Tropical Science

By: | April 19, 2017

A few months ago I found myself south of the border working on a story for Scientific American about the glories of really small brains. When I say south of the border, I mean south of the Mexican border and when I say small brains I mean really really small brains. Like those of a wasp whose whole body is smaller than a single-celled paramecium.

Just let that thought tumble around in your head for a second.

Kind of amazing right? I also learned about two relatively similar species of spider who are so different in size, putting them next to each other would be like a normal man standing next to a giant 250 miles tall.

Tumble that one for a second too. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

My guides in this amazing world of miniaturization were William Wcislo and William Eberhard* at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. Both are excellent scientists and their facilities were second to none (Wcislo got money from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to do some truly cutting edge science involving photons and bee navigation).

Which, I have to say, kind of surprised me. After all, when I think about the words “tropical” and research” I think of either some northern researcher venturing into the jungle for a few weeks or a second rate facility neglected by a corrupt government. I couldn’t have been more wrong and the Williams were more than happy to set me straight. Continue reading →

The Community Listservs of the People of LWON

By: | April 18, 2017

 

Emily Underwood, Friend of LWON, posted on Facebook a collection of topics from her community listserv.

  • Lions (mountain lions)
  • Free blue heeler
  • Sick chicken

Ann doesn’t know exactly where Emily lives but it sure isn’t Baltimore.  Ann’s community listserv looks more like this.

  • 2nd Quarterly Citizen’s Decision-Making Training (formerly known as “Shoot Don’t Shoot”)
  • Children’s clothing and kitchen items needed for Syrian family
  • Former bishop up for parole after less than 2 years.
  • Guest Lecture – Renewable Energy and Social Enterprise in Africa
  • Does anybody know this p.o.s that broke into my sister’s house today.
  • Low-frequency hum

Cassie lives in Madison.

  • We haven’t been placing our bins out correctly–have you?
  • Jaspers Sad Update
  • Spot light fishing along shorelines and river banks.
  • Found Debit card
  • Citgo on Sherman ave sold?
  • Electric tankless water heater – pros & cons? tips?
  • Example of clover or thyme lawn to visit?
  • Beaver traps removed

Jasper the dog has an inoperable brain tumor, in case you’re wondering.
 Continue reading →

The Kind of People Whose Neighbors Are Sad When They Move Away

By: | April 17, 2017

I have neighbors who were also friends who have just moved away.  I look at their house now and they’re not in it, it’s empty, they’re gone.  I’m sad.  Why should I care so much? It’s what urban America does, it moves away — stays a while, then moves somewhere else.  I’m used to it.  These people whose daily cycles, real worries and deserved joys, faults and virtues, parents and children, and cars and gardens I know so well, I now know at best via Facebook, maybe Christmas cards, “we should get together again sometime.”  Fine.  That’s the way it is.  I’m still sad.

Meanwhile, I’ve given some thought to what you might do to be the kind of person whose neighbors are sad when you to move away.  I started looking for research in the social psychology of groups but it’s the wrong field; it’s about how groups function for good or ill, and not about how to be a certain kind of person.  Maybe I’m talking about moral philosophy.  Maybe Aristotle covered this; maybe Montaigne did; I don’t think Kant did.  But I’m not looking it up.  Instead I’m going to make a specific list of action items and we can theorize another time. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 15, 2017

April 10 – 14, 2017

The word was, DC’s famous cherry blossoms had died untimely deaths due to cold and ice.  Wrong, says Helen, and proves it, sepal by sepal, petal by petal.

The music behind the math in movies, says Guest Stephen Ornes, can sound just like the math: doubling back, laying down patterns, tick tick ticking.

A science metaphor called scale mismatch, remembers Michelle, is temporally appropriate: “match the scale of the problem, either by making ourselves larger or making the problem smaller. We make ourselves larger through cooperation. We make the problem smaller by discerning the sliver we’re best equipped to solve.”

Cameron faces down the bug on her floor like a cowboy badass, but from somewhere now in the grass outside is a bug whistling the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Galaxy Zoo, a citizen science project set up because people could do superbly what computers couldn’t, Jessa says, is in trouble because computers are now doing what people can’t.

First, AI came for our volunteer jobs

By: | April 14, 2017

In 2007, while a researcher at Oxford, astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski co-founded what would become the largest online citizen science project to date. Galaxy Zoo involved several hundred thousand volunteers pouring over images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to classify galaxies. Significant discoveries were made, dozens of journal articles published the results, and another site, Zooniverse, launched to apply the same process in other fields.

Since then, and in part as a result, citizen science has become all the rage. Funding agencies are keen to support it, the concept has proven useful, and it’s a popular pastime for those whose passion for science must be expressed outside of working hours. But just as the movement has earned its chops, it may be about to be upstaged.

“I think the whole old approach of ‘Let’s crowdsource it to the whole internet’, that’s I think somewhat if not largely superseded’” says Schawinski, now at ETH Zurich. “Just because thanks to machine learning, we don’t need half a million people to go click away at galaxies anymore. I think that is probably over.” Continue reading →

“Bug” on My Floor

By: | April 13, 2017

It was a standoff in my own living room. The stranger and I faced each other, both completely still. I could almost hear that eerie whistle from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. 

The stranger was dressed in black. I was dressed in black yoga pants. I towered over my challenger, who was only an inch long. But still, it looked fierce, and I knew it had a secret weapon. Which one of us would still be standing after this showdown?

This foe goes by many names: pinacate beetle, darkling beetle, clown bug, stink bug. As far as I know, it was Eleodes obscura, a beetle that lives all over the west. I’ve seen them plenty of times on trails, but I’d never seen one in my house. This one lowered its head and raised its beetle bum. It was ready. Continue reading →

Redux: Science Metaphors (cont.): Scale Mismatch

By: | April 12, 2017

I wrote this post less than 24 hours after the U.S. presidential election. It’s been a long five months since then, but I’m still finding this metaphor useful, in work and in the rest of life. I hope you will, too.

Dear readers, dear friends,

As I write this, on the afternoon of November 9, 2016, the future looks very dark. If you respect reason and truth, if you care about the planet we depend on, if you believe that biology is just biology, not destiny, then I expect the future looks dark to you, too.

I hope that you and yours are finding solace and strength as best you can.

I don’t have much to offer. But on and off during this chaotic, distressing year, I’ve found it useful to borrow a metaphor from ecologists and conservation biologists. I’m sure they won’t mind if I lend it out to you. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Math Movie Music

By: | April 11, 2017

Let’s be real: Watching someone doing math is only slightly more exciting than watching metal corrode. That may be why we’ve never seen a naturalistic depiction of math in the movies; such a snoozer would show someone hunched over a desk or a computer for hours, maybe with a few coffee refills and bathroom breaks. Math is such a mental sport that its dramas, its twists and surprises, its gradual build to Unassailable Truth, are usually locked between the eyes and the fingertips.

But not at the movies! A good math movie can draw out those inner eddies of abstraction. Which is why the math music of movies is so great. Imagine the the task given to a film’s composers as they start to assemble a soundtrack for a math-heavy movie: “Okay folks, in this scene the genius is going to solve some equations, and you have to write music to make people care. Go!” And yet they do it.

Last year’s Hidden Figures, for example, included several scenes where Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), NASA math genius, obliterator of obstacles rooted in racism, does nothing more than solve equations. And we’re riveted, partly because Henson pulls it off, and also because the soundtrack — by Pharrell Williams, Hans Zimmer, and Benjamin Wallfisch — tells us we should be. (To hear what I’m writing about, and for enhanced experience of this post, play one of the HF math-doing tracks by clicking here. In fact, if you play the music, this post will be better.)

At its best, math movie music helps the rest of us experience the emotional payoff of mathematics: The elegance of a proof, for example, or the underlying beauty of group theory. For just a moment, the music connects us to the mathematician’s mental gymnastics, and while may not get the math itself, we share in her feeling of triumph as she approaches the truth.

Continue reading →