by David Brooks | Oct 15, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
If Elon Musk ever makes it to Mars, he’ll grab his phone and start tweeting. Frances Rivera-Hernandez, on the other hand, would grab a shovel. “I want to dig some pits to see if the ground ice is there and how much,” said Rivera-Hernandez, a post-doc in Earth science...
by David Brooks | Oct 15, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
Where do languages come from? Is the Internet changing English? Can I split infinitives? Why do some languages have masculine/feminine nouns but we don’t? Why is “enough” spelled so weird? Come and ask your questions about the science linguistics – a topic we’ve...
by David Brooks | Oct 15, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
A few days ago I wrote about the way that engineered timber, a.k.a. mass timber, can replace steel and sometimes concrete in buildings, which creates big greenhouse-gas benefits. Here’s the item, if you didn’t see it. I mentioned that New Hampshire is...
by David Brooks | Oct 14, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
Steven Strogatz, a Cornell math professor and math communicator (I’m waiting for his much-praised book “Infinite Powers” about calculus to come out in paperback) had an interesting series of Tweets over the weekend that began: “I’ve long...
by David Brooks | Oct 12, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
Tackling the biggest problems of the world today and in the future could benefit from technologies of the past. “This is back to the future,” is how Joe Short, vice president of Northern Forest Center, put it at the start of a conference Friday discussing mass timber,...
by David Brooks | Oct 11, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
Last November I had an item about vague thoughts of creating an orbital small launching facility at closed air bases in northern Maine, using small rockets to launch cubesats. As I said at the time, “More like Wallops Island, Virginia, than Cape...
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