One spring very long ago, as a proud first-time home-owner, I thought I’d start a garden. I’d never done it before, but I’d had a windowbox that looked great. How hard could it be? So I chipped a few holes into the orange clay beside my driveway and jammed in some johnny jumpups.
Predictably, the poor little violets died in record time, but I was lucky in my neighbors, one …
Someone asked me the other day what I make of recent reports that global warming is slowing down. Well, hmm. I did say I would no longer doom and gloom, didn’t I? However, you asked. So I have to say that as far as I can see, global warming has not slowed. What’s true is that air temperatures did not rise in the 12 years of this century as fast …
Point one: Below you’ll find a video that moved me to tears and made me want to empty my bank account. The children are so beautiful, the need so great, the creativity so profound, and the subject so central—music, something the entire world shares. (Thanks for the tip, Judy Sandoval.) If you also want to help, Kickstarter is the place to go.
Point two: Today I updated a post from …
I promised a friend recently that I would start posting daily. He said (more or less this baldly), “You talk about all these interesting ideas, and then I can’t find them in the site. That’s dumb. You should just write a page every day, and some of it will be wonderful and some of it will be crap, and so what? That’s the way the web is. Just do it. …
Once upon a time, it was engineers—often after a stint at Harvard or the Wharton School of Business—who ran technical companies, like Big Oil. Now they don’t. Money men do. What difference does it make? A big one.
Here’s a plug for one of the old, old ways, as practiced in the Golden Desert of India, where they harvest water, and HAVE water, that is gathered by roofs and pavements and is stored (clean) in systems that are centuries old and still working. The locals ….
Dear Mr. President:
My enclosed book, Ideas Into Words, is a gift as well as a credential of sorts (it is the science-writing text used at MIT). I was for many years editor of the Johns Hopkins University Magazine. Much of what our magazine did was translate cutting-edge science for non-specialists, and 25 years of that work has left me with an unusual viewpoint of science and the natural world, one that is both insider and outsider. This letter offers a nugget from that understanding that I think may be helpful to you, faced as you are with huge decisions amid conflicting arguments.
This offering makes me laugh every time I look at it, which was often for a while. (Till everyone I know was bored with it, to tell the truth.)
“Whoever made that must feel very proud,” was my 5-year-old grandson’s comment. I think so too.Take a look:
What you just saw—and heard about, if you went to the very end of the video—is a prototype of a mechanical critter used …
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