The theory of relativity explained in words of four letters or less. It reads a little like Cat in a Hat, only with fewer rhymes and less impressive rhythm: “I can hear you say, “No way. That can’t be!” But I tell […]

When we picked up Noah from the airport a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I brought along her ABC book so we could do her reading homework on the airport bus. On the way back from the airport, My daughter […]

Of course, putting the category at the bottom of each post leads to some funny sentences. I’ve not designed my categories for this grammar: “Posted by Jill to world at 8:59” – well, yes, I suppose I am posting to the world. […]

Problems in Iraq: deodorant desparately needed.

Extremely frequent visitors may have noticed that link-packed comments advertising various drugs keep popping up and disappearing here. They’re always comments to posts that have a lot of links pointing to them and thereby a high Google PageRank, which is obviously what […]

He slept through my entire visit, so I didn’t get to hold him. But while his mother was unwrapping the soft cotton blanket I’d brought for him he opened his eyes a little, not quite awake, but looking steadfastly at me as […]

This morning I was writing when Mark pinged me in iChat: There are definitely a few times I’ve been alone in foreign cities where I’d have liked to sit down, order a coffee, unfold a slim laptop and find a list of […]

Digitales2003 is calling for stories and texts about gender and technology. Different stories: One often hears that girls are not interested in technical things because they are too cold and too systematic, but what about telling them that one of the pioneers […]

Reading an old copy of The Guardian’s Review section over breakfast, I found this that I want to remember: When Marco Polo first saw a rhinoceros on Java, he recognised it as a unicorn. The creature had a single horn and the […]

It’s been raining for days and days and days and days. My camera is too slow to capture the splash of raindrops in puddles but heightens the blue monotony of the bridge across the inlet, viewed from beneath my umbrella.