THE COMPLEX TALE OF LUNAR PARAPHERNALIA
WHO SAYS Science, the weekly magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is full of dull and boring (you’ll excuse the expression) science? Here’s a tale of … Continue reading
BUCKLING UP WITH ROVER
SEAT BELTS came late to the automobile, as we will see here from a series of 1967 R&Ts. In the earliest days of powered mobility, no one thought of securing … Continue reading
ON BENJAMINS, JACKSONS, HAMILTONS—BUT MAYBE NOT TUBMANS
U.S. CURRENCY has been in the media a lot these days. Recently I’ve read stories about our paper money in The Christian Science Monitor, The New Yorker, The New York … Continue reading
MALIBU CANYON’S PINK LADY
I THOUGHT about a Pink Lady recently. The drink kind: gin, grenadine dashes, egg white; shaken with ice. This in turn got me thinking about the Pink Lady of Malibu … Continue reading
THE CLASSICS WITH DAFFY, BUGS, AND ELMER
THE TERM “cartoon classics” has at least two meanings: There are the Warner Bros and Disney cartoons, timeless in their humor, exquisite in their production values. And there is the … Continue reading
STILL STUCK ON YOU (AFTER ALL THESE YEARS)
ELVIS IMPERSONATORS, including some more than 10-ft. tall, got All Shook Up at the 18th Annual Elvis Festival in Garden Grove, California, this past Sunday, August 27, 2017. And the … Continue reading
HALLELUJAH HYPOCRISY
IT IS extraordinary that I am disturbed by reading something in Science, the weekly magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But these are extraordinary times. Indeed, … Continue reading
THE 1878 TOTAL ECLIPSE, PART 2
AS DESCRIBED here yesterday, the 1878 solar eclipse didn’t exactly further astronomer James Craig Watson’s search for the planet Vulcan. Today, we’ll look at the 1878 eclipse again and find … Continue reading
THE 1878 TOTAL ECLIPSE, PART 1
ON JULY 29, 1878, a total eclipse of the sun swept across the western United States, and not without scientific and geopolitical implications. David Baron’s book American Eclipse focuses on … Continue reading
SELF-DRIVING TECHNICALITY, MORALITY, AND REGULATION
WHAT WITH my muted enthusiasm for self-driving vehicles, I confess to a bit of cherry-picking by gleaning highlights from the article “Self-Driving Policy Vacuum?” by Eric Kulisch in Automotive News, … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 