Sharing Science With Wisconsin
For May 22, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, In August 2009 I phoned home from Washington DC to talk with my Dad in Dixon, IL. His voice sounded like he had a frog in his throat, but when I asked him about it, he said he couldn’t clear his throat. He was heading to …
Hi WN@TL Fans, The seal of UW–Madison features an eye with rays of light. It’s not clear if the light is emanating from the eye or converging upon it. Perhaps it is both. The dichotomy goes way back before 1849. Plato postulated in the 4th Century BC that vision worked by rays streaming out from the eye. His student …
For May 8, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, We like to say that the Wisconsin Idea is in the UW’s DNA. The only problem is, it wasn’t that way. The founding documents of the university don’t even mention research, let alone a public service mission reaching beyond the campus. The Morrill Land-grant …
For May 1, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, Painter, engineer, architect, inventor and more: Leonardo Da Vinci put the poly in polymath. As far as I know, as a mathematician he left us no equations, but he did bequeath us unequaled images, including astonishing drawings of the human body and illuminating paintings of …
For April 24, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, Since I bike to work, most of my driving is spent hauling my kids, ages14 and 11, around town to swim practice and hockey or soccer practice. Plus to the meets or games. As is the parlance, I am a Daddy Uber. D’Uber for …
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 the Great Lakes. …
For April 17, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, Last week’s photo of a black hole required a sustained stare by 8 different telescopes at 8 different locations across the globe focussed on a single point a bazillion miles away. This is a many-eyed approach of Argus. Then the petabytes of data had to be crunched and …
For April 10, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, The first house I ever owned was on an old farmstead on McGirr Road in DeKalb County in Illinois. The constellation of run-down buildings included a barn, a corn crib, a hog shed, and a machine shed. There was one more …
For April 3, 2019 Hi WN@TL Fans, As a longtime subscriber to National Geographic (or rather, as a member of the National Geographic Society, I beg your pardon), nothing is more exhilarating than unfolding a brand new map. Nothing, perhaps, except unfolding a really old map. Maps chart …
Hi WN@TL Fans, My Grandpa Zinnen worked for the Burlington Route, and so I’ve been tuned to the double iron bars since I was a kid. Railroads run on many things, but one you might not want to overlook is the ballast under the rails and between the ties. We think of trains as running on iron or …