Why I Love The English Language, no. 1

First — and who knows, perhaps last — in an occaisioned series. One of the reasons to love this grand instrument is that it erupts into sentences that are wholly comprehensible, wonderful, even, that my enormously literate and sometimes word-drunk  father would not have known how to decipher.  From today’s Times, this: “What I love [...]

The Future of Science Journalism — a live blog

I’m sitting in the MIT Museum, listening to the Institute’s President, Susan Hockfield, introduce an evening in which the good and the great in and around science writing are going to talk about what the future holds for the effort to engage the public in science and technology.  So what will follow is my attempt [...]

The Uses Of Opera: Why We Love High Speed Photography/Disgusting Video Dept.

It’s Friday, and that means we need some fun stuff, right? Try this (h/t Sullivan): more about “Sneezing In Ultra Slow Motion Video“, posted with vodpod On the theme of this blog (and of my writing over a long time) — this gets to one of the real drivers of scientific advance that scientists understand intimately, but [...]

Applied Physics: Don’t Try This At Home Dept.

Via Synthstuff, this: Seeing this reminds me of a passage from Jeremy Bernstein’s now sadly out-of-print lovely little book Quantum Profiles. In the first of the three scientist encounters, Bernstein talks to the now-legendary Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell.  Bell is most famous for Bell’s Theorem, which provides one of the clearest and most powerful [...]

Sighting: Newton and the Countefeiter First Review

As readers of this blog no doubt know too well by this point, I’m on the verge of publishing a new book called Newton and the Counterfeiter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 4, 2009; Faber & Faber, August 20, 2009).  In the writing trade’s equivalent of the first robin of the spring, I just got word [...]

Texas is missing (one of its) Idiots: OMG That Man’s A Congressman Dept.

Via TPM TV: Watch it and weep.  I mean really.  There are many reasons the GOP deserves to lose every election:  Joe Barton (R – Magic Beans) is one of them. This man shouldn’t be allowed to operate power tools, much less have 1/435 votes on matters of national and international import. Until that sporadically [...]

A Linnaeus sighting in London

I’m in London for a few days shooting a short promotional video for this book. (Or, if you are in the UK, this one.) My ritual for this kind of travel is pretty constant:  I take the day flight over from Boston and devote the first day in my (literally) mother country to jet-lag recovery.  [...]

A Nice Milestone

This blog passed 200,000 site visits this weekend — a number that does not include the readership of my hardy RSS subscribers. That’s a modest number compared to some — but the quality is unsurpassed, and our numbers have been growing.  Soon it might be said that we surround them…;) Thanks to all — and [...]

Any Day The Yankees Lose…

…is a good day.  Red Sox 1/2 a game in front of the Evil Empire, 1/2 behind the Orioles. I’m very happy (rain delayed) baseball is here. Image: Cy Young baseball card 1911.  (between Boston stints).

Cockroaches Fear Light

See Scott Horton on the GOP attempt to blackmail the Obama adminstration into burying the Bush torture memos by threatening to filibuster unrelated appointments. (H/t Calchala over at Daily Kos.) There is, of course, only one reason why GOP senators would be so eager to make sure that the Bush era descent into the realms [...]