Auditing Astronomy Class

By: | November 1, 2019

It’s my mom’s birthday today, so I thought I’d revisit this post about a time when she audited an astronomy class. This semester, she’s taking French. Bon anniversaire, maman.

I’m not sure exactly where this story begins, but maybe it’s here: Sometime this summer, my mom decided to take an astronomy class. She had taken drama and philosophy classes through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley  and audited a history of theater course. She’d heard that this particular astronomy class was aimed at non-science majors, and that the professor, Alex Filippenko, had won all sorts of teaching awards. She emailed him to see if it was okay for her to sit in – it was – and then convinced a few friends to join her.

Maybe what I should say next is that my mom has never been that interested in science. I actually didn’t know how much she didn’t like it until we talked about it recently.  In college, she filled her science requirement with comparative anatomy, a class that required dissecting frogs and cats. “I hated the smell of formaldehyde,” she said. “Dinner was right after that. I just hated it.”

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On Vulnerability

By: | October 31, 2019

This post first ran on June 12, 2018. The need to think about predation and empathy — equal but opposite responses to vulnerability — is alive and kicking. But the online magazine referred to at the end is dead.

Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to watch what they said.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Do NSA people really need that much reminding? They’re not reminded, they run around singing like birds?

@father_kipz:  To be honest, humans are social animals and easy to hack. The constant reminders probably do help a bit.

I have no idea who @father_kipz is and googling doesn’t help, so I don’t know his authority in these matters.  Nevertheless:

@AnnFinkbeiner:  Hackable humans.  I like that.

@father_kipz:   Hackers have a term for the process, social engineering. Basically what Kevin Mitnick was famous for.

@AnnFinkbeiner:   Had to google Mitnick. And here I thought “social engineering” was just sort of overzealous city planning. Hoo boy, that stuff is NASTY.

Kevin Mitnick is a hacker whose methods are apparently based less on cleverness about computers than on his ability to scam people.  From a post at Big Think:  “By the age of 12, he was adept at “social engineering,” which is to human beings as hacking is to computers. You find their vulnerabilities – trust, mainly – and exploit them.”

“Vulnerable” comes from a Latin word that means “to maim, to wound.” So Mitnick’s kind of social engineer exploits the places at which other people can be wounded, in particular, their trust.  Exploiting someone’s trust is as good a working definition of human evil as I’ve seen.  But it’s neither surprising nor unusual, and I’m not talking about fudging on your taxes or lying to the competition or spying on bad guys.  I’m talking about people who look you in the eye and lie and then say, “Well too bad, you trusted me.”  If I were God, I’d consider a nice cleansing flood.

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Stop Underestimating Chickens

By: | October 30, 2019

Re-running this piece as a reminder for all of us to appreciate even our fowl-est friends. (See what I did there?)

One of my favorite things about my usual writing beat (living things) is that we humans never stop learning new things about animals. We’re even still discovering species that are new to science. (Check out the glorious ruby sea dragon, previously known only from beach corpses, and Hoolock tianxing, a gibbon just determined to be its own species that, sadly, comes into its own already labeled endangered.)

While “new” is good, I get most jazzed over discoveries about species we already know, or think we know. A few recent bits in the news: Dogs really do get the meaning of words, not just of the tone of voice that accompanies them (which is also cool). Macaques understand the limits of their own memory. Bats’ endless cave chatter is complex and full of bickering.

And sometimes the findings flip long-held assumptions on their heads. Continue reading →

How to Fail the Pre-K Entrance Exams

By: | October 29, 2019

As many of you know, I’m a pretty big deal journalist. I mean, not the kind of big deal whose name or stories you might recognize. Or who even writes for outlets you might recognize. But still, a pretty big deal.

And like any big deal journalist, I have confidential sources. Super secret ones. Like, so confidential that even my thinking of them right now might be a breach. That’s how confidential they are.

Anyway, one of my sources told me a story that I thought I would share with you today. His name is Erin. Erin, um, Vace. Totally a real person. Who’s also confidential. And a woman, now that I think of it.

Anyway, Erin has top level security clearance, which is why she’s my confidential source. That’s right, I don’t bother with anyone below Collateral Secret. She did two tours in Afghanistan, one in Iraq and one in a war zone so secret no one even knows the country’s name. She’s been undercover with the Mexican cartels, ISIS and the Russian oligarchs.

But nothing could prepare her for switching preschools mid-year.

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Confessions of a Caveman

By: | October 28, 2019

A former in-law came online a few days back to call me a troglodyte, and then a caveman. And not a nice way. I’m not averse to the title. I am a bearded, trunky fellow, strong legs and back. I can carry much weight through high passes and rocky canyons. I can’t recall the number of caves I’ve slept in; there’ve been many. I’ve got caveman cred.

Imagine Homo heidelbergensis hunkered at the mouth of a natural rock shelter 700,000 years ago, pondering how to feed his children, or a Neanderthal thumbing out flower petals over the grave of a dead relative, dusting it with pollens, laying down pieces of ochre. We all have deeply rooted ancestry somewhere in the world.

Maybe she was thinking more recently, the Wisconsin Ice Age, late Pleistocene. I’d be from a clan of cave painters and valley dwellers, people working mammoth ivory into eyed sewing needles for their clothes. By the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was the last tool-making hominid on earth, anatomically modern, brains 5 percent larger than our own. For what that’s worth.

Is this the caveman she meant? An atlatl thrower, ground sloth eater? Using fox canines, I might have strung ornaments around my neck, scavenged mammoth kills on the tundra, burned bone to make fire. These were people with languages and customs. Venus figurines had already been made for tens of thousands of years. Trade routes extended hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands. Though it would be 15,000 years before metal, we did more or less what we do today: forage, sleep, eat, talk, worry, hope.

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You Cannot Prove A Negative. Does That Mean We’ll Search Forever?

By: | October 25, 2019
meerkat-telescope-array

The TESS telescope is a shiny little thinking metal tube, drinking the light of 20 million stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It launched last year on a voyage to identify planets that look like this one—a miraculous feat, if it succeeds. Among the panoply of planets found so far, there is positively no place like home. 

TESS is looking for other Earths, but the real goal, long-term, is to find a planet with something breathing on one of those Earths. Astronomers are careful not to say that too explicitly, though. They say TESS is merely a planet hunter; it will seek out new worlds, which will be explored in more detail later, by other, more capable telescopes.

Given that, an announcement this week caught my eye: TESS is teaming up with Breakthrough Listen, a well-heeled SETI effort that will probably be the money behind the discovery of an alien civilization.

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Winemaking Is Like Book Writing

By: | October 24, 2019
This year’s Malbec grapes.

I’d just filled a wine bottle with Malbec and was handing it to a neighbor who was operating the manual corking machine when it occurred to me that wine making is a lot like book writing. 

I was at the tail end of a whirlwind tour to promote my new book, and I was home just long enough to help out with some bottling at the little winery my husband has built from the ground up, with sweat, love and borrowed or bartered equipment. 

A good wine starts with good grapes, just as a good book begins with a good idea. But neither of these is enough to produce a delicious wine or unforgettable book. These things take patience, time and the right kind of effort. 

Wine begins with delectable grapes that are then crushed, pressed and fermented. (The order of the pressing and fermenting depends on whether you’re making a white or red wine.) Then the waiting begins. Nature needs to take its course.  The Malbec we were bottling today was harvested in 2016, and it spent 30 months in French oak before reaching the bottle.

That’s a lot how it went with my book, too. I began with the idea, then mushed it around, researching it from every angle while allowing the ideas I was accumulating to ferment into something enticing. There was a lot of waiting around for ideas to mature.

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Viewshed

By: | October 23, 2019

First must have come listening
to the wind or regarding
the movements of animals,
then monitoring the stars
and sometime after that
scrutinizing fire;
but somewhere in there belongs
watching the progress of a river…

Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes”

Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough to watch palaces of cottonwood trees go from green to gold. It happened fast, high desert washes flaring in a matter days.

Watching is something we’ve been doing since the beginning, one of the traits of being human. Something catches our eye, not predator or prey, but a swirl in water, a turning of stars, and we stare at it, enchanted. It is like waking up for the first time, seeing where you are. Watch for long enough and you witness change too slow for the human eye. Horsetails breeze from one side of the sky to the next as veins in leaves tighten, pigment brightening while chlorophyll dies.

Part of these couple of weeks, I was co-teaching an archaeological field program in southeast Utah, days of marching up and down canyons, reaching rock horns hundreds of feet in the air. We looked at petroglyphs dating back hundreds to many thousands of years. The co-instructor was Hopi archaeologist Lyle Balenquah, and he offered theories as to a sandstone wall with a 15-foot line of small human figures pecked into it, all going the same direction, some with hands, some with gear on their backs, some with penises, most without, one playing a flute, and, intermittently, a figure bigger than the others, with a bent-neck staff as if driving them. The line had 179 figures. Slaves on the march, migrants moving east to west, a village visiting another and commemorating the moment.

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