Category: WN@TL Blog

For July 11, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, My personal sample size is pretty small—two kids of my own, plus about a dozen nieces and nephews I’ve known since they were born—so I will stake no claims to deep insights into this week’s topic:  the emotional world of infants. I will venture to say …

For July 4, 2018     Hi WN@TL Fans, This week, for the 4th of July: a hiatus, a break, a pause.  WN@TL goes dark on a day when little towns all over the country light up the night as these United States of America celebrate the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence and its dedicated proposition that all men …

For June 27, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, Madison is about 850 miles from the closest salt water—the Inner Harbor at Baltimore—and about 1000 miles from the warm sea water of the Gulf of Mexico.  So one might expect that hurricanes play little parts in our lives. And yet, in August 1992 I was in Tadoussac, …

For June 20, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, As I mentioned two weeks ago, the story of my hometown is driven in no small part by the changing tides of energy production.  Dixon was founded in 1828 as a ferry across the Rock River on the wagon road between Peoria on the Illinois River and Galena on the …

For June 13, 2018       Hi WN@TL Fans, I don’t know how many trees were in the Garden of Eden, but for me the two with names — the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life — have long been icons of the scientific enterprise.  To learn to discern between Good …

For June 6, 2018 Hi WN@TL Fans, I grew up at 118 College Avenue in Dixon, Illinois, two blocks south of Commonwealth Edison’s coal-burning electric power plant on the Rock River.   A spur of the Illinois Central Railroad brought the coal by the carload and heaped a huge black pile along the river. My Mom …

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 …