Year: 2018

For May 30, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, In an interview 13 years ago with one of his grandchildren, my Dad said that Saving Private Ryan was his favorite movie. The fundamental message of the movie was found in the last words of Tom Hanks’ character:   “Earn this.” I think those two words were probably the …

For May 23, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Yesterday was one of those stunner days when you learn something that bowls over your worldview, even though the news is six years old.  It was a simple sentence:  “Scientists now believe there are more planets than stars in the universe.” Likewise, it had been a stunner in 1992 when …

For May 16, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Consider the word “map.” What comes to your mind first: the noun or the verb?  The image or the action? ‘Map’ is just three letters of text, but those three letters stand for the making of some of the most influential images humans have ever created. Whether you’re …

For May 9, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.  What is more electric than the dialectic? To compose by combining, Kant, Hegel, Fichte and others plucked parts from a thesis here and pulled components from an antithesis there and plugged them together to synthesize new ideas.  Every synthesis becomes a thesis, begetting its own antithesis, resulting in …

For May 2, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, My quick-fire list of model organisms would include E. coli, brewer’s yeast, C. elegans, the fruit fly, the zebrafish, the rat, the mouse, and the monkey. Given more time, I’d add lambda phage, Paramecium, tobacco, corn, Arabidopsis, Xenopus, and of course the guinea pig. But the pig itself, sui generis, …

For April 25, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, “It is written” are three of the most momentous words in English.   Something powerful, authoritative, and permanent happens when the spoken word is conjured by pen with ink on papyrus, vellum, or paper.  Spoken words are here and heard, and then they are gone with the wind. …

For April 18, 2018      Hi WN@TL Fans, “Cows are people, too,” proclaimed Radar O’Reilly of Iowa, in one of scores of philosophical gambits played on the small screen by the writers of M*A*S*H.  If Radar had grown up in Oconto instead of Ottumwa, he may have had a tougher proposition to parse:  what’s the bioethical status of the sea …

Hi WN@TL Fans, As you know, WN@TL is always on, unless the chancellor closes the university. That has happened only once on a Wednesday, back on February 2, 2011, when David Gamm was our scheduled speaker. We’re on tonight, as usual, every Wednesday night, at 7pm. Tonight: The Environmental Fate of Lampricides in Tributaries of …

For April 11, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Few places are geographically outlined and culturally defined by its freshwater as Wisconsin is by its Great Lakes, its boundary rivers, its inland lakes & streams. Even the etymological source of Wisconsin is in its water: the word comes from a Miami Indian phrase meaning “a river running through a …

For April 4, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Try to imagine a chemistry lab without glassware. Picture a lab decked out only with  porcelain mortars, stone pestles, ceramic jars, copper tubing and stills, iron pots and ovens and cauldrons. See if you can conjure a lab with no beakers, no Erlenmeyer flasks, no graduated cylinders, no …