I have, objectively speaking, done a lot of cool stuff in my life. I once spent six weeks on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea. I’ve seen toucans, monkeys, and whales in the wild. I keep going to Switzerland. I was once on the local news in Kumamoto, Japan. Actually, it may have been twice. I don’t remember.
Does this sounds like bragging? I know, I’m sorry. It’s really not supposed to. Bear with me for a moment. Continue reading
I’ve just about recovered from my trip to Darmstadt, just outside Frankfurt, which was home to mission control for the recent landing of the tiny and now ‘sleeping’ Philae lander onto the surface of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. One of the joys of covering a European mission is the variety of accents and backgrounds involved; just as the lander had legs built in England and electronics from Hungary, so the team ranged from London-raised Matt Taylor (he of the shirt) to Italian flight director Andrea Accomazzo. This was a truly European mission, and as speaker after speaker at press conference after interview talked about ‘Europe’, ‘Europe’ and ‘Europe’ I wondered how this must look to the outside world.
It was a week of thanks and turkeys.
Scientists and editors claim not to like anthropomorphizing, but Ann did it anyway. With galaxies. Which breathe. No, really!
Guest Nell Greenfieldboyce watched a spider go about its business in her window for weeks, then wrote about it, and it’s lovely.
Those pronouncements on climate change? They start with people making measurements in very cold places. Craig knows – he’s been there and shoveled the snow.
For Thanksgiving, the People of LWON put pen to paper and expressed our thanks for crows, the sun, and you, Dear Reader.
Erik visited a new museum in Panama and took the opportunity to fill us in on a few million years of romances between the continents.
Last weekend, as a part of a much-needed vacation to Colombia, my wife and I took a long layover in Panama City. Also known as “home to that canal that the entire world needs to do business,” Panama City is a lovely town. Lately, people have taken to calling it the Dubai of Latin America because dozens of skyscrapers that have shot up in the last few decades (many of which are nearly empty).
What does one do with half a day in Panama City? If one has a small head, one buys a Panama hat at one of the many tourist shops (however, true Panama hats come from Ecuador). If one has a large head or else already has a hat he likes, one goes to Frank Gehry’s “Biomuseo,” the garish-yet-oddly-hypnotic-and-possibly-soon-to-look-dated science museum overlooking the city.
Dear Readers:
Writing down our thoughts and feelings is pretty normal for the People of LWON. We’ve even written our thanks before. But this year for Thanksgiving, we wrote our thanks on paper. With our hands. Whoa.
Click each image to enlarge.
And to you, Dear Reader: Thank you for reading us.
Love,
The People of LWON
Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with an even firmer stance on current environmental affairs, including reams of new data from more scientists saying, basically, news is not good. The New York Times called it “the starkest warning yet.” Little new was revealed in the report, rather it deepened the empirical resolve that changes we are now witness to are the tip of an ever-growing iceberg.
The findings of the IPCC are not numbers invented out of black boxes. They come from the ground, from sensors, from live people getting eye to eye with the changes that faraway news media eventually pick up.
In May of 2010, I had the back-breaking pleasure of excavating the desk of IPCC cryosphere author Konrad Steffen. Using a shovel, I dug through hard-packed snow to get to his desk and see what he’d been up to. Continue reading
My first impressions of the spider: It was big and it was smart.
The brownish spider was nearly two inches long. It had constructed a thick, complicated web in the corner of my kitchen window’s frame, outside of the house. On the wall inside, right next to the web, is a light fixture that almost always gets switched on at night.
“Look at this amazing spider!” I told my four-year-old son. He dutifully peered out at the spider huddled against the glass. Then he went back to work on his own web-like creation, a “machine” made of strings that stretched across the room. He had tied the ends to the fridge and the oven and the sink. He was using more string to attach a broom and various pots and pans. His machines often make it difficult for the rest of the family to walk through the house. Continue reading
I’ve just finished a story about gas and galaxies. You’re bored already, aren’t you. After I’d sent the editor a query about it, he took months to respond and then wanted several rewrites of the query; I think he was bored too. If gas and galaxies are so boring, why did I want so much to write about them, what was so interesting? Unfortunately I don’t usually figure that out until after I’ve written the story. But now the story is finished so I know what I think is interesting and unfortunately again, it didn’t make it into the story. Continue reading