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

The Institute of Making

By: Jessa Gamble | March 26, 2013

The first commercial object I remember coveting – and receiving – was a Spears toy hand loom. I must have been about eight. My family was not one in which children made wish lists for Christmas, let alone by brand name, but my friend Kathryn had this thing and I needed one. I was actually kind of amazed when my father agreed and produced it.

There’s a beauteous mathematical truth in the way that alternating pinholes and slots could turn into a machine. Push down on the shaft, and the warp threads would cross like closing spikes on a venus fly trap. Send the shuttle through, and let the shaft spring back up. In three seconds I had done the same work as if I had threaded a needle and painstakingly run the obstacle course, up and down, across forty-odd woolen strings.

The elegance was very appealing, to a mind that was just learning to think about dividing things in half. Continue reading →

Correlation, Speculation and the Periodicity of Environmental Journalism

By: Thomas Hayden | March 25, 2013

These are down times for environmental journalism – or so you’d think, judging by recent news and the attendant hand wringing. The New York Times not only disbanded its environmental desk in January, but shut down its popular Green Blog early in March, also. Meanwhile the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, longtime environmental correspondent a reportorial force of nature in her own right, decamped for the White House beat. Quite probably a lot of other bad-seeming things happened, too.

But the reality is that significant swings in attention paid to environmental issues are the norm, and not necessarily a sign of Some New Bad Thing. Sure, to young reporters who hopped on the recent Long Boom of interest in environmental journalism, a Google Trends graph such as the following, showing the relative volume of web searches for the term “environment,” could be alarming: Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | March 23, 2013

March 18 – 22

FOLWON* guest poster Brooke Borel introduces the world to the bed bug hockey stick graph. Read it and you will understand why data journalism is about to change the world.

That’s highly relevant for Erika’s post, because as she tells us, you only have control over your data until you become a patient. What’s more, as she informed us in February, in the age of Big Data, there is no way to keep patient information anonymous.

Christie tells us about invisible flu, the kind that leaves you symptom-free –and dangerous.

Beer is the new wine. Or so we think. Heather tells us that the Natufians knew that 13,000 years ago.

Have you ever wondered who holds the patents on the atom bomb? That’s only the least crazy thing in Ann’s post about what might be the most sinister conspiracy of the atomic age.

*Friend of LWON, i.e. multiple guest poster

The sniffle, hack, sneeze blame game

By: Christie Aschwanden | March 22, 2013

The storytelling begins the morning you wake up with a slight scratch in your throat. Oh, this is nothing, you tell yourself, as if denial was the best antidote to a virus. If I just sip some throat-soothing tea, I’ll be fine.

When the runny nose starts, you load up on oranges or Fisherman’s Friend and promise yourself an early bedtime. When evening rolls around, your head is on the verge of exploding with mucous. You can try to hit the sack early, but it’s no use. The mucous is flowing fast and furious now, and perhaps you’re coughing too. You’ll get no sleep tonight.

When morning arrives, you’re exhausted and cranky and this is when the next phase of storytelling begins. You need an explanation — what is it, and why me?

Without a bunch of lab tests, you won’t find any certainty. But that’s ok, because you’ll invent an explanation that at the very least feels true. Oh, it’s that flu that was going around at work. I must have caught this from that coughing bastard on the plane. Obviously, my husband’s little cold mutated into this nasty flu.

Continue reading →

Brewing Up a Very Good Time

By: Heather Pringle | March 20, 2013

It started two Christmases ago. That’s when I learned that beer is the new wine. My nephew, a film student, came home from McGill expounding on the finer points of Belgian Gueuze and German Dunkelweizen. And since then, foodie-friends have all but abandoned the pleasures of the grape for the more arcane delight of hops. Now when my husband and I stroll towards the beer cooler in our local liquor store, a burly, heavily tattooed clerk intercepts us to rave about Rogue’s Yellow Snow IPA or Longboat Chocolate Porter.

It turns out, though, that beer has a very long history as a luxury drink. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Data Mining and Visualization: Bed Bug Edition

By: Brooke Borel | March 19, 2013

Data mining. Maybe the term makes you think of tapping out facts out with a pickax, or of scary algorithms and programming. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With this handy guide, I’ll show you how to do (rudimentary) data mining from the comfort of your desk, no computer science degree necessary. All you’ll need is a computer with an Internet connection, a spreadsheet, and a lot of time. Optional but highly recommended: music and beer. You’ll want a lot of the latter.

We’ll use my own data mining project as an example, in which I was trying to look at trends in bed bug research since the early 1900s. Uh, why, you ask? I’ve been working on a book about bed bugs for two years, and I was trying to answer a question. During my research, nearly every bed bug expert has told me that when bed bug populations dropped drastically after World War II and the advent of DDT, at least in some parts of the world, research on bed bugs similarly dropped for many decades. Then, when it was evident to scientists that the bed bugs were resurging in the early aughts, they had to relearn how to raise the bugs in the lab and how to study them.

This is partly true. But, during my research, I kept coming across bed bug journal articles from the seventies and eighties. My question was, if no one was studying bed bugs, why were they publishing studies about them? I decided to map out all of the journal articles I could find and see if the trend matched the story. Continue reading →

A. Wellerstein & the Death of a Patent Clerk

By: Ann Finkbeiner | March 18, 2013

Alex Wellerstein is an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics with an obsession about the atomic bomb and in particular, about the patents taken out on it. Patents on the atomic bomb seem odd: apparently the government wanted to be sure it owned the rights, and not the “private contractors, private scientists, and universities” who actually designed and built the bomb.

Anyway, in Wellerstein’s researches into the Manhattan Project’s patent office, he saw the name of a staffer named Captain Paul P. Stoutenburgh. Not that the name stood out, Wellerstein says. He was a guy doing his job, which would have entailed knowing the patentable details of the bomb. Nevertheless, as a good historian does, Wellerstein tracked down the documented particulars on Stoutenburgh from his birth, through his education, jobs, etc. etc., until his death. And then he did stand out. On April 1, 1946, he apparently shot first his wife and his 12-year old daughter and then himself. Word was that he had a “phobia,” that he’d been warning the War Department (the one we now call the Defense Department), that he was worried sick that bomb secrets were being leaked. Continue reading →