The Kid Fire

By: | January 5, 2018

A small fire on the beach, ringed with white seashells

Some years ago I attended a beach barbecue in Juneau, Alaska on a gray summer day. The adults drank beer in a ring around a fire where salmon collars sizzled and talked about the price of boats and politics. The kids ran in a mixed-age herd closer to the surf, clambering over driftwood and getting wet. And then with the sly grace of a trickster god, a ten or eleven year old boy insinuated himself into our adult circle and lifted a burning brand from our fire, disappearing with it before I could so much as determine which adult he went with.

A few moments later, the kids had coalesced around an expertly built ‘kid fire,’ which they had lighted from that stolen spark. This ‘kid fire’ seemed to alarm none of the local adults, and indeed seemed to be a regular feature of long afternoons on the beach in Juneau. I watched with interest as the older children maintained the fire and policed access, allowing younger children only to chuck on small sticks from a distance. This would never fly in the lower 48, I thought.

Continue reading →

Adventures of an Occasional Goatherd

By: | January 4, 2018

Baby, it’s cold outside! So I’m posting a little look-back at some warmer-weather fun on the farm.

————–

I love goats. In many ways they’re a lot like dogs, and I love dogs. So, it follows.

How are they like dogs? At least the ones I’ve met love attention. They want to be petted and loved. They look you in the eye and make you feel needed. They’ll jump and climb on you in a friendly way. They’re not shy about whapping you with a foot if you stop stroking them. (I prefer the dog’s paw in this scenario, because cloven hoof.) They burp and poop a lot. They have terrible breath. (Fermented hay is pungent stuff.) They live about as long as dogs. They love taking walks.

I’ve learned these things because I’ve been spending some time on a farm in central Virginia that had (before a big sale in September) 100-plus goats, lots of them young females. The place is called Caromont Farm and it’s known in the area because Gail, the owner, makes fantastic (goat-milk) cheeses in a small building on the property, and she invites the public to come cuddle the kids (baby goats) each spring. She gets so many requests for the latter that she now schedules all-day cuddlefests and sells tickets for $10. Continue reading →

2018: What’s the worst that could happen?

By: | January 3, 2018

a bird on a wire

“It is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the odds that all human existence is a simulation

“Two tech billionaires [are] secretly engaging scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.” – The Guardian 

“What is going on with all these spammy pitching bots in my inbox?” – Chief Features Editor, New Scientist

 

From: Alyssa Callaway
Sent: 22 September 2017 09:59
To: Sally Adee [New Scientist technology news editor]
Subject: Can I contribute!!

Hello Sally,

how are you? I first want to take the opportunity to congratulate you on your blogs, quality of writing, intellectual viewpoints and diverse underpinnings. I have read your blog many times and love the content you post.

I recently saw that you write on Bitcoin related items. What do you think of Bitcoin and Blockchain related issues post publishing? Continue reading →

The Historically Slippery Age of Puberty

By: | January 2, 2018

Puberty is happening earlier now. Girls in the West, particularly those living in poverty, get breast buds a year or two earlier in the 21st Century than they did in the mid-20th Century, and on average the age of menarche—a girl’s first period—has fallen by about 3 ½ months per decade. Boys’ development is accelerating too. We see this trend tracking childhood obesity rates and other endocrine disruptors, and there has been considerable handwringing in the media about this divergence from nature.

The worry is justified in the sense that the sorts of things that currently cause it are worrying, as I wrote recently in Nature. Childhood obesity is worrying. Endocrine disruptors in the environment are worrying. Sexual abuse, which also leads to earlier menarche, is awful and must be fought. But as for the age of puberty itself, the story of the last half-century or so—that our twisted lifestyles warp our children into adults before their time—is only part of a much larger and more interesting story.

Throughout human history, puberty has hopped back and forth along the timeline of our lifespans. Boy’s voices tend to break around age 11 now, whereas in 1960 that age range centered around the 13 year mark. But keep scrolling back and you’ll find choirmaster’s records show chorister’s voices breaking at age 18 in the mid-1700s. Girls get their periods on average when they are 12 now, whereas in 1920, the average age in the United States and France was 14. Again, scroll farther back and you get up to age 16 in Northern Europe during the 1800s. Continue reading →

Walking Into the New Year

By: | January 1, 2018

Well now then.  Here we are.  The first day of another year.  What to do about that?

January 1 is a day for looking forward.  Kids mostly look forward, I think.  But any adult knows you make sense of any given situation only by looking back, by remembering.  Memory allows the comparison between then and now by which we more thoroughly understand the now.  The fact that memory is also a complete crapshoot just makes life more interesting.  Where was I going with this?  Ok, I remember now.

I’ve lived in Baltimore since 1980, longer than I’ve lived any other place.  Most people from where I grew up move a lot: I remember a guy telling me the average stay in my home town was now 2.5 years. I remember thinking that 2.5 years doesn’t give you much chance at maintaining a community.  I’m digressing again, please forgive me.

Back to Baltimore.  I’ve lived here long enough that places, buildings, streets, sidewalks, aren’t just themselves any more, they’re colored by, or they resonate with, what happened there in the past.  The street corner where I fell off the curb and cut the hell out of my knee and my husband took me to the crowded ER where I didn’t make the triage and when I finally got into an examining room, flat on my back looking up at an examining light, and the doctor said to my extremely-curious husband, “Sir, your head is between the light and her knee,” that street corner is a little scary and mostly funny. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | December 30, 2017

December 25-29

The People of LWON took a short winter’s nap this week and revisited a few favorite posts from years past.

On Monday, Erik writes about pilgrimages, both his own and others’. I believe in the open road and the open air and people together on a journey and sore legs and a rejuvenated spirit. I believe in the mountains and the sea and little Medieval villages and canola fields and the sensation of seeing it all with people who feel the same way.

Christie loves some words, and chronicles the People of LWON’s loathing for others. English also has no true equivalent to my own favorite foreign word: gemütlichkeit, a German term that connotes the kind of warm coziness you feel when gathered around a fire with your dearest friends, perhaps drinking Glühwein.

Jennifer gets snarky about Chihuahuas on Wednesday. I’d rather cuddle and kiss a used Bandaid from a public pool. I’d rather spoon with Golem on a bed of cricket shit. Inexplicably, none of the Chihuahuas I’ve met like me, either.

Ann goes to the coffee shop, finds the origins of science. If 1000 years as a science writer have taught me nothing else, it’s 1) that science is the way people think when they’re admiring their worlds, when they’re thinking of explanations of their worlds that they can most reliably believe.  And 2) that scientists are just specially-educated versions of the guys in the coffee shops.

Sally wraps up the week with a story about how people find their way when someone goes missing (in this case, her grandfather). The effects of his loss were pronounced and specific. My mother grew up knowing first and foremost that you couldn’t rely on anyone but yourself. . . Hans’ disappearance had a different effect on her brother Frank. He made it his life’s project to understand how the world works.

See you in 2018!

**

Image by Flickr user Morgan under Creative Commons license

Redux: Fatherhood: the Outline of a Man

By: | December 29, 2017

This was written for Father’s Day, June 11, 2012.  But it also suits this holiday season when too many people are missing too many other people.  That is, you know who a person is by the shape of the hole they leave when they’re not there.

Here you go.  It’s not sad.

Redux: Coffeeshop Science

By: | December 28, 2017

This was posted September 24, 2015.  I go later to the coffeeshop now and don’t run into Larry and John, its chief scientists.  I do have an update on neighborhood-kid questions though.  “Why does this blue flower have a yellow dot in the center?” “Why do birds poop?” “Why are there ants going up the tree and ants going down the tree?”

My favorite, though, happened a couple years ago.  A two-year old’s older brother was talking to a neighbor about rocks.  The neighbor said she had a piece of lava in her living room, did the boy want to see it?  The two-year old, whose speech was just developing and who talked as though he were speaking a foreign language, interrupted the neighbor and asked, “Do. You. Have. A. Volcano. In. Your. House?”

Anyway, here’s the original post.

____

Volcano by Taro Taylor via Wikimedia Commons