Damn You, Predictive-Text Typewriter!

I don’t care if they’re real. I’m just grateful for the texting fails collected on DamnYouAutocorrect. Maybe a guy really did offer to cook his girlfriend “chicken vaginas” instead of chicken fajitas; maybe a mom described her toddlers as having “pornstaches” instead of milkstaches in their Christmas photos; maybe a dad told his kids that [...]

Secret Satans: Technology

For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us. My father wasn’t a physicist, but he could work wonders with gravity. He’d be showing me how to change a flat, or fix [...]

The thin white line

It was hardly the first time a ref had gotten it wrong. But the error at the 2010 World Cup was the last straw. Germany (the machine) was only beating England (the perpetual underdog) by a single goal. No fewer than five refs were mulling about the pitch when Frank Lampard, an England player, took [...]

DIY Space Flight

Virgin Galactic describes astronauts as “the world’s most exclusive club.” I know this because I recently downloaded the company’s brochure, and spent many happy minutes fantasizing about what it would be like to lay down $200,000 and take out a membership. Virgin Galactic, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is the space tourism company dreamt up [...]

Guest Post: The Zombie Zeitgeist, Ham Radio, and the End of the World

The end of the world has been preying on my mind lately. Not in a religious, horsemen-of-the-apocalypse way  ‒— but in a more surviving-the-failure-of-modern-amenities way. One reason for this preoccupation is my generation’s fascination not only with zombie film and literature1 but with interactive zombie games, like elaborate tag variation humans vs zombies, races with [...]

Review of an Old Book Unjustly Forgotten

Some of the characters of Thomas McMahon’s novel, Loving Little Egypt: Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make [...]

Chop Like A Girl

  ast weekend, my friend Sarah Gilman won the women’s woodsplitting competition at the 41st annual Mountain Fair in Carbondale, Colo., out-chopping several close rivals — including a local county commissioner — and taking home a championship tiara and an six-pound splitting maul. It was Sarah’s second tiara, and second prize maul; she first won [...]

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 [...]