Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house. This — and by “this” I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family and I lived off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, in […]
Month: June 2013
Ann: May I introduce my friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger. She once wrote a book about her trips to the world’s various nuclear test sites and it sold reasonably well, probably to boys. But recently somebody else’s book, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold History of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, […]
On Sunday evening, I was standing in our orchard watching the sunset when I turned around and saw a strange beam of light that appeared to rise from the east, directly opposite the setting sun. Crepuscular rays or “God’s Fingers” are pretty common around here, but usually these majestic light rays emanate from the sun. […]
Right now, the butterfly might be coming out. Or it might not. On Thursday, my son’s preschool teacher said that Friday would be the day. On Friday, she said she hoped it would wait until Monday. She and the kids have been marking off the days since the monarch caterpillar stopped munching milkweed and spun […]
June 10 – 14 This week, LWON got a new PoLWON! (not pictured at left) Her name is Roberta Kwok and you may remember her from her intriguing guest post about how investigators solved a grisly and tragic car crash. Roberta kicked the doors down with with an amazing primer on the history of the […]
CELESTE: How long this time? LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more. CELESTE: What if you miss it? LE GENTIL: The transit? I won’t. CELESTE: You missed the last one. Venus (the small dark dot) crosses the Sun. That […]
We are overjoyed to announce that Roberta Kwok has become the newest person of LWON (or LaWONian, as some of us like to say). You’ve seen her here before. Her first guest post explained how a study to detect traffic patterns gave investigators new insight into a fatal car crash. Elsewhere, she’s written about synthetic […]
When I think back on the formative moments of my youth, it’s hard to top the Canada-Wide Science Fair of 1980. It was there, in Thompson, Manitoba, that I first truly experienced the transformative power of science to make daily life richer, better, more rewarding. No, it wasn’t my own engagement with the scientific method […]