Tom Gill sent this to us, with the suggestion “Why can’t more scientific papers have evocative, poetic titles like this? I mean, it sounds more like a song than a technical article.” The study is: “The Strength of the Evening Wind,” A. Lapworth, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, vol. 183, 2022, pp. 215–225.
In this six-minute-long impassioned video, Carl Malamud draws on his considerable poetical and performance skills to introduce The General Index: What is The General Index, and how can it benefit you? The answer, some of it in the form of questions, is in the video. Here, to whet your appetite for viewing the video, are […]
Somewhere round or about the late 1850s, John Tyndall FRS [* see note below] was developing and perfecting his experiments with “Sensitive Flames”. He describes one such experiment in his book ‘Sounds’ (p. 238). In which he reads a passage of poetry from Edmund Spenser’s ‘Belphœbe the Huntress’ to the flame (which he calls The Vowel-flame) […]
What’s funny about watching someone struggle with an unruly umbrella? Few, if any, have come up with a better explanation than W H Auden who took a stab at it in 1952, and came up with two reasons : “a) An umbrella is a mechanism designed by man to function in a particular manner, and its […]