I rarely write personal things in this blog, or in the magazine, or in the newspaper column (in The Guardian). The Guardian asked me to write something about what people in Boston are thinking in the immediate wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the ensuing horrors. (The Guardian asked me to do this, I think, because I am their only columnist […]
Tag: guardian
Liechtenstein still up for rent
News travels slowly, sometimes. In 2003 the Ig Nobel Prize in economics was awarded jointly to Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings. Today, April 16, 2011, The Guardian (and other news organizations), aided by a press […]
Blowing the feathers off a chicken
In a 1975 monograph called Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed, Bernard Vonnegut considers what might happen to a dead chicken if it were fired from a cannon. He explains: “One way of estimating the wind in a tornado vortex is to determine by experiment what air speed is required to blow all […]