The Scots called it Dùnrath. It lay on the northern coast of the isle, keeping watch as the cold waves broke upon its shore. No one’s quite certain where the name came from, but it is thought to derive from an ancient stone fort nearby, called a “broch.” In 1437, invaders from Clan MacKay...
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“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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