Debunking Hollywood: Falling!!!

By: | January 9, 2015

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. shutterstock_96684256

Our hero is in dire trouble yet again. He stands on the rooftop, a villain in front of him, his feet inches from a seven-story fall. Sweat glistens on his brow as he fearlessly throws a punch but the villain is too quick. In a swift movement, the evil man kicks our hero in the stomach and he plummets toward the pavement below, the villain cackling with glee and twisting his mustache.

Ah! But just as his fate looks sealed, 20 feet down he catches the bottom of the fire escape and hangs precariously by one arm. Whew!

This kind of last-ditch-grab-for-safety is standard fare in almost any action movie. (The scene you’ve just read was an excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished trashy detective novel, Blades of Courage, part of the Slade McGee series. No, no, make that Icy Hot, part of the Chet Heartstrong series. I’m still ironing out the details.)

But how possible is it in reality? As a former rock climbing instructor, I’ve taken my share of falls – always with a rope firmly attached to me. Every time it happens, I’m shocked by just how fast a person can fall. Most times I don’t even know what’s happening until the rope catches me five or ten feet down. Continue reading →

Gender in the Paleolithic

By: | January 8, 2015

Bethany and SteveCamped with seven adults and five children on the south-central coast of Alaska, I was doing a little writing experiment. I had been following possible Paleolithic routes, taking off with adventurers across glaciers and mountains to get a sense of living and traveling in the same landscapes people faced tens of thousands of years ago. One thing was missing: families.

Following a hypothesized coastal migration route from 16,000 years ago, we headed out in a gaggle of sea kayaks. We’d been dropped off three hours by boat out of Whittier, Alaska, for a 9-day trip. By day 5, we were running low on food, turning to foraging, digging up clams, setting a shrimp pot, and catching whatever we could by hook and line.

As if going through a house after a nightly rampage of children and pajamas, one evening we put away toothbrushes and picked up stray, damp articles of clothing, hanging them on guy-wires from the kitchen tarp. And not like living in a house at all, we collected all food that wasn’t in hard-plastic bear boxes and packed it into bags to hang as high and as intricately as we could. We had a pulley system rigged up over the water, about a hundred pounds of food suspended from a rope thrown over a sturdy spruce hanging 30 feet above the incoming and outgoing tide. It was as far as we could get food from bears.

Gender was an issue from day one. Our tasks divided by male and female. It was never discussed. It just happened. That evening, I sat with Becky Ela, a mother of two from a farm family in Western Colorado. Becky and I sat at the edge of the kitchen tarp. I was on the dry ground and she was on a cooler whittling a stick into a rug of wood shavings. Rain fell in dusk light darkening into an early-July midnight. Tent lights went out, other parents putting kids down for the night. Continue reading →

A Snow Day

By: | January 7, 2015

snowy morningThe first snow of the year, and the first noticeable snow of this winter, fell here in D.C. on Tuesday. Yes, we know that our reaction to snow makes no sense. No, we don’t have enough snowplows. No, we don’t know how to drive in snow. You’re very clever for noticing, People Who Live In Consistently Snowy Places.

A few inches of snow wreaked the usual havoc. Screenshots of the traffic maps this morning showed red spaghetti. Schools delayed, then closed, or didn’t close and earned their very own trending hashtag (#closeFCPS). Some find the chaos profitable–“body shop weather,” an acquaintance who manages such a business called it. Many, I gather, find it annoying.

With no car to keep out of the ditch or kids to worry about, snow still holds that joy of childhood for me – the promise of a special day, just because the moisture and the cold collided in just the right way in my part of the world. Even though I don’t get days off for meteorology anymore, because I work for a company headquartered in a place that gets serious snow. But a snow day still feels special, a cold, white present from the sky, a literal gift from above. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Mars Rover of Calculators

By: | January 6, 2015

Anne Sasso's calculatorMy cell phone battery only capriciously holds a charge. My laptop battery isn’t much better. In fact, it seems that I have to replace my computer every three years because something goes kaplooey. The current one no longer emits sound. Oh, the darned CPU fan still sounds like a wheezing freight train chugging up a long, torturous incline. But I can’t hear the audio on Jimmy Fallon videos, use Google Hangout or rely on that essential noise that Outlook makes to remind me of an interview scheduled in 15 minutes.

Given my experience with electronic devices, I feel I can be forgiven for indulging in a little magical thinking related to my pocket calculator (which I’ve never actually carried in a pocket).

The pocket calculator in question? It’s a Sharp scientific calculator, model EL-5103S. It’s about the size of an iPhone 5. Today’s teenagers might even mistake it for some retro-hip version of a smartphone—until they flipped open the cover and saw the tiny screen and the vast array of buttons. Continue reading →

To File or Pile?

By: | January 5, 2015

Piles of papersWith the new year often comes an urge to purge all my unnecessary belongings. I dream of tossing entire filing boxes of documents into the recycling bin, hauling a dozen garbage bags of clothes to Goodwill, or whittling down my possessions to a few suitcases and moving into a tiny house.

This year, I was motivated to clean out my overstuffed boxes of papers after noticing a serene little hardcover book by Japanese organization consultant Marie Kondo in my neighbourhood bookstore. Kondo has one guiding principle for dealing with papers: “throw them all away,” she writes. “My clients are stunned when I say this, but there is nothing more annoying than papers.” And no, she’s not advocating scanning reams of documents onto the computer; she means banishing them for good.

After reading her advice, I sat on the floor of my office and started going through my seemingly endless folders. Old insurance policies, handwritten notes from conferences, class handouts on journalism ethics from my graduate school program, maintenance records for the 2001 Civic that I no longer owned, historical documents accumulated as part of research for a blog post written two years ago — all went into the trash. I started to warm up to the idea of discarding paper by default, instead of hanging onto it until it “expired” at some unknown future date. What if, upon receiving a document in the mail that seemed vaguely important, I immediately threw it away? Or after publishing a story, ditching my research materials within a week instead of keeping them for future stories that I never ended up writing?

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 3, 2015

Craig's face

 

December 29, 2014 to January 2, 2015

LWON continued revisiting our favorite posts this week with a series of holiday reduxes, including wishes for a “bullshit-free” 2015.

Craig goes primal with some dabs of red ochre face paint during an icy trek. Tens of thousands of years ago, artistically-inclined ancestors in Indonesia used the same type of pigment to depict hands on a cave wall.

Erik tells the tale of a kindly bookstore owner, also known as Doctor de Agua, who brought much-needed clean water to a village in Bolivia.

If you want to improve your performance, try tracking your outcomes, suggests Christie. Otherwise, you might suffer from the same ignorance as doctors who push unproven treatments.

Michelle breaks down her Bullshit Prevention Protocol and explains why fact-checking “can feel like a particularly demented form of needlepoint.”

And Cameron pays her respects to her favorite chess piece, the knight.

Image credit: Sarah Gilman

Holiday Redux: Funny How the Knight Moves

By: | January 2, 2015

1024px-Los_tres_caballos

 

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in May 2014, but sadly, the fickle inhabitants of this household have moved on to blackjack and Michigan rummy.

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The jokers in the house are starting to learn the game of kings.  The set they play with is piecemeal, with a wooden toy horse for a white knight and a lump of rainbow-colored glass for one of the pawns. The board is metal, designed for playing checkers on the road. But still the jokers learn.

Until now, chess has always seemed like a burden, something I should have learned but never really did–like shorthand, or how to fold a fitted sheet.  I don’t think I enjoyed, let alone finished, the few games I played as a kid.

Yet decades later, I’ve now checked out a kids’ book about chess to find something that makes the game seem less daunting. This is it: there are games that you don’t need all the pieces to play.

Continue reading →

Holiday Redux: The Pocket Guide to Bullshit Prevention

By: | January 1, 2015

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in April 2014, but its applications multiply. 

Wishing you a very happy—and bullshit-free—2015.

I am often wrong. I misunderstand; I misremember; I believe things I shouldn’t. I’m overly optimistic about the future quality of Downton Abbey, and inexact in my recall of rock-star shenanigans. But I am not often—knock wood—wrong in print, and that’s because, as a journalist, I’ve had advanced training in Bullshit Prevention Protocol (BPP).

Lately, as I’ve watched smarter and better-dressed friends believe all manner of Internet nonsense, I’ve come to appreciate my familiarity with BPP. Especially because we’re all publishers now. (Sharing a piece of news with 900 Facebook friends is not talking. It’s publishing.) And publishing bullshit is extremely destructive: It makes it harder for the rest of us to distinguish between bogus news and something real, awful, and urgent.

While BPP is not failsafe, generations of crotchety, underpaid, truth-loving journalists have found that it dramatically reduces one’s chances of publishing bullshit.

So I believe that everyone should practice BPP before publishing. No prior experience is required: Though it’s possible to spend a lifetime debating the finer points of BPP (and the sorely-needed news literacy movement wants high-school and college students to spend at least a semester doing so) its general principles, listed in a handy, portable, and free—free!—form above, are simple.

Here’s how they work in practice.

Continue reading →