Science Metaphors (cont.): Scale Mismatch

By: | November 10, 2016

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 →

Redux: Boobies Behaving Badly

By: | November 9, 2016

In 2015, I wrote a post ostensibly about a funny-looking seabird called the booby. It’s about evolution and biology I suppose but in truth, it’s really about the forces of nature that drive at least some of our actions. And how those forces aren’t always good. 

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In my last post I made the case for why we are not, in fact, slaves to nature and our genes. Today allow me to do the opposite.

First let me set the stage. You are on a tiny island – maybe the size of a few city blocks – looking out to sea. You could almost see the west coast of Mexico from the rocky shores, were it just a few miles closer. The only people here are a few fishermen and the occasional Mexican navy boat passing by. But you are not alone, not by a long shot.

Around you are thousands of terns, frigate birds, and every seabird you can imagine. It’s a cacophony of posturing, bickering, and breeding. Life, death, and the struggle for survival, laid bare for all to see. And at the center of it all are the boobies. No, not that kind of booby (Jesus, people, what kind of a blog do you think this is?), the ones with blue feet and freakishly long wings.

A few months ago, I published a story  for Hakai magazine about a researcher in Mexico named Hugh Drummond, who has dedicated his entire life to studying booby behavior. Normally, the angle for such a story would be a sloppy version of “hey, look at this crazy guy who studies this crazy thing that will never be of use to anyone!” But that wasn’t my angle because it’s not true.

In fact, Drummond’s work is some of the most profound and enlightening science I have ever come across. And in this post I’ll attempt to show you a glimpse of why that is. Continue reading →

This Election Day, contemplate the vastness of space and time (after you vote)

By: | November 8, 2016
A spiral galaxy composed of uncountable numbers of stars floating in the blackness of space.
Spiral galaxy NGC 6814. NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image.

Today is Election Day in the United States. For the past several months, this election, the most brutal, mean-spirited, and frankly alarming in decades, has caused a wave of anxiety, dread, and bitterness to blanket the country like a kind of noxious psychic soot. The American Psychological Association reports that 52 percent of American adults say that the 2016 election is a “very” or “somewhat” significant source of stress for them. It has been particularly horrible for women who’ve been sexually assaulted or harassed (which sadly, is most of us), people without papers, Muslim-Americans, anybody of color, um babies—and yeah, this list could go on for a long time. I think you could probably fit the people Trump hasn’t attacked or threatened into one executive suite at Trump Tower.

The stress is bipartisan. For every liberal like me, concerned that a Trump victory will usher in a dark era of fearfulness, bigotry, xenophobia, and climate inaction, there is apparently a conservative who fears Clinton will destroy America…with her emails. Or maybe because she is an actual Satanist! Have you been following that one on the internet? (Yes, I need to get off Twitter.)

What to do about these powerful and scary feelings of impending doom? Well, first of all, a sufferer of election stress must vote. This is the mechanism our democracy has in place for us hoi polloi to directly influence the course of our nation. But voting may not be enough. If you are reading these words after voting—perhaps while frantically clicking through your Twitter feed, stroking your “I Voted” sticker, and thinking about pushing cocktail hour forward to 2:00 PM—I have another approach you can try: deep time eyes. Continue reading →

That Old Cafeteria Smell

By: | November 7, 2016

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I’ve spent a lot of time giving talks at elementary and middle schools recently, as I’m touring for my new book Unlikely Friendships DOGS (yes, that’s yet another shameless plug).

Wandering those halls, with their shiny mopped floors and florescent lighting, draws up so many strange feelings—like that first-day flip-gut excitement (School! New books! Friends! Chalk!) followed by the inevitable rush of fear (School! Overdue books! Judgmental friends! Embarrassing chalk incident in 6th grade math!) topped off by a dribble of melancholy (I’m old now and everything hurts), plus a bunch of emotions that are too hard for this tour-weary writer to explain.

The most powerful moment of familiarity, though, comes with a smell. Humans, after all, can detect a trillion different odors with our six million or so odor receptors, of which there are 400 different types. So, even if dogs have something like 300 million to our six, a little schnoz hubris is in order. We have plenty of molecular know-how to pick up what’s cookin’.

What’s cookin’ in this case (see what I did there?) is whatever’s for lunch in the school cafeteria. It’s the “hot lunch,” as it was known at my ES. (“Cold lunch” meant you brought it in a bag or box [boy do I wish I’d saved the latter–Scooby Doo, of course] and had a blue token to get a milk. And whatever was in your bag, including the smushed PB&J, you probably traded for something else.) There is no odor quite like school hot lunch, and it seems to be exactly the same in every hall of education I’ve been in. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | November 5, 2016

img_7176October 31 – November 4, 2016

On Monday, our Tom Hayden reflects on sharing his name with the other Tom Hayden, who died last week.

Guest Laura Paskus has been trying to avoid the election. But the kids are asking questions—ones that maybe all of us should have to answer.

Say your friend is being harassed online, and you don’t know what to say (or you’re worried you’ve already said the wrong thing). Read what Rose wrote on Wednesday.

Ann and her siblings do an experiment: they try to describe their childhood garage. Confusion ensues (as does a charming conversation).

I have also been avoiding the election. But I could no longer avoid the seven-arm octopus. TGIPF!

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Photo by Laura Paskus

 

 

TGIPF: The Seven-Arm Octopus

By: | November 4, 2016

I’ve written about cephalopod penises before, but the time seems right to approach this subject (with extreme caution) again. You know, because it’s Friday.

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The octopus and the number eight seem inseparable. We have read children’s counting books that feature this cephalopod prominently between pages 7 and 9; we flip through under-the-sea books that rhyme “eight” with “great!” and carefully point out each of the felt legs. (Side note: why are the octopuses in our books always purple?) When we visit our local aquarium, we dutifully inspect that the resident octopus has all of its appendages intact.

Then I saw this video. Go ahead, count how many tentacles the octopus has.

Ok, it’s the cephalopod equivalent of a photobomb, so I can’t really count them very accurately. But this is the unusual Haliphron atlanticus–aka the seven-arm octopus–one of the largest octopus species in the world.

Something seems wrong about this, doesn’t it? Seven arms. Very, very wrong. Continue reading →

Experiment Regarding a Garage

By: | November 3, 2016

266488347_66da0f3ef8_zI’ve been reading a history book, this one on a subject with so little documentation it needs to rely on eyewitnesses remembering what happened 10, 30, 50 years before.  Which, honest to God, why would you even bother?

Science insists over and over and over, eyewitness testimony isn’t reliable – it’s influenced by stress, it conflates similar memories into one, it’s full of holes, it’s subject to our human love of narrative.  Even lawyers who have to rely on eyewitness testimony don’t like it.   It’s a problem of epistemology, no worse kind:  everything we know or think we know is based on memory of what we saw, heard, read, thought, felt.  And if memory is no good, then everything we know could be wrong.

What then?  I have all these old memories – what do I do with them? how do I trust them?  Check them out, right?  Find other people who were there and together create some sort of reality, that if not true, is then at least agreed-upon.  And how does that work out?  For your edification and delight, I have done an experiment.

I asked my two brothers and one sister (we span a range of 10 years) to remember our childhood (maybe 50 years ago) and suggest an event we could each describe.  We couldn’t decide: either the event was too personal for publication or at least one of us had no memory whatever of it.  So we lowered the bar and decided to describe the garage.

Picture, not a suburban garage but a farm outbuilding.  It looked nothing like the picture here – that’s there just for atmosphere – but it had the same air of remaining upright only out of habit.  I won’t trouble you with our four descriptions of the garage; instead I’ll tell you what, if you read only these descriptions, you’d know about the garage. Continue reading →

How To Be A Good Online Friend

By: | November 2, 2016

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For better or for worse, I have a lot of experience dealing with online harassment. I also have a lot of experience with friends who are kind and caring and largely oblivious to what online harassment looks for feels like. Which is good! I hope they never have to experience it. It is not fun. But when I talk about the harassment I get (usually to ask people to help me report a particularly terrible Twitter account) I hear a lot of these lovely people say things that are, at best, unhelpful.

I know these friends really care, and are trying to find something to say that will help. But sometimes what comes out isn’t so great. You might have been in this situation before! So here is a guide for how to (and how not to) help your friends. Continue reading →