The Journal of a Middle-Aged, Middle-Management, Sub-Atomic Particle

By: | January 17, 2019

It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, I just haven’t been feeling the same way as I did in the billions of years after the Big Bang. Back then, being a quark meant something – it had weight you know? Muons and leptons took you seriously, electrons wanted to get together with you and build a little chemistry.

I just … popped after the Big Bang. I had charge.

But the last couple billion years, I don’t know, I’ve just felt a little down. I feel jumbled, disordered. Maybe it’s entropy, maybe I just need a hobby.

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So I split up with my nucleus. Being part of a proton as kid was exciting, we were colliding with everything in our path and ready to take on the galaxy. But the galaxy is mostly empty space and, when you get right down to it, so is the atom. Lately it’s been like, what’s the point? It was amicable. We said we’d keep in touch – we won’t – joint custody of the ions – I’ll be lucky to get weekends. I was sad to see the fourth valence electron go, she was a mercurial as hell but a good listener. Ah well. Onward.

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Life has become a slog. I guess I’ll never be one of those top quarks you see in the magazines. I’m doing some part time work in a tomography lab but I just don’t get much from weak interactions. Everything around me these days just feels like decay. I’m guess I’m just having trouble feeling positive.

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Things have gotten worse. I can’t tell anymore if I’m spinning or everyone else is. I’m pretty down.

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Redux: Old Bone Song

By: | January 16, 2019
An elk skull nestled in dewy grass

I am turning 40 on the day I am supposed to write this, so instead, I am re-running my favorite LWON essay–one suited to summiting the peak of midlife and looking out towards the horizon of death (ideally still just at the limit of one’s vision). Enjoy!

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We Need More Than A Tweet

By: | January 15, 2019
A local network. Image by See-ming Lee via Wikimedia Commons.

It just happened again. My Twitter mentions blew up, because someone posted a tweet soliciting names of favorite female science writers after most of the students in a science communication class couldn’t come up with a single one. I have no doubt that the tweet was well-intentioned, but all I could think is, oh no, here we go again…

Of course I was flattered and happy to be mentioned in the tweets and responses, and I’d be overjoyed to see more attention paid to the many, many talented and accomplished writers who aren’t cis men. 

The problem is that these twitter threads don’t really accomplish that, and I’ve started to wonder if they might even be counter productive if they make people feel like they’ve accomplished more than they really have.

It’s easy to see the appeal though. It feels good to do something. Science writing is a field filled with women, and yet the counts and statistics show that the awards and recognition and plum assignments go disproportionately to men. And the problems driving this are “so systemic, so insidious, so much a part of our culture and so much bigger than one single person that it feels hopeless,” as Bethany Brookshire said in a chat among some of my journalist friends. A discussion in which we collectively wrung our hands and did a lot of sighing. 

“How can you nudge the finger of every person who automatically RTs the same men, crowing their brilliance, while scrolling past the few women in their feed?” Brookshire asked. “How can you possibly shift the gaze of a male science writer, looking for articles to read and promote, who tracks toward the bylines of the people he’s already friends with, giving them priority over the people of whom he’s never heard?” There aren’t many easy answers, she said. “But you can tweet. That takes only a second. It gives a small sweet feeling of triumph. You DID something.”

What does this accomplish? It can make you feel good for a minute. “If you’re a man, you get ‘fresh-baked ally cookies’ and if you’re a woman, you get the cred of looking like crusaders,” Brookshire said.

But then you’re back to square one. “This is not an effective means of signal boosting—I think I got one new follower,” Shannon Palus said in our informal discussion. “Increasing diversity meaningfully requires people with power, money and/or clout spending time and resources on sharing that power, money, and/or clout.”

Yes, it truly does feel uplifting to be praised in these Twitter threads, but it doesn’t help us solve the invisible women problem when these outbursts of love are mostly among ourselves. We need people to buy our books, invite us to speak at events. Give us a seat at the table.

Maryn McKenna may have said it best with this tweet, “I am thrilled to see so many women science writers listed. I’m simultaneously discouraged that we keep having to make these lists, again and again.”

Lugworms? Why, Certainly!

By: | January 14, 2019

I warned you. Well, I warned someone…probably one of my fellow LWONers…that if nobody suggested a compelling way to fill this space for today, I’d write about lugworms.

Time’s up!

I’ve actually been thinking a lot about lugworms of late because of a recent diving experience in Ria Formosa, a sandy-bottom coastal lagoon in the Algarve of Portugal. I was there searching for seahorses (a perfectly fine subject for this essay…why not seahorses?? Look how lovable!) and I repeatedly noticed these walnut-size grayish mucus balls flopping around among the rocks. The current was kicking them hard, but they were clearly built to take it; some held tight, balloons tied to a fence on a windy day. Others detached and rolled through the sand and seagrass like tumbleweeds. Tumbleweeds made of mucus.

What were they? I wanted to know. So, I asked the seahorse scientist Miguel Correia, of the Center for Ocean Studies at the University of the Algarve, who had escorted me on the seahorse dives (and probably also wondered why I wasn’t writing about seahorses for this essay).

I was delighted with his answer: Lugworm egg sacs. Continue reading →

Redux: Science Metaphors (cont.): Arctic Resignation

By: | January 11, 2019

The Svalbard archipelago, midway between continental Norway and the North Pole, is famous for its polar bears, but it is also home to the distinctive (and distinctively adorable) Svalbard reindeer. Shaggy-haired and stubby-legged, the Svalbard reindeer is not only the world’s smallest subspecies of reindeer but also the world’s northernmost herbivorous mammal, and its survival is something of a daily miracle.

Winter vegetation on Svalbard is sparse to begin with, and because winter temperatures regularly rise above freezing, any greenery is usually covered with ice. So between April and late August, when the Arctic sun shines all day and vegetation grows round the clock, Svalbard reindeer eat frantically, laying on fat for the months ahead. When winter descends, they enter a state that’s not quite hibernation—they stay alert, and their body temperature stays constant—and not quite torpor, for their metabolic rate doesn’t change much. They just … stop moving. Norwegian zoologist Arnoldus Blix has dubbed this curious state “arctic resignation.”

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Year of the Cat

By: | January 8, 2019

We’ve had a number of cats around here over the last year, roamers and strays. Two we brought in and three, the feral ones, came on their own.

A little more than a year ago, a barn cat showed up at a friend’s ranch an hour from where we live in southwest Colorado. It was a lanky pure black neuter, a short-hair with a nip out of one of its ears. The old man who owned the next ranch down the creek had died and one of his cats came nosing around, looking for a new home.

We needed a mouser. We brought him home and named him McElmo for McElmo Canyon, Colorado, where he came from. Though he spent many of his nights indoors, his days were out. If a door opened, he was free before you could take a step.

In the few months we had McElmo, I didn’t notice a decrease in songbirds who’d fly through every fall, but I’d be a fool to think this cat wasn’t eating birds. We’d unleashed a new predator. In the continental US, domestic cats are believed to kill from 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds each year. That may be concentrated in urban areas where habitats are more focused, but we were adding to the problem locally. With patience, he’d be indoors eventually, not necessarily what a barn cat wants, but we tried.

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