Category Archives: sciences

this view of mortality

Stephen Jay Gould is dead of cancer at sixty. Somehow he always seemed like a youngster to me (despite photographs) – perhaps because I never knew until now that he had two wives and two sons.

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what family doesn’t have its ups and downs?

If we persons of pallor are all descended from Charlemagne, we could still one-up each other on what fraction of our ancestry is royal, or how few of the links in the chain are female. If a genie offered me … Continue reading

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we distort, you deride

A misquoted economist remarks: . . . (“I’m reading right off Fox news!” gets my vote as worst argument from authority ever).

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I always wanted one

A Webwide World by Ken Perlin, NYU, 1998 – Java applet that rapidly generates a fractal planet. Unlike the Planet of the Day generated by ppmforge, Perlin’s planet is three-dimensional and can be rotated.

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old medium meets new

It was a treat to see Eugene Volokh quoted in The Economist — to his own surprise.

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nerds mourn

The sequels to The Matrix are not The Transpose and The Eigenvector but Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions.

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human mosaic

At age 18 or so I wrote a scene (opening an otherwise unconceived story) set in the distant future, in which one of the characters was a tiger-striped human. Now . . . Look halfway down this page: Human genetics: Dual identities … Continue reading

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