This was first published on December 23, 2011. But microbes seem hot these days so we hope this will add to your knowledge about their manifold hotnesses — which apparently encompass radioactivity (hot? get it?) and spiders. Maybe not spiders. Anyway, the post is now, somewhat reliably, UPDATED. Last week, the Augusta Chronicle reported that […]
Month: April 2014
April 14 – 18 Our boy, Abstruse Goose, becomes as one with his electronic devices. Truer than he knows. Well. I don’t know what he knows. Truer than you might think, anyway. Poor Jessa, age 35, thinking about losing her math abilities. And yes, mathematicians do have the reputation of topping out young. But Jessa, […]
“Colon cancer screening saves lives.” That’s how I began my latest article for Nature Medicine. The news story was about new non-invasive tests that aim to make screening a lot more pleasant. The lead wasn’t great. You could probably find a dozen other stories that begin the same way. But it at least seemed solid. […]
Last Saturday, my daughter and I went to the opening day of Little League season. In our small town of White Salmon, Washington, it’s a day for classic Americana: The players chase their coaches around the bases, the Boy Scouts raise the Stars and Stripes, we sing the Star-Spangled Banner, and a local celebrity throws […]
Spring is in the air, and with it comes the cha-ching of candy-bar sales. Of jogathons. Of hordes of students (and their parents) trying to raise money for books, for field trips, for the art program that’s on the chopping block, for scholarships. In some places there are also auctions. Here, we have themed auctions where […]
In playwright David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work Proof (later adapted into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal) there’s an exchange between a young mathematician and the daughter of his recently-deceased mentor. They’re at a party and discussing the use of amphetamines by older mathematicians: Hal: There’s this fear that your creativity peaks around […]
AG’s mouseover says, “When I forget to charge my phone at night, my existence feels incomplete in the morning,” meaning I guess that he’s become as one with his electronic devices. But as I know because I’ve been writing an interminable story about insomnia, AG’s identity as an electronic device is just the God’s truth. […]
April 7 – 11, 2014 This week we say a sad but temporary ciao to Sally and a delighted ecco! to Craig Childs, and no, I don’t have a clue what he’s doing in that photograph. Sports programs measuring themselves by winning instead of by kick-ass players who also know how to lose are, says […]