Walking in the Land in Between

By: | November 3, 2015
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The Cotswold escarpment, from the village of North Nibley.

I love walking.

This seems like such a silly thing to say, like “I love breathing.” We’re humans, you and me. Walking is our thing. Being bipedal makes us us. But walking is also an activity that I love. It takes me places, it shows me things, it gives me ideas, it calms my nerves. So I was pleased to discover that someone had written a whole book about it: Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit, published in 2000.

In her chapter on Pilgrimage, Solnit mentions the idea of a liminal state. This is an in-between place, where you don’t have family responsibilities or rank; instead of your regular life, you are in a state of possibility. It comes from the Latin limin, threshold. When you’re a pilgrim, you have stepped out of the secular world, over the threshold into this other world.

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0/0/1969

By: | November 2, 2015

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I know a guy who doesn’t have a birthday. Andy* was born in the Moroccan desert. His parents were nomads. There were no smartphones in the 1960s and a nomadic tribe didn’t have much use for the Gregorian calendar. And when it came to recalling the exact day and month of Andy’s birth, there were higher priorities.

Twenty years later, planning to move to Switzerland, he needed a national ID. Thanks to some artifact of Moroccan bureaucracy, he found himself with a state-issued birth certificate that listed only a date – 1969, his best guess at the year of his birth.

When he arrived in Switzerland, he needed a driver’s license. Because of the mismatch between required fields and available data, the compromise was an ID with the birthdate 0/0/1969. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 31, 2015

Revised alienSally says the big breakthrough in hyper super fast electronics is not silicon, not graphene, but the black gunk that collects in your septic system pipes.  At least there’d be plenty of it.

Erik says the hardest of the hardest-core people are not the mountain climbers or the trekkers on the Inca trail, but the bug nerds in the jungle.

Our new Person of LWON, Sarah Gilman (pretty hard-core herself) carries out a noble social experiment wearing an alien costume, which feels pretty weird until she meets the lady in the squirrel suit.

Christie really wishes people would for chrissakes stop thinking a little less reflexively and a little more statistically so she could stop writing about the wisdom of mammograms.

Rose wonders whether Moore’s Law, which says computer speed doubles every two years, might not have been a evil lie and market manipulation by Intel.  She investigates.

Happy Halloween (in the U.S.) and set your clocks back tonight (in the U.S.).  The rest of the people in the world should carry on as usual.

A Moore’s Law Mystery

By: | October 30, 2015

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You know those things that people say as an aside? Things that aren’t their main point, but just kind of come out of their mouths. Fun facts, little anecdotes, steam of consciousness blips. I find that when I’m looking back at my notes from conferences, the things that pop out to me are, largely, those things. Not what the talk was about, but those little snippets and asides.

Recently I was at a conference about biology. And when I looked back at my notes one thing popped out at me. A scribbled note that said: “Moore’s Law marketing scam.” The line came as an aside in a talk by Rob Carlson, the Managing Director of a company called Bioeconomy Capital. Carlson is also the author of a book called Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life.

Carlson says he wouldn’t have used the word scam. He would have used the phrase “marketing head fake.” What he said went something like this: Moore’s Law was a marketing fake invented by Intel to slow down their competition. In reality, they were working much faster than that internally, but they invented Moore’s Law to get everybody else to slow down. This is a big claim to make.  Continue reading →

Like Groundhog Day: the Mammogram Story That Won’t Die

By: | October 29, 2015

breastcancerBefore I begin, a disclaimer: I’m sick of writing about mammography. It feels like groundhog day — I’ve been writing the same damn story, over and over and over again, for nearly 15 years. This is at least the fifth time I’ve written a LWON post about mammograms. (See also: Breast cancer’s false narrative, The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, FAQs about breast cancer screening, and Breast cancer’s latest saga: misfearing and misplaced goalposts.)

So why I am I writing about mammograms again? Because even though I just published a story at FiveThirtyEight explaining why science won’t resolve the mammogram debate and a feature at Mother Jones asking how many women have mammograms hurt? (the answer is millions) the harms of mammography continue to be ignored or mischaracterized in the media. Every time this happens, I get letters from people asking me to please clarify this point again. Just this past week, a New York Times editorial penned by two breast radiologists and a breast surgeon declared, “Let’s stop overemphasizing the ‘harms’ related to mammogram callbacks and biopsies,” while an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about breast cancer” claimed that, “the idea that anxiety is a major harm doesn’t have much scientific support.” (In fact, at least one study has found long-term consequences from a false alarm.)

What both of these opinion pieces miss and what too many women still don’t know is that while 61 percent of women who have annual mammograms will have a callback for something ultimately declared “not cancer,” this isn’t the most damaging problem. Such false alarms are more devastating than they might seem (I can’t think of another recommended medical test with such a high false positive rate), but most women would probably gladly accept this risk in exchange for a reasonable chance to prevent a cancer death.

Here’s the bigger problem: screening mammography has failed to reduce the incidence of metastatic disease and it’s created an epidemic of a precancer called DCIS. The premise of screening is that it can find cancers destined to metastasize when they’re at an early stage so that they can be treated before they turn deadly. If this were the case, then finding and treating cancers at an early stage should reduce the rate at which cancers present at a later, metastatic stage. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happened. Continue reading →

An extraterrestrial social experiment

By: | October 28, 2015

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When I put on the metallic silver unitard and homemade alien mask that rainy morning, I had no idea that I was about to embark on one of the most stressful weekends of my life.

How could I? I love wearing costumes. One Halloween, I dressed as a vulture-like Skeksis from Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, and stalked through the local grocery sniffing packages of meat. Another, I made 30 little men out of fabric and baling wire, gluegunned toothpick spears into their tiny mitts, and sewed them all over my clothes. When my friends asked what I was, I screamed that I was “BEING ATTACKED BY TINY PEOPLE!”

A mask gives you freedom to reinterpret yourself. Sort of like the way being drunk cleanses you of all your inhibitions: Maybe you dance “15,000 times better in costume than out,” as one of my friends puts it, or maybe you finally have an excuse to talk to that cute stranger dressed as a box of wine. To wear a costume is to take on a sort of power.

But the difference with my alien getup was that it wasn’t Halloween. It was an ordinary March day. As a newcomer to Portland, Oregon, I had decided to take on the role of the ultimate foreign visitor for a travel story that I was writing – a sort of cross between performance art and social experiment where I would spend 48 hours seeing the city’s sights through black, ovoid eyes. There was a tenuous journalistic angle, in that Oregon had the highest per capita rate of UFO sightings in 2014, and Portland was a hotspot. But it was personal, too: Moving from a town of 1,500 to a city of 600,000, I felt invisible. I yearned, with tinges of existential dread, to set myself apart from the faceless masses. To be a special snowflake. A special alien snowflake.

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New Person of LWON: Sarah Gilman

By: | October 27, 2015

Sarah Gilman 2Sarah Gilman enters the stage tomorrow as a New Person of LWON. I’m pleased to usher her onto the page after having been on the same team trekking across an Alaskan icefield, jammed in a tent during a white out. We survived without going at each other with ice axes. That’s a good thing.

Gilman double majored in studio art and biology. The former still has her doodling, watercoloring, weaving and sewing in her spare time. The latter involved studying parasite-mediated sexual selection among white crowned sparrows at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in central Colorado. She toted a giant microphone into the woods by mountain bike everyday at 4 or 5 a.m. This is where she learned how much she loves fieldwork and how much she hates what she calls “the scientific publishing ratrace and the obtuse, unreadable format of scientific papers.” After eight years working as a journalist and editor for High Country News in Colorado, she’s landed in Portland, OR. Welcome her into the fold. Wonderful things to come.

So Hard Core

By: | October 27, 2015

shutterstock_187066352Many years ago, before I was a science writer, but after I tried being a scientist, I spent some time in the outdoor industry. It’s a weird phrase, I know, but it covers anything related to activities like skiing, backpacking, kayaking and generally avoiding getting a real job.

We did a lot of guiding and working at summer camps while selling outdoor gear to make rent. And all the while, planning our next adventure into the wilderness and parts unknown. Occasionally, very rarely, one of us would be sponsored to have a truly epic adventure in Antarctica or an African rainforest. But those were only the seriously hardcore.

If you work in this field long enough, you find there is a certain kind of bravado that goes along with the outdoor industry – a sort of one-upmanship about who is the most outdoorsy.

Hardman one: “Yeah, so last year when I was trekking in Nepal with a community of Sherpas, I just couldn’t handle all the tourists.”

Hardman two: “Oh yeah, when I was walking the Inca trail with nothing but my sandals and leatherman tool I had the same problem.”

Hardwoman: “Oh, I never have that problem. Because where I go, there aren’t any tourists.”

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