Rambles at starchamber.com

My brother and his wife were recently in town for a surprise visit (my birthday). At one point, over lunch, the conversation turned to population growth and the woes of the world. I pointed out that all was not lost, since the Earth’s population was going to peak in this century and shrink for a [...]

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This report is long overdue, since after all the Greater Boston Walk Now for Autism was on October 14th. But it took us a while to get all the final fundraising details sorted out, and then we had to do some last minute procrastination. But at last the results are in…

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Despite the long line of disappointed, broken, and more or less dead people who have tried to fly like a bird, it seems reasonably likely that eventually someone will succeed. They will do this not so much by flying like a bird as by safely landing like a bird. What defines flying like a bird [...]

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Every year this time I am compelled to point out the day in December with the earliest sunset. Where I live, that day is December 9th, which means I am now safely on the far side of the solstitial crepuscular cusp. Since I’m not an early riser, that means I’ll be seeing a little more [...]

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Whenever there’s some news about how the stock market was really awful or especially busy, you see the picture. The picture is a shot of men on the trading floor displaying the essential emotion of today’s market. On good days you get the picture on the left. On bad days you get the one on [...]

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We live in some kind of golden age of microscopy. In the old days, people relied on stains that made cells look like this.

Useful, but not too pretty. It kills the cells too, but more to the point, no matter how useful it is, a picture like this is never going to land you on [...]

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