As the latest crop of First Graders trundle off to school, I can’t help thinking back to my first year of school in Texas, and the badge of maturity I proudly wore on my left arm: the round scar produced by smallpox vaccination. It proved I was practically grown-up. Today, kids no longer receive smallpox …
Category: Blog
The bandwidth bonanza
August 30 was the 30th birthday of the Internet. On that day in 1969 a group of scientists and technicians at UCLA plugged two computers together through a refrigerator-sized box designed to let them talk to each other–and it worked. Originally involving just four university-based computers used by only a few dozen people, the Internet …
Missions to Mars
Thursday, September 23, 1999, wasn’t a good day for NASA. At 5:01 a.m. EDT, the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million (U.S) space probe intended to observe Martian weather for two years, fired its engines to enter orbit around Mars and dove behind the planet. It never reappeared. After several hours of study, NASA announced …
Skateboarding
Skateboarders have become as much a part of the urban landscape as pigeons, scooting down the roads and sidewalks, jumping over curbs, turning any ramp, railing or set of steps into an excuse for acrobatics–seemingly defying the laws of physics. Skateboarding may seem like the ultimate in turn-of-the-millennium hipness, but it’s been around a long …
Adapting to space
In the movies, spaceships have artificial gravity, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to film that way. Real-life astronauts aren’t so lucky. The men and women who inhabit the Mir space station spend months in weightlessness. Sure, it’s a lot of fun–flying around, leaving objects hanging in mid-air–but inside those cosmonauts’ and astronauts’ …
Airships (1999)
It’s one of the most familiar newsclips of the 20th century: the giant airship Hindenburg approaching the mooring mast in New Jersey, the sudden rush of fire, the announcer choking out “the humanity, the humanity!” as the Hindenburg settles to the ground in flames. Many people think giant, passenger-carrying airships died forever with that crash. …
Bouncing balls
Summer is high sports season, and most of the games being played involve balls: baseballs, tennis balls, volleyballs, soccer balls. At first glance, every ball appears much the same as every other ball: round and bouncy. The only thing that’s different is the size. But in fact, each ball is designed specifically for the sport …
Con-Version XVI
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I had the pleasure of once again attending ConVersion, the annual science fiction convention held in Calgary. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re picturing a bunch of oddballs in Star Trek and Star Wars costumes, sitting in the dark watching videos and yelling out the dialog in time with …
Lake monsters
Now that summer is winding down and people are heading home from the lake, it’s time to ask, “Did you see anything weird out there?” It wouldn’t be surprising if you did, since Canada has more lake monsters than any other country in the world. “Lake monsters” are large unknown creatures said to inhabit many …
Lightning and humans
Being struck by lightning is one of those occurrences we consider highly unlikely. How often have you said, “You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than… (fill in the blank–win the lottery, for example). But for a surprising number of people every year, the unlikely becomes all too real. The National Weather Service in …
Internal clocks
Once in a while, everyone has trouble getting to sleep. (I rarely do, but that’s because, now that I’m married, I have to get up much earlier than I did in my single days, in order to get my wife off to work. Marriage as a cure for sleeplessness might seem a little drastic to …
My latest live walk and vlog
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