Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson, our black superstar of science, is going to host a mini-series that follows on Carl Sagan's famous "Cosmos" and will bear that name. It's going to air on Fox and some people are hoping that he might make science more cool for the consumerist masses.

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“A Higgs boson goes into a church. …”

Neil deGrasse Tyson—America’s best-known astrophysicist, with more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter—is telling a joke to the team shooting his photo for the cover of Parade. Standing in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, he continues: “And the priest says, ‘We don’t allow Higgs bosons here.’ And the Higgs boson says, ‘But without me there is no mass.’ ” Bada bing!

He’s got another. “A photon walks into a bar and orders a drink,” Tyson begins, his resonant bass voice bubbling up from his 6-foot-2 frame. “The bartender says, ‘Do you want a double?’ And the photon says, ‘No, I’m traveling light.’ ” Bada boom!

Everyone laughs, without necessarily knowing that a photon is a tiny particle of light, or that the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” gives everything physical mass. Tyson’s delivery is so enticing, his playfulness so charming, it’s no wonder Jon Stewart repeatedly features him on The Daily Show. “It’s one thing to be a lauded astrophysicist,” Stewart says. “It’s another to possess a gift for comedic timing. You don’t normally get both, but that’s Neil.”

-- ONTD

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The Natural World

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President George Washington

As an informal civil war was brewing between Hamilton on one side and Jefferson and Madison on the other side, George Washington was not enjoying an easy time in his presidency and in his old age.

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George Washington watched this feuding in his cabinet with dismay. He was no longer the swaggering young general of the Revolution but a craggy, aging man with parchment skin. His gray eyes seemed smaller, more deeply set in their sockets. He was plagued by rheumatism, and his painful dentures crafted from hippopotamus tusks rubbed agonizingly against his one remaining good tooth.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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Reading Life

A flash of old memory. During those Bay Horse years, at one point, I felt the desire to burrow deep into a subject, rather than go on with my very shallow reading, picking a book about this era and another on that historical era, a book on consciousness, another book on evolution, always satisfying myself with getting only a taste of countless subjects. I wanted to pick a single subject and just read books on that particular subject, or at least maybe doing that for every other book. To become a specialist, to have some deep knowledge, an expertise, about at least one subject in the world.


This recollection refueled that desire. Back then, at Bay Horse, I could not settle on a subject and I let the mood pass. I obviously was not very serious - just another one of those flighty thoughts, right up there with my Utopian plans for the world, that glorious Walden Two. But I can think of a subject now: the presidencies from Kennedy on. That’s not as narrowly tailored as I would like, but I am not looking to achieve expertise.

I even have a book in mind to start me off: that book on Reagan’s 1980 campaign, “Rendezvous with Destiny” by Craig Shirley. I actually borrowed that book from the library once and started it. Although I liked it, I think that I got sidetracked into pursuing a study of American poetry, which did not last very long in itself, yet another aborted project. I don’t intend to focus very heavily on this subject. I am just going to make it my night time reading. This will represent an upgrade from pop fiction and erotica, and although I am worrying that it might prove too beefy for my bedtime reading, I am thinking that the subject is kind of familiar and cozy enough to keep up my interest level, as well as remain very easy to follow, even in a very sleepy state of mind. Though, you should not be surprised if I slip in some hot fiction every once in a while.

American Democracy

A story about another industrial accident, this one fouling up a community's water supply. I remarked that, despite the increasing occurrence of these contaminations, people still vote for Republicans.

Mr. Justice said, "I knew a guy who's family suffered from lead poisoning, yet when the EPA shut down the smelting plant, he complained about Obama (who had nothing to do with it other than ostensibly heading the DEA) shutting down the plant and taking his bullets. I seriously wondered if the lead was affecting him."

Monk said, "Exactly! What can you do, democratically speaking, if so many Americans insist on identifying Republicans as being the Party of apple pie and mom, and see the Democrats as the Party of colored people and foreign socialism?"

{Source: PolitiCartoons}