The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

What Does Today’s Possible Rocket Launch Have to Do With Japanese Pop Music? (I’ll Tell You: Very Little)

By: Helen Fields | January 30, 2015

Friday morning, if all goes well, NASA is launching a satellite with the name SMAP. As I write late Thursday night, it’s perched atop a Delta II rocket an hour up the California coast from Santa Barbara. It was supposed to launch this morning, but high-altitude winds got in the way.

Like so many things in NASA world, SMAP is an acronym. It stands for Soil Moisture Active Passive. The satellite is monitoring soil moisture, and it’s using both active and passive methods to do so.

I don’t know any more about the science than a quick perusal of NASA’s website got me, but I do know this: SMAP is a really silly-sounding name.

This is not a new opinion. I would like you to know that this is an opinion I have had more than 15 years to develop. This is not the first thing named SMAP to enter my life. Continue reading →

Sassy Smocks and Moist Panties

By: Christie Aschwanden | January 28, 2015

Words are a writer’s currency, and we each have our favorites. The first word I remember falling in love with was onomatopoeia. It had a satisfying rhythm, plus there was the delight of discovering, oh — there’s a word for that.

That joy of discovery was exactly what I felt reading Lost in Translation, a delightful new book by Ella Frances Sanders, who draws illustrations to help explain “untranslatable word from around the world” like trepverter (Yiddish for the perfect retort that comes to you later, when it’s too late), iktsuarpok (Inuit for the act of repeatedly going outside to check if anyone’s coming), cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish for a man who insists on leaving his shirt tails untucked) and tsundoku (Japanese for leaving unread a book you’ve bought, perhaps piling it on top of a stack of other books you haven’t read).

English also has no true equivalent to my own favorite foreign word: gemütlichkeit, a German term that connotes the kind of warm coziness you feel when gathered around a fire with your dearest friends, perhaps drinking Glühwein. It must exist in some language, but I’m still seeking a word to describe a dog’s joy while frolicking in fresh snow.

Many of my beloved English words are onomatopoeic ones like flicker, boing, ripple, riffraff, guffaw and clusterfuck. As a kid, my favorite part of art class was the smock. Not the thing itself, but the occasion to say the word aloud, repeatedly. Smock, smock, smock. I don’t know why I love it, but I do. I also love sassy and saucy and, especially, sashay. I could say that word all day. Continue reading →

Hard Times in the Younger Dryas

By: Craig Childs | January 27, 2015

This time last year, most of North America was buried in an unusual cold period. The jet stream had hemorrhaged in early January and the Polar Vortex that usually sits atop the hemisphere like a halo came pouring down. Known as the 2014 North American Cold Wave, temperatures plummeted, particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest where double digits below 0 °F appeared for weeks. Lake Superior froze more solidly than it had in decades.

That’s when I went to the Superior shore of northern Wisconsin where nearby temperatures had reached -37 °F. If I wanted to get the feel of a cold spell, I figured this was my moment. At the time, I was writing about the Younger Dryas, a cold anomaly that hit the Northern Hemisphere 12,800 years ago and continued for a thousand years. The world at that point had been gradually warming, the Ice Age coming to an end. Suddenly, within the space of a decade, ocean currents reversed in the Atlantic, probably triggered by cold, meltwater flows coming off the shrinking Laurentide Ice Sheet. This reversal sent the world back into the Ice Age, and brought the end of the Clovis tradition in North America, the climate upheaval speeding up megafauna extinctions.

I don’t like writing about events without witnessing them, so I set off across frozen Lake Superior out of Ashland, Wisconsin, pulling a sled behind me with enough gear to last several days. I wanted a taste of the Younger Dryas. Continue reading →

Rainforest Drop In

By: Lesley Evans Ogden | January 26, 2015

I didn’t intend to fall in love with the rain forest. It crept up on me, imperceptibly at first, because the West Coast was never a place I had intended to stay. My roots were nurtured in the farmland, lakes and forests of Ontario before transplantation to the West, an alien habitat of strangely mild temperatures plus rain, rain, and more rain. I anticipated my westward migration as a transient phase. So I kept my emotional distance from this adoptive habitat, or so I thought. But recently, my strong attachment to this lush green place has become impossible to deny.

I spent my childhood in a land of predictable and obvious seasons. Summer was humid, hot, and thunder stormy. Autumn was crinkly, red-leaved and crisp. Winter was snowy and eye-icicly cold. And spring was muddy, rainy, and greenly profuse. So as I adapted to my new surroundings, one of the strangest, most disconcerting experiences was a momentary loss in time. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | January 24, 2015

January 19 – 23

Cassandra explains why the flu shot is ineffective this year, what H and N stand for, how the virus outevolved the statisticians, and why to get the shot anyway. A magisterially thorough explanation, and one feels better for it already.

Cameron has always liked maps, all kind of maps, maps that outline human influence on terrain, maps of holiday lights even. But now she’s thinking about the dark places in between and surrounding the lights.

I got the flu shot, and then I got the flu. I try to understand Cassie’s explanations and arguments but can see only seraphim and devils. The flu is just flat-out medieval and the 21st century is very little help.

Helen’s lovely little turtles, fwip, fwip, fwipping their way down the beach to the brightest light around, the ocean. And just like your cousins on Facebook, the turtles come back again full circle.

Richard watches the documentary A Brief History of Time. He finds out that seeing is not so much believing — because general relativity is seriously unbelievable — as it is understanding. “Of course,” he says.

______

sea turtles by Claudio Giovenzana www.longwalk.it, via Wikimedia

Of Time and Turtles

By: Helen Fields | January 22, 2015

On Tuesday two people who I met a few years ago posted similar pictures. One still lives in the town of Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where I briefly lived; the other, last I heard, had moved even farther north, to somewhere in the Norwegian wilds.

Each posted a picture showing the bright yellow light of the sun – the first time, I believe, that either had seen it in 2015. Its yellow disk glowed, a bright return after the twilight of winter noons.

In Kiruna, at 68 degrees north, the sun set the second week of December and stayed down. Now it’s up for nine minutes longer every day. By the end of May, it will stop setting entirely. Here at 39 degrees north, the sun will be up for almost 10 hours today.

Somehow, after I left the Arctic, people kept on living. It’s one of the most artificial things about social networking, that it keeps us in touch with acquaintances who would otherwise have drifted away. But it’s also one of the wonders. The odd childhood friend appears. Cousins’ kids grow up and get opinionated. College networks reassemble. Continue reading →

Ask Your Doctor, Much Good It Will Do You

By: Ann Finkbeiner | January 21, 2015

Q: Oh, you’re a doctor! Oh good! I need a doctor. I had the flu shot but I’ve got the flu anyway. I feel like roadkill looks.

A: You do know, don’t you, that since this year’s flu shot is only 23% effective, you had an 89% chance of getting the flu.

Q: Is that math quite right? Never mind, regardless of math, I’ve definitely got the flu and I’d put my faith in the flu shot and I’ve been betrayed. So why, when I got the flu shot, did I still get the flu?

A: First you have to understand that flu counts as flu only if you show up at a doctor’s office, an emergency room, or a morgue. Otherwise, you’re on your own and who knows what you’ve got.

Q: I’ve got the flu. Would you please just answer my question. Why did I get the flu?

Continue reading →

A Few Good Maps

By: Cameron Walker | January 20, 2015

640px-Claudius_Ptolemy-_The_World I’ve probably said this before, but I really like maps. In college, I bought a huge collection of used maps at a geography department sale to use as wrapping paper. When we lived in Oregon, we got a gigantic one of the state to put on the living room wall. (We also got an even bigger one of California, which should have been a clue that we might come back.) And there’s a poor cartographer who I keep interviewing without a story in sight, just because his job seems so cool. Continue reading →