Bourbon Cowboy: What Happens to Superscript Over the Phone

About Me

Location: New York, New York, United States

I'm a storyteller in the New York area who is a regular on NPR's "This American Life" and at shows around the city. Moved to New York in 2006 and am working on selling a memoir of my years as a greeting card writer, and (as a personal, noncommercial obsession) a nonfiction book called "How to Love God Without Being a Jerk." My agent is Adam Chromy at Artists and Artisans. If you came here after hearing about my book on "This American Life" and Googling my name, the "How to Love God" book itself isn't in print yet, and may not even see print in its current form (I'm focusing on humorous memoir), but here's a sample I've posted in case you're curious anyway: Sample How To Love God Introduction, Pt. 1 of 3. Or just look through the archives for September 18, 2007.) The book you should be expecting is the greeting card book, about which more information is pending. Keep checking back!

Monday, February 25, 2008

What Happens to Superscript Over the Phone

From a LiveScience/Yahoo! article about the new technique of filming electrons in motion:

"'It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe,' said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden."

I assume that's supposed to be 10 to the -18th power. Either that, or the entire universe has only been around for one-tenth, or possibly one-eighteenth, of a second. Catch it before they edit the article!

(Also: We can measure attoseconds! Science is freakin' amazing.)

Labels: current events, humor and whimsy