The Last Word

By: | July 28, 2012

July 23 – 27

Penis Friday got violent this week with Brooke Borel‘s guest post about the bedbug penis, whose shape makes me freeze in terror. They use this thing to engage in what researchers call “traumatic insemination“. Aw, and bedbugs used to be so cute, too.

Speaking of dicks, turns out Walt Whitman was quite a superior species, as Ann reveals in her usual lovely contextualisation of Abstruse Goose’s lament for the Mars budget.

Guest poster Amanda Mascarelli disentangled the vastly more complicated reality behind the old saw about left-brain/right-brain creativity and learning.

Jessa’s answer to the recent flap about internet addiction is a fascinating look at the alarmist history of media addiction: back when the hot new medium was the humble book, scholars wrung their hands over all that newfangled book-learnin’, convinced that it would cause us to break our mental fibres (think about that Newsweek cover).

And Ginny concluded her remarkable Galapagos Mondays series, wondering whether the Galapagos’ economy is eating itself. Tourists mean money for conservation but they also mean destruction of the environment they’re paying to see. The question, she finds, goes far beyond the Galapagos: is it ever possible to square conservation with economic development?

See you next week.

TGIPF: The Bed Bug and His Violent Penis

By: | July 27, 2012

Behold the bed bug penis. Entomologists call it a lanceolate paramere, where lanceolate means “shaped like a lance head” and paramere, the “copulatory hooks formed from outer subdivision of primary phallic lobes.” Put more simply, it curves out from the tip of the male’s abdomen and ends in a wicked point, like a dagger.

This shape is no coincidence. The bed bug penis is adapted to stab. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: A Walk on Mars

By: | July 25, 2012

__________

This reminds me of that idiot, Walt Whitman,  who thought his appreciation of the stars was so superior to the learn’d astronomer’s.  The guy needed a pie in the face.

But here’s the question:  is good poetry (not AG’s) as enlightening, meaningful, or interesting as a walk on Mars — or any kind of thing that you see and that no one’s ever seen before?  Maybe the effects are similar?

_________

http://abstrusegoose.com/446

Unraveling the left brain/right brain theory

By: | July 24, 2012

Not so long ago, I had more hobbies than I could keep up with, from SCUBA diving to horseback riding and dancing to snowboarding. Then my son and daughter (now 4 and almost 3) came along, and I found myself struggling to name a single hobby—something, anything, that I can call my own, that I do just because I love to. The combination of parenting and keeping my writing career afloat just didn’t leave space for me. It was time to learn something new. Continue reading →

Galápagos Monday: The People Problem

By: | July 23, 2012
Puerto Ayora, a city of 18,000 people, is the economic hub of the Galápagos.

This is the last installment of my six-week series about the Galápagos Islands. To recap the first five posts: The Galápagos is an archipelago of 14 volcanic islands that scientists since Darwin have gone well out of their way to study. The islands are extremely inhospitable to life, and yet, over long periods of time, life has found a way. Humans are capable of disturbing that ecosystem, but equally capable of restoring it. It’s this last point, the People Problem, that most interests me.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 21, 2012

July 16 – 21

So what do we do about invasive species? Exterminate ’em, right? and feel holy about it. And when the invasives are goats on the Galapagos, we still exterminate ’em, right?  Only it doesn’t feel so holy, says Virginia.

Ann, in her obsessive search for the metaphors of science, finds another one:  sub-grid physics, or making it up as you go but not fooling yourself about it.

Guest Erin Gettler loves the old naturalists who observed so closely for so many years so she tries it herself, gets bored, thinks she’s doing something wrong, tries again.

The Colorado River water crisis, says Michelle, might be solved “if water negotiators in the western United States can bring themselves to act like giant tubeworms — even a little bit.”

Richard reads through his inbox the morning after the announcement of the Higgs boson, is on the whole happy, but don’t get him started on “God particle.  And while you’re at it, look at the picture of those people listening to the announcement — have you ever seen a bunch of backs look more intense?

Bonus:   the Galapagos/Judas goat post has a lively comments fight.

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photo by Erin Gettler

Higgs This, Boson That

By: | July 20, 2012

I slept through the Higgs boson announcement on July 4. Whatever the news that the Large Hadron Collider physicists would be trumpeting in the middle of the New York night, it wasn’t going to change by 9 a.m. No, what I would be monitoring throughout the day were the press releases and media coverage. Would they be sensitive to the nuances of science?

As I’ve argued before, confusion in the media about the meanings of “prove” and “theory,” especially when that confusion is fostered by scientific institutions engaging in hyperbole, gives science deniers the chance to claim that one “theory” is as good as the next because, hey, evolution and the Big Bang haven’t been “proved” either. The Higgs announcement promised to be the kind that would penetrate the public consciousness. For many people, it would define what science does and how it does it.

The week hadn’t started well. “Proof of ‘God particle’ found,” read an APNewsBreak headline that Monday, two days before the official announcement.

Sigh. Whatever it is that the ATLAS and CMS researchers found, it wasn’t “proof.” Extraordinarily strong evidence, evidence so strong that physicists everywhere will proceed as if the Higgs exists, but not proof. But because the source was AP, the story as well as the sensibility behind the headline was soon appearing everywhere.

So much for the news coverage, at least in advance of the event. What about the official announcements?

I woke up Wednesday morning to an inbox filled with press releases.  Continue reading →

Learning from the Tubeworm

By: | July 19, 2012

This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River.

I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult life I’ve heard about (and reported on) the bureaucratic battles over the river’s flow. Over the past century, the seven arid states that share the river — “share” being a generous term here — have tried to protect their portions with multiple lawsuits, clever insults, and, in one notorious case, the Arizona National Guard.

So when I recently moderated a panel at the Aspen Environment Forum about the future of the Colorado River, I expected to hear about more of the same. Surely, I thought, drought and population growth are only ratcheting up the drama.

Continue reading →