There Goes the Sun

By: | April 16, 2015
TSE1999Europe
That’s me in the Black Sea, lower right, waving. (You might have to squint.)

During a total eclipse of the sun, the landscape darkens. But you knew that. What you might not know—what I didn’t know, anyway, when I observed a total solar eclipse on August 11, 1999—is that the experience comes with a lot of other sensory overload.

I found myself thinking about that total eclipse while reading about the one that was visible last month—visible, that is, if you were among the few eyewitnesses in the high northern latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1999, though, the path of totality cut across the heart of Europe and the abdomen of Asia, ranking it among the most-watched total eclipses of the sun in human history. I myself saw it from the deck of a cruise ship in the Black Sea, courtesy of a magazine that paid all expenses—round-trip air to Athens, cruise passage, ground transportation—in exchange for an 800-word article. (Plus the fee for writing the article.) (Those were the days.) While I clearly remember the sight of the moon’s disk slipping in front of the sun’s—somewhere I have a tape recording of my on-the-scene musings, which, as I recall, consisted mostly of “Wow”s—I also can conjure, just as vividly, memories of what I didn’t expect. Continue reading →

A Sense of Many Places

By: | April 15, 2015
Two women sniff a fruit tree.
Two of the People of LWON investigate a fruit tree.

In the past half year, I’ve traveled a lot.

I’ve always traveled a lot. Until recently there’s been a heavy emphasis on longer trips: going to live in a foreign country or hang out on a ship for a few weeks or months. In the five and a half years I was freelancing, time was basically limitless, but money was tight. Now, thanks to a steady office job with an employer that is friendly to the idea of three-day weekends, I’ve been able to start taking short trips to visit friends around the country.

I have a love-hate relationship with travel. There’s the expense and the packing and all that time squeezed into a sardine can with wings. Also, I love home so much, it’s hard to leave it.

Christie, one of the People of the LWON, has written thoughtfully about staying home. For all of 2010, she stayed within 100 miles of the farm where she and her husband live in western Colorado. If I were to clumsily condense Christie’s message, it would be something like this: Stop traveling so much. Be at home in your place. Get to know your neighbors.

But, if I took her advice, I wouldn’t get to hang out on her farm.

Continue reading →

The Dragons’ Third Stir: the Next Bigge One

By: | April 13, 2015

shutterstock_148606181In keeping with the brave tradition of gullible, single-source reporting, here’s an astounding science news report.  It ran in the News and Views section of the prestigious journal, Nature, a couple weeks ago, I don’t know how I missed it, and it surely deserved more than the brief flurry of attention it got on Twitter.   In brief: global warming will almost certainly trigger The Third Stirring of the world’s dragons.  The report’s authors, borrowing a phrase from Geoffrey of Exmouth, say this will be “the bigge one.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 11, 2015

3536058968_bf7418f169_oApril 6 – 10

Have you ever had to endure the smug cocktail party contention that “biology is just chemistry, chemistry is just physics, and physics is just math” (and so all of life is reducible to math)? Abstruse Goose demolishes that glib noise with a thought experiment that reverses the formula.

Michael Balter’s brontosaurus story has everything. Internecine science-mag warfare! An embargo scandal! Stephen J. Gould! Unfairly maligned stamps! Oh, and a giant thunder lizard.

Michelle and frequent guest Judith Lewis Mernit undertake a closely considered reading of Jonathan Franzen’s climate piece. They dive deep: if you must choose between the climate and the environment, is anything acceptable as collateral damage? Can we really afford to think of anything as expendable?

GM crops are bad, Craig shows us, but not for the reason your crazy aunt thinks they are.

“When a scientific theory comes face to face with new facts, scientists adjust the theory accordingly, and journalists should do the same.” Christie bravely wades into the Rolling Stone rape story fiasco.

See you next week!

Guest Post: Brontosaurus and Me

By: | April 10, 2015

Brontosaurus_Copyright_DavideBonadonna (1)The biggest science story this week was really, really big. Brontosaurus, weighing in at about 16 metric tons, is a taxonomic contender once again, thanks to a 300 page long cladistic analysis in the online journal PeerJ.  (Spoiler alert: Yes, the rest of this piece will include puns, jokes and allusions to classic films just as corny as these.)

Every major and minor news outlet in the world seems to have the story, and it’s no surprise. This is not just a major science story, but also a cultural event of monumental proportions. How do I know that? Simple: even The New Yorker weighed in with a commentary on the paper. That either means the news has very deep resonance for humanity (including New Yorkers), or that The New Yorker is slumming it these days, or a bit of both. You decide.

As pretty much every reporter pointed out, Brontosaurus is an “iconic” dinosaur that lost its wonderful name (“thunder lizard” in Greek) through no fault of its own. The blame can be put squarely on Othniel Marsh, the 19th century dino hunter who—in his greed to discover as many dinosaurs as possible—named one skeleton Apatosaurus in 1877 and then named another, very similar, skeleton Brontosaurus in 1879. Four years after Marsh’s death in 1899, paleontologists decided that they were the same beast and so Brontosaurus lost out thanks to the rules of scientific nomenclature. I don’t need to tell you more because, as a sophisticated, scientifically literate reader of LWON, you will have read at least one if not more of the numerous news stories that relate the tale of the “Bone Wars” in pretty much the same terms. So to refresh yourself on the details, simply click on any of the many, many—no, wait, read MY STORY!

Okay, now that you know this piece is going to be at least partly about me, let’s get shameless. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Fundamentalist Comp Lit

By: | April 9, 2015

nontrivial_subfieldI suppose somebody could actually think these things.  I doubt that person would be in comp lit, though.  I suppose reductionism comes in here somewhere but in spite of having it explained 100000 times, I don’t understand it.  I don’t know, I’m just so depressed that Abstruse Goose seems to have fallen down.  Oh Abstruse Goose, we love you get up.*

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http://abstrusegoose.com/544

*That’s from a poem by Frank O’Hara.

Remnant of Eden

By: | April 8, 2015

IMG_2596A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. I wanted to see what besides corn and soybeans lived out here. Not much, I found. Spiders and ants were few and only the smallest species survived. There were some mushrooms, but not many, and I happened into a whitetail deer one night. Otherwise, it was a catastrophic biological landscape, as if a bomb had gone off killing almost everything but a couple engineered species.

Thrashing out of the hot, dripping fields, my skin coated in sweat and grimy soil the consistency of shoe polish, I set off looking for signs of biologic hope in the area. I ended up at small patch of what is called virgin prairie, a plot of ground near the forgotten town of Butler Center where crops had never been planted. The town itself was gone, plowed under and turned into rows of corn, while this plot called the Clay Hills Preserve had been set aside. No plow had ever touched the ground.

Ruth Haan, a woman in her eighties, was one of the last on a board of volunteers overseeing the preserve. Locals warned me that Haan was losing her mental faculties. Her niece who drove her to the site to meet me on a blistering summer day said right in front of her that she was getting a little loopy.

“Oh, honey, I just need a little help now and then,” Haan said in her sundress, the fat of her arms hanging like handbags.

Haan pushed her wheeled walker across bumpy ground to reach the fence marking the refuge that she’d known her entire life. “Volunteers haven’t met for quite a while because most of us have died,” she said. “I sure hope someone will keep an eye on this after I’m gone; it’s the last piece around.” Continue reading →

Journalists Should Act More Like Scientists

By: | April 7, 2015

UVAshutterstock

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” — Some wise person who wasn’t Einstein.

“I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” [Rolling Stone managing editor, Will] Dana, said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.”

I’ve never liked that (fake) Einstein quote, because it conflates stupidity with insanity. But I couldn’t help thinking of it when I read the Dana quote in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report on what went wrong on the now-discredited Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus.” The story recounted a harrowing tale of a University of Virginia student’s alleged gang rape at a campus fraternity house.

I’m not going to rehash all the problems with the Rolling Stone story (you can read all about it in the report). Let’s just say that something went very wrong, and the magazine’s tone deaf response to the report gives journalism another black eye. By insisting that,”Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting,” Rolling Stone editors essential threw the alleged victim, “Jackie,” under the bus.

The problem wasn’t that the magazine gave too much weight to Jackie’s story, it’s that they had settled on the story they wanted to tell before they’d ever gathered the facts. As Jay Rosen notes in his blog, “[This narrative] didn’t start with Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She was sent on a search for where to set it.” Continue reading →