They called her the girl in the cage. “How about her?” the Vietnamese official asked, flipping the book to an image of a girl crouched behind bars. The thick album in front of me featured photographs and short bios of purported Agent Orange victims. There was the boy with no arms, the girl with […]
Month: February 2012
Sometime in the winter of 1907 and 1908, an American researcher found a curious assortment of objects lying in a small pit in the Valley of the Kings. Theodore Davis, like many Egyptologists of the day, was looking for large, grand things, preferably royal tombs. So when he and his workers dug up several jars filled […]
I don’t have anything to add, except that I remember the day I learned that being where I was at that exact minute was highly improbable. I mean, I was there, right then, I was 100 percent probable. But if I’d calculated it ahead of time I’d have been as AG says, 0.000312 or something. […]
February 20 – 24 This week, Michelle bestowed upon a grateful universe the phrase “probably unpleasant but non-lethal chipmunk ear punches” Cassie wept as a doctor sang to her awkwardly in Spanish Ann showed us that up close, cosmological dark matter looks like poppies Tom found the sole heir to They Might Be Giants’ science […]
** The new study, certainly not the last word on DNA, was published last week in The EMBO Journal. The music is Chopin’s Minute Waltz, the subject of another post.
Science or music, music or science? Too often when it comes to science-inflected tunage, that’s the choice one has to make. The best songs, usually, are only tangentially about science. The Low Anthem’s “Charlie Darwin,” for example, is stirringly beautiful, and improves with each listen well into the hundreds. But poor old Darwin doesn’t ever […]
A week ago, I found myself sitting in a small phlebotomy room at the back of my doctor’s office. Had you been a fly on the wall, this is what you would have observed: On one side of me stood a young nurse holding a hollow needle and a glass tube with a brown rubber […]
This is the universe at present. You’re seeing not the light but the dark — you knew that most of the universe’s matter is dark, right? — and its motions. Not until the far right end are you seeing the light. Go ahead and clickety click all over this; zoom it in and out, drag it around. […]