Polymath at Large

kw: cooking, hygiene I have heard a number of times, and heard again this morning, someone say on the radio, "If you see what's goi...

kw: experiences, dentistry, medicine I had a permanent crown fitted on a lower molar yesterday, then spent much of the day in a daze, while ...

kw: words, wordplay I suppose we have all heard the term "blasted to smithereens." Some years ago, I began to wonder, was there ev...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, graphic novels, physicists (If you care to read the text in this scan, click on the image.) On my...

kw: politics, polemics I was out a bit before Noon today, and listened to part of the Dom Giordano program on 1210AM. At a listener's su...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, wordplay, words, collections Roy Blount, Jr. collects words, particularly their origins and associations. Thre...

kw: poems I didn't come up with this, but read it today. It is the funniest I've seen in a long, long while: A certain old person of...

kw: islamic extremists, news The news is full of reports about troubles in Afghanistan over a few copies of the Q'uran being burned. Two...

kw: technical trends We just had a Verizon tech spend a couple hours at our home adding Verizon FIOS TV to our phone and internet package. O...

kw: photographs, springtime Someone from quite nearby posted a photo of yellow crocuses. Ours began to bloom in the last day or two, but the...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoos, animals, photographs A lifelong lover of animals and frequent zoo visitor, Betty White has been a board ...

kw: computer usability, preferences I have had Windows 7 going for about a year on my main computer at home, and I like it more and more. It...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, environmentalism, polemics For lunch today, I had one of those microwave meals, something I very rarely do. I ...

kw: musings, psychology Hysteresis is the tendency of a system's behavior to depend on its history. When the history is but one of a num...

kw: observations, materials science While preparing a talk on the semiprecious varieties of chalcedony, I read in a few articles about the w...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, mathematicians, astronomers Sunday coming, in just a few days, will mark the 549 th birthday of ...

kw: card stacking, records Many years ago my first wife and I filled a rainy weekend with building a house of cards that reached the ceiling...

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, gemstones, diamonds, memoirs These three gems may not be the same size originally, but I took care to reproduc...

kw: minerals, gemstones OK, time to drop the other shoe. My last post was about the importance of hardness in the beauty of a gemstone. Here...

kw: minerals, gemstones I was recently sorting some jasper material to determine what to donate to an educational rock club and what to keep...