Last year I wrote of visiting the Nikola Tesla Museum. This year we went again and found good news. Let’s set the scene. Nikola Tesla, for those who may have been raised on a restricted diet of Thomas Edison, is the Serbian inventor who really did bring light to the world with major innovations. George […]
Strategy (in its strict sense) is about survival in a situation. I have studied it for forty years. The Syrian situation seems to center on Bashar al-Assad’s survival. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin—also a survivor—is making a move. The news says Russia is flying planes and tanks and troops into Latakia, a port city in […]
Wanderlust has got us traveling again. We are in Europe, taking trains and walking in cold city streets. What is hot in Europe now? (Okay, this is not rocket science. It’s not obvious that there is any science in it, though there is.) Hot? How about those Poles? We’re checking out their second city, Krakow, […]
These days there’s news about the pros and cons of vaccinations. There is good news and there’s bad news. Let’s unscramble them, because we can learn from both good and bad. There is good news about ebola vaccines. Ebola is about eight times less infectious than measles but it’s far more deadly. It’s a gruesome […]
These days we all have a stake in physics. It’s not just that physics costs and we, the public, pay. Physics drives our economy. We should be concerned when physicists start writing about how badly it is going. When they write books about this, we should worry. It’s almost a decade since American physicist Lee […]
It is ‘an engineering project on a gargantuan scale.’ So says American physicist, P.K. Aravind. ‘By far the largest megaproject ever undertaken,’ says another American physicist, Adam Brown. Each is writing of an antigravity device called a space elevator. The picture shows how it’s supposed to work. The centrifugal pull of a counterweight holds up […]
Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle! Lewis Carroll (1871) ‘Our rock,’ we call it. Its tons of granite became solid some two billion years ago. Most recently―maybe ten thousand years ago―a glacier left it on the shoreline of a lake. On July 6 the spider shows up on our rock. She keeps to […]
A question guitar-player Swarup Sinhato posted on Time One’s Facebook Page gets me thinking. He wonders why we hear so little about Tesla these days. I’m not sure. But Nikola Tesla seems to have a way of crossing my trail. (Of course it’s vice versa.) In my teens I was intrigued by Tesla. I built electrical transformers and my own Tesla […]
Fair Skin and the 737: Deadly Combination? It’s northern summer so let’s speak about the m-word: Melanoma. We evolved in a wide range of sunshine so it’s no surprise that our relationship with it is complex. Equatorial peoples have dark skins and can take (and need) lots of sun; high-latitude peoples take and need little. […]