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

Stepping Off the Multi-Tasking Treadmill

By: Christie Aschwanden | September 17, 2014

Yesterday in the Washington Post, I wrote about how I wanted to love my treadmill desk, but I just don’t.

I had high hopes. I’ve been a standing desk user for more than 10 years, long before they were a “thing.” I’m an active, restless person who already spends more than 80 percent of my workday standing, so a treadmill seemed like the natural next step in my workspace evolution.

But then I tried it. Walking feels good, and my impulse is to walk fast. The more I raised the speed (the treadmill can go up to four mph), the better the walking felt, but the more distracted I became from the task at hand. Walking slowly was even more distracting, due to my impulse to up the speed.

Walking on a desk treadmill, I soon discovered, is about as satisfying as eating a gourmet meal while driving. I love walking outside. Many of my best ideas come when I’m out walking my dogs. But combining walking and working seemed to diminish both experiences. Continue reading →

More Energy, Less Freedom

By: Michelle Nijhuis | September 16, 2014

The writer and filmmaker Swain Wolfe spent his earliest years at a tuberculosis sanatarium near Colorado Springs, Colorado, where his father was the director. After World War II, the sanatarium closed, his parents divorced, and his mother moved Wolfe and his sister to a ranch in western Colorado and then, when Wolfe was a teenager, to Montana. Wolfe dropped out of high school and found work on timber crews, in sawmills and slaughterhouses, and finally in the underground copper mines around Butte, Montana. He recalled his mining days in a 1994 interview in the Bloomsbury Review:

When you’re underground for a while, you begin to get the feel of where the ore flows, how hard the granite is one place from another, how hot the wall temperature is from level to level, where the earth slips and messes up the tracks, and things you knew but never had words for. Then one day after work you drive over to Anaconda to see your girl and you realize something is very different. Your world is never going to be the same because you cannot be on the surface without thinking about what’s underneath.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Bárðarbunga and the Winters of Winds, of the Sword, of the World

By: Alexandra Witze | September 15, 2014

Snow fell on the four quarters of the world; icy winds blew from every side; the sun and the moon were hidden by storms.

— Writer and folklorist Padraic Colum, citing an Icelandic legend in Orpheus: Myths of the World

When you live in Iceland, you kind of expect a rough winter. But sometimes the winters are harsher than most, and sometimes they seem to last year after year. To anyone clinging to this chunk of hardened lava in the North Atlantic, it might feel like the end of the world is at hand. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Richard Panek | September 13, 2014

September 8 – 12, 2014

The week began with a greatest hit from Cameron, a 2011 post that proved to be one of LWON’s most-visited—an ode to an astronomy professor who changed her mother’s life,

Then came a new and no less viral post from Erik questioning the professional ethics of another academic, Henry Walton Jones, Jr., a professor of archeology at Marshall College in Connecticut who goes by the nickname of “Indiana.”

Speaking of archeology: Craig visited western Nevada to investigate prehistoric tribal rituals, some of which he identified even before he got to the Burning Man festival.

Guest Elizabeth Bradfield considered the pros and cons of wind farming—and found some surprising benefits among the underseas population.

Christie commemorated the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks through her own perspective as an “army brat” who spent her childhood fearing the day her fighter-pilot father might fall from the sky.

13 Years Later and Still Bracing

By: Christie Aschwanden | September 11, 2014

When I realized that I was scheduled to post on the 13th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, I decided I should write something about the legacy of that day. I want so badly to find a kernel of hope, but current events leave me with nothing but pessimism. Violence has begotten more violence. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. has spent more than a TRILLION dollars on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war has cost nearly 7,000 American lives. At least 21,000 Afghan civilians and about 140,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, and the violence continues. Last night, President Obama announced that he’s sending 475 service members to Iraq. For most Americans, this news is a blip on the news cycle. For the one percent of the American public that serves in the military, it’s a message that they must continue to brace for the uncertainty of battle.

As we enter the 14th year since the 9/11 attacks, please take a moment to consider the families who serve and sacrifice for our country. Continue reading →

The Urban Ocean

By: Eizabeth Bradfield | September 10, 2014

Where do you fall on the issue of wind farms at sea? Tidal energy generators? Artificial reefs? Mooring fields? Glass bottles? Old piers? Shipwrecks? Are they junk to be cleared away or are they habitat to be protected? How are they to be categorized, and at what stage in their “useful” lives do they become useless, or vice versa?

A new study published in Current Biology deepens the mystery. Titled “Marine mammals trace anthropogenic structures at sea,” it describes how researchers put GPS tracking devices on North Sea harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and gray seals (Halichoerus grypus) in Britain and the Netherlands. They wanted to see how these high-level predators interacted with offshore wind farms in the area while they were foraging.

The North Sea has vast arrays of wind farms. A list on Wikipedia shows that the earliest array was put up in 2002 and by 2013 there were roughly 802 turbines spread across the waters of the UK, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and Norway. Some are only 1.6 km from shore while others are 32 km from the beach. Excluding the deep outlier Hywind array in Norway, they are in an average of 16 m of water (range: 0 – 45m). That’s a lot of infrastructure spread through just the kind of water in which small marine mammals love to forage.

The US doesn’t have acres of sea studded with wind turbines… yet. Continue reading →

Why Archeologists Hate Indiana Jones

By: Erik Vance | September 9, 2014

The jungles of the Peten are hot and sweaty. Most of the best places for archeology are. Field seasons are especially hot, since they are always during the driest time of year so that the site doesn’t get flooded. Howler monkeys boom from the parched trees, which barely twitch during the windless days. Meanwhile, pasty grad students toil away in the hot sun, quietly picking away at a stucco relief or the markings on a stone pillar.

In this heat, it’s good to wear a hat, preferably something sturdy with a wide brim. Every archeology site in the world is littered with rugged people in wide-brimmed hats talking about long dead civilizations. Tulane archeologist Marcello Canuto, for instance, prefers the khaki, floppy variety. Walking back to camp with after a long day at one Northern Guatemalan site, I can’t help but make the obvious comparison.

“Oh God,” he groans, “Don’t even go there. Indiana Jones is not an archeologist.” Continue reading →

Redux: Auditing Astronomy Class

By: Cameron Walker | September 8, 2014

This was first published in Dec 6, 2011 — it was originally a guest post, Cameron wasn’t yet an LWONer — and was honorable-mentioned for the American Institute of Physics’ 2012 science writing prize in the New Media category. Her mom sounds like a doll.
I’m not sure exactly where this story begins, but maybe it’s here: Sometime this summer, my mom decided to take an astronomy class. She had taken drama and philosophy classes through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley and audited a history of theater course. She’d heard that this particular astronomy class was aimed at non-science majors, and that the professor, Alex Filippenko, had won all sorts of teaching awards. She emailed him to see if it was okay for her to sit in – it was – and then convinced a few friends to join her.

Maybe what I should say next is that my mom has never been that interested in science. I actually didn’t know how much she didn’t like it until we talked about it recently. In college, she filled her science requirement with comparative anatomy, a class that required dissecting frogs and cats. “I hated the smell of formaldehyde,” she said. “Dinner was right after that. I just hated it.”

Astronomy had also gotten on her bad list. “Whenever I saw something in the paper about a comet, a supernova—I just didn’t read it. I thought, I’m never going to understand this anyway.”

This class had no formaldehyde, just a professor who has enough astronomy-themed T-shirts to cover three afternoons a week for a whole semester without repeating a shirt. Before each class, he played a piece of music that somehow related to the theme of the lecture—Clair de Lune, Stardust, Dark Side of the Moon, “popular stuff, like by Moby,” my mom said.

That’s how I first heard about what was going on in class. My mom called one day and asked if I knew what shepherd moons are. I didn’t (although I did know the song by Enya) so she explained. Continue reading →