Science Metaphors (cont.): Sub-Virial

By: | March 5, 2018

A neighborhood kid, maybe 10 years old, doesn’t have the usual relationship with gravity.  I know it’s her even when I can’t see her clearly by the way she moves through space: even when she’s not running, just walking, she looks like she might re-connect with the earth but also she might not.  She reminds me of the young dog who blew past me on my walk yesterday, ears back, head down, feet folded under its body and more off the ground than on.  She reminds me of the ballet dancer who was asked how he managed such high, long jumps and who answered, “I just go up in the air and stay there a while.”

I was interviewing an astrophysicist about the haloes of gas that surround galaxies, about the arguments over whether the gas was drifting down into the galaxies or just hanging up in space and staying there a while.  She said, “Matt thinks the halo clouds are sub-virial.”  Sub-virial.  I hadn’t heard that before, I could guess what it meant, and I’ve been looking for that word for my whole life. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 3, 2018

Erik wonders if the nonsense words that populate the best children’s books are a good idea when your kid is already tasked with learning two languages. “Someday he’ll learn the words “muggle,” “orc,” “Ewok,” Klingon,” “melange,” and “thoughtful lawmaker,” none of which are real,” he writes, prompting many assurances in the comments that “melange” is definitely real.

Craig calls the Red Mountain Pass “a breathtaking drive through the San Juan Mountains”. There are no guardrails, hardly any shoulder; cliffs and canyons soar above and below. It’s also prone to avalanches – one of which killed a man while he was trying to help people who were trapped on the pass. I guess that’s one way to define breathtaking.

Guest Eric Wagner describes the sheer pandemonium that ensues when you’re trying to count birds for science.

Cameron tries to approach her fellow humans the way we instinctively approach trees – “Some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way.”

Cassie channels every parent’s lament – the Faustian bargain that pits reclaiming those precious few hours at night to be your own human being again, against getting the necessary sleep you need to be a functioning human being.

 

Another Day on Red Mountain Pass

By: | March 2, 2018

Driving home through the bottom of Colorado you can’t help hitting mountains. A jigsaw puzzle of passes lies ahead. In the winter, choose your poison, Lizard Head, Wolf Creek, or, in the middle, the dangerous one. The route we took last week put us through the middle route, a chain of two passes leading to a ribbon of asphalt blasted into a third pass, Red Mountain Pass, between the towns of Silverton and Ouray.

In the summer, Red Mountain Pass is a breathtaking drive through the San Juan Mountains. There are no guardrails, hardly any shoulder. If your tire caught the edge and you went off, the fall is hundreds of feet. Cliffs and canyons soar above and below. In the winter, this is one of the most avalanche-prone highways in the lower 48 states. One hundred-sixty slide paths breach a 20-mile stretch of pavement. I’ve driven it many times in powder snow on the highway, strong crosswinds building drifts.

The day we came through was a blizzard with stretches of complete whiteout where we had to stop mid-highway and wait for visibility to return. If you kept driving blind, you could go off the edge.

One spring night years ago, more than 60 avalanches crossed a 5-mile stretch of this highway. The town of Ouray was buried in a sudden 4 feet of snowfall. I was working at the weekly paper in Ouray at the time, and we had just put the flats to bed, ready to ship to the printer in the morning. Having a drink at a bar on main street, the highway through town, we were toasting another edition when we saw the flashing lights of a snowplow heading toward the pass. We paused our toast and watched the lights through blinding snow, each of us thinking this can’t be a good.

That night, the driver of that snowplow, Eddie Imel, was killed by the infamous East Riverside Slide. He was the third snowplow driver to perish on that same 100 feet of highway. The pass had been closed, but cars that had come over from the Silverton side were trapped in a concrete snowshed that covers a piece of highway, protecting it from slides. An avalanche had hit the shed and blocked one side. Eddie and his partner Danny Jaramillo had gone up to clear the slide and get people down.

A chain broke on the snowplow tire in front of the snowshed and while they were out fixing it, East Riverside ran, and buried them. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Counting Backwards

By: | March 1, 2018

 

 

The dunlin (Calidris alpina) is a small shorebird about seven or eight inches long, with a graceful downcurved bill. When breeding, its plumage is a study of delicate russet over an oil-black breast and belly. The rest of the year it is a drab gray, like it has rolled in ash. As such, when dunlin gather during the winter months on the sloughs around Padilla Bay, in northern Washington, the flocks can look from a distance like an undifferentiated gray smear.

I am staring through my binoculars at just such a smear, tasked this cold January morning with counting dunlin on a crescent of shore. The standard method is to start at the flock’s front and work back from there, batching the birds in groups of increasing quantity, like so:

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10…20…30…40…50…..100……200……300……400……500……600……700……800……900

Things go smoothly until somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand, when the flock starts to stir. The effect is subtle at first, as single birds take off and move from back to front, perhaps so they don’t have to forage in mud their flock-mates have picked clean. But then more dunlin follow, and before long the entire flock is rolling over itself as if on a great conveyer. Since I don’t want to double-count birds, I start again.

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10…20…30…40…50…..100……200……300……400     Shoot!

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10…20…30…40…50…..100……200     Damn!

By now the flock is a chaos of motion. A fuse blows somewhere behind my eyes and I put down my binoculars. Keeping track of the birds is impossible. I have lost count. Continue reading →

Whatever Trees

By: | February 28, 2018

There’s a quote I’ve seen attributed to Ram Dass about why we should turn people into trees. When we look at people (or ourselves), we judge. We compare. We criticize. But for trees, Ram Dass says, it’s different. “Some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way.”

That’s what I look for, the whatever in trees. The more whatever the better. Continue reading →

Leading the Bedtime Rebellion

By: | February 27, 2018

Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed on time?”

The manuscript begins like this: “Most people do not get enough sleep on work days despite sleep’s importance for well-being, performance, and health. A phenomenon held responsible for promoting insufficient sleep on work days is bedtime procrastination. Bedtime procrastination is defined as ‘going to bed later than intended, without having external reasons for doing so’, that is, ‘people just fail to [go to bed].’”

Ah, bedtime procrastination. I had never heard the term before, but I am intimately familiar with the concept of failing to go to bed. If bedtime procrastination had a poster, I would be that poster’s child. My husband, on the other hand, does not procrastinate. He is a bedtime anticipator. A bedtime enthusiast. A bedtime yearner. He would go to bed right now if you let him.

The texted link was clearly the latest passive aggressive salvo in our years-long battle to define an appropriate bedtime. Me: 12-1am. Him: 9:30pm or, better yet, immediately. Continue reading →

Baby Steps With Baby Words

By: | February 26, 2018

Having a baby is a miracle. Everyone tells me so, so it must be true. It’s also an adventure – again, according to pretty much everybody. I’ve had a lot of adventures and spent years searching for miracles and I have to say, those words don’t really fit.

It’s more like one long psychology experiment. Sample size of one, with the option for follow-ups to test reproducibility. The latest stage of my own research has been language acquisition. My son’s first word was “mommy.” Second was “kitty.” (Daddy was in the top ten though. I think.) Ever since then it seem like he’s just been collecting words and sticking them in his pockets like shiny pennies.

And in two languages. I’m raising my son to be bilingual because I live in Mexico and also because apparently it’s the hip thing to do these days. Studies suggest that a second language promotes things like problem-solving, attention, and seeing things from multiple points of view. In addition, it also increases the ability to, you know, speak a second language.

(My own research also suggest that when your baby is bilingual you can lord it over other parents at Gymboree because you are so culturally sensitive and they are total parenting failures. I’m not judging, that’s just science.)

But not all research supports teaching second languages. Some studies have shown that when a person grows up with two languages their vocabularies in each is lower than in those who speak just one. Now, the margins are small, and they might not even be real. But to a secretly highly insecure parent like me they are enough to freak out about. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 24, 2018

February 19-23, 2018

My g-g-uncle Norman experienced an early wilderness death by charismatic megafauna: eaten by a lion. Nevertheless, he was deemed to have died for King and Empire.

The open secret of the lies of professional wrestling have been generalized into the political sphere, economics, and even scientific discourse, says Sally. Are you in on the joke?

Jenny’s dog is dying, and her family tries to guess what will make him comfortable and give him a few more happy moments. All while wrestling with the question of when to decide this day is his last.

Guest Wudan Yan’s ethnicity serves as a lock-pick in her investigative reporting. In Indonesia, it means she can get into the palm oil plantations without arousing suspicion, and form a different type of rapport with her sources.

Helen and Michelle were in the focus group that author Catherine Price used to test her 30-day method for emancipating yourself from your phone’s enslavement. A hilarious comparing of notes ensues.