Sunday is Father’s Day, a national holiday built around the giving and receiving of ugly ties, power tools and camping gear. I’ve always felt that Father’s Day is a sort of second class holiday – an awkward “me too” to Mother’s Day that is just a tick above Administrative Professionals’ Day (4/22/15) and Fairy Day (6/24/15). […]
Commentary
I haven’t got much on my mind today that I want to think about so I distract myself with pictures. This one, as science pictures often do, conflates beauty and truth and let me repeat, beauty. It’s a result of letting the Hubble Space Telescope take repeated pictures of a single cluster of galaxies. Clusters […]
The post has taken me entirely too much time to write. Not because I’m procrastinating or writing slowly, but because I’m being held hostage by the spinning beach ball of death. I bought my current iMac in early 2011, which means that enough time has elapsed that the Apple Care warranty I purchased with it […]
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” — Some wise person who wasn’t Einstein. “I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” [Rolling Stone managing editor, Will] Dana, said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done […]
Since Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Carbon Capture” went live on the New Yorker’s website last week, environmentalists and the journalists who write about them haven’t been able to stop bickering about it. Whether Franzen was wrong-headed or visionary, dumb or prophetic, he clearly touched a nerve when he asked, “Has climate change made it harder for […]
On Wednesday, at 3:25 Pacific Standard Time, two scruffy, skinny men embraced atop Yosemite’s El Capitan. To the casual observer, just a couple dudes in a national park trying to get off the mountain before sunset. Yet, these men had accomplished something so amazing that the sitting US president would call and congratulate them. So difficult […]
Earlier this year, I made the case for tracking outcomes. As we enter 2015, now is a natural time to reflect on the year that was. As I do every December, I’ve spent some time this month evaluating my work performance, my accomplishments and my failures, and, as always, the process has led me to insights that […]
Newsflash — Press releases about medical studies may contain hype. That was the conclusion of a report published last week in the medical journal BMJ. Petroc Sumner, a professor at Cardiff University, compared 462 press releases on medical studies from leading United Kingdom universities in 2011 and found that 33 to 40 percent of the […]