The Last Word

By: | November 25, 2017

The Last Word

November 20-24, 2017

Sarah changed her landscape, and finds herself changed. I never meant to be one of those people who would trade redrock bones of desert and mountain crags and the velvet nakedness of tundra for the claustrophobic press of forest. For a place so green and eager to grow that if you sit still too long you’ll be mossed and brambled over, just another soft shapeless lump at the toes of giants.

Craig looks for pockets of acoustic delight wherever he travels. I move through the city the same way I move through the desert, looking for shaded alcoves that might hold rock art, hissing or clucking my tongue to hear the sound bounce back. 

Emma eats an Impossible Burger with Charles Mann. For lunch, Mann and I dined at Farmers & Distillers on Massachusetts Ave, one of the early adopters of the Impossible Burger, a wheat-based veggie burger that includes heme produced by genetically engineered yeast. It tastes not exactly like beef but light-years more like beef than any veggie burger I have ever tried.

Thursday was Thanksgiving in the US, and the People of LWON talk about gratitude. It’s not payment for goods delivered in hope of getting more, but a sentiment, a weightless emotion, a thank you. Whatever it is, it goes out and not in.

On Friday, we rehash our Thanksgiving memories. Some people associate scents like baking pie crusts and buttery sweet potatoes with the fall holidays. That would be nice. My scent memory is no less powerful, though not quite as pleasing. Giblets.

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Image by Sarah Gilman

 

The People of LWON Have Memories

By: | November 24, 2017

 

Rebecca

I have the worst memory. I say this a lot, and I worry about it a lot. I forget meaningful details, or snippets of conversations I know are important. I forget to whom I’ve told something, and then I tell them again, and sometimes they look at me funny and I realize I’m repeating myself. I may think I remember something, and then I look at a photo associated with that memory, and realize I remember the composition of the photo, not necessarily the composition of the day. I have forgotten so much more than I know.

But, faulty though it may be, I have my memory. Today, someone very important to me no longer has hers. My great-aunt, who has been sort of an extra grandmother, is in a “nursing home.” Or a “long-term care facility,” a “memory-care center,” or whatever euphemism you might choose to describe a place where we silo our oldest loved ones, those who can no longer live independently. Continue reading →

The People of LWON Are Grateful

By: | November 23, 2017

Craig

I like to think that being thankful carries weight, that it occupies an influential space in the world. In a series of 2003 studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, subjects kept journals reporting their levels of gratitude. Each of three studies found that people who experienced more gratitude “exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies.” That leaves me wondering, are we grateful in order to better ourselves, or is that the byproduct, and the whole point of gratitude is to send goodness outward, back to the source? It’s not payment for goods delivered in hope of getting more, but a sentiment, a weightless emotion, a thank you. Whatever it is, it goes out and not in.

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Visiting Norman Borlaug and Eating an Impossible Burger with Charles Mann

By: | November 22, 2017

Charles Mann smiles in front of a statue of Norman BorlaugIf you are planning a huge, calorie-dense feast for dinner later this week, you might want to take a moment to thank a man you’ve likely never heard of—a man whose scientific breakthroughs in agriculture made food cheaper and more plentiful around the world. Norman Borlaug may have saved up to a billion lives by breeding up new short, high-yielding varieties of wheat, often running field trials personally, plowing, planting, and harvesting by hand. Combined with irrigation and synthetic fertilizer, Borlaug’s plants ushered in the “green revolution,” in which crop yields skyrocketed from India to Iowa, his home state. In the biography written to introduce him as the winner of the 1970 Peace Prize, he was described as both “an eclectic, pragmatic, goal-oriented scientist,” and “a vigorous man who can perform prodigies of manual labor in the fields.” The Nobel prize committee often calls at five in the morning to make sure they find their winners at home. When they called for Borlaug, his wife told them that he had been already out in the field, working, for a solid hour.

Not everyone is a Borlaug fan, though. Since his agricultural improvements relied on more expensive seed, irrigation, and fertilizers, some say they caused mass impoverishment for farmers who could not afford these technologies and led to poisoned rivers and genetic homogenization of crops. More broadly, his reliance on technology doesn’t sit well with those who blame blind faith in technology and capitalism for many of our environmental problems. And the disagreement over his legacy mirrors a decades old disagreement about how to save the planet: should we respect “planetary boundaries” and “limits to growth” and live lightly on the planet or should we simply innovate our way out of trouble? 

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Whispering Walls and the Nature of Acoustic Geometry

By: | November 21, 2017

In caves and rock walls of the southern Utah desert, pictographs have been painted, added to the backs of clamshell-shaped sandstone enclosures. Many are noted to have acoustic properties, meaning these ancient, Indigenous images seem to be correlated with the way sound reflects around them. I’ve spoken in a normal voice back and forth from one sheltered rock art panel to another an eighth of a mile downcanyon. The way sound spreads and is refocused, we could hear each other’s every word.

James Farmer, from the Utah Rock Art Research Association, wrote that panels from the ghostly and enigmatic Barrier Creek tradition in Utah (pictured above) contain what he sees as thunderstorm motifs. At one of these Barrier Creek panels, he witnessed a cloudburst with thunder, waterfalls, and falling boulders. He wrote about the intensification of sound from the storm around the rock art, “it seems inconceivable to me that any ancient archaic hunter-gatherers witnessing a similar event would not have been just as astonished as me, and would have naturally invested the location with divine, supernatural powers.”

The nascent field of “archaeoacoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. I look at this as not just an ancient feature, but one that we walk through everyday. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. By happenstance or not, resonance is part of the way we relate to architecture, whether human made or carved by nature. Continue reading →

Unintentional treevotee

By: | November 20, 2017

I never meant for this to happen.

When I moved to the Pacific Northwest from arid Colorado three years ago, I was one of those people who insisted on horizons.

The town where I was born is a place where the foothills of the Rockies stand like a cliffy coastline overlooking a dry sea of plains. From their height, you can watch the change of light roll through the day like surf, can see storms so far away that lightning comes without sound—a flicker on the dark edge of awareness.

Even now, if you asked me what landscape makes me feel so big and free that I might crack right in half, I would say alpine tundra—the naked, velvet crowns of our sky islands, with their pikas and marmots and ptarmigan, with their cushion plants smaller than mixing bowls but older than I’ll ever be.

When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, I worried that all this lush and green would make me soft. My friend Ben told me that the first thing I’d notice was how nice everyone’s skin is, compared to the weathered hide that passes for such on we Coloradans. Western Oregon, after all, is a place insulated from the UV glare of the sun by a few thousand extra feet of atmosphere, by dozens of extra days of cloudcover, by air so thick with moisture that it’s practically water. Indeed, as soon as I arrived, I spent a lot less money on lotion. My blood pressure mysteriously dropped 20 points and stayed there. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 18, 2017

There is no roadmap for confronting a neighbor in the grocery store about a sexual assault that happened twenty years ago. Cassie, on Monday.

On a happier note, we’ve got a new Person of LWON. Rebecca Boyle sees her bare-branched pin oak and thinks asteroids. Apart from humans, maybe, trees are the best form of life on this planet. . . They are the embodiment of our shared presence on a rocky planet that orbits a star. Hedgehogs and helminths may be interesting, but they don’t constantly remind us, simply by existing, that we are in a solar system.

Jenny reduxes her post about J-Shame, because it is (unfortunately) still relevant: [J-Shame] hits when your beat is way out of synch with a big tragic thing that’s on everyone’s mind. It shrivels your confidence and embarrasses you for not taking on something with bigger-picture importance.

Rose has a brilliant idea about best-of lists—KABOOM! (After a year, that is.): We are creating a great pacific garbage patch of best of lists — a region of the web that looks fine from the surface but is thick with tiny particles of information that have decomposed and are no longer useful but can still get stuck in our guts and cause all kinds of intestinal problems.

Ann looks at the connections between astronomy and the military—and there are more than you might think: An astronomer told me once that astronomers sometimes work with the military because their technology is often the same, but (and I paraphrase), “they’re using it to look down and we’re using it to look up.”

Hope things are looking up this weekend—we’ll see you next week.

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Image credit: Linsey via Flickr

Loving Explosions

By: | November 17, 2017

Years ago, talking about the persistent rumor that the Hubble Space Telescope was an off-the-shelf spy satellite retrofitted for astronomy*, I told a NASA employee that I was pretty sure academic astronomers were culturally anti-military and they wouldn’t be crossing lines and dealing with spies or the defense department.  The NASA employee looked at me and said, “Don’t be naïve.”  And ever since, I’ve been interested in the cases of interplay between astronomers and the military.  The case I learned about most recently:  a hyper-violent explosion called a gamma ray burst, that astronomers are still trying to figure out, was first discovered by satellites flown by the defense department’s Advanced Researth Projects Agency, ARPA, now called DARPA. Continue reading →