Month: April 2001
Five billion years ago, dark energy and matter density were constant
“On one level, the universe, with all of its dark baggage, seems to make sense. The total amount of matter and energy seems to be just enough to guarantee that the large-scale geometry of space-time is ‘flat,’ or Euclidean, a result that cosmologists have long considered to be the most desirable and aesthetic. On the…
Animal kingdom re-make of the Great Escape
“We dropped smoke bombs down their holes and plugged the holes with dirt. When we came back the next day, we found the holes had been dug out, and all the empty canisters were placed outside the holes.”
Not an ounce of persuasion in those words, not a breath of moral argument
“The children, ages 5, 8 and 10, are still in their pajamas, very upset, flicking away tears. I have seen these kids before: They’re not easily upset by grownups. These are politics kids. I remember running into Miller in the grocery store when she had the littlest one in the cart: The minute we started…
Pleased to say we identified her as a star four years ago
“With international news, you can always be assured of one thing: that there will be more gloom and doom and people getting killed somewhere in the world, on a massive scale.”
We should have acted sooner
“I’ve seen death and destruction from accidents and shootings and the like, but nothing like this. The sports pitch was more like a battlefield with bodies strewn across it. Medics were rushing around carrying bodies dead or alive, and giving pulmonary resuscitation to fans whose chests had been crushed but were still alive. It was…
Pete Seeger: You couldn’t understand a goddamn word of what they were singing
“I’d dance with you, Maria, but my hands are on fire.”
So now that technology has fulfilled its promise we’re worried about it?
“I fear just on a gut level that we’re raising a whole generation of kids who will be so addicted to the thrill of multitasking that as they grow older we’ll see this huge communal sacrifice of some of the qualities we hold dear, like patience and tranquillity. Restlessness will triumph over all.”
A store with every possible permutation of pipe, but not a working register
“Azad owns about nine buildings and has perfected the black art of slumlordery. When I lived in one of his other apartments, I saw garden hose in the place of piping in bathrooms, pennies jammed into fuse boxes, entire closet walls made of caulking and spackle tape, electric lights powered by inserting loose wires into…
There could not be a better setting for a tragi-comedy than a bus terminus
“While we were gazing at them, off roared the bus we had first seen, tucked away in a corner, its departure unaccountably advanced by twenty minutes. There was a mad scramble to get out of the bus into which we had just got in and a dash to the one which was tantalisingly poised at…