Today my four-year-old Mac G4 laptop began acting its age.
Groups of pixels jittered chaotically in horizontal regiments, sometimes covering the screen. Then, without anodyne application, the problem would disappear. And just as unpredictably, reappear. Further investigation revealed that these video measles increased or decreased as a function of manual pressure exerted on [...]
When Richard Feynman came back to Ojai’s Summer Science Program for a second, unscheduled visit, his topic was what he called “smallness.” Today that field, in which he was a visionary, is called Nanotechnology.
Having been mesmerized by Feynman’s brilliance and wit during his talk on Relativity a couple of weeks earlier, we 36 science/math nerds [...]
Richard Feynman at Summer Science Program
In 1960, I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, my feet thrust out, listening to Caltech’s Richard Feynman explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Einstein, dead for only five years, was an icon and a Nobel Laureate. I was too young and unread then to know [...]
February 29, 2008 – 6:16 am
Today is Leap Day. We add this extra day in February if the year is evenly divisible by four. That’s once every four years. Right?
Wrong.
February 28, 2008 – 8:28 am
Hidden behind a fishing boat, a strange craft is silently lowered into the water. The inventor, David Bushnell, has named it “Turtle” because of its shape…and because it is a submarine. It carries a single bomb and its mission is sabotage.
A thin young man named Ezra Lee hands Bushnell a final letter for [...]
February 25, 2008 – 8:24 am
My mother died ten years ago this week, and I am brought to think of the vanishing point, that not-so-distant past beyond which none of us can know the fathers and mothers who brought us here.
My parents were flesh to me, as were both grandmothers. I never knew either grandfather, but they are romance and [...]
February 12, 2008 – 6:44 pm
Born 199 years ago, February 12, 1809: Charles Darwin, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in the bios, and Abraham Lincoln, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in society.
