Casting about for an appropriate blog post for Valentine’s Day, Jen-Luc Piquant dug up this snarky humor piece from 2008, riffing on an earlier piece that went on to spawn even more versions. Good Internet humor never really dies; it just languishes for awhile in the dusty archives until a new crop of browsers stumbles [...]

One of the standout anecdotes in Carl Zimmer’s most excellent compilation, Science Ink (a.k.a. My Favorite Science Book of 2011 And Possibly Ever) occurs in the first few pages: “A former student [physics major] got a tattoo of a cartoon atom on the back of one of his legs. He told me that the first [...]

Note: Last November, a Twitter exchange revealed that certain members of the small subset of science writers who were humanities majors (including your humble cocktail party blogger), also have a shared taste for classic murder mysteries. They thought they would co-post, on their respective blogs, various takes on the science of classical mystery writers. And [...]

Meet halfway or we ain’t gonna make it, baby/ Meet halfway if you want to get it right – Bonnie Raitt, “Meet Me Halfway,” Fundamental Who among us has not found ourselves in the awkward and frustrating position of trying to connect with someone conversationally — and failing, despite our best efforts? It’s in stark [...]

A couple of weeks ago, new media mogul Arianna Huffington had an unusual experience: assisting veteran sword swallower Dan Meyer, who was visiting the Huffington Post headquarters in New York City. Meyer heads the Sword Swallowers Association International, based in Antioch, Tennessee. He’s a five-time Guiness Book of World Record Holder, and has appeared on [...]

Just before the holidays, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes — who wrote the definitive history of the Manhattan Project with The Making of the Atomic Bomb — published a new biography of film star Hedy Lamar: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. Why? There’s been a resurgence of public interest in [...]

All the cool kids seem to be doing it so I figured I’d compile a year-end list of my own favorite posts from this past Year of Blogging Shamelessly. I Like Coffee, I Like Tea. All about interactive coasters, the physics of coffee rings, how to make siphon coffee (basically using pressure to create a [...]

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where  the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and [...]

“There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of [...]

A Twitter exchange recently revealed that certain members of the small subset of science writers who were humanities majors, also have a shared taste for classic mysteries. They thought they would co-post, on their respective blogs, some nice literary analyses (“the epistolary opening of Busman’s Honeymoon …”), but then realized that readers were no doubt [...]