The Last Word

By: | February 17, 2018

February 12-16, 2018

The Tesla/SpaceX launch left Rebecca exhilarated—but she knows not everyone felt the same way. Plenty of people didn’t like it because they argue we have enough to deal with here on Earth. Some people were unhappy because they don’t like Elon Musk, who owns the rocket and the car. And some people didn’t like that the car launched on a billionaire’s rocket, painted with a private logo, not a NASA rocket flying the American flag.

What are those sounds that just rush out of you when you’re outside, sounds of joy or pain, of surprise, of delight or simply of the moment? Sarah has some ideas. Sometimes, at the edge of a landscape, at the edge of an abyss, at the razor thin edge between flying and falling—the feelings are so big that the sound just comes out of you. People screamed at the total solar eclipse. They scream at the moon. They scream across canyon bottoms and they scream their grief into the desert.

Craig sees a lot of weird stuff in the sky (and the rest of us are glad that he keeps looking up, and writing about what he sees). I’d never seen anything like it, the light clearly defined as it grew, as if it were a force field, Gaia emerged from her slumber. The light eventually faded and stars moved in like hundreds of bright seeds. I never learned what it was.

The Fall Line: an invisible underground cliff that marks the old eastern edge of the continent. Ann is obsessed with it. Cities grew along the Fall Line, roads connected the cities.  It’s all so logical. But why would weather follow the Fall Line? It doesn’t of course — because weather is much more complicated — except when it does.

Rose writes about a psych test with a joke-telling, Sudoku-playing robot—a study with methodology that has haunted her for years. Why do all these experimenters love Sudoku so much? Can’t they find another game for you to play? Can’t computers figure these things out in seconds? Is this robot going to embarrass you? Maybe this is an experiment on how badly people react to being shown up by a robot.

See you next week!

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Image of DC snowstorm on the interstate: braidedinkwell, via Flickr

 

I Hope You Can Keep It A Secret

By: | February 16, 2018

The psychology department is a small, squatty building on the west side of campus. It has a weird exterior, a vaguely geometric set of slats that surround the building, probably to cover up the ailing stucco beneath. You’re five minutes late.

With a backpack slung over your back, you hustle down the hall, looking for room 119B. 119A is inexplicably on the other side of the building. 119B is a short jog down a linoleum tiled hallway away.

The $25 bucks you’re about to get paid has already been budgeted in your mind. Dinner with Max, your friend who had tipped you off to signing up for psychology studies as a semi-steady flow of petty cash. The trick, Max explained, was to cycle through the different labs in order, so they don’t notice you’re in there too much. Continue reading →

Following the Fall Line

By: | February 15, 2018

Winter’s here, maybe forever, and we’re having the usual Fall Line storms.  We have Fall Line storms in the summer too but winter’s are more dramatic.  Because Baltimore is perched right on the Fall Line, colder to the left, warmer to the right, our normal storm is snow, then ice, then rain, then ice, then snow, not one thing, not the other, just everything taking turns and messing around.  And what is the Fall Line, you say?  Oh, my dears, it’s the invisible line that controls the whole east coast.  This post first ran Feb. 15, 2018.

My brother and sister-in-law and I were remembering an unpleasant event fondly, as one does once it’s safely over.  A few years ago, they’d been here in Baltimore and were heading back on I-95 to Philadelphia, and the usual 1.5-to-2 hour trip took 5 because a snow storm had moved over I-95 and stayed there.  In our reminiscences, we noted that storms, rain or snow, seemed to follow I-95, that is, I-95 seems to be the line between one kind of weather and another.   Were we making that up, we wondered?  Why would weather follow an interstate?  I had an ephiphany:  maybe because I-95 follows the Fall Line.  I am obsessed with the Fall Line, mostly because the name is so pretty.

I-95 is the white line in this picture.  It runs the length of the east coast — a terrible, kill-or-be-killed road but that’s neither here nor there — and connects the east coast’s major cities. It follows the Fall Line and the cities are dotted along the Fall Line.

The cities and roads are where they are because of what the Fall Line is:  a more or less invisible, small, underground cliff  — an escarpment — that marks the old edge of the continent.

On the Fall Line’s west side, the high side, are tough crystalline rocks; on the east side, the low side, are soft, easily-moveable sediments.  Rivers running out of the Appalachians east to the Atlantic crossed the cliff, and where they did, made falls.  The early settlers couldn’t get their boats up the rivers past the falls, so they unloaded there and stayed put.  Cities grew along the Fall Line, roads connected the cities.  It’s all so logical.

But why would weather follow the Fall Line?  Continue reading →

Weird Things I’ve Seen in the Sky

By: | February 14, 2018
Photo by author in western Colorado last Monday

Have you seen events in the sky you can’t explain? I’m asked this question frequently because I’ve spent many nights out, a likely candidate for seeing things that can scarcely be fathomed.

One happened last week. I live near the Utah-Colorado border, no human lights to be seen. Carrying groceries and my work down the unlit walkway, I was looking up at the usual dazzle of stars and intermittent passenger jets around 7:30pm when I noticed in the southwest a peculiar light. A white pinpoint glowed through a cloud veil, only there were no clouds. It was moving, not unlike a plane or a blazing satellite. I was about to open the front door and go in when I stopped and waited for the blinking lights of an airplane to appear. Instead, the bright object began emitting a luminous tail, like a comet. I set my things down, and snapped off a grainy picture with my phone (above).

The tail spread until it was diaphanous and covered a large portion of the southern sky. Was it Falcon Heavy? An alien probe? A divine spitball?

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is the correct answer, the burn that sent this rocket, with a convertible sports car attached to its upper stage, out of Earth’s orbit and into infinite space. I was seeing a moment in history, but instead of recognizing the gravitas, I scratched my head and wondered, what the hell is that?

Last week’s SpaceX launch was not the only peculiarity I’ve witnessed in the night sky. I used to guide high schoolers in the desert of southern Arizona and southern California. One evening we all saw a green dome of light expand in the west until it looked to be miles high, covering almost a quarter of the sky. The kids were perturbed, jabbering rapidly, asking their teachers what it was. One of the teachers who’d been telling the kids to calm down, came to me and softly said, “Really, Craig, what is that?” Continue reading →

The Screamers of Artist Point

By: | February 13, 2018

It starts quietly enough. At around 9:30 a.m., I strap snowshoes to my feet and part ways with some friends bound for a backcountry ski. While they skin over a nearby saddle, my dog Taiga and I shuff our way into the stream of snowshoers along the boundary of the Mt, Baker Ski Area, headed for Artist Point. It’s not a long hike, nor an extreme one, but the hordes jostle and slip like drunks. One guy slides on his side in slow motion down the steep hill, parallel to the trail, unsure how to get his snowshoes back under him.

“You could dig in your ski pole to self arrest,” I suggest gently. “I am!” he exclaims, continuing to slide past, his poles dragging unused across the slope.

Maybe he’s overwhelmed, I muse, continuing on.

“What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds, wind, and mountains repeating—this is what always happens here,” the poet Gary Snyder wrote of this place one long-gone August, looking towards the edifice of Mount Shuksan from his post at the Crater Mountain Fire Lookout. Today, though, is the first truly sunny day of the year.

The hanging glaciers of Shuksan gleam blindingly above us. Thick snow spackles every surface, like lavishly applied frosting on a carrot cake. A short, huffing climb farther on, the ridge is all smooth, luscious rises and swooping depressions—not baked goods now, but hips and shoulders and bent knees. Cornices hang bluely from the rocky clifftops; dark conifers wink out from sculpted carapaces of white.

I walk around in my sweat-damp clothes, stunned by this vision that is at once food and flesh and neither of those things.

It makes me hungry. It fills me with something like song. Skiers skin past, gathering in little knots at the edges of the ridge, or descending into the next valley. Mt. Baker looms hugely across the southwest skyline, its crevasses cozened in powder, like eyelids and mouths swollen shut. It seems to scream silence.

And that’s when the actual screaming begins. Continue reading →

Defending Government-Subsidized Performance Art

By: | February 12, 2018

tesla-in-space

The other day, a giant rocket riding a triple tower of fire lifted a rich guy’s car into space and on to the asteroid belt. You probably heard about this, if you have access to the internet or a newspaper. It was the coolest thing you have seen in a long time, or the most ridiculously wasteful thing you have seen in your life, depending on who you are.

Whether an observer liked or hated it could not be reliably correlated with any particular attribute or affinity. Trump-supporting country-music-listening white male retirees thought it was awesome, or hated it or didn’t care at all. Bleeding-heart progressive socialist David Bowie-listening white women wept with joy, or hated it or didn’t care at all. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 10, 2018

February 5-9, 2018

Jessa starts off the week by writing about a Canadian researcher on an Arctic icebreaker who tracks radioactive material released after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. The atmospheric release took eight days to reach Cullen’s home in Victoria, British Columbia, and most of it ended up in the North Pacific. Ultimately it will be transported to the Arctic Ocean. Unlike the air-borne material, the water-borne release took a lot longer to spread, reaching the West Coast of North America starting in 2014.

Years ago, Emma visited a research site in the Australian Outback; recent research from the site found that small mammals may have been overlooked as landscape shapers because in many places, they’re now gone. Scotia is a beautiful place, dotted with trees garlanded with long peeling bark, its sandy soil hosting eerily circular growths of spinifex grass. It is a dry place, a hard place to live. I look at the pictures of it I took those years ago and I wonder how much of what I am seeing is the botanical expression of the population crash of so many Australian mammals

Sally and Alexa chat about apes and monkeys, and Amazon gets involved. NB: this is fanfic. Suggest a disclaimer appended to this specific “fact of the day” stating that amazon is aware of the differences between monkeys and apes, and that the wording of the joke in no way implies that we are seeking to obscure those differences. 

Big headline: Backpackers don’t need to filter their water!!!!! But Erik’s not drinking that Kool-Aid…er, agua. I’ll never forget the feeling of staring at a snowmelt stream while coming off Clyde Minaret in the Sierras, long after dark, totally lost and dry as desert salt. I just sat there, staring, holding my broken Steripen and wondering if it was worth the risk.

Childhood memories can be tricky things for journalists, says Cassie—so she fact-checks one of her own. My memories of that time seem slippery. I can never quite get a solid enough grasp on them to wring out meaning. And even the ones that seem so vivid and real feel fake, like cheap knockoffs. 

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Image courtesy of Don…The UpNorth Memories Guy…Harrison via Flickr.

Tenuous Memories of Driving on Ice

By: | February 9, 2018

When I was five or six years old, my mom’s boyfriend took us ice fishing. He drove his Jeep to the edge of one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes and then he kept going, down the boat ramp and out onto the glittering expanse of white. He stopped next to a small ice shanty, and then he built a fire. Right on the ice.

That’s what I remember, at least. But, now, thirty-four years later, these memories seem suspect. Did we really drive on the lake? Did he really build a fire on the ice?

I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately. My therapist and I have begun the arduous process of unpacking my childhood to see if we can find the source of my adult neuroses. I worry this will be an impossible task. My memories of that time seem slippery. I can never quite get a solid enough grasp on them to wring out meaning. And even the ones that seem so vivid and real feel fake, like cheap knockoffs.  Continue reading →