Program Notes: BBC Radio 4/Newton and the Counterfeiter/Self Aggrandizement edition

Update: Thanks to commenter Thony C. for the link to the first installment. A quick heads up to all in search of true high quality radio in the UK in the coming week.  My book Newton and the Counterfeiter is BBC 4′s Book of the Week for the coming five days. So, tune in at [...]

And Just to Ease the Cares of the Day: Birther/GOP mockery dept.

Seed art (sic!?–ed.) sums up the current intellectual credibility of the disloyal opposition. Now that’s commitment. (h/t Minnesota Independent via a Balloon Juice commenter.) Image:  from Tacuinum Sanitatis, “Peasants Threshing Wheat” 15th century.

Oddly Satisfying Factoid of the Day: Gerald Ford’s last laugh edition

Via this piece on newspaper obituary practices in Slate, I learned that Gerald Ford outlived the writer of at least one of his obituaries by eleven months. Now that’s commitment. Image:  John Everett Millais, “The Vale of Rest” 1858

Another Reason Why My Doctor Tells Me The Nation Shouldn’t Read Megan McArdle…

…the necessary blood pressure medication on its own would bankrupt our soon-to-be-reformed health care system. Though perhaps, pieces like this actually evoke more of a sense of wonder than anything else — not merely at the banality and evil so neatly conjoined in its content, but at the astonishing reality that anyone who routinely writes [...]

Senator Edward Kennedy…

Was  a great man, and he will be deeply missed. For all the overwhelming evidence of the bankruptcy of American politics these days, Ted Kennedy serves as a reminder of the other possibility. Everyone else will have more,* so I won’t belabor my own feelings.  Just that our senior senator has been yet another instance [...]

Friday Isaac Newton Blogging: How nice it is to be wrong, Newton and the South Sea Bubble Edition

One of the great pleasures of the writing life is the stuff you learn.  There is the material that you seek out during the research of any project, and then there are the moments of serendipity. One of these just came my way, in the form of one of the happiest corrections of error I [...]

Science and the Law: Why Antonin Scalia is not just wrong, but incapable

Update: I’ve corrected the number of dissenters in this case from 3 to two,  Scalia and Thomas, per Jason’s comment; Justice Sotomayor, newly arrived at the court, did not take part in this case. Upfront:  I’m not a lawyer, nor a regular student of legal matters, Supreme Court jurisprudence or Constitutional scholarship. But such inconvenient [...]

Deep Thought…NHS edition

I’m staying in London in a relative’s home just a couple of blocks down from the Royal Free Hospital. I wonder if such proximity to the availability of no-questions asked healthcare will achieve the pre-communist softening of the brain so cunningly avoided when the city fathers of my home town, Berkleley CA, managed in the [...]

More Newton and the Counterfeiter, Mother Tongue edition

A return, gingerly, to the blogging life…. Move complete, and divorce avoided by promising my wife that I will never, ever dream of taking off for a week in London four days after taking up residence in a new home. But that’s where I am now, here to do what I can to promote the [...]

Housekeeping and another review or two

Dear all: This week I’m moving from my home of the last fifteen years to the money pit made infamous in this post.  (Though I have to say the honey was the best I’ve ever had…) It’s a complete madhouse, as I’m sure anyone who’s ever moved with more than a year or two’s accumulation [...]