Redux: How Losing My Phone Made Me Smarter

By: | August 28, 2017

This post first ran on April 22, 2014.
SmartPhoneshutterstock_128808976

A few weekends ago, I hiked a deep canyon with a couple of friends. As has become my habit, I toted my smart phone along. I set it to mute so that I’d remain undisturbed by pings and rings, and I pulled it out of my pack only to take a few photos.

After the hike, my friend drove us back to our carpool spot, and after changing out of my hiking shoes, I reached for my phone to call my husband. Except it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the front pocket of my pack, or anywhere else I looked.

Panic. Was it in my friend’s car? Or had I dropped it somewhere in the canyon? I reached to call the friend, who was now five minutes down the road in the other direction, but — oh right. I’d have to call her when I got home. Wait, did I know her number? No, I did not. It’s programmed into my phone. I probably added it to my contacts via email, never once dialing it.

A sense of doom set in, as I thought about all the other information I’d offloaded from my brain to that shiny glass rectangle. But the despair was quickly followed by a sense of release. I was suddenly free from obligation. I couldn’t check messages. No one could reach me. I was untethered. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 26, 2017

a woman, a telescope, a piece of paper

August 21-25, 2017

Cast your mind all the way back to Monday and you may remember something special happened then. LWON had been gearing up for the eclipse with a week of related posts, and this week continued that theme, for an Eclipse Fortnight.

Craig stayed home instead of driving the eight hours to the path of totality, because it was his son’s first day of high school. But a large part of him wanted to take his boys to Wyoming: “If this were the world I made, our lives would be nothing but this: transformation after transformation, eyes so bugged out from the epic tapestry of the universe you feel like alternately weeping and screaming.”

Helen caught the full show at a NASA-affiliated event in South Carolina. It was a lot of driving made worth it for an ecstatic two minutes. And she made drawings.

Emma and Michelle captured the magic of children talking about the eclipse. “It feels like nighttime.” “Good job, moon.”

Cassie and her husband caught the whole thing on audio, with additional commentary from their two-year-old. “We came, we saw, we freaked out a little bit.” Time to drive back to Wisconsin.

Eclipse fortnight having ended, I continued our occasional series, Debunking Hollywood, taking a look at human hibernation and finding some holes in the movie version.

 

-Art by Helen

Debunking Hollywood: Human hibernation

By: | August 25, 2017

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. 

Nothing says interstellar travel like a hibernation pod. The heroes of the 2016 holiday blockbuster Passengers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, embark on a century-long journey to an planet outside our solar system. Hibernation pods extend their lifespans for the long trip, but they wake from torpor 90 years earlier than scheduled. Then they set about trying to fix the ship and trying to put themselves back to sleep.

First of all, let’s talk about this ‘waking’ from hibernation business. Hibernation may involve lying down with ones eyes closed, but there’s no sleeping going on; In fact, a long stretch of it leaves the body sleep deprived. If this movie were true to life, the first thing that would happen when Jennifer Lawrence opened her long-lashed eyes in the hibernation pod would not be her listening to the ship computer’s crew update. It would be her closing those long lashes again and descending straight into sleep. Continue reading →

A Toddler in Totality

By: | August 24, 2017

A couple of months ago, I hatched a really good plan. My husband and I would drive six hours into the path of totality without our two-year-old daughter. We would have a relaxing car ride, followed by some nice meals at fancy St. Louis restaurants. But then I realized that no one was available to watch our two-year-old, so we had to take her with.

I could write a long post about the unspeakable freakiness of seeing a total eclipse. Or about the uselessness of trying to make a two-year-old wear eclipse glasses. But I can’t say anything that others haven’t already said. So instead I invite you to join my family as we experience totality. The following three-minute audio clip was recorded and produced by Radiolab’s managing editor, Soren Wheeler. I got it for free because he’s also my husband.

What: A total eclipse!

Where: Dr. Edmund A. Babler Memorial State Park, just outside St. Louis, Missouri

Who: Me, my husband, our two-year-old, and a bunch of eclipse-happy strangers

Why: Because my science writer friends told me that 85% would not be good enough. Not by a long shot.

Totality Awesome

By: | August 23, 2017


The eclipse, as narrated by our children and their friends.

Two hours before totality

Adele, age 7: “What do you know about the eclipse?”
Lulu, age 8: “What happens is that the moon comes in front of the sun and eats it and blocks the sunlight.”
Adele: “Goes in front of it, kinda.”
Lulu: “And it is very important that you wear the eclipse glasses because otherwise the eclipse is gonna hurt your eyes and so we need eclipse glasses to keep us safe. And it is a really interesting thing if you are wearing the eclipse glasses.”

One hour before totality

Sylvia, age 8: “The sun’s mouth is opening!”
Adele: “The moon is getting hungry.”
Lulu: “It looks like a cheesecake with a bite out of it.”
Abe, age 8: “It looks more like Pac-Man.”
Adele: “I love the eclipse.”

Three minutes before totality

Nicolas, age 5: “It’s almost time to go to sleep, Mama?”
Nicolas, later: “I was saying that for a joke.”

Two minutes before totality

Adele: “I wonder what is going to happen?”

Thirty seconds before totality

Lulu: “There’s a star!”

During totality

All: “Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!”

Nicolas: “Why is it like it is night time?”
Emma: “Why do you think?”
Nicolas: “Because the moon is covering the sun.”
Emma: “Right. How does it feel?”
Nicolas: “It feels like night time.”
Emma: “Does it make you feel strange?”
Nico: “No. Feels like …” [starts screaming, possibly with joy]

Sylvia, quietly: “This is amazing.”

Five seconds after totality

All: “Yaaaaaaay! Good job, moon!”

24 hours after totality

Emma: “You never told me how the eclipse made you feel, Adele.”
Adele: “It made me feel … eclipsey.”

Photo of young eclipse-watcher by Emma.

On the Path of Totality

By: | August 22, 2017

drawing of traffic jam on interstate

I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95.

When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on I-95, from the world’s worst traffic jam, on my phone.

Well, the joke’s on me; my phone died.

Surely no one can expect anything coherent from me, from the right lane of an interstate somewhere south of Fayetteville, NC. Instead, I present some eclipse impressions.

1. Traffic. The drawing that starts this post is from the worst traffic we hit on Saturday, on I-95 between Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg. Here’s the thing, though – I think that may have been normal August weekend traffic. Apparently taking 2.5 hours to go 30 miles is not that unusual. (It was many hours after that traffic jam that my phone gave up its fight. Fortunately, I also brought a laptop.)

 

Continue reading →

Why Am I Not There?

By: | August 21, 2017
“Eclipse” Chalk, Blackboard 42″ x 70″ 2009 Adam David Brown

I’m not at the totality today, and it’s been gnawing at me. Between 1 and 7 million people are estimated to witness this swath of darkness across the middle of North America from coast to coast. I live about an eight-hour drive away, and I’ve heard totality is a mystical experience, once in a lifetime. Your inner picture of the earth, possibly the entire cosmos can change. I’ve driven eight hours for far less.

I did see a minor solar eclipse once. I was in the bare boned desert of southern Utah, and at first I thought my eyesight was failing. As half-light settled, I realized it wasn’t me. It was summer…or at least a warm month…and I remember lifting a hand to block the sun. There was not a cloud, not a visible reason for this shift, buttes and palisades losing their sharpness around me. It had to have been an eclipse. The light was almost silvery. Even though I knew the basic science, how the moon casts its own shadow onto Earth, I still thought a little bit of the world was ending.

After several minutes, the white light of the sun was back to its blinding self. My sublime sense of dread had faded, replaced by a magnificent sense of motion on a scale far beyond my body on the ground.

With that experience behind me, I’d drop anything to experience totality eight hours away. I was born for this event, every cell of me made to feel the path of spheres through the sky, practically dizzy from the revolutions of my planet underfoot on a daily basis. When the moon rises, do you gasp, too?

So, why am I not there?
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 19, 2017

August 14 – 18, 2017

Jenny watches the married, loving mourning doves. Then Jenny’s all-but-feral dog kills the dove wife.  The dove husband perches above her grave and calls and calls, no answer. So then what? Well what do you think.

And with Erik’s post, LWON begins Eclipse Week.  Erik polls the ancient Vikings, Maya, Mexica, Hindus, and Christians, and not one of them had anything good to say about eclipses. My personal favorite is the Vikings.

I’ve never seen a total eclipse and won’t see this one either.  I get only a partial one and I’m not even going to look up, I’m going to look down.  Because last time I did that, I had a flat-out epiphany.

Christie and her dad have neither one of them seen a total eclipse.  But they’re going to be together and right in the path of this one.  And they’ve got some good reasons to be doing likewise.

Richard, on the other hand, is an old hand at total eclipses.  The last one he was on a cruise ship in the Black Sea, poor guy, taking notes. What he chiefly remembers was the fast shadow, the chill, and the silence.