Exploring the universe with lego

Some good news from The New Yorker this week…

First, the (nearly) nonagenarian magazine is opening up a large part of its archives to non-subscribers. A look into this library can be found here.

Second, Andy Borowitz reports that once, this nation actually believed in science. That’s right, these United States supported and the advancement of science as a public good. We have to wind back the clock to a time not so long ago, when science had a convergence of basic and applied goals. The public was rallying behind a space race to the moon (we chose the moon as the finish line because it was the only time we were ahead), while the politicos rallied behind the rockets that propelled them. After all, if we can put something on the moon with such precision that people could survive the journey, we can certainly put a rocket (and whatever payload we wanted) into any backyard in the world (even the Kremlin).