Father Things

By: | June 14, 2024

Father’s Day. Many of the fathers of the People of LWON’s have died, some long ago, some recently; and some haven’t died at all and are entirely alive. We have things that belonged to them, we have things we want to ask them. This sounds like it might be sad but it’s not.

Helen:

Right now, almost anything can remind me of my dad. It’s only been 6 months since he died. I often have an instant of wanting to call or email him about something, before I remember. It’s tiny, just a split second of urge, of starting to reframe my observation or thought for him. A few weeks after he died, I started keeping a list and here are a few:
The old car sold for $1685! (12/20/23)
You were right about that elm tree at Wayne’s house – it broke and took out the power lines. (1/9/24)
What should I do about the water on the floor in the basement? (1/17/24)
What kind of car insurance should I get? (2/1/24)
What are your tips for catching mice? I know you had a system. (3/6/24)
Look at this cute Japanese manhole cover! (3/27/24)
Maybe you’d like to go see this musical with me! (5/7/24)
My car is parked under a cherry tree and the birds sit over it and it is a MESS. (6/2/24)
So now, dear reader, I’m telling you, I guess.

Craig:

On the bookshelf in the foyer is a stack of painted black-on-white potsherds. They are nested into each other and sit neatly between our wedding invitation and the replica skull of a saber-toothed smilodon. The sherds come from a small broken vessel, something I inherited from my father who died thirty years ago. He bought this contemporary Acoma vessel from a dealer in Santa Fe before it was broken, obviously, and I’ve carried it gently from move to move. It was a seed jar, a style with a small opening in the top allowing seeds to be shaken into the hand. This type is significant, probably more than my dad knew. In rubble-mound villages and ruined Pueblo towns around the Four Corners, seed jars date back more than a thousand years. They have been excavated from ancestral dwellings to the tune of one per household per generation, meaning these were pre-Columbian heirlooms. The one my dad bought had been produced in the late 1980’s and I’m guessing he paid a few hundred dollars for it. I must have brushed it when I was putting something away because it tipped over and fell four feet to the concrete floor. I remember the pop. It was a satisfying sound, and turned my blood cold. I gasped as it happened, but once it was done, it was done. There are some things you never get to do over. Some of the pieces, painted in precise black lines classic of Southwest Pueblo traditions, I put in the garden knowing I’d find them over the years, and maybe they’d keep turning up for centuries. The rest I stacked on this shelf so I would think of my dad and, with the bittersweetness of entropy, I’d smile.

Continue reading →

Don’t Eat This

By: | June 12, 2024

[This post ran some years back. I’ve been thinking again about food and gut health and all the bad stuff we do to ourselves, so I thought I’d re-run it. I mean, eat what you like. But be mindful of all the things.]

—–

Here’s what I remember eating as a kid: Oscar Mayer bologna and American cheese (the individually wrapped slices) on white bread. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread. Honey and butter (yup!) on white bread. Grilled American cheese on white toast. Hot dogs on white buns. Deli ham on big puffy white Kaiser rolls.

Why not? After all, white bread was “enriched”! Doesn’t that sound healthy? Never mind that the bread-refining process that made Wonder such a wonder got rid of the naturally occurring nutritious bits (e.g., the mineral-rich grain coatings); “enriching” the bread was the industry’s attempt to put some of those nutrients back. I just remember how pure and soft and spongy the slices were. And it never went bad. And the label promised a loaf full of vitamins and minerals. It didn’t occur to us we were being deprived of anything, or that we were swallowing anything but good nutrition.

Continue reading →

The Tentative Nature of Science

By: | June 10, 2024

Recently I had what Cassie has dubbed a “Hubble moment.” I’ve been on the board of directors at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing for at least a decade, but had somehow never grasped the fine print of how our Taylor Blakeslee fellowship came to be.

I knew it was named after two science writer greats — former AP science editor Alton Blakeslee and AP writer Rennie Taylor, but I didn’t know that the seed money had come from The American Tentative Society. 

In a beautiful obituary for her father, Alton Blakeslee, the science writer Sandra Blakeslee explained that The American Tentative Society “was hatched in the wee hours of the morning, over many bottles of Jack Daniels, in Santa Rosa, California.” Her father and friends Taylor and Pat McGrady would get together on occasion.  

“Rennie felt that most Americans view science as facts cast in stone rather than as an ever-changing, tentative enterprise. In his will, he stipulated that his estate be used to set up the ATS to honor scientists whose work demonstrates the tentative nature of our knowledge,” Sandra wrote. 

The elder Blakeslee served as President of the ATS, and enjoyed throwing luncheons for scientists. “They drank toasts to Rennie, of course, and did more serious work like supporting young science writers.”

Alton Blakeslee told Science magazine that during its first eight years, the ATS was little more than a “lively concept,” but they were looking for projects to fund. (The title of the small blurb printed in Science was “American Tentative Society Has Money, Needs Ideas.”) That was 1974. The organization was eventually disbanded in the 1990s, and the money went to CASW.

Since then, the Taylor Blakeslee Fellowship has supported a large number of up and coming science writers. But we’re all still facing this problem that Taylor had sought to address with the ATS.

As I discuss in my new podcast series, the public too often views science as a creator of facts, rather than a provisional process, full of uncertainties. This misunderstanding has consequences, as we saw during the pandemic when a subset of the public lost faith in science when they saw it updating as new evidence came in. Of course, we also have a long history of nefarious interests weaponizing the uncertainty that’s inherent in science to create doubt in the public’s mind. 

How do we counteract the public’s misunderstandings of science? I’ve spent a great deal of my career thinking about this, and I still don’t have a satisfying answer. But I do think it might be time to revive the ATS.

Photo by Christina Morillo.

Snapshot: Look at this violet!

By: | June 7, 2024
A violet growing between bricks

It’s hard to pay attention. It’s hard to be in the moment. It’s very easy to walk around with your face buried in the internet. I’ve started making a game of it – when I’m standing at a busy street corner, how many of the other walkers are staring at their phones? When I’m coming down the escalator to a metro station platform, how many fellow passengers can I spot who are waiting for a train while doing anything *but* gazing into a lighted piece of glass? (Not many.)

This evening as I walked the mile home from exercise class, I probably managed to spent at least half of the time looking at the actual physical world.

And looking had such rewards! I exchanged smiles with an older man watering his hydrangeas. I saw some other hydrangeas and thought, “wow, there’s a lot of hydrangeas around here.” I had the small and uninteresting epiphany that hydrangeas probably have a season, and this is it. I even noticed some things that didn’t have to do with hydrangeas.

Like this here violet.

Now, first of all: When I saw this plant, I thought “violet!” but I can see that it kind of looks like a pansy in the photo. So I’ve spent some time in an Internet rabbithole (on my phone, but not while walking around) trying to determine if this is a violet or a pansy. What I’ve learned is that “violet” is generally used for the ones who breathe free and take over your lawn, while “pansy” is for the ones that are showy and planted from seed. Given that this one has planted itself in a sidewalk, I’m calling it a violet.

Anyway. Look at this violet! Look at it! Bravely growing up between the bricks, six blocks from the U.S. Capitol building.

In this neighborhood, I’ve realized, you can tell the patterns of sidewalk use by the quantity of weeds growing between the bricks. In the straight lines where everyone walks, the bricks are bare. At the edges near the less-used curbs, green weeds flourish. From the presence of this violet, I conclude that most people don’t walk within a brick’s length of this fire hydrant. And I guess we can conclude that violets are resistant to dog pee. Or that the dogs around here prefer trees and low stone walls.

Please note that I am not claiming to be much better than other people at looking up from my phone. Right after I took the first two photos of the brave sidewalk violet, I walked onward, to the corner, while checking the photos on my phone. And then went back and took four more. And then admired those photos as I continued on, and then put the phone away and imagined the little essay I would write.

While I walk, it’s so easy to follow a train of thought to something I’d like to google, or to feel the buzz of a friend’s text message and get involved in an amusing conversation.

But oh, golly. The rewards for looking up. They are many.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

Is that when you decided to remove your implant?

By: | June 5, 2024

Item code: Partial transcript
Date: 20330503 05:06:35
Source: NeoBrane 1.8 cortical interface ExoRAM®™ cache
Note: Data retrieval partial due to implant damage

got it done last year because Noah told me it did multiple orgasms for men. Before that I had the Neuron.XI. Which was fine, but it didn’t do that. Actually they specifically said it was impossible, something about how you couldn’t make threads long enough to synchronise overclocking in the hippocampus, or the insula, and a bunch of other deep brain shit I don’t remember. But then Noah was like “uh case in point.”

of course it was noah. gross

I know but he was right. It was really good for a few months

this is teetering on the edge of things I don’t want to know

Sorry.

seriously though you got a neobrane because of **noah**? was that ever going to turn out any other way?

No but he was right, it did work. Except then Kara got an upgrade on her Cosmos and there was a synching glitch with the NeoBrane chassis which meant that we were coming at different times and it kept asking me to upgrade and they kept using more tactics. One time it actually suspended me right at point of orgasm and said you can either upgrade or watch a one minute ad

!

A crypto wallet ad. 

is that when you started looking for the jailbreak forums

Continue reading →

Things That Went Wrong in Nature This Week

By: | June 3, 2024

It’s been a rough week for wildlife in my neighborhood. Here are some of the things that happened:

  1. Neighbors a few doors down had two MASSIVE red oak trees removed, and with them no doubt squirrel and bird nests with tiny creatures in them—wee newbies so trusting, waiting to be fed, not expecting their world to topple. When the heavy machinery arrived on the street, I knew what was coming, but it still crushed me to see those massive leafy branches disappear into the grinder to be turned into mulch. That sound has always made me cringe. I went looking for fallen squirrel pups after the deed was done, but there was nothing left.
  2. It’s tree frog time and we have a pond, but we now also have three koi who, it turns out, like frog eggs for breakfast. So that first early morning after a riotous night of croaking and ‘phib love, no egg masses were floating at the pond edges and under fallen leaves as they used to in before-fish times. The same was true all the mornings to follow. So much effort on the frogs’ part, with nothing to show for it progeny-wise. I’m tempted to re-home the damn fish.
  3. This frog.

  4. There was a lovely cardinal mom nesting in a shrub just outside our front window and I’d been watching her for days, waiting for those pretty little eggs to hatch. Instead, while she was out one day (probably having scrammed because of our comings and goings nearby), her eggs were snatched and smashed. I found them cooking on the slate, mother bird nowhere to be found. It appears nobody even got the protein out of them. The nest now sits empty, recalling happier times.
  5. The invasive plants in our yard are going nuts. And they’re all things that I planted, because many moons ago I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t realize an ornamental or two would ultimately take over every spot of soil on the planet.
  6. In digging up some of said invasive plants (a Sisyphean task if there ever was one), I beheaded/halved so many worms. What a shame. (I believe some can regenerate, but still. That can’t possibly feel good.)

Thanks for letting me gently weep.

——————-

Sad pics by the author. I left out the diced worm because it looked like a backyard crime scene photo.

Hard Times in the Younger Dryas

By: | May 31, 2024
Lake superior with arrow

This post ran in 2015, and it remains the coldest experience in my life. Put on something warm and enjoy.

In the winter of 2014, most of North America was buried in an unusual cold period. The jet stream had hemorrhaged in early January and the Polar Vortex that usually sits atop the hemisphere like a halo came pouring down. Known as the 2014 North American Cold Wave, temperatures plummeted, particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest where double digits below 0 °F appeared for weeks. Lake Superior froze more solidly than it had in decades.

That’s when I went to the Superior shore of northern Wisconsin where nearby temperatures had reached -37 °F. If I wanted to get the feel of a cold spell, I figured this was my moment. At the time, I was writing about the Younger Dryas, a cold anomaly that hit the Northern Hemisphere 12,800 years ago and continued for a thousand years. The world at that point had been gradually warming, the Ice Age coming to an end. Suddenly, within the space of a decade, ocean currents reversed in the Atlantic, probably triggered by cold, meltwater flows coming off the shrinking Laurentide Ice Sheet. This reversal sent the world back into the Ice Age, and brought the end of the Clovis tradition in North America, the climate upheaval speeding up megafauna extinctions.

I don’t like writing about events without witnessing them, so I set off across frozen Lake Superior out of Ashland, Wisconsin, pulling a sled behind me with enough gear to last several days. I wanted a taste of the Younger Dryas.

Continue reading →

Living in a Non-Ergodic World

By: | May 29, 2024
  • You earn a series of promotions at work, but when it comes time to make a lateral move, you find you’ve neglected to build a professional network that will help you make the next jump.
  • You compartmentalize your success in badminton and realize too late you’ve neglected all your friendships and nobody is there to celebrate your wins when you retire from sport.
  • You are so determined in your plan to succeed that you refuse emerging opportunities to succeed in a different way altogether.

These are just some of the many ways to fail at a long-term game even as you succeed in the short-term ones that make it up. It turns out this is a common mistake that arises because we live in a non-ergodic world. It’s a real problem in our decision making.

You might not have encountered ergodicity unless you have a background in statistical mechanics or probability theory. It’s the idea that what happens over short periods can be extrapolated to the long run using the law of averages. Recently I was introduced to the idea by Italian independent researcher Luca Dellanna, who spoke at value investing ideas conference VALUEx in Omaha. In his books he applies the concept of ergodicity to everyday life and points out that in the real world, very little actually works this way.

Continue reading →