Debunking Hollywood: Drowning

By: | March 20, 2015

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. 

drowning

“Help!”

The lifeguard straightens in his chair, craning his neck to find the citizen in peril.

“Help!”

Over there, by the barrier floats! The victim’s face is obscured by great splashes raised in her violent struggle for survival. With a panicked plea, she kicks desperately and raises her arms in the signature distress wave, bending her elbows and crossing her hands above her head.

“I can’t swim!”

The lifeguard is up in a flash, ring buoy in hand as he dashes toward her, calling out reassurances. He tosses the life-ring to within reaching distance and tells her to grab it.

“Just a little to your left!” He calls.

With a desperate lunge, she clings to the floating life-line, and the lifeguard pulls her to safety and lifts her to the beach.

***

This scenario – reinforced by television and movie scenes – has become society’s platonic ideal of drowning, and it held sway even in lifeguard training up until the 1960s. That’s when Frank Pia, Chief Lifeguard on Orchard Beach in the Bronx, realized it didn’t square with the thousands of drownings and near-drownings he’d witnessed in his job. Continue reading →

G is for Goddamned Goshawk

By: | March 19, 2015

EllieGoshawkI knew something was wrong the moment I opened the orchard gate. My guinea fowl were squawking like crazy, buckwheat!, buckwheat!, and none of my two dozen or so chickens were anywhere in sight. I scanned the area around the poultry barn for signs of a predator, but saw nothing.

Until I reached the chicken house. As I entered the doorway to the chicken yard, which is secured by fencing wire on every side and overhead, I saw it — a young goshawk. It was inside the yard, having entered the same way that my chickens and guineas wander out during the day — through the open door.

Now I was standing in the doorway, blocking its exit and feeling rather pissed off. In another context, I would have been glowing with admiration for this beautiful bird. Instead, I was cursing. Between me and the goshawk lay a pile of guts and feathers — the remains of the chicken the hawk had been devouring until I came to interrupt the meal. Continue reading →

From Puffball to Predator

By: | March 18, 2015

knut and dorfleinOn December 6, 2005, a polar bear was born in captivity. His mother rejected him and his twin, and his twin died. The survivor was an adorable baby polar bear, but that phrase doesn’t need the initial adjective, does it? A baby polar bear is a little puffball, white with button eyes and perfect and cuddly. Zookeepers raised him. I fell in love. His name was Knut and he was a bit of an international sensation.

Knut was raised by zookeepers at the Berlin Zoo, most memorably Thomas Dörflein, a ponytailed zookeeper who fed him from a baby bottle and scratched his head. The internet filled with photos (like the one above) and videos of Knut and his keeper. Looking back, it seems this must have been early in the days of being able to watch video on the internet. I think I still had dial-up at home. It was a special event, cooing with coworkers over a tiny fluffy animal, while now you can do that any time you want on a screen in your pocket. Continue reading →

Now We Rhyme The Science Times

By: | March 17, 2015

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Dear friends! Forgive a change of form
A deviation from the norm
For on the feast of Saint Pat-rick
A man who liked his Limerick
We here present for all to see
The science news from A to Z
The facts from ‘cross the universe
The Science Times, told in light verse

Today above the fold (we think—
for we no longer read in ink)
We visit with the Nashville gent
Who tried to be our president
Look, he’s gone vegan! He’s lost weight!
He’s optimistic ’bout our fate!
The cost of solar’s going down
And energy the whole world ’round
Is getting greener—his new slides
Will linger on the brighter sides
No more talk of climate peril
He’s onstage with—is that Pharell?

Continue reading →

Redux Baltimore: Drugs, Guns, and Real Life

By: | March 16, 2015

This was originally published 8/23/2011.  More should have changed by now.  This is a sort of permanent redux.Today is my birthday, a good time to reflect. And one of the things I have found myself brooding over lately is my love of Baltimore. As fans of The Wire know, the city has more than its fair share of problems — drugs, violence, and HIV, to name a few. I moved to Baltimore in 2006. And I spent a healthy chunk of the nine months I lived there trying to understand why those problems exist. Specifically, I wanted to understand why Baltimore became a hotbed for heroin and how the city’s heroin addiction fueled the spread of HIV. I interviewed dozens of people and tried to make sense of what they told me. The end result was my graduate thesis.

The following piece is a chapter from that document. I’ve changed the name of the main character to protect his privacy, and I’ve shortened it a bit to make it more blog-friendly (though it’s still a long read).

Readers of LWON, meet Leroy.

Leroy Wallace, standing in the lobby of the Baltimore’s Moore Clinic, is bird thin beneath his dark jeans and cream sweater.  A gold cross, suspended from a fragile chain, hangs halfway down his chest.  He introduces himself, shakes my hand, and we follow a nurse to a quiet room where we can talk.  Leroy is eager and his false teeth, one of which is gold, clack rhythmically as he tells me the story of how he became a heroin addict. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 14, 2015

IMG_2033March 9-13, 2015

On Friday the 13th, Cassie told us the sad story of the people who died after taking a perfectly reasonable-seeming medicine, and what that means for the drugs we take today.

Ann told us what today’s brilliant young astronomers are up to: crazy stuff, like figuring out a rule of thumb for guessing the density of faraway planets.

Jessa followed up on the quiz from two weeks ago with a brief lecture on symmetry, and how big of a deal it is for both arthropods and humans.

Cameron considered geography and personality and why, as an introvert, she prefers the ocean (above), then asked her friends what kind of landscape they like.

On Monday, Richard reached into the vaults to rerun a post on science, America, and the Enlightenment. Remember the good ol’ days, when people thought empiricism was important?

photo: Cameron Walker

 

Watkins’ Lethal Elixir

By: | March 13, 2015

Elixir_SulfanilamideOn September 27, 1937, Susie Mae DeLoach caught her leg on a strip of barbed wire. The wound festered, and the infection spread, eventually reaching her heart. None of the remedies DeLoach’s doctor recommended seemed to have any effect. And by the time her family called Dr. Johnston Peeples for a second opinion, she was gravely ill. Peeples prescribed a new medication—a sweet, ruby liquid called Elixir Sulfanilmide. DeLoach’s kidneys began to fail, and a little over a week later, she was dead.

Others in the South were dying too—a farm laborer in Mississippi, a butcher in Tennessee, an eight-year-old boy in Oklahoma. More than 100 people died in the fall of 1937. They suffered from a variety of maladies, but all exhibited remarkably similar symptoms toward the end: vomiting and an inability to urinate. And all shared a common remedy—Elixir Sulfanilmide. Continue reading →

Another Brick in the Anti-Copernican Wall

By: | March 12, 2015

8480735637_c2f3a78185_cThe Hubble Fellows are — forgive me — young stars: young PhD astronomers granted the money to go to whatever astronomy-doing place they want to go to and do whatever astronomy they want to do.  And once a year, the Hubble Fellows give public talks about what they’re up to, so any astronomy writer with a brain knows that these young folks are doing the next science and will be all over those talks.

The first thing I notice, because I’m unbearably trivial, is that the young men scientists in their shirts and chinos/jeans with stuff in their pockets are dressed more casually than the older men scientists wearing sports jackets which they clearly keep handy in a pile under their desks.  And the young women scientists are dressed unlike the older women scientists who seem to feel the necessity for dressing as much as possible like the older men scientists.  The second thing I notice is how hard I have to work to figure out what they’re talking about but once I do, it’s often so ingenious that I can see what evolution saw in humans. Continue reading →