds with the story of the Farm Hall tapes, the greatest-ever lesson in counterfactual thinking.  Also, just off the cuff, who else thinks a dubstep group called “Hitler’s Uranium Club” lurks in our future? Cameron says no one does austerity quite like the people [...]

Farm Hall: the Fall into Failure

You probably know this.  In August, 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to the American government.  German scientists had announced that the energy holding an atom together could be released – in fact, 2.2 pounds-worth of uranium atoms would equal 10,000 tons of TNT.  Einstein said this implied a new kind of bomb that Hitler’s government [...]