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. […]
Last week, headlines said ANTARCTIC GLACIER LOSS IS UNSTOPPABLE. Melting slowly, said the texts. It’s not a new concern. Forty years ago reinsurer Munich Re warned of such hazards. So, why now and what’s this to you? There’s more to this than meets the eye. Those glaciers are part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. […]
It’s still the sniffle season and there’s still no cure for the common cold. So says the Mayo Clinic; so say many others. They are wrong. Here is the long-sought cure. No kidding. It turns out to be spectacularly unspectacular. It is simple physics. (That’s too bad; if it were complex chemistry it would be […]
Just Don’t Bug Me: Infection Control in a Far Country Back to Priština, new capital of a new country, Kosovo. Our hadrons lost an argument about occupying space on a crosswalk. We’re taxi-struck and dazed. Ambulance doors open. Sign says Emergency. Another sign, University Clinical Center of Kosova, is the only other English sight or sound amid […]
After some sunny days in Beograd we take a bus to Priština, a 5½-hour ride, or so we think. There are overnight buses but we decide to take the day bus. It leaves at noon. It is a clean but hand-me-down Mercedes with two drivers and is almost full. All locals, except for us. I […]
It’s a break for me from writing, or so I’m thinking. We are on the 09:48 from Wien to Beograd. Change of trains in Budapest; a 16-minute connection ― safe enough because the first leg is an Austrian train. The second leg is 7 hours. Or should be. It seems that we are stopping overlong […]