How the West was Lost

How the East was Lost: Institutions and Culture in 16 Century Portuguese Empire

For want of a pessary, the life was lost.

One of the riches of being a family physician is getting to know the people we encounter in our offices that we call “patients.” This knowledge goes beyond diagnoses and treatment plans, and often involves learning about the lives they experience with their families and in their communities. By paying close attention to my patients’ lives, I often learn critical life lessons that I subsequently...

Was one sunspot cycle in the 18th century really lost?

The unusually long 4th solar cycle has recently been proposed by Usoskin et al. (2001) to be composed of two cycles. They argue that a weak and short cycle might have been lost in sparse sunspot data at the end of the 18th century. Here we check this hypothesis in different ways. First, we consider the sunspot number record in greater detail and compare in a statistical sense the sunspot observ...

How the quest was won

Not long after Jim Watson's The Double Helix appeared, there was talk about making a movie about the DNA story. The author of the book took this very seriously and did not find all the many suggestions made to him very helpful. One idea put forward was that Jim should be played by Woody Allen and Francis Crick by Peter O'Toole. Another was to do it as a musical with a dance based on the entwini...

How Infectious Was #Deflategate?

On Monday January 19, 2015 a story broke that the National Football League (NFL) had started an investigation into whether the New England Patriots deliberately deflated the footballs they used during their championship win over the Indianapolis Colts. Like an infectious disease, discussion regarding Deflategate grew rapidly on social media sites in the hours and days after the release of the s...