The trouble with abundance

By: | February 1, 2017
A rotting stump in old growth forest on Prince of Wales Island

There are several things you’re likely to notice if you fly over Southeast Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago on a clear day. If you’re an alpine junky like me, the first will be the snowcapped mountains that stretch seemingly without end from near the coast to the eastern horizon somewhere in Canada, their white-and-gray-tongued glaciers pouring all the way to the sea. The second is the serene sea itself, scattered with more than 1,000 islands that jut down from the state along the coast like a shattered thumb. The third thing, the thing that Southeast Alaska and British Columbia have in greater abundance than just about everywhere else on Earth, is drippy, sponge-floored old-growth temperate rainforest.

It furs the near-coast foothills, the lower toes of peaks and all those islands for miles—dark, silvered at the edges with hanging lichens and mosses, youthful with saplings, wise with centuries-old giants, boney with standing snags. It looks like the hide of something Maurice Sendak would have drawn, or of one of Jim Henson’s fantastical creatures, or of something you can’t quite imagine at all. It looks wild in the truest sense of the word. Continue reading →

Wish We Were Here

By: | January 31, 2017

This is a travel story about a place I’ve never been. Maybe it’s a strange destination—a single, cold room. It’s thousands of miles from where I am, though, which makes it seem fascinating based on distance alone. But even better: inside it, you’d find pieces of the whole world. More than 500 million tiny pieces. Seeds.

There are seeds of all kinds: eggplants from South America, the maize from Italy used to make the best polenta you’ve ever had. Melon from Taiwan, luffa from Burundi. Quinoa and barley and millet and rye. There are even seeds from wheat and barley collected on the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are very close to Antarctica, and very, very far away from where we are, in this room, deep in a mountain on an island 800 miles from the North Pole.

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What I Learned From a Year of Drawing [almost] Every Day

By: | January 30, 2017
a drawing of a small boy with a red shirt, playing by a lake
My sister-in-law (swimming), dad (kayaking), brother (wading), and nephew (playing).

I’ve made a lot of attempts at drawing in my life. I took required art classes in high school and a non-required one in college. Every few years through my adult life, I’d get together some pencils and paper, do some drawings, and, within a week or two, drop it, frustrated by my lame attempts.

Sometime around the end of last January I decided to change this. Drawing every day was a private project. I didn’t hold a launch party. But I started, and I mostly stuck with it, and now I’ve been drawing for a year.

Part of the key to my success was being quite generous in how I defined a drawing. A doodle on a meeting agenda at work counted just the same as if I spent an hour on a still life. I kept a notepad in my bedside table, so if I realized I hadn’t done a drawing by bedtime, I could do a quick sketch of a stuffed animal or my eyedrops. My Instagram followers are familiar with my lamp.

The first thing I had to let go of was caring whether a drawing was good or not. Sometimes I do a lousy drawing, and that’s ok. Sometimes I do a pretty good drawing, and that is also ok. Often a drawing that I dislike when I finish it turns out to have some redeeming element when I look at it later. I don’t think I’ve ever done a drawing I’m 100% satisfied with.

But, it turns out, if you do something every day, you get better at it.

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The Last Word

By: | January 28, 2017

January 23-27, 2017

Hey, you. Yes, you. You are underestimating chickens. They’re more like us than we imagined, says Jennifer. Chickens are rarely given the benefit of the doubt. No one goes to a chicken for advice. No one expects a chicken to do its own taxes. Chickens babble a lot while saying very little. Or so we thought.

Guest Ivan Amato has a beautiful old oak table in his new living room, and remembers the philosopher who used to sit there. To Sol, my dad, oak was one of nature’s finest gifts to civilization. Adding to his adoration was the table’s lock-and-release mechanism for inserting and removing leaves. With every swivel of the mechanism’s handle, a reverberant metallic clack advertised a marriage of steel, wood, and good design.

A new documentary about Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, aired this week. Perfect–and poignant–timing, says Michelle, when the week started with the Trump administration freezing EPA grants and contracts.  While it’s easy to see Carson as the archetypal lone warrior, the David to the chemical industry’s Goliath, her story is more complicated. Carson was a brilliant synthesizer, translator, and writer, but her case against unregulated pesticides would not have been heard if the country hadn’t been ready to hear it. 

Erik writes about a pair of scientists who, in the 1970s, conducted an experiment that started the placebo craze. What had been missing was the promise of relief. In all the other studies, it had been a choice between the same pain or more pain. But as soon as you added the possibility of morphine, some of the people would start to expect it and their brains would begin kicking out painkillers.

Truth and beauty. We need these things. In patterns of nature, Ann finds both. My favorite is convection.  It begins with the simple rule:  heat rises, cold falls.  Follow that rule with liquid and in three dimensions and you get columns, called cells, of rising, cooling, falling.

Hope you find more truth and beauty over the weekend. And chickens, too.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

Truth + Beauty

By: | January 27, 2017

A couple of Harvard astronomers just wrote an essay in a new journal called Nature Astronomy.  That’s not the most riveting opening sentence you’ve ever read; I apologize.

But the essay was odd, a kind of rumination-with-examples about how things in astronomy on vastly different scales nevertheless have similar structures.  That is, electrons orbit atomic nuclei in the same pattern that planets orbit the sun.  The astronomers say that aside from such patterns being  pretty, finding them might also “unravel fundamental truths that unifies their governing principles.”

I don’t know whether to think that’s confusing (finding a pattern that unravels fundamental truths unifying governing principles? what does that mean?) or obvious (planets orbit stars because that’s how masses behave in gravitational fields and electron orbit nuclei because that’s how charged particles behave in electromagnetic fields; and both behaviors obey the inverse square law) or who knows (I’m not an astronomer), maybe profound.

In any case, they give other examples.  The Milky Way has a disk of stars; the stars have disks of planets; and planets have disks of gas and rocks and dust.  Galaxies and the gas between them lie along vast filaments; the same filaments show up in gas when nearby stars blow up and in the cold dense clouds of gas as they condense into stars.  Galaxies are arranged in clusters, and within the galaxies are clusters of those same cold dense gas clouds that eventually form clusters of stars.  So: orbits, disks, filaments, clusters, all on different scales. Continue reading →

The Really Big, Astounding Experiment That Changed Everything But Kinda Happened By Accident

By: | January 26, 2017

If you read science magazines – and certainly if you read this blog – you know by now that lots of people are talking about placebos these days. They are real, they are scientifically important, they are distracting, they are good, they have something to do with chakras, they are bad, they are the next big thing, they are a bunch of BS.

In my recent book, Suggestible You, I spend a fair amount of time talking about them and meeting with the luminaries of an emerging field within psychology and neuroscience that focuses almost totally on placebos and the expectations that create them. And yes, they are all of those things and more.

Over the past five (oh, who am I kidding – ten) years working on this project, I’ve tried to draw together a number of themes that all the scientists studying placebos have in common – belief, expectation, pain relief, and the power of subconscious cues. But there’s one thing that ties almost all the modern furor over placebos that I totally missed: Fields and Levine.

Howard Fields and Jon Levine were a couple scientists who, back in the 1970s, showed that the placebo effect for pain was triggered by a flood of internal opioids, similar to the endorphins that give us a runners high, among many other pleasurable experiences.

Almost every scientist I talked to who studies placebos mentioned their seminal 1978 paper. They get mentioned so much in the small world of placebo research that I started to think of them as some kind of mythical creature – the Fieldsnlevine. Just a little smaller than the Watsonncrick. It never occurred to me that they might be real people who put their pants on every day and occasionally pick up phones. Continue reading →

Why Rachel Carson Still Matters

By: | January 25, 2017

On Monday, the Trump administration instructed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staffers to freeze all of the agency’s grants and contracts—cutting off financial support for many state and tribal environmental protection programs. (Staffers were also told not to discuss the freeze with anyone outside the agency, but the news was quickly leaked to both ProPublica and the Huffington Post.)

So it’s especially appropriate, and poignant, that a terrific documentary about Rachel Carson is airing on PBS this week. Carson’s book Silent Spring, and the public outcry it caused, helped persuade President Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. The agency was charged with protecting human health by safeguarding the air, water, and land, and while the EPA is anything but perfect, it is safe to say that hundreds of thousands of Americans are alive today thanks to its regulation of carcinogenic pesticides, lead paint and leaded gasoline, asbestos, ozone-destroying CFCs, and any number of other poisonous, polluting, and life-shortening substances. Carson’s bureaucratic legacy is massive but, for many of us, largely invisible, and the documentary is a timely reminder that it still can’t be taken for granted.

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Guest Post: The Philosopher’s Table

By: | January 24, 2017

edge of oak table

In the summer of 1968, my thirty-something parents bought a 48-inch-diameter round oak pedestal table from an antique furniture dealer in Union, N.J. The moment the table assumed its new position in the kitchen of Solomon and Sylvia’s Victorian home in nearby South Orange, it asserted itself as the center of gravity of the house.

A half-century earlier, master artisans in Hastings, Michigan, built the table with four curvaceous, lion-pawed legs extending from its pedestal’s bottom. They quartersawed the wood to produce a tight “tiger oak” grain pattern and fumed it with ammonia to darken the finish. To Sol, my dad, oak was one of nature’s finest gifts to civilization. Adding to his adoration was the table’s lock-and-release mechanism for inserting and removing leaves. With every swivel of the mechanism’s handle, a reverberant metallic clack advertised a marriage of steel, wood, and good design.

My father’s mother died when he was four. His father, an émigré from the Aegean island of Rhodes, suffered from deafness and diabetes and was unable to care for his three sons. Sol grew up in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City and then under a series of foster parents. Solidity. Stability. Safety. All of these were absent for young Solomon, but they were all embodied in the table.

Continue reading →