The Ill Effects of Urban Living

By: | September 12, 2012

A week ago, I flew from the wide open spaces of Grand Junction, Colorado, to New York, the city I now call home. Air traffic at LaGuardia airport had delayed my flight two hours and still the pilot had to circle several times before we received clearance to land. I was late, I was crabby, and I just wanted to be home. So you can imagine my frustration when I stepped out of the airport and into the muggy night to behold the scene on the left. Yes, folks, that’s the taxi line. It snaked down the sidewalk and then doubled back on itself. The queue was so long I couldn’t see the turnaround point. I snapped a photo and posted it to Facebook. “Welcome back to the big apple, Cassie! Here’s your taxi line,” I wrote. I was being sarcastic. Five [expletive] minutes in New York and already I was cursing and scowling.

LaGuardia is notorious for delays and lines, but there’s a deeper, more basic problem — New York has too many people in too small a space.* It’s super dense. Fun fact: If you could convince the entire world to live like New Yorkers, you could pack all 6.9 billion of us into the state of Texas. That might be good for the environment, but what about our mental health? Continue reading →

Kitchen Catalysts

By: | September 11, 2012

The other day I was sitting in the bathroom, lamenting the decline of my bathroom reading material. At its zenith, the back of my toilet was heavy with Nature. (I inadvertently impressed one of my grad school classmates, who didn’t know that I thought I was subscribing to a magazine with lots of photos of penguins and manatees.)

Now the can is crammed with lighter reading: fashion magazines left behind by traveling visitors, Highlights, and the cooking magazines we’ve been getting as gift subscriptions. Continue reading →

Want to Erase Fear Memories? Put Down the Booze, Pick Up the Pot.

By: | September 10, 2012

Tomorrow marks the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed nearly 3,000 people and traumatized hundreds of thousands of others. One out of four witnesses to that awful scene — fires, blood, flying glass and metal and stone and people — developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized by fearful memories that just won’t recede.

It’s no wonder that many people with PTSD — about 14 percent — try to self-medicate with alcohol. Booze helps us forget, right? The idea lurks in idioms — I might get “trashed” or “wasted,” or “drown my sorrows” — and in Proverbs 31:7, and in the gospel of Dave Matthews: Excuse me please / one more drink / Could you make it strong / ‘Cause I don’t need to think… One drink to remember / Then another to forget…

So I was fascinated by a new study showing the opposite. Alcohol, it seems, helps cement painful memories into neural circuits.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 8, 2012

September 3 – 7

Sometimes new technology gives you a person who can only compare the moon to a tart. And sometimes it gives you Galileo, or the Beatles. This week, Richard pondered the connection.

For labor day, Ann brought back her famous account of scientists being withering.

Tom got irritated about the science lies in kid lit and nursery rhymes that lay the groundwork for science illiteracy.

Abstruse Goose considered the last light that is all that may remain of lost civilizations.

And Ann considered the plight of the science PhD student: “middle-aged, overspecialized, mentally deranged, depressed and discouraged.” There’s got to be a better way.

I Saw Them Standing There

By: | September 7, 2012

I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” the other night when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, and the camera cut to curtains flying apart with an abandon that matched the song’s first notes, already slamming away. Then Paul stepped to the microphone and opened his mouth.

“[    ], she was [    ] seventeen, you know what I mean.”

But Paul recovered quickly. He bent closer to the microphone, so that now we could at least make out all the lyrics, even if the instruments were still overwhelming them.

Then John stepped forward toward his own microphone. Was his at the wrong height, too?

Continue reading →

The Sooner You Make It Yours, the Better

By: | September 6, 2012

My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing.  Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What are you reading?” and he’d get a funny look and say, “Oh nothing, just a paper,” meaning a dense, opaque, difficult scientific journal article.  And when I asked him how things were going at school, this normally close-mouthed kid started talking and didn’t stop, and he wasn’t sounding cheery.

Freeman Dyson wrote:  “The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow-area of specialization. . . . I am personally acquainted with several cases of young people who became mentally deranged, not to speak of many more who became depressed and discouraged, their lives ruined by the tyranny of the Ph.D. system.” Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Supernova

By: | September 5, 2012

I don’t know what it is with these young people thinking the violent obliteration of a planet and all its civilizations is cool.  Maybe they grew up with reality being virtual and not the other kind.  Never mind.  Supernova 1987A — the “A” because it was 1987’s first supernova — used to be a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69° 202; I mention these things because I like star names.  It  blew up in 1987, though as AG points out, it actually blew up in 166,000 BC, the middle of the Middle Paleolithic.  If the obliterated planet had been Earth, civilization would have gotten only as far as tools, fire, and hunting, so maybe no great loss.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/451

How Kid Culture Tells our Children Lies and Destroys the Future of Science

By: | September 4, 2012

Some parents, especially those with writerly or scientific tendencies, cope with the shock of having reproduced by chronicling every twist and turn as their progeny move from mewling rage ball to drooling tyrant, and beyond. Not for the me the introspection and fearless truth telling of Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, or the abstracted observation of Charles Fernyhough’s A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of his Daughter’s Developing Mind.  I much prefer to embrace nature’s memory-wiping balm of exhaustion, distraction and confusion. Continue reading →