[{"id":39674,"date":"2026-09-23T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39674"},"modified":"2026-09-22T21:31:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T01:31:42","slug":"golden-boy-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/23\/golden-boy-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Golden Boy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It is fall, and even though not much changes here, the light becomes low and golden. I feel like every season is my favorite time of year when it arrives, but this time, I really mean it. Here is a beautiful tree of gold from a trip to Japan, and here’s a post I wrote about that tree, another moment of golden light. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I fell in love in Japan. He was older, and so very tall. There was a glow about him, warm as sunshine. I could have sat and watched him for hours. Even though we didn\u2019t have that much time together, I knew I would never forget him. He was so present, so grounded. Resilient after years of living, marked by all of the storms, both meteorologic and political, that he had weathered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so alone\u2014not just on that path near Nijo Castle, but in the world. He had no living relatives. On a family tree, he would sit on a distant, dangling branch, separated from his kin by millions of years.  And there was something about this solitude that was irresistible, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ginkgo tree is an island in the arboreal world. Ginkgo flourished during the Cretaceous<\/a>, with five or six species growing in the Northern Hemisphere. But as time passed, the number of species shrank to a single species with fan shaped leaves. It disappeared from Europe and North America. The survivors found themselves in China<\/a>, where, years and years later, humans began to protect and cultivate them, and ultimately, bring them elsewhere\u2014to Japan, to Korea, to Berlin and Central Park.<\/a>  There is even one on my street, growing out of the planting strip, coming up to my shoulder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ginkgos are known to be resilient, thriving in urban areas that cause other trees to wither. In Hiroshima, ginkgo trees began growing new shoots<\/a> in the days after the atomic bomb killed 70,000 people instantly. People would continue to die in the months and years that followed, but the ginkgo trees unfurled their green fans again the next spring<\/a>. They still do. About 170 trees, known as hibakujumoku<\/em>, survive today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But none is so appealing than my dear tree, thousands of miles away now. I\u2019m not sure what drew me to him above all other ginkgos. Perhaps he was the first one who helped me feel the deep time of a tree that extends further backward and forward than I can ever imagine. Time that feels like golden autumn light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Cameron Walker<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is fall, and even though not much changes here, the light becomes low and golden. I feel like every season is my favorite time of year when it arrives, but this time, I really mean it. Here is a beautiful tree of gold from a trip to Japan, and here’s a post I wrote […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1724,5232,5487],"tags":[4834,5590,2884],"class_list":["post-39674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cameron","category-travel","category-trees","tag-autumn","tag-ginkgo","tag-trees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39674"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39677,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39674\/revisions\/39677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39663,"date":"2026-09-21T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39663"},"modified":"2026-09-18T12:01:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T16:01:14","slug":"nobody-was-here-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/21\/nobody-was-here-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobody Was Here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time? The New World, when the Old World was full of all kinds of people, had nobody. NOBODY WAS HERE. THEY ALL CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Everybody here was at some point AN IMMIGRANT. And yes, I’m shouting, why can’t we get this into our tiny brains?<\/em> This first ran Feb. 26, 2024<\/em>, and I learned it because I was working on the profile of one of the scientists figuring out where we all came from, for a magazine, Hakai, that has since died and that makes me mad too.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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I don\u2019t know how I managed to not know this for my whole life, but here it is: the Americas were the last continents (except for Antarctica which still doesn’t have any people) to have people on them. By around 30,000 years ago, all the other continents had people on them. We didn\u2019t have any people. Nobody. Empty of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why not? How do continents gets their people anyway? Well, in the beginning people evolved. They evolved in Africa, and later maybe some kind of evolution refinements were going on in Europe and Asia and Australia. But not here, not in the New World. I asked a couple of anthropologists why not. And they said \u201cNope, before 20,000 years ago, no evidence of people whatever. They just didn\u2019t evolve here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell why not?\u201d I said. \u201cWrong monkeys,\u201d they said, and I\u2019m paraphrasing. The great apes with the capacity for evolving into humans didn\u2019t live here. We had only miscellaneous little monkeys \u2014 the\u00a0New World monkeys<\/a>\u00a0which, granted, evolved from\u00a0Old World monkeys<\/a>\u00a0but neither one evolved into humans. No, I don\u2019t know why they didn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if people didn\u2019t evolve here, they must have come in from the outside, from the other continents, immigrated in like immigrants, right? Right you are. Once homo sapiens \u2014 Latin for “wise humans,” somebody\u2019s sense of humor I guess \u2014 evolved in Africa, they headed out on all directions. By\u00a040,000 years ago<\/a>, they\u2019d moved over into Asia, down into Southeast Asia, up into Siberia, even to Australia, and up to Europe. They didn\u2019t get to the Americas until about 20,000 years ago. The Siberian Asians must have gotten curious about the stretch of land crossing the ocean to the east and trekked across it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These people, the Asians, came in waves: an early, maybe the first, wave went straight south along the west coast, and by 14,500 years ago was at the tip of South America. Other waves, maybe around the same time, maybe later, came inland into North America, down an open corridor between glaciers, then skirted the bottom of the glaciers and headed south and east \u2014 though the archeological evidence is indirect at best and inevitably hit-or-miss.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Asians also circulated in South America and everywhere began the business of civilizing themselves. They first settled somewhere, built houses, learned to grow their own food, found the commonalities \u2014 the languages and religions and meeting places \u2014 that let them form tribes, communities, villages, cities, states, and in a few cases \u2014 Aztec, Maya, Inka \u2014 create civilizations as impressive as those in the Old World. In general, it\u2019s kind of a pretty story, people doing great things by making communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story gets less pretty once the Old World \u2014 you know this already \u2014 became aware of the new one. The first people to come over were the Vikings and one Italian; then Spanish, Portuguese, English, Scots\/Irish, French, Russians, and later, Germans, Scandanavians, Irish, Italians. Each one settled in its own communities and declared that the next immigrants were not really humans. Later, those immigrants declared that the new next immigrants were not really humans. And of course the special case is the Africans who immigrated, not because they wanted to but because Europeans had already decided they weren\u2019t really humans \u2014 which is rich considering that the Africans were the first humans. We\u2019re still doing it, running around like dumb monkeys declaring immigrants not humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m beginning to piss myself off, talking about this. And you certainly see what I\u2019m getting at: nobody, NOBODY was in this New World. Plenty of animals and plants, no humans. Every single one of us, we all came here. Every variegated one of us is an immigrant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not saying waves of immigrants don\u2019t cause problems or that dehumanizing them isn\u2019t as human as walking upright. I\u2019m saying the problems and the dehumanization have solutions that aren\u2019t rocket science. Like, believe the National Academy of Sciences when it says that compared to current residents<\/a>, immigrants are more law-abiding, their families are more stable, they’re more likely to have jobs; and their children are better educated and speak English like they were born here which they were. Like, every religion on earth mandates that we treat other people like ourselves. Like, THEY’RE THE SAME AS US, WE ARE ALL IMMIGRANTS HERE. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m getting pissed off again, I sometimes wish the Siberians had looked at the Bering land bridge and said, \u201cNah. Leave it empty.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

________<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pictures: New and Unknown World by Arnold Montanus<\/a>, 1671; Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White<\/a>,1585. Both from the splendidly intriguing Public Domain Review<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time? The New World, when the Old World was full of all kinds of people, had nobody. NOBODY WAS HERE. THEY ALL CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Everybody here was at some point AN IMMIGRANT. And yes, I’m shouting, why can’t […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39663"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39670,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39663\/revisions\/39670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39147,"date":"2026-09-18T04:59:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T08:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39147"},"modified":"2026-09-18T07:27:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:27:00","slug":"make-me-like-a-tree-and-leave-me-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/18\/make-me-like-a-tree-and-leave-me-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Make Me Like a Tree, and Leave Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sometimes we change our minds about big life choices: where we live, what career we pursue, who walks beside us. I’ve been pretty consistent<\/em> so far, especially when it comes to what follows. A friend of mine wants to be donated to a body farm so she can “live again” by being prodded and measured in the hot sun for science. Not me. I want a different kind of life after life. Here’s a reminder of my plan, for anyone who needs or wants to know.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I\u2019m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or dress me in a mushroom suit that feeds the soil and plant me in the woods. Really, this is a thing<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t preserve me or put makeup on me or dye my skin to prompt people\u2019s lies: They did such a nice job, she looks so natural;<\/em> keep away with the creepy mouth formers and eye caps that prop up a sunken face. I don\u2019t need a big polished coffin lined with silk, or a concrete urn to keep the worms out. I don\u2019t need anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to this resource<\/a>, which seems in synch with others I\u2019ve come across, common burial in the West uses over 6 billion tons of concrete, enough wood to build millions of homes, and 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde each year. Exact figures vary, but safe to say the death industry in the U.S., at least, is a toxic resource hog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Embalming seems to me the most egregious aspect of how we treat our dead. The practice\u2013which is accepted, even expected, in most major religions (the Jewish and Muslim faiths being blessed exceptions)\u2013arose in the West around the Civil War so dead soldiers could be shipped home without decomposing. At first arsenic and mercury were used as preservatives\u2014which meant super-toxic stuff seeping into the environment. Later came variants of formaldehyde, which at least breaks down in water and soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(I must give credit to the ancient Egyptians for their non-toxic approach, sucking out the dead\u2019s blood and organs\u2013the brain came out through the nose, if I recall my favorite ewww-inducing historic facts correctly\u2013and then filling the body cavity with natural materials to keep decomp at bay. Of course, for the elite there came those multi-roomed tombs filled with furniture, jewels, and other items for the afterlife\u2026not exactly worm food.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are consequences of Western burials above ground, too: Graveyards tend to be grassy yards\u2014low-diversity environments\u2013that require mowing and fertilizing. One silver lining: A graveyard may offer citizens a park-like experience in an urban area otherwise lacking in green space. Better a cemetery than an Arby\u2019s parking lot, I always say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The funeral industry should be gearing up for a long, flush stretch. By midcentury, some 16 percent of people worldwide will be 65 years old and older, up from 9 percent today, according to population projections. In the West, city cemeteries in particular are already stuffed to the gills, while many of those on coasts are eroding away<\/a> as seas devours shorelines. (See my own article about this phenomenon<\/a> here.) Meanwhile, our toxin-pumped, horizontal, one-person-per-plot burials continue apace in our most people-packed places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Netherlands, among others, has reduced the need for the land grab by renting grave sites for 10 to 20 years, then reusing them when the lease is up. Term limits for graves in Hong Kong is six years; unclaimed remains are cremated and added to a communal plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note that cremation, which might seem a healthy solution, isn\u2019t harmless. A body releases CO2 when burned, plus heavy metals (including mercury if you have old dental fillings), and crematoriums use fuel to speed up the process. But compared with the energy it takes just to manufacture and transport a coffin, for example, a fiery end is still a healthier choice. Some crematoriums are also capturing useable energy<\/a> as they burn the dead. And finally comes perhaps the \u201cgreenest\u201d cremation method of all, like something from The Godfather<\/em>: Place the deceased in a bath of water and potassium hydroxide and heat to about 350 degrees F. The body dissolves into a sterile liquid and bone fragments in just a couple of hours\u2013hard to beat if a small footprint is your goal\u2026or if you just want to get rid of a body posthaste<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If fire and dissolution don\u2019t mesh with your vision of the afterdeath, it\u2019s nice to know that old ideas like straight-into-the-earth burials\u2014even space-saving upright burials\u2013<\/a>may be options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simple, natural. It just makes sense to me. When I was a kid, we\u2019d go to graveyards and do \u201crubbings\u201d\u2014putting paper atop tombstones and scratching with a crayon to pick up the inscriptions. It was art of a sort, and I think gave us a sense, at a young age, of life\u2019s impermanence versus that of the rock commemorating it. Deep down, it occurred to me that in death, too, we should be impermanent. Why work so hard to stick around? Getting back to nature as fast as possible, feeding animals, plants, and microbes, has always seemed like the right thing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, when I\u2019ve given all I can as a living being, I want to give myself to the soil (or the sea, but that\u2019s another story). What could be more spiritual than becoming the seed for something else, especially something that\u2019s leafy and flowering and beautiful?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wherever I land, I hope there will be dappled sunlight, native wildlife, and a soft breeze. Once I\u2019m settled in, feel free to come sit awhile. I\u2019d imagine much good thinking can be done after a death, under a tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Claude Monet, Weeping Willow<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes we change our minds about big life choices: where we live, what career we pursue, who walks beside us. I’ve been pretty consistent so far, especially when it comes to what follows. A friend of mine wants to be donated to a body farm so she can “live again” by being prodded and measured […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39147"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39151,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39147\/revisions\/39151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39631,"date":"2026-09-16T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39631"},"modified":"2026-09-16T08:58:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T12:58:48","slug":"a-taxonomy-of-toddler-jokes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/16\/a-taxonomy-of-toddler-jokes\/","title":{"rendered":"A taxonomy of toddler jokes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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So there we were, on the deck of a nice restaurant with a view of the mountains and a valley with a river flowing through it, and a menu Google had described as “elevated.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, out of nowhere, a tiger<\/em> appeared. It prowled the deck, brandishing its claws at a bachelorette party sitting next to us. As it stalked the bride, we saw with horror that its jaws were dripping with blood \u2014 or was that \u2026 ketchup? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No! Will! we cried, scrambling across the deck and attempting to grab the tiger by his ankles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

RAAAAWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!<\/em> he growled, twisting free and creeping toward the bride-to-be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will, stop! I pleaded. He looked back at me, grinning, then sprang forward, coming within inches of mawling her cream-colored dress before I could grab him and football-carry him back to his booster seat.<\/p>\n\n\n

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In comedy this is called escalation \u2014  taking an initial premise and making it progressively bigger, weirder, more outrageous. It is also an apt description of parenting a toddler, and the remarkable rate at which humor develops between birth and age four. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first comprehensive taxonomy of humor in the first four years of life, published in 2022<\/a> in Behavior Research Methods<\/em>, found that jokes of all kinds \u2014 from tiger imitations to wearing a salad spinner as a hat \u2014 increase sharply from age zero to two, growing increasingly elaborate with age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That study, drawing on data from more than 800 children, resulted in the Early Humor Survey, a 20-item parent report measure of humor development that includes a rich variety of comedic forms, from “Saying strange things\/mixing up concepts\/nonsense (e.g., dinosaurs eat the wall; cats have 5 legs, dogs say moo)” to “Referring to gross things, e.g., poo, sneezing, smelly feet, etc.” Here’s a graph of their data:<\/p>\n\n\n

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Predicted age curves for laughter, humor appreciation, and humor production
Behav Res Methods<\/em>. 2021 Nov 18;54(4):1928\u20131953. doi: 10.3758\/s13428-021-01704-4<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Will, at 27 months, is right on schedule, having graduated from silly faces, gestures and sounds to parading around the house with a crinkly tube that is by turns an elephant\u2019s nose, a wind instrument, and a bubble blower. According to the EHS, he’s well on his way to irony, which typically shows up around four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the way home from our Tahoe dinner, Will worked on his favorite burp joke  \u2014 fake burp followed by: Mama, I burped! followed by<\/em>: BIG BURP! HAHAHAH!<\/em> \u2014 for a solid 30 minutes, then moved on to another favorite game: randomly pointing out the window in faux alarm and shouting OCTOPUS!!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about the tiger attack at the restaurant, and how he’d managed to recruit not just me, but Pete, the waiter, and the bachelorette party into his performance \u2014 although, unlike the remarkably chill waiter, the bachelorettes had not seemed 100% amused. When Will gets going, we’re not just his audience, I realized. We’re his sidekicks. The inept zookeepers in his circus. His personal improv troupe.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The fact that all toddlers in every society enjoy humor \u2014 and basically the same jokes \u2013 has long suggested to scientists that it must serve some purpose, from social bonding to developing symbolic thinking and theory of mind. But testing how these milestones contribute to or correlate with cognitive outcomes is difficult, partly because so much of the research is based on parent reports \u2014 people like me, watching their kids and filling out surveys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the Early Humor Survey was reliable in terms of “parental inter-observability” (translation = two parents took the same survey independently and got similar answers), the researchers also found that “lab experiments do not necessarily capture the everyday humor reported by parents.” Could it be that the scientists in the study were simply not very funny<\/em> when they delivered the “horse says “neigh” vs. “Quack! Quack Quack!” joke? Yes, they conceded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Understanding toddler humor can indeed be difficult. For example: when I put a diaper on my head and Will laughs, one scientific interpretation of his glee is that he\u2019s laughing because a) he knows what the diaper is for b) he can infer that I, too, know what a diaper is for c) he knows that I\u2019m doing the \u201cwrong\u201d thing with the diaper on purpose and d) he can tell from my face that I am being silly with the intention of eliciting his giggles. As his mother, I’m inclined to agree with this sophisticated explanation. But since Will can\u2019t yet clearly explain his thinking to me, I can\u2019t really know <\/em>that it’s true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My friend, who has a 1-year-old, describes the exact same diaper-on-the-head routine. She initially thought was their own, private joke. But according to the Early Humor Survey, neither her baby nor Will are unusual \u2014 the diaper joke is a standard toddler bit, like Will\u2019s tiger attack and his relentless delight in putting his toes on our dining room table. Will’s volume of his mirth is also pretty typical, the 2022 study suggests: When the scientists asked the parents of 671 kids how often their toddlers laughed at something funny, the answer was a median interval of every two hours.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I called my mom the other day when I was waiting for my train \u2014 I get lonely on my rides to and from work, missing Will \u2014 and we traded stories of all the funny new things he’s done and said lately. Then we talked about a funny viral video she’d sent me, the one of those guys at DCA who bought secret ugly pants for each other. They agreed to trade them and wear them in the terminal \u2014 pants with sequins, fringe, ruffles, an elephant\u2019s dangling proboscis \u2014 and then they just crack each other up<\/em>. It feels good, we agreed, to watch that kind of uninhibited silliness in grownup people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our conversation turned to her recent visit to the Farallon Islands \u2014 how rich those islands were, so alive with rare seabirds and whales and dolphins and endangered seals. That\u2019s how the coast of California used to be, the tour guide had said. Doesn’t it just make you hate people, someone had replied. My mom agreed, at the time, but then watched the ugly pants video in the airport and reconsidered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, she didn’t hate people. At least not the ones who made her laugh, she said. And especially not Will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And suddenly, I felt buoyed by the fact that our private jokes with Will are not private, but universal. I thought of all the laughing toddlers out there \u2014 unfettered and life-giving, like the Farallon Islands with their chattering birds and seals. That reminded me of an artesian well I once stumbled on accidentally in Colorado: a free upwelling of pure spring water. And of that time were in line at Target, when Will laughed so uproariously during checkout that everyone stopped and turned towards us, looking for the source of those irrepressible peals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So there we were, on the deck of a nice restaurant with a view of the mountains and a valley with a river flowing through it, and a menu Google had described as “elevated.\u201d  Then, out of nowhere, a tiger appeared. It prowled the deck, brandishing its claws at a bachelorette party sitting next to us. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5243,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emily","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39631"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39662,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39631\/revisions\/39662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39627,"date":"2026-09-14T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39627"},"modified":"2026-09-13T20:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T00:00:16","slug":"will-the-real-women-in-science-please-stand-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/14\/will-the-real-women-in-science-please-stand-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Will the real women in science please stand up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

On the second Tuesday of October, a small subset of humanity celebrates Ada Lovelace Day in honour of the 19th<\/sup> Century computing pioneer. There are film screenings and museum visits, and bloggers are encouraged to write about women\u2019s achievements in STEM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most distinctive of the events is a Wikipedia Editathon to set the record straight and add as many fully fleshed-out entries about female scientists, engineers and mathematicians as can be done in the span of an afternoon. Given that more than 80% of Wikipedia\u2019s biographical articles are about men (and this reflects the wider ratio of coverage and recognition), the editathons are an act of resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which may be why xAI\u2019s Grok has been getting into the same spirit. Not generally known for woke activism, the Large Language Model recently composed an article for its competing site Grokipedia that nevertheless helped redress the balance. The entry chronicles the wartime work of a member of the Manhattan Project’s Montreal Lab and the later designer of Canada’s first nuclear reactors. It details an extraordinary career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs one of the pioneering women in Canadian nuclear physics during an era when female scientists faced significant barriers to entry and advancement,\u201d writes the artificial intelligence<\/a>, \u201cSargent demonstrated remarkable resilience in balancing her professional commitments with personal challenges, though details of her family life remain largely private.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Grokipedia page \u2018Bernice Weldon Sargent\u2019 is a 2,700 word article that cites 25 sources, and it was \u2018fact-checked by Grok 7 months ago\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trouble is, Dr. Sargent was a man. A cisgender man. He was the man depicted in the photo above. He did have a first name now more commonly given to women, and when given to boys nowadays it\u2019s spelt Burnice, but Dr. Sargent was born at the turn of the century when his own spelling was briefly popular. Any one of the 25 sources cited by the article would have correctly used male pronouns for this expert in beta decay processes, but Grokipedia uses female ones throughout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Wikipedia, one could have made the edits directly, but the AI-written encyclopedia only allows for \u2018suggested\u2019 edits. I submitted a suggested overhaul of the article before I found out that nothing on Grokipedia has been added or changed since the Spring, even though this fact has not been acknowledged by the company. This male physicist will be mis-gendered, and mis-sexed, on a global internet for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can we do, and who is responsible, when lies are spoken about us by something that is not human? Some of us may be about to find out. The scarier thing is when it tells lies about you that you never hear, but that affect your life. You mysteriously get turned down for a job and never know why. You\u2019re rejected at the bank for your mortgage renewal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t feel empowered to change that, but I can point out what I notice with the small platform I have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now, I can talk about a man named Bernice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the second Tuesday of October, a small subset of humanity celebrates Ada Lovelace Day in honour of the 19th Century computing pioneer. There are film screenings and museum visits, and bloggers are encouraged to write about women\u2019s achievements in STEM. Most distinctive of the events is a Wikipedia Editathon to set the record straight […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39629,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39627\/revisions\/39629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39618,"date":"2026-09-11T04:21:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T08:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39618"},"modified":"2026-09-10T15:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T19:50:09","slug":"39618","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/11\/39618\/","title":{"rendered":"Rail Trails, Towpaths, and Other Great Trails Along Failed Transportation Routes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\"
A tunnel along the Great Allegheny Passage rail trail. <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some of the best trails run along failed transportation routes. Today you can bike or hike along abandoned canal towpaths, logging roads, railroads, or road roads<\/a>. My favorites are the rail trails<\/a>. They\u2019re usually wide, smooth, and only as steep as the steepest grade a freight train could handle. I\u2019m sure some mountain bikers and Tour de Francers think rail trails are bunny slopes for babies, but I love them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also love the great transfer of property from exploitative, extractive, polluting industries to public lands. It\u2019s like beating swords into ploughshares, only for recreation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lots of parks have interpretive signs that show the history of the trails and the land around them. Each one tells a specific story, but the general message is: Logging and mining companies bought the land for a pittance, brought in workers who had little power because they were Black or recent immigrants, paid them and their children miserable wages to chop down every tree and dig out all the coal, and then left a wasteland of erosion, mudslides, polluted rivers, and poverty. The old photos on these signs are horrifying\u2014bare slopes, skinny kids, derailed trains, workers\u2019 shacks, clouds of smoke. The land became worthless, so the Forest Service acquired it, let the forests grow back, reintroduced otters or red-cockaded woodpeckers<\/a>, and now it\u2019s lovely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I bet many of you also read signs and markers along trails and roads. I visit West Virginia every year, where every tourist town has a cafe, hair-dresser, bar, or ice cream stand called “Almost Heaven.” And it is! But it wasn’t. The town of Davis, now surrounded by parks and forests, used to be nicknamed “Stumptown.” Historical markers across the state remind us about all the mining disasters. Miners were crushed by collapses, poisoned by gas, or blown apart by explosions. Many of the victims died when they rushed into a mine to save others. Those who didn\u2019t die on the job died later of black lung. Massey Energy killed 29 people in 2010<\/a> and its villainous CEO<\/a> has had the nerve to run for political office several times since then.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, not everybody agrees, but the wind farms along West Virginia mountain ranges are beautiful<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hiking or biking along former logging roads and once polluted rivers is a great reminder that humans can devastate ecosystems, and that we can bring them back, or almost back, with proper environmental protections, conservation plans, government oversight, and popular support. We’ll need to remember this when we have a chance to build back the Environmental Protection Agency and all the national monuments and wilderness areas that are being devastated right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upriver from Washington, DC, you can walk along former canal paths where mules towed boats past the Potomac River’s rapids and waterfalls. The company that built the canals went bankrupt and lost out to the railroads, which lost out to the highways.\u00a0Maybe someday they’ll be bike paths, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of my other favorites: The Western Maryland Rail Trail (watch out for deer<\/a>). The Great Allegheny Passage goes from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland. The Cuyahoga Valley National Park rails trails in Ohio run along a river once so polluted that it burned<\/a>. Now it\u2019s lovely.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A rail trail from Baltimore to York, Pennsylvania runs through Maryland\u2019s Gunpowder Falls State Park. It\u2019s named for the gunpowder factory that used to operate there. Can you guess what happened to it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It blew up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interpretive signs along that trail show former fancy hotels (burned), towns (flooded), and bank buildings made out of stone. The banks are some of the only historic buildings still standing, and people have converted some of them into quirky homes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trails also endure; people have been going from here to there and back again along these routes for centuries, sometimes for business but now, for now, for pleasure.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of the best hiking and biking trails run along abandoned railroads, logging roads, and canals. It’s like beating swords into ploughshares, only for recreation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5755,1],"tags":[4640,128,4469,5845],"class_list":["post-39618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-laura","category-uncategorized","tag-environment","tag-history","tag-public-lands","tag-trails"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39618"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39625,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39618\/revisions\/39625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39559,"date":"2026-09-09T04:02:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T08:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39559"},"modified":"2026-09-09T23:36:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T03:36:58","slug":"every-map-starts-with-a-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/09\/every-map-starts-with-a-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"Every Map Starts with a Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\"
A map of the world published in 1961 by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office uses the Mercator projection. This projection distorts the shapes and relative sizes of the continents, enlarging them near the poles, but it preserves directions, making it useful for navigation at sea.<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not often that a map projection makes headlines. I have tried and failed to convince editors they are newsworthy. So it\u2019s honestly exciting to see so many stories about the United Nations\u2019 decision to adopt a new map projection. When I heard the news, I thought, \u201cYES! They are ditching the Mercator. Good riddance!\u201d I was pretty sure I knew why. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand this decision, it helps to know a little about map projections. Because the Earth is a three-dimensional, round object, all maps have to distort geography in some way to fit that information onto a two-dimensional piece of paper (or your computer screen). Think of cutting open a tennis ball and trying to lay it flat on a table. There are five different aspects of geography that can be distorted to varying degrees during the flattening process: area, shape, distance, direction, and angle. Reducing the distortion of one of these attributes necessarily means increasing the distortion of one or more of the others. A map projection is basically math that dictates how things are distorted. Cartographers choose projections based on the purpose of a map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 (More on map projections\u2014including my favorite, the Armadillo \u2014 and how they work in an excerpt from my book All Over the Map<\/a><\/em> below), <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mercator projection was designed for navigating oceans, so it prioritizes keeping angles and directions between two locations true. To make up for that, it distorts the size and shape of landmasses, making some places (notably Africa) look smaller relative to other continents, and it inflates the size of others (notably Europe and North America). People have argued that this also inflates the perceived importance of northern hemisphere countries relative to countries closer to the equator, which is what I suspected was the reason the U.N. ditched the projection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
From thetruesize.com<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

To see how absurd the Mercator projection\u2019s distortions are, visit thetruesize.com<\/a> where you can see that Brazil is essentially the same size as the entire continental U.S., and also the same size as Canada! Alaska is smaller than Libya. And yes, Greenland is not larger than South America (as it appears to be in the Mercator map at the top of the post). In fact, it is only a quarter of the size of Brazil alone. (You can read more about how your mental map of the world is probably wrong<\/a> in this story I wrote for National Geographic). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But my glee at hearing the news was immediately followed by dread. If you want the size of the landmasses to be relatively undistorted, but you still want a rectangular map that fits nicely onto a square piece of paper, the solution is even worse than the problem: the hideous Gall-Peters projection, which, as many cartographers have pointed out, makes the continents look like wet laundry hanging from a clothesline (see the first map in the excerpt below). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thankfully, the U.N.was willing to forgo the square in favor of a much more attractive choice: the Equal Earth Projection. This is a fairly new option, having only been invented by a trio of cartographers in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another handy way to visualize the distortions of a map projection is Tissot\u2019s indicatrix, which plots circles on the map that are stretched the way the underlying geography is. Here are the indicatraces for Mercator, Gall-Peters, and Equal Earth projections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Tissot’s indicatrices<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The following is an excerpt from my book with Greg Miller, All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey<\/em><\/a> (National Geographic, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flattening the World<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem of reducing the globe to two dimensions has many interesting solutions<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every cartographer creating a map of the world faces the same problem: how to flatten the skin of a three-dimensional sphere onto a two-dimensional plane. There\u2019s simply no way to do it without stretching, tearing, or otherwise distorting the planet\u2019s surface. Unless it\u2019s on a globe, every map is an imperfect representation of reality in one way or another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Different ways of representing Earth\u2019s curved surface on a flat map are called projections. To choose one, cartographers have to decide which types of distortion they can live with and which to minimize. Projections can distort five aspects of geography: area, shape, distance, angle, and direction. Reducing one means increasing others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the best known world map projections was designed in the 16th century by German-Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator as a framework for maritime navigation. Maps that use his projection prioritize angles and direction so that if you were to draw a straight line between two points, you could measure the angle of the line with a protractor and use that bearing to travel between those points in the real world. Mercator\u2019s projection remained popular into the 20th century, hanging on walls in many classrooms and, some would argue, distorting students\u2019 conception of the world. It was particularly ubiquitous for maps focused on the oceans. The U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office adopted it (top of the post) and eventually pressured the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey into using it as well.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
The Peters projection used for this shaded relief map of the world keeps the total area of the continents and oceans correct relative to each other, but shapes are distorted. The continents are stretched vertically near the equator and compressed horizontally near the poles.<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The Mercator projection began to fall out of favor in the middle of the 20th century largely due to one of its other notable characteristics: In order to keep direction true, lines of longitude have to be parallel, which means area is increasingly inflated toward the poles. This leads to gross distortions of the relative size of continents and countries, with some absurd results. For example, Sweden appears to be twice its actual size. Europe is also larger than it should be, which was handy for cartographers trying to fit in all of Europe\u2019s tiny countries and their names. But some argued that the projection is misleading because it magnifies the perceived importance of northern countries relative to those closer to the Equator. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One remedy for Mercator\u2019s polar inflation is a projection that prioritizes area. German historian Arno Peters invented one such \u201cequalarea\u201d projection in 1967 and presented it as a replacement for Mercator\u2019s that would more accurately, and fairly, portray the developing world. This aspect made the Peters projection (above) popular with development organizations and educators in the 1980s. The projection made news in 2017 when the Boston Public School System began hanging it in classrooms in place of Mercator maps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But cartographers, and many others, generally despise the Peters projection because it drastically distorts the shapes of continents, stretching them vertically near the Equator and squashing them horizontally near the poles. The Peters projection may not be pretty, but comparing it to Mercator\u2019s is a cogent demonstration of how important the choice of projection can be. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
National Geographic uses the Winkel Tripel projection for its world maps. The projection is designed to minimize the distortion by spreading it out among all the geographical aspects. In its online store, National Geographic proclaims that on this 2015 map, \u201cGreenland is shown the same size as Argentina and not as the size of all of South America.\u201d<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

National Geographic\u2019s preferred projection, known as the Winkel Tripel (right), is an example of a compromise projection. It minimizes distortion as much as possible by spreading it out among the various geographic factors in an effort to make everything look balanced and achieve an aesthetically appealing portrayal of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another such compromise projection was created in 1943 by Hungarian American cartographer Erwin Raisz, a vocal critic of the Mercator projection. He called his projection the Armadillo for its resemblance to that animal\u2019s curved, leathery armor. It adds an element of perspective that makes the projection appear three-dimensional, almost as if Earth had been cracked open and spread apart. \u201cAlthough the distortions on the peripheries of the [projection] may be extreme, we perceive the correct proportions because we visualize a three-dimensional body instead of a flat map,\u201d Raisz wrote in a paper introducing the projection. Though Raisz used the projection for a few thematic maps in his 1944 atlas (below), it was mostly intended to inspire experimentation with new projections.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
The Armadillo projection used for this map of world agriculture in Erwin Raisz\u2019s 1944 Atlas of Global Geography is named for its resemblance to that animal\u2019s armored skin. It adds a bit of three dimensional perspective while still showing most of the globe. New Zealand disappears around the corner, so on some Armadillo maps, a \u201cpigtail\u201d with the islands on it is added.<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Another way to keep from warping the continents is to break the map into pieces. In 1909 Bernard Cahill, a British architect living in San Francisco, presented a projection made of eight triangles with curved sides arranged in a configuration resembling a butterfly (below). While this interrupted view breaks up the oceans, it minimizes the distortion of the continents. Cahill argued that his Butterfly was a much better map than Mercator\u2019s \u201cpreposterous chart\u201d for anyone interested in comparisons of things that occur on land: geographers, teachers, political economists, statesmen, students of the Weltpolitik, and especially scientists. \u201cIn short, the uses of such a map are endless,\u201d he wrote. He formed the Cahill World Map Company to promote the projection, but the Butterfly never caught on. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
This 1923 promotional map puts San Francisco at the center of the world using Cahill\u2019s Butterfly projection. The projection minimizes distortion by breaking the globe into eight pieces that can be arranged in various ways to keep either continents or oceans intact. <\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Other interrupted views fared somewhat better. J. Paul Goode\u2019s \u201corange-peel\u201d projection, which could be arranged to divide the oceans and keep the continents whole or vice versa, was introduced in 1923 and used in Rand McNally\u2019s Goode\u2019s World Atlas through most of the rest of the 20th century. Two examples of Goode\u2019s projection can be seen in the bottom corners of the National Geographic world map showing population density and vegetation and land use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the best known example of an interrupted view was invented by American architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller in 1943 and introduced with a photo essay in Life magazine. Fuller\u2019s projection is made by first projecting the Earth\u2019s surface onto a 20-sided shape made of triangles called an icosahedron. The map can then be unfolded in a number of ways, but he settled on this arrangement<\/a> in 1954, which he named the Dymaxion map. It modifies a few of the triangles to show the proximity and connectedness of the planet\u2019s landmass as \u201cone island in one ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are thousands of different solutions to the problem of flattening Earth\u2019s surface. Each offers a different outlook on the world that is sometimes intentional, but often incidental. In a sense, every map starts with a lie, and viewers would do well to keep that in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not often that a map projection makes headlines. I have tried and failed to convince editors they are newsworthy. So it\u2019s honestly exciting to see so many stories about the United Nations\u2019 decision to adopt a new map projection. When I heard the news, I thought, \u201cYES! They are ditching the Mercator. Good riddance!\u201d […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":173,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5754,155],"tags":[5844,4111,806],"class_list":["post-39559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-betsy","category-earth","tag-cartography","tag-geography","tag-maps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/173"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39559"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39616,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39559\/revisions\/39616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39143,"date":"2026-09-07T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39143"},"modified":"2026-09-07T07:35:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T11:35:42","slug":"a-little-night-music-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/07\/a-little-night-music-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"A Little Night Music (Revisited)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Dueting with animals will always be thrilling for me, and I’ll always envision our melodic conversations filling a sound gap somewhere up there. Enjoy this memory along with me!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had a conversation with an owl the other night. It was a barred owl, a pretty common species in the woods around our cabin in central Virginia. The bird got going early\u2014well before dusk\u2014and I happened to be outside with my native wooden flute (purchased from this lovely flutemaker<\/a> in Canada), so I found similar notes and replied in the same pattern. There was a pause while cicadas and crickets took a turn. Then, the owl again. Four quick hoots, repeated twice, the final one dropping off into a guttural drag. I waited a few beats, lets the insects hum some more, then played again, the eight notes. Seconds passed. Then, the owl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barred owls aren\u2019t just one-note birds: They have a variety of calls,<\/a> more than a dozen by some counts, including one that you\u2019d swear came from a monkey. But this was the one people like to say sounds like \u201cWho cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?\u201d (I\u2019m not sold on that comparison, but it endures.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s very possible, likely, even, that my flute playing had nothing to do with the owl\u2019s decision to keep hooting. In my experience these owls will repeat the sequence at least a few times over a couple of minutes, regardless of any back talk. But I like to think we were conversing. There\u2019s something magical about hearing a wild animal respond to you the way he would to his own kind, as if what you said was meaningful enough in his language to warrant a reply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If barred owls weren\u2019t so vocal, I wouldn\u2019t know for sure they were around. Only once did I spy one, barely, as I pointed my flashlight beam into the big oak where a call seemed to be coming from. It was fully dark, but I glimpsed the bird\u2019s eyeshine before he swooped toward me and then away, over my head. (A little anatomy: An owl\u2019s eyes are super reflective, having an extra layer called the tapetum lucidum<\/em> that snags light passing through the retina and bounces it back to what are already very sensitive rods.) The swoop was almost silent; I felt it more than heard it. Which is the owl\u2019s way: The structure and texture of the wing feathers lets them funnel air very quietly by breaking up the turbulence that would otherwise whoosh.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it was the calls moving through the air more than the bird’s anatomy that interested me that night. I thought about how the animal\u2019s vocalizations in a sense fill a niche much as the physical animal does. It\u2019s a more temporary residency, but still. I had the same notion some months before while lying in my tent in a rainforest in Borneo. I was listening, on my first night there, to the delightfully unfamiliar calls of wild things coming awake just before dawn. As cricket chirps were topped by a bird’s song that gave way to monkey chatter, I envisioned the soundscape in 3D with each unique noise\u2014with its own pitch and volume and frequency\u2014rushing in to inhabit an empty spot, standing tall to make itself known\u2014ta da!–<\/em>and then vacating just as quickly. Picture Tom Cruise in Minority Report<\/em> flinging bits of data around in space with his finger\u2026sliding this bit over, that one up, another one off screen, a new one in to replace it. That\u2019s sort of how I saw it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, I think of animals as competing not just for a physical niche but for an aural one as well\u2014a slot in the soundspace not yet taken that they can fill with chatter and alarms and music and be heard despite the din. It’s another way to make oneself known in a crowd. The variety makes it all possible: An elephant sending low-frequency rumbles through the Earth reaches her intended even as lions roar and cicadas scream. Like a lioness intent on spotting the weakest gazelle in the herd, an animal can hear a familiar voice and a known language rising above all others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know that this is a terribly profound notion, but conversing with the owl, I realized that my flute toots were taking up one tiny pocket of aural space, filling that sound niche just for a moment, then flitting offscreen, leaving that spot vacant for the owl\u2019s reply. Profound or no, it was kind of a neat way to think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

–Photo by Joshua J. Cotten<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dueting with animals will always be thrilling for me, and I’ll always envision our melodic conversations filling a sound gap somewhere up there. Enjoy this memory along with me! I had a conversation with an owl the other night. It was a barred owl, a pretty common species in the woods around our cabin in […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39143"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39146,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39143\/revisions\/39146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":39498,"date":"2026-09-04T05:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/?p=39498"},"modified":"2026-09-08T07:12:41","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T11:12:41","slug":"the-tale-of-what-ails-the-snails-in-hayle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonnothing.com\/2026\/09\/04\/the-tale-of-what-ails-the-snails-in-hayle\/","title":{"rendered":"A baleful tale of the snails in Hayle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"snails<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If you really squint at a map and spin up your full kindergarten imagination, Great Britain looks like a little cartoon dinosaur roaring at Europe, its tail pointing back across the Atlantic ocean. Zoom in on the tip of that squat tail: this is Cornwall, home of clotted cream and dramatic coastal walks. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"a<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Right at the end you\u2019ll find a shaggy little town called Hayle. Hayle\u2019s defining feature is an exceptionally enormous beach, but that\u2019s also pretty much its only feature. That was exactly what we were after. For a few days this summer, we escaped the heat and crowd and stench of London for a settlement of little one-story hobbit houses pressed into the dunes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The path from our particular hobbit house to the beach wound along barely existent paths through dry, sharp grasses and brambles that nipped at our ankles and calves. I started to notice that some of these grasses bloomed with an intriguing flower I had never seen, whose pale white whorls looked almost snail-like. I examined them more closely.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\"Many<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Oh. Not snail-like<\/em>. These were actual snails. Which had climbed to the top of tall grass stalks, sometimes alone and sometimes in groups, forming the little clusters I had mistaken for exotic Cornish flora. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But why?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turns out a stalk of grass is as good as a wall for slithering up, and they slither up both for the same reasons: evade predators, and of course get out of the interminable heat. Somewhat counterintuitively, it\u2019s cooler a bit further up than it is on the ground. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The snails may also go up there to estivate<\/a>. This process is how they survive periods of drought or extreme heat<\/a>, plugging up their shell entrance with sticky mucus to keep in the moisture. Thus sealed inside their shell, they hit pause on life as they wait for conditions to improve (NB I\u2019m in midst of a life stage that’s making me consider the same approach). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an interesting question in the fact that I found snails doing this in the UK. It seems like this behaviour is much more typical of snails in Mediterranean regions. A nature illustrator called John Muir Laws<\/a>, whose Instagram is a buffet of gorgeous drawings<\/a>, captured snails estivating in Santorini, a sunwashed Greek island whose weather didn\u2019t resemble ours in the UK until this year. His artworks show the much more populous and elaborate structures they form out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, like me, he also seemed to get hung up on the climbing behaviour. \u201cWhy go up?\u201d he muses in looping calligraphy. And then, in the lower left corner, a note hints at a much more horrifying reason a snail will seek higher ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"illustration<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnts infected with cordyceps\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you read LWON there\u2019s a good chance you’re familiar with the villainous serial killer Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis<\/a><\/em>. When this murderous parasitic fungus hijacks an ant\u2019s nervous system, it overrides the ant\u2019s life goals with its own. The parasitized ant, instead of sneaking around in the underbrush, now feels an overwhelming need to climb to high ground. Once there, the fungus\u2019 final act of brutality is to punch a mushroom through the ant\u2019s head like the chestburster in Alien<\/em>, which waves around\u00a0its grotesque little head until it explodes in a shower of spores that disperse in the breeze and will infect any ants unlucky enough to be downwind. Lather, rinse, repeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, cordyceps is not the only psycho killer on the loose: the parasitic worm Leucochloridium paradoxum<\/em> (AKA “green-banded brood sack”, which is less ‘illuminating alias’ than ‘insult you’d find in The Princess Bride<\/em>‘) hijacks snails to the same devious ends. First, the snails eat the eggs of the parasitic worm when they eat infected bird poo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Sorry to interrupt. I’ve just clocked that snails eat bird poo<\/em>. That seems like a terrible idea. And this story was already so disgusting without that note. But it’s not the worst thing they eat. They’re cannibals, so they also eat other snails. Some of which have undoubtedly eaten worm-egg-laced bird poo. God, it’s just a nesting doll of abominations.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, after they eat the bird poo, the eggs hatch in the snail and the worms make their way to the snail’s nervous system, hijack the snail command centre, and send it scuttling up a tall structure all the better to get in view of a bird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And because snails are too plodding to seize even the most caffeinated bird’s attention, the worm now reveals its grossest trick. It has also invaded the snail’s eye stalks. The infection causes these to swell, pulsate, and manifest undulating bands of green and white. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They wave around on the snail’s face until a passing bird thinks “oooh! caterpillar!” and swoops in. (Cornwall police were unable to provide data for how many snails survive these encounters with their eye stalks pecked off versus how many are eaten in one gulp.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having eaten its infected lunch, the bird then lets its poo fly where it may, and where another snail cannibal squad stands ready to play its part in the worm’s life cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was unclear to me from the snail shell flowers I passed whether they still contained their sleeping occupants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t exactly Midsommar Murders out here, but we did have bucolic British countryside, eccentric behaviour, and a possible body count. If there is a moral to the tale of the snails from Hayle? Don’t eat bird poo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Image credits:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The snail lollipop image<\/strong>, which is much prettier than any of my janky mobile phone photography, was taken by BlueBreezeWiki<\/a>. It shows a cluster of white heath snails (Xerolenta obvia)\u00a0in Provence<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Snail illustration detail<\/strong>: John Muir Laws<\/a>, original here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The infected snail with its throbbing eyes <\/strong>is by <\/a>Eveline van der Jagt<\/a>. It shows an infected amber snail<\/a> in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other images are by me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n