Redux: Happy Lady Ada Day

By: | October 11, 2016

10618433553_6fd8d1f039_zIt’s that time again! Happy Ada Lovelace Day to you and all the Lady Adas in your life. For more on this year’s observances, see Finding Ada. This post was originally published in 2014. 

I’m not, in general, huge on holidays. I often wish that those of us in the U.S. would observe the weeks between Halloween and Martin Luther King, Jr., Day with a nice long nationwide nap. But I feel differently about Ada Lovelace Day, founded by British digital-rights activist Suw Charman-Anderson in 2009. Now, every year in mid-October, the world has a chance to recognize Lady Ada, the woman some call the first computer programmer.

This year, Ada Lovelace Day arrives with a fine new Lovelace biography, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age. The last major standalone biography of Lovelace was published in the late 1990s, and a lot has happened since then: a new set of letters between Lovelace and her collaborator Charles Babbage was discovered in 2000, and we’ve all clicked and poked and LOLed our way through another decade of the digital age. Ada’s Algorithm argues that Lovelace was one of the first—if not the first—to foresee just how deeply computing would affect our lives. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Cuba’s Stories in Stone

By: | October 10, 2016

fragmento_del_valle_de_vinales-_cubaStarting about 135 million years ago, long after the Pangea supercontinent fragmented into shards of planetary crust, one of those geological slivers began noodling toward the north and east. Near the end of the Eocene epoch, it bumped into what is now Florida. With a newborn ocean giving it a shove from behind, it overrode and then permanently glommed onto the North American crustal plate. Thus, geologically speaking, was Cuba born.

The island’s first geological maps came in 1869, from Manuel Fernández de Castro of the Spanish Geological Survey. A century later, the Cuban Academy of Sciences worked with its equivalents in Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union to produce detailed modern surveys. Today academics from Spain, France, Germany, and elsewhere publish on Cuba’s natural wonders. But one major research partner has of course been missing: American geologists. “Cuba accreted to America 44 million years ago,” says Robert Stern, a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, “and got ripped apart again 55 years ago.”  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 8, 2016

photo-4October 3-7, 2016

This week we rounded up a number of posts about bugs and how we love them. I think it says quite a lot about us that we didn’t even come close to exhausting our supply of bug-love posts.

Sarah attempted to find things to appreciate about ticks, like the cute way they stand on leaves waving their arms around like children looking for hugs. But ultimately their actual role in the ecosystem is to sicken animals.

The courtship dance of the jumping spider has seven stages and lasts up to 20 minutes — a significant proportion of the animal’s lifespan, points out Anne Casselman. And all because the female spider is increasingly hard to impress.

Cameron has had some magical encounters with fireflies, made all the more exotic for their refusal to flash out West where she lives.

Nell Greenfiedboyce cohabited with a funnel weaver spider that bucked unsolicited predictions of her impending death and comparisons with Charlotte of E.B. White fame.

Brooke Borel’s kitchen ant saga is multimedia masterpiece that involves googling “how to remove ants from dog food” while cheering their efforts to carry food up the wall. One of our all-time favourites.

Bug love redux: The day I tried to love ticks

By: | October 7, 2016

Has anyone mentioned that LWONers love weird things? As professional nerds, we wring our hands a lot over things normal people don’t give a damn about. Like: Gribbles. Like: Poohsticks. Like: Marine iguanas. If you’re late to this game, this week, we’re parading forth a few musings on some times that we spent loving bugs. Or, in my case, trying and failing to love them. And yes, I know ticks aren’t bugs. Not even close. Not at all. 

The best thing I discovered while writing this, though, is that there are some other people out there who love ticks A LOT. Like  A LOT, A LOT. The other best thing I discovered? In the sweaty suburban wilds of Georgia, there is an official U.S. National Tick Collection. How’s that for awesome hand-wringery? And now, for the post, which originally appeared Feb. 26, 2016:

6368332077_9e5a91f7c1_zThere’s a certain category of mundane but distinctly unpleasant discovery: The blueberries you just mixed in your oatmeal explode mold into your mouth at 6 a.m. You read that Donald Trump won the Nevada Republican caucuses. You roll over in bed to find a tick lodged midriff-deep in your shoulder, wiggling about with a tenacity that suggests she plans to spelunk all the way through to your lungs.

“Fortuitously, the antibiotic you take prophylactically for Lyme disease is also the one you take to treat Chlamydia,” the doctor tells me cheerfully a day later when he checks the bruised and swollen bite and gives me a prescription. I stare at him, wondering why he assumes this chlamydia connection is so fortuitous for me. It’s also unlikely that I’ve got Lyme. Though local incidence is going up, Oregon saw only 44 reported cases in 2014 and Washington generally gets fewer than 30 a year – with just zero to three stemming from local ticks. But the fact that odds are in my favor fails to cheer me as I pluck tick after ever-more-engorged tick from my dog over the next several days. They’re small and hide well in her fur, so unless they pop out of her ears and stroll calmly across her face (some do) I can’t seem to find them until they’re attached and on their way to becoming fat and shiny as coffee beans.

Their emergence is, of course, just as much a sign of spring as the lovely purple grass widows my friend Roger and I had been out looking for when tickmageddon started last Saturday. By tick 10, I started to wonder: Aside from their reputation for transmitting more diseases than any other blood-sucking arthropod, why shouldn’t I find a way to appreciate ticks, too – from a safe distance away? Maybe I could even learn to love them a little bit. More…

 

Bug Love Redux: Jumping Spiders in Love

By: | October 6, 2016

The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation.  That way they’ll all be in one place. This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs.

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“Oh my god is this complexity ever going to end?” thought zoologist Wayne Maddison in 1974, when he first witnessed the elaborate courtship dance of the male jumping spider. The answer, as Maddison and our guest poster Anne Casselman discovered, is no. No, it is not. Read the skinny on the Salticidae shimmy here.

Bug Love Redux: Wonder TK

By: | October 5, 2016

The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation.  That way they’ll all be in one place. This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs.

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I wrote my first guest post for LWON five years ago. It’s about fireflies. I’m so happy to have since become a regular here, and also happy to have learned that the firefly researcher I contacted has written a book about fireflies. Sara Lewis’s book is Silent Sparks; you can read the original post here.

Bug Love Redux: Spider at the Window

By: | October 4, 2016

The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation.  That way they’ll all be in one place. This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs.

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A few years ago, a funnel spider made a home in Nell Greenfieldboyce’s window. In this beautiful essay from 2014, Nell becomes absorbed with the task of trying to love her. But this human-spider unrequited love story (like so many interspecies love stories involving spiders) ends in heartache.

Bug Love Redux: The Ant-Man Diary

By: | October 3, 2016

The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation.  That way they’ll all be in one place.  I have a feeling this isn’t making much sense.  However.  This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs.

photo-4This is one of my all-time favorite LWON posts.  Guest Brooke Borel is a curious science writer with a deadline, naturally looking for something else to do, finds ants in her kitchen.  The result is a Norse epic, a Greek tragedy, an Ibsen play, a story of love and loss, of fall and redemption, and a sudden descent into madness.  With video, diagram, and pictures.  Just go read it.