The Last Word

August 13 – 17 In his second guest post, Erik Vance tells us that, with regard to end-of-the-world prophecies, we’re doing it wrong. Christie wonders how sincere repentant dopers really are. Abstruse Goose considers the success rate of astrobiology. Guest poster Nicholas Sunzeff wonders if cosmology is a meaningful endeavour in a world filled with [...]

The Last Word

July 2 – 6 This week, Tom wondered why one of the greatest mental capacities our outrageously successful species possesses hardly works at all. Faced with parenting in a region “where a high school diploma confers a solid elementary school education”, Jessa weighed her home schooling options and whether they could guarantee a prodigy. Cassie’s [...]

Dirty, dirty electricity

In 2010, an epidemiologist was asked by a California school to investigate its high levels of dangerous dirty electricity. When he arrived to take readings, he found that some classrooms contained levels of electrical pollution so intense that they exceeded his meter’s ability to measure them. This story was reported in a major US news [...]

Happy Birthday to Us Yay

Happy Birthday to us, we’ve just turned two.  We’re bigger: we’ve added three new Persons of LWON.  And we’ve matured, that is, we stopped looking so much at our own bellybutton and are more aware of the intelligent, thoughtful Commenters of LWON.  So for our birthday celebration, we’ll look back at the year and not [...]

The Last Word

May 7 – May 11 To commemorate mother’s day, Cassie starts the week by wondering whether paper/rock/scissors is a good way to trick her indecisive biological clock; Making the case that Cassie should take the plunge, Cameron introduces us to the unforgettable stadium metaphor; Christie says a family of two is a family too; Jessa [...]

Motherhood: Immaculate gestation

“Mommy, why did you kill me?” was the first line of the comment. It devolved from there into a maudlin, hallucinatory, and occasionally Freudian fantasy of an aborted child’s final message to his mother, and it ended with the little guy playing baseball with God in heaven while the mother burned in hell. The reply [...]

What’s In a Number

“Since there is an infinite number of alternative universes, there must be one in which there isn’t an infinite number of alternative universes. Perhaps this is it.” No, that speculation didn’t come from the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag. It’s from a reader of New Scientist, courtesy of LWON’s own Sally, who is an editor at [...]

LWOVE

Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct [...]