Guest Post: Praised Be

By: | June 18, 2015

Casina Pio IV, Vatican City

“I have an idea,” said my friend Chris. We often walk and talk briskly together in the California beach town where we live. Not long before, we’d talked about how the Earth’s huge population is a major contributor to global warming. So I was only slightly amazed when she followed up with, “I think we should write to the pope.”

Although Vatican City has no families and a fertility rate of zero children per family, the Catholic Church opposes contraception. As leader of the Church, the pope has the power to make women half a world away bear children they do not want and which the world does not need. Would it do any good to ask him to change that policy? I wasn’t convinced. But I loved the idea of writing a letter that might move a pontiff and help save the world.

I knew the Vatican of the last few decades cared about science, accepting evolution and the Big Bang, for example, and sheepishly forgiving Galileo in 1992 (it takes guts to admit you were wrong). And the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in the Casina Pio IV (shown above), looks like a great place for a sabbatical.

Chris wrote up a draft of a letter to His Holiness, tactfully pointing out that the Catholic Church has a pivotal role to play in solving the problem of global warming. I added facts, references, and polish.

We had plenty of time. Our deadline was the encyclical on climate change to be released in the summer of 2015. That was a year away, a balmy summer and a dry winter away. Continue reading →

Island Bears

By: | June 17, 2015

beartongue

My fascination with bears began on a family road trip from Wisconsin to Yellowstone. To pass the time, my parents and I took turns reading from a book whose title now escapes me. Was it “Bear Attacks”? Or “When Man Becomes Prey”? Well, you get the gist. It was gruesome and terrifying, a delicious read when one is safely tucked inside a moving vehicle. But later, alone in my tent with only a thin sheet of nylon between me and the bear-ridden blackness, the most devastating passages came back to haunt me.

I’m no idiot. I didn’t bring any food into the tent. But my pants, no doubt infused with the heady scent of hot dogs and toasted marshmallows, lay wadded near the flap. So I worried. My ears strained to hear everything—every creak, every snuffle, every twig snap. Even the tiniest noises echoed through the still air like the crack of a gunshot. Near dawn I drifted into a fitful sleep punctuated by dreams of bear maulings.

I never encountered a bear that trip. But last summer when I visited the Apostle Islands, an archipelago that juts out from Wisconsin’s northernmost tip into the deep blue of Lake Superior, memories of that terrifying book flooded back. My husband and I had reserved an idyllic and isolated campsite on Sand Island, part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. We planned to kayak there. For weeks I had been nervous about the kayaking. Lake Superior is cold, and I am woefully inexperienced. But as I read up on the islands, a new worry emerged: The Apostle Islands are positively riddled with black bears. Continue reading →

Interesting Fact:

By: | June 16, 2015

zebra factoidThere are two ways of reading, according to my local primary school teachers. You can sound out the words or you can just look at the pictures and infer a story. Of course, this position encourages exposure to text for non-readers, but the idea pervades adult culture too. Scanning photos and skimming headlines passes for reading the paper.

I dispute it. A picture may tell a thousand words, but those words will be a limited subset of the language, not representative of what words can do. In recent years, talented graphic designers and video editors have made spectacular multimedia pieces possible. But in many cases, more viscerally stimulating media desensitize the reader from his task of immersing himself in the writing and creating the pictures in his own mind. Continue reading →

Postcards From IRL

By: | June 15, 2015

postcardA friend recently sent me a postcard from her overseas trip. The card reached me long after I’d seen her photographs on Facebook. By the time it arrived, she was back home in Washington DC. Still, I was delighted to receive the handwritten note. The thing about Facebook posts is that they’re broadcast to everyone. The postcard was personal, a note to say that she’d thought of me. It wasn’t necessary, and I didn’t expect that she’d have me on her mind as she was enjoying a vacation with some other friends. So the fact that she’d taken the time to send a personal note felt dear. Personal connections like these feel especially meaningful in the digital age. Sure, emails can be wonderful, but they can also be cut and pasted. Handwriting, well, it’s one of a kind. Just like my dear friend.

I’ve always loved postcards and hand-written letters, and thinking of about why reminded me of a post I published back in 2012 about what we’ve lost in the digital cloud. It’s reprinted below.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 13, 2015

18054254285_05cad8102d_k (1)June 8 – 12, 2015

Cameron got so discouraged about California’s annual June Gloom that she went back and revisited an old one; at least she has something to talk to the neighbors about.

You know those maps on which you place little markers that show where you’ve been?  Helen says the markers should really be lines, like spider silk, you could follow forward and backward and stay everlastingly connected.

Christie is on a tear.  Is there any reason on God’s earth why electronics last such a short time? or why they never seem to be fixable? or why the manufacturers who determine these rules shouldn’t take responsibility for recycling the ailing ones?

I remain obsessed with choosing between beauty and truth and in my line of business, I’d better choose truth.  But when truth is too complicated for my slack, inadequate neurons, then what the hell, I’ll choose beauty.

Jenny’s trying to do to her innards what yogurt does to milk.  It sounds a tiny bit iffy.  It certainly sounds onerous.  It also sounds soothing.

Getting Cultured

By: | June 12, 2015

1024px-Forks_and_spoons_(8164518682)Recently, I’ve been making my own yogurt.

I’m on one of those annoyingly limited diets, trying to get my messed-up gut to cooperate. I can’t have many of the things I love. Noodles. Huge pieces of bread slathered with butter (and then one more piece even though it’s going to spoil my dinner). Cereal—not even oatmeal, so Captain Crunch is definitely out of the question. Muffins with Skittles on top (or without). Anything with flour. Milky things. Feta cheese. That sweet-tart powder that comes in a pouch with a little white candy stick that you lick and dip. Rice. ‘Taters. Chocolate. I can use a little honey if I need sweetener, and I can put almond milk in my coffee. (Lesson: No honey in coffee. Terrible.) Almost all fruits and veggies are fine, as are meat and fish and hard cheese, plus most nuts. And bone broth. I’m supposed to make and eat bone broth. (It’s made with chicken or beef bones, you sicko.)

But I’m already pretty tired of the “legal” foods. I constantly want to break the rules. Because my sweet tooth is the size of my head.

Continue reading →

Truth vs. Beauty, Again

By: | June 11, 2015

18054254285_05cad8102d_k (1)I haven’t got much on my mind today that I want to think about so I distract myself with pictures. This one, as science pictures often do, conflates beauty and truth and let me repeat, beauty.  It’s a result of letting the Hubble Space Telescope take repeated pictures of a single cluster of galaxies.  Clusters are like families of galaxies, bound together by gravity.  I could go on for a long time about clusters but in a way I’m more interested in this picture on account of a personal belief that if you have to choose between truth and beauty, you should choose truth. Continue reading →

The Tyranny of Planned Obsolescence

By: | June 10, 2015

iMacG4

The post has taken me entirely too much time to write. Not because I’m procrastinating or writing slowly, but because I’m being held hostage by the spinning beach ball of death. I bought my current iMac in early 2011, which means that enough time has elapsed that the Apple Care warranty I purchased with it has expired and nothing works quite right any more. I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time seeking solutions in online forums, to no avail.

I generally avoid software updates on older machines, but when it was no longer possible to write 200 words without lobbing a string of expletives at the computer, I upgraded to a newer operating system. If anything, this just made the computer slower. In desperation, I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system, which helped not at all.

The body of my iMac is practically brand-new. The screen is beautiful, it’s only the guts that need upgrading. It seems tragic and wasteful that I can’t just replace a few of the internal parts.

I wish it was just the computer, but my four-year-old iPhone 4 has also become almost unbearable. It’s slow to respond to the touchpad, and it regularly freezes when I try to move from one app to another. But the body is still in perfectly good shape and I don’t really want to get another phone. Why can’t Apple make devices that last? These are the tools of my profession, so I can easily justify (and deduct) the expense of replacing them, but it makes my stomach churn to think about turning these devices into toxic heaps of garbage. Continue reading →