Author Archives: John F. Lindner

Up early this morning to watch the spectacular fourth integrated flight test of SpaceX’s Superheavy Starship, the largest rocket ever built. Each IFT has greatly improved on the previous one, and the fourth was no exception. For the first time, &… Continue reading →

John Chase, the head of the Walter Johnson High School Math Department, in Maryland, near Washington DC, liked my Stegosaurus variation of the Spectre monotile so much that he had his students paint it on the wall of their math … Continue reading… Continue reading →

I still retain the personal, anecdotal memory of my first encounter with the spelling of people. I was learning to read, and I got cat, mat, pat. I got lot, pot, dot. But I did not get people. Why the o, and… Continue reading →

Thousands of years ago, ancient astronomers like Eratosthenes and Aristarchus combined careful observations with simple mathematics to measure the solar system, especially the diameters D of Earth, Luna (Earth’s moon), Sol (Earth’s star, th… Continue reading →

Saturday, March 8, 2008. A heavy snow, one of the heaviest I remember, shuts down the city of Wooster. Streets are undriveable, so I walk to Taylor Hall, getting snow in my boots. Taylor is deserted, as the College has … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The pressure and temperature near the surface of Venus is so high that its carbon dioxide atmosphere is a supercritical fluid, a global ocean of a remarkable state of matter, which fills any container like a gas but is as … Continue reading → Continue reading →

A chill went through the spaceflight community last week as NASA reported that it had lost contact with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Delivered to Mars under the belly of the Perseverance rover and intended as a 5-flight 30-sol tech demo, … Cont… Continue reading →

Because of the pandemic, the summer of 2019 was regrettably and unexpectedly my last Wooster summer research program, but the team was amazing. Niklas Manz and I obtained Sherman-Fairchild funding to work with Margaret McGuire ’20, Yang (Fish) Yu… Continue reading →

I hired Kiyomi from Hawai’i for our NSF REU summer program in spring 2020 amidst fears of the pandemic that eventually postponed the program two years. When she finally arrived in summer 2022, I had already retired from Wooster, where … Con… Continue reading →

When I bought my new house, I knew I would soon need to replace its heat pump, which was almost 20 years old. Earlier this month, with my old pump laboring under a cold snap, I upgraded to a new … Continue reading → Continue reading →