Wednesday night, Washington, D.C.: Because my work life is slightly on fire right now, and because I already spent 10 hours of this day either sitting in front of my computer or walking around in circles talking to people on the phone, I present to you a photograph of a sunrise in the Caribbean last month. Isn’t it nice? Please imagine that you are on a small and fast boat, speeding across the water, and that everything is lovely.
Photo: Helen Fields, for sure
These little friends got a ride home with me from the gym the other morning, stuck into the spiderwebs that cling to the side mirrors. There were more all across the front of the car, stuck in the small valley between the folded windshield wipers and the glass. I was delighted—could this be seed dispersal in action? In the absence of hooking into fur or feather, they’d found something else that worked: a minivan. (Does this count as carpooling?)
Creative seed transport isn’t always whimsical—or wanted. A paper this month in PNAS followed native and non-native plantains and found that these plants can break ecological rules and thrive far outside their native range. They became even more genetically diverse in far-away lands, where only a few seeds may have traveled to start the plantain explosion, than in large groups of plantains back home.
Oh, dear little ones on my mirror, I should probably feel differently about you. Still, I love how you found these small spaces to land, and how you hung on for the ride.
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Earlier this month, on a night hike in Costa Rica’s Monteverde cloud forest, I made the acquaintance of the above insect, which, best I can tell, is a member of the Pterochrozinae, a group commonly known as the leaf-mimic katydids. (Entomologists, please correct me!) Walter, our guide, found this individual, which is fortunate because I never could have. Examining this photo anew, I’m freshly astonished by the detail of this katydid’s impeccable camouflage: the green-and-brown mottling of the dying “leaf” (which also serves to break up the critter’s silhouette), the well-defined midrib, the delicate veining. My favorite grace note is the missing chunk along the wing’s underside — a feigned attack from a colony of leafcutter ants.
Leaf-mimic katydids are — pardon the cliché — the snowflakes of the insect world. (I’m talking here about their uniqueness, not their emotional fragility in the face of online trolling.) Seldom do two individuals, let alone two species, look alike. Their remarkable diversity is nicely illustrated in a 1995 paper by James Castner and David Nickle, entomologists who began collecting katydids in Peru in 1986. Castner and Nickle note that many leaf-mimics are “polymorphic” — i.e., divided into several distinct forms — and that some species come in as many as seven flavors. Take Typophyllum bolivari, which has four very different morphs: “overall color dark green”; “irregular blotchy pattern of medium and light browns, some approaching pink in color”; “overall monochromatic medium brown”; and “generally dark brown” with “two well-developed transparent elliptical areas.” Fake holes, in other words, in the middle of a fake leaf.
Continue readingCosmology is timeless, perhaps literally—as this post argued on January 23, 2015.
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.)
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.)
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.
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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.
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