“Aren’t you nervous?” “Nope.” -Manhattan Project physicists Isidor Rabi and Kenneth Greisen, lying on the ground one minute before the first atomic bomb test, July 1945 “Now I’m scared.” -Greisen, as the countdown hit 10 seconds On the day of the The Trinity Test, Enrico Fermi offered a bet to any takers. Would the...
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Let’s talk about good ideas for a minute. Good ideas are like building blocks. Pretty much everything worthwhile, from a fun weekend to a breakthrough in medicine, begins when someone puts a good idea out there into the ether. Sometimes that idea stands alone, a self-sustaining entity. Sometimes it is met in kind with...
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Heartened by the recent blow struck against the spidergoat menace, I’ve found that my outlook has improved dramatically. There’s been a subtle spring in my step, a flicker of hope around the corners of my smile. It’s kind of like the end of “Terminator 2,” when Sarah Connor stares at the road ahead of...
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A funny thing happened when I mentioned both doom news and spidergoats in the same story. Out of nowhere, the forces of good got one right. This happens every now and then, I suppose—minor victories that stem the tides of darkness and give us some small (if temporary) comfort. “There’s no way in hell...
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Every now and then, dire news quietly appears in the background of media noise. Let’s call it doom news. The reporter puts on his best Pulitzer voice, while a stern-sounding expert tries to explain why the apocalypse lurks on the horizon—and, as often as not, why it’s already too late. The varieties of doom...
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