Brooklyn! The only borough where a guy, employed in both web development and fashion, might bike to an office to work on a project funded in part by internet donors. In most cases that project is, like, some kind of stupid bike with humongous wheels, or an old-timey pickle-making set-up, or something. But in Mark Suppes’ case, it’s a machine that forcibly joins atoms together. Yes, Brooklyn: Home of artisanal nuclear fusion.
Posted July 21, 2010 at 8:50am
With the death of Lost and 24, we find ourselves looking for the next bit of pop culture big-fucking-dealness that we can get ourselves all worked up for. And when I say “we” I’m referring to Fans of TV with a capital F and not simply those for whom TV is the thing that occupies the space between dinner and the sleep apnea machine. We Fans of TV want that Big Sexy Going Down the Rabbit Hole Feeling and no matter how much my mother loves Simon Baker, The Mentalist just isn’t going to do it for us.
Posted July 21, 2010 at 8:36am
Crossing an open ocean without instruments in knife-edged canoes, as the Polynesians did a thousand years before Cook, is one of the great achievements in human exploration. To those of us who are blind to the night sky, and deaf to the language of clouds, currents and ocean swells, it seems like a mystical or superhuman act. It is not — the palu’s skill is an achievement of reason, memory and calculation, though a staggering one.
— Star Man
Posted July 18, 2010 at 6:44pm
But the data indicates that the extinctions occur every 27 million years, as regular as clockwork. “Fossil data, which motivated the idea of Nemesis, now militate against it,” say Melott and Bambuch.
That means something else must be responsible. It’s not easy to imagine a process in our chaotic interstellar environment that could have such a regular heart beat; perhaps the answer is closer to home.
Posted July 16, 2010 at 11:08am
Over the last 500 million years or so, life on Earth has been threatened on many occasions; the fossil record is littered with extinction events. What’s curious about these events is that they seem to occur with alarming regularity.
The periodicity is a matter of some controversy among paleobiologists but there is a growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years. The question is what?
Posted July 16, 2010 at 11:05am
“An amazing performance by jazz artist Anita O’Day, 1957. This clip is featured off of ‘Jazz on a Summer’s Day.’”
Posted July 7, 2010 at 9:58am
