11:59:59:59:59:59:59….

By: | February 24, 2020

Cosmology is timeless, perhaps literally—as this post argued on January 23, 2015.
11-59-59

In the 1992 documentary A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking describes what we would see if we were observing an astronaut nearing a black hole’s event horizon—the barrier beyond which gravitation is so great that not even light can escape. He invites us to imagine that the astronaut is wearing a watch, and that the second hand is ticking toward 12:00. As the astronaut gets closer to the event horizon, the motion of the second hand will appear to us to be slowing down. The closer the astronaut gets to the event horizon, the slower the motion of the hand, from our perspective. “Each second on the watch would appear to take longer and longer,” Hawking says, “until the last second before midnight would take forever.”

Then the documentary reverses the point of view and explores what the astronaut would be experiencing. That poor sap has a perspective, too. And that’s where things get weird. (Well, weirder.)

Continue reading →

Asking the Big Questions

By: | February 21, 2020

Gosh darn it, right now I have so many big questions about what’s happening in the world, and there seem to be so few good answers that it makes me want to shut down and hide under the bed. Not to sound negative. But I think you’re right there with me, yes?

And so, I’d posit it can be useful on occasion to escape by turning inward, or at least to glance down at ourselves and notice what’s happening right here. The big world’s terrifying turns are practically invisible if you zoom in on what’s in your immediate space, kind of in the same the way that, when you drive, the mountains stay put while the roadside trees whip by. (I’m not sure that analogy works, but I’m going with it.)

Continue reading →

A = B, B=C, so A=C. Right? Right?

By: | February 20, 2020

My neighbor likes to ask big questions about big ideas.  He’s not pretentious and doesn’t pontificate, so I think he just likes big questions.  Anyway, the other day he asked what the necessary components of an ideal public education were.  “Writing,” I said, naturally.  He agreed partly because, he said, good writing involves good thinking.  That’s certainly true, at least of good nonfiction writing.  I’m less interested in big questions, though, and I didn’t take it any further – into, for instance, whatever “good thinking” might be.

Then at the coffee shop:  Grace and Larry were arguing about the violence in Ferguson, Missouri.  Larry said what you always hear, that the conflict between the police and the community was because the police force was white and the community was black.  Grace said, “those two facts are not necessarily related,” and pointed out that Baltimore (where we all were) had its Freddy Grey violence but the police force and community, not to mention the city council, are pretty much the same mix of black and white.  This is not quite true: Baltimore is 28 percent white; its police force is 45 percent white.  But Grace’s point was that Larry wasn’t being logical, that he was committing a logical fallacy.

That is, he assumed that the tension between police and community is determined by the racial mix of each, and that Ferguson’s police force and community had different racial mixes, and so Ferguson had tension.  The logical fallacies are all named, oh joy!  I think, but am not sure, that this is the logical fallacy of begging the question, petitio principii:  “a conclusion is derived from premises that presuppose the conclusion, ” or you try to prove a thing by assuming it’s true.  

Continue reading →

Alaska Calling

By: | February 19, 2020

Arizona winter night, stars over pines, my buddy and I were heading for a hot tub on the outskirts of Flagstaff when a phone rang. It was a mutual friend, Jayme Dittmar, a dog musher on a 1,300-mile expedition by dog sled from Nome, Alaska, to the village of Utqiagvik on Point Barrow. She was calling to check in from Teller, an Inupiat village on a spit of land sticking into the Bering Sea, population 200 plus change. We stopped our advance toward the hot tub to chat with her on speaker.

They’d arrived in Teller just as darkness and a storm settled in. How are the dogs was our first question, knowing how close she gets to them. She said they’re Alaskan huskies, they live for this, curling into a ball, making a snow cave of themselves as they are buried by the storm. I imagined holes in the snow rimed with the steam of their breathing.

Continue reading →

Flipping the Script

By: | February 17, 2020

“Freak.” “Monster.” “Gorilla.” During this year’s Super Bowl Sunday, Shakira and J-Lo were not the only hyperboles on show. Both the official sports commentary and its online counterparts were littered with back-handed terms of admiration tinged with disgust. Why is it, I wondered, that these off-putting words are preferred over unambiguous compliments like ‘exceptional athlete’ and ‘outstanding contender’?

In writing this, of course, I’ve answered my own question. Undiluted positivity is boring. Even the Webster’s New World Thesaurus entry for the word “prodigy” carries these new terms, reappropriated by the muscular freakshow talents of this world: “prodigy n. marvel, portent, miracle, monster, enormity, spectacle, freak, curiosity, phenom.” (emphasis mine)

Continue reading →

Ask Mr. Cosmology

By: | February 14, 2020

On October 25, 2010, LWON welcomed a new occasional feature, “Ask Mr. Cosmology,” which invites readers to contribute to a mailbag full of questions about…The Wonders of the Universe! This entry comes from March 26, 2012.

Q: Can neutrinos travel faster than light?

Mr. Cosmology: Depends what you mean by “light.” Light, as in light rail? Yes. Light, as in electromagnetic radiation? Almost certainly not. Light, as in light beer? Definitely not; that stuff will zip right through you.

Q: You’ve met a lot of cosmologists. What are they like?

Mr. Cosmology: They sit around in their underwear all day, they’re drunk by 3 in the afternoon, and their idea of a good time is chasing squirrels off the garage roof with a baseball bat.

Q: Really?

Mr. Cosmology: Oh, wait. Sorry—Mr. Cosmology was thinking of the next-door neighbor when he was growing up.

Continue reading →

Update: Underwater Photography

By: | February 13, 2020
Yellow barrel sponge, underwater, surrounded by sand and soft corals.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about practicing underwater photography on the junk at the bottom of the public pool – band-aids, mostly – and my hope that I would find something better to photograph in Belize.

Good news: I did. I saw a ton of lovely fish, some sea turtles, and a lot of really neat sponges. And not a single rogue band-aid.

My photos aren’t the most spectacular underwater photos that have ever been taken, but they are the most mine, and I love them.

A Flamingo tongue mollusk on a bare stalk of soft coral.
A diver silhouetted behind a coral fan.
This feels like some kind of underwater cliche, but I guess I have to get through the cliches before I can take good pictures.
A fish looks out of a sponge.
Big sponge, grumpy fish.

Photos: Me.