The Awl died. Or will die, in a couple of weeks. It was/is a website with the usual internet attitude – an awl, dear children, is a sharp pointed instrument for punching holes — but not the usual internet manners. My Twitter feed is full of writers who were young a few years ago, who […]
Ann
Last week Michelle wrote that, given the speed of change in the reality under the science, climatology needed some new words, and she proposed a beauty: “antevernal,” meaning “daffodils blooming in February.” To back her word-making, she quoted a naturalist: “If the language we use to speak of the natural world is not innovative and […]
Well now then. Here we are. The first day of another year. What to do about that? January 1 is a day for looking forward. Kids mostly look forward, I think. But any adult knows you make sense of any given situation only by looking back, by remembering. Memory allows the comparison between then and […]
This was posted September 24, 2015. I go later to the coffeeshop now and don’t run into Larry and John, its chief scientists. I do have an update on neighborhood-kid questions though. “Why does this blue flower have a yellow dot in the center?” “Why do birds poop?” “Why are there ants going up the […]
UPDATE, 10/27/2020: This post is about, among other things, Peter Ganz, a German philologist with an unlikely personal history. One of his sons, Adam, just wrote telling me about a centenary at Oxford University that celebrates Peter’s accomplishments. I thought you might like to know. I mean, the man left Buchenwald, then helped spy on […]
Years ago, talking about the persistent rumor that the Hubble Space Telescope was an off-the-shelf spy satellite retrofitted for astronomy*, I told a NASA employee that I was pretty sure academic astronomers were culturally anti-military and they wouldn’t be crossing lines and dealing with spies or the defense department. The NASA employee looked at me […]
So. Everybody got excited about gravitational waves coming from the mergers of neutron stars and black holes. My Facebook feed which is full of scientists and science writers got further excited about a newish phrase everybody used, “multimessenger astronomy.” My Facebook feed agreed that “multimessenger astronomy” is an all-around dreadful phrase. Not only does it sound corporate and […]
This post was originally published on March 5, 2013 at Double X Science, a now defunct website about women in science. Since then, it’s gotten quite a bit of attention, including a story in the Columbia Journalism Review, a mention in the New York Times, and even its own Wikipedia page. The Finkbeiner Test also has […]