Redux: On Getting From “Wow!” to “[yawn]”: Yes!!!

By: | October 4, 2017

Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy announced that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics would recognize the discovery of gravitational waves; the recipients would be Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, three of the visionaries who shepherded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) through four decades of technological and bureaucratic innovations. (Another founder of the project, Ronald Drever, died earlier this year and was therefore ineligible for the Prize.) LWON has twice published essays based on discussions with the new Nobel laureates. The first, in December 2014, explained the physics behind the black hole in Interstellar, a movie that Thorne helped conceive and produce. The second post, republished below, addresses the LIGO experiment itself; the post originally appeared in June 2016.
Black_Swan_bgA few weeks ago I was talking to one of the founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the collaboration that last September made the first detection of gravitational waves. Even if you’re not science-savvy, you will almost certainly recall the worldwide breathless news coverage following the February announcement of that detection. Now Rainer Weiss, MIT professor emeritus, had further news. He told me that the LIGO collaboration would soon announce another detection of a gravitational-wave-producing event.

Exciting!

For now.

Continue reading →

Speaking of the Trees

By: | October 3, 2017

The fires, the fires. When I started writing this some weeks back there were 137 of them torching forests across the American West. There are many fewer now—thank firefighters and weather—but so far they’ve consumed some 8.5 million acres of trees, some of them old growth, many of them on parkland filled with wildlife. British Columbia, too, has seen more fire destruction in recent months than anyone alive can recall. While massive hurricanes and flood waters and devastating earthquakes have steered our collective empathy to the south, parts of the Northwest smolder on.

Appropriately, we mourn for the people who have died or are still suffering from all of these disasters. Their agony isn’t abated by clear skies. Some of us also ache for the animals, those killed but maybe even more so those left behind in the chaos, confused and terrified.

And then there are the trees. Up north fires gobbled up huge swaths of them in no time; down south, winds ripped individuals out by the roots or snapped their spines and flung their limbs. We don’t tend to think of a body count when plants are the victims, but if we did, the number would be tragically high.

Continue reading →

If You’re Reading this on the Modern Talking Website, They Stole Our Work (Again)

By: | October 2, 2017

Official Letterhead of The People of LWON

Dear Madam/Sir/Bot:

We are going to enjoy seeing this letter show up on your website. [Update, 6:17 a.m. 10/2/2017:  The Modern Talking website may or may not have been taken down since yesterday.  If so, we hope we played our part — see the following.]

You are the proprietor(s) of a website called The Modern Talking. We are the proprietors of a website called The Last Word on Nothing (LWON). The Modern Talking lists 22 posts under the tab, Science. Of those, 20 were originally published on LWON, either the day before or that same day.

The 20 science posts on The Modern Talking are published under the byline, Ajesh Joy. No link or credit lets the reader know that the posts were written, not by Ajesh Joy, but by the various People of LWON.

The People of LWON think that The Modern Talking is poopyheads and we don’t like you one bit. We don’t like you even if y’all are bots and not real people.

You never asked our permission to publish our works, we certainly never granted it, and we each own the copyright on our own posts. It says so right at the bottom:

Copyright © 2017 All Rights Reserved.
The writing on this blog belongs to the person who wrote it and should not be re-published without explicit permission of the author. Thank you!

So you’re infringing on our copyright and we’re science writers, so we can read the law and find lawyers and sue you for damages. Which we’d like to do, because we make no money on LWON and, if you have to pay us damages, then we can pay the hosting service and the tech guy.

Here’s what we want: We want you to stop swiping our work and we want you to stop immediately. Right now this minute. And don’t start up again either. Never publish our work without our permission again so long as you live. Assuming you’re alive.

Also, don’t steal anyone else’s work either. Stealing is very bad manners.

We also want you to remove from your website all the posts you swiped from us.

Now go away. Git. Stay away from The Last Word on Nothing. And cripes, you guys don’t even Google: type “The Modern Talking” and the first 5 pages are some German pop group.

 

The Last Word

By: | September 30, 2017

September 25 – 29, 2017

Emma started off the week by writing about why she cried while doing the dishes and listening to an NPR podcast. It’s not the reason you might think: What got me about this moment was that this successful, professional woman was using such a traditionally feminine example from her own life—and completely without apology. 

What could possibly be better than Ann Finkbeiner arguing with herself about the Finkbeiner Test? I thought I might have to write a profile that would consciously fail the Finkbeiner Test, then change my name and move to New Zealand. 

Rose reduxes a post about all the clever inventions people have come up with to assist with women’s menstrual periods. Have you ever wanted to know what’s going on with your tampon? Is it too full? Is it ready to come out? Or is it still ready for more uterine gold? Well, there might at some point be an app for that.

Science poetry comics. It’s a thing. It’s a wonderful thing (see image above), and Sarah showed us so on Thursday. They say she must eat light, and steer by it too –/the stars her lamp and compass.

Erik lives in Mexico City. He and his family are okay, but some of their neighbors aren’t. What happened in Mexico City was not what was expected. The buildings that came down not the ones we expected.And regardless of whether you think the city performed better or worse than expected, it was a brutal reminder that none of us is really in control. 

See you next week!

*

Image by Sarah Gilman

Losing Control Every Day

By: | September 29, 2017

You’ve never heard a kid scream until you’ve heard one who knows his daddy is no longer in control.

When the earthquake struck, I had my headphones in. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t working, I was starting to zone out a bit. Some days I’m more productive than others and this was not a productive moment. Sue me.

Normally in Mexico City it takes a minute to recognize a quake but not this time. At the first jolt I snapped the earbuds out and bolted for my baby sleeping in the nursery. Normally I would wait a moment by his door to make sure it was a big enough quake to bother waking him up but, again, not this time. This time I grabbed him out of the crib and stuffed him under it, then stuffed as much of me as I could in after him. That’s when he started screaming.

When it was over, we calmly filed out and met with some of the other folks in the building out in the street and made our way to the park around the corner. It was only when I was sure we were safe and started canvassing the neighborhood that I realized what had really just happened.

For blocks and blocks it looked exactly the same as it had the day before. A few bricks on the ground perhaps. For a moment I even lamented the fact there wouldn’t be a decent story in it for me. I saw a building with a piece of a wall missing so that I could see a desk inside. I snapped a photo.

Then I saw the first building down. It was a squat little brown thing I must have passed a hundred times – right next to that cheesy 1950’s-themed hamburger joint I swore I’d never go back to. And it was nearly pancaked. Oddly enough, the bottom floor was still intact but the three above it kind of looked like one. Neighbors were hammering away, trying to rescue those trapped inside. People who had come to their office. People taking a cooking class.

My neighbors were trapped. In other places my colleagues were trapped. My neighbors were dying. Not in some far off place, down the street. People I pass on the way to the cantina. Next to that cheesy burger joint.

Whenever a natural disaster strikes, it’s easy to find a reason why you were clever enough to escape it. Oh, look at that building, why would they live there? Well look where their house is. Well why did they get in their car during a flood? Why didn’t they get in their car during a fire? It gives us a sense of control.

It’s only when control is totally gone that you realize you never had it in the first place. Continue reading →

Redux: The Wonderful World of Period Patents

By: | September 27, 2017

US5158535-1

Earlier this week I got an email from my mother. “It appears you are not the only Eveleth interested in women’s undergarments” was the subject line. The body of the email contained a link to this delightful patent that my great great grandmother apparently got on February 13th, 1900. The patent reads:

Be it known that I, ANNIE S. EVELETH, a citizen of the United States, residing at Little Falls, in the county of Herkimer and State of New York, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Underwaists,of which the following is a specification.

This invention relates to underwaists for women; and the object of the improvement is to provide a waist so constructed as to obviate any pressure upon the breasts of the wearer and also permit of free access to the breasts without necessitating unbuttonin g or disarranging the waist-a feature of great convenience for nursing mothers.

It’s true that I am quite interested in women’s undergarments. And patents. And below you’ll find a post that ran on this here blog about a year ago, about patents for menstrual products that I found delightful, interesting and downright bizarre. The post was inspired by the invention of a chiropractor in Kansas, who came out with a “labial glue” to keep menstrual blood in the vagina. To be clear: this is a very, very bad idea. And I added it to my list of strange period-related patents, which you can find below.

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I recently wrote a story for Racked about how some of the period underwear on the market work — the kind that either help keep your pad in place, or help replace tampons by wicking and absorbing blood. And because I always like to know about the evolution of various technologies, one of the first things I did in my research was go to the U.S. Patent Office website to see what kinds of patents already existed for these sorts of things.

It turned out that there were a whole lot of patents for menstrual underwear like this. I’ll quote myself here:

The specific materials that Dear Kate and THINX use are new, but idea of specially designed period underwear goes back nearly 40 years. In 1967, a patent for a “protective petticoat” was issued to a woman named Gladys Ruppel Williams. The undergarment was a half-slip, “constructed with a moisture-proof material” to protect the outer clothing from being stained. In 1988, a Chinese company was issued a patent for “woman menstruation underpants” that included two layers of cloth sewn into the crotch of the panties, each lined with a “non-toxic, flexible plastic film.” In 1995 another Chinese company patented a “clean-keeping women undergarment,” which included a leakproof liner.

Yep, “clean-keeping women undergarment.” But these are just a few of the patents for menstruation related items that I found when I started looking. So I want to share some more of them with you. This time with pictures. Because they’re great. Continue reading →

Arguing with the Finkbeiner Test

By: | September 26, 2017

Apparently we’re feminine/ist this week, or so far Emma and I are.  I want to argue about the Finkbeiner Test.  The test began with a heroic vow:  I would write a profile of a woman scientist without the clichés that litter these profiles.  The test took off when Christie wrote a post about my post for Double X Science, making a solid argument in which she listed the cliches as bullet points.  And it became nationally famous when the New York Times began the obituary of a woman rocket scientist with “She made a mean beef Stroganoff.”  (The Times had to change that sentence and you may picture me smiling evilly as I type this.)  In general, the Finkbeiner Test* comes down to this:  if you’re not writing it about a man scientist, then why would you write it about a woman scientist?

Recent specific examples:

  • Last week, I heard a woman scientist being introduced as the first woman to win the Crafoord Prize.
  • Also last week I read a well-researched, well-written profile in a science magazine of another woman scientist whose science is careful but her results are unexpected and therefore controversial; also she has children, her ex-husband’s opinion of her work is low, she finds the controversy difficult to handle, and in fact, her field’s aggressiveness has cost her an NSF grant.**
  • And the week before last, I finished writing a profile of yet another woman scientist: she worked much of her career without a university job, finally got one with tenure at age 59.

Would you write any of these things about a man scientist? any at all?  You would not.  He’d never be the first man to win an established prize.  His children and his ex-wife’s opinions would be seen as patently irrelevant.  His controversial work and his ability to withstand his field’s aggressiveness would make him not fragile, but an iconoclastic hero.  And by age 59 he’d be thinking retirement.  You write about women scientists saying these same things, even though all are meant as compliments, and wouldn’t you suspect these women of being, well, you know, sort of affirmative-actiony, kind of weepy, a little second-tier, maybe not quite top-drawer? You would.

The Finkbeiner Test caught a certain amount of flack***, all of it rational and politely-expressed and usually posed as questions.  I am here to answer them. Continue reading →