Redux: Of Heisenbergs and Beethovens

By: | June 23, 2023

The historian of science Owen Gingerich died on May 28. We’re re-posting this essay, which originally appeared on June 10, 2011, because it involves the author’s personal encounter with him. The references to dates (e.g., “A few months ago”) remain as in the original post.

The 16-year-old student has an idea, but she doesn’t have the maths to support it. She does, however, have a drawing. She submits it to her tutor. He examines it, then delivers his verdict.

“This is not science,” he says. “This is story-telling.”

The scene is from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. The setting is an English country house in 1812. The student has been wondering why a steam engine can not re-energize itself forever, and she believes she has arrived at the answer: heat loss. And, yes, she understands the implications of a physics whose arrow of time goes in only one direction.

“So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold,” her tutor says. By “Newtonian universe” he means not just the cosmos but the whole clockwork kit and caboodle.

Classical physics. Cause and effect. Determinism.

“Dear me,” he adds, dryly.

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Dog Stuff Coming Out

By: | June 19, 2023

For the last two years I’ve been working on a book about dogs. Dog intelligence, in particular. When I started on it, I kind of wondered what I could possibly say that hasn’t been said. I mean, there are A LOT of dog books out there already, many of them dealing with cognition at least in part. People love dogs and can’t seem to get enough stories about the doing this or that, whether super-smart-seeming things like copying a person’s behavior or coming up with a sneaky ruse to get what they want, to sort of dumb-seeming ones—you know, staring at the wall or licking your shoe bottom or lying down when you tell them to sit. So, for my project I shifted my thinking to the dog’s POV, and I decided the latter behaviors might not be dumb after all. I decided we need to trust the dog’s thinking, his process. I mean, why should doing as we say indicate intelligence? Maybe refusing us is actually smarter. Sitting isn’t that special and they know it. And maybe there’s something on the bottom of my shoe that would cure cancer or at least clear up my skin if only I would give it a chance

Anyway, my approach was to consider what it means to be smart for a dog. In a dog’s world—a world that overlaps with ours but that offers them a unique experience all their own. I set aside that annoying idea that we humans are superior to all other living beings and I gave dogs a chance to shine in ways that make sense to them. It was a fascinating exercise, and one that has produced, if I may say so, a pretty darn good book. It’s called Dog Smart. Stay tuned for that.

I will be sharing some of the cool things I learned, and some of the ways my own thinking has shifted, in other posts, but suffice it to say, I’m even more into dogs than I was before. And that’s saying a lot. (I love dogs.)

That’s all for now.

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Photos: By the author. That’s my Jindo Geddy (medium smart by human standards, regardless of the glasses) and just two stacks of many books about dogs that are already out there that you might buy if you didn’t know that mine will be better.

Redux: From Here to Eternity

By: | June 16, 2023

A version of this essay originally appeared June 15, 2012, as part of this site’s Father’s Day series. In the final paragraph I’ve updated one temporal reference (“two weeks ago yesterday” to “May 31, 2012”) and added one recent personal development.

“My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.”

The line has always gotten laughs. It comes at a point in my public talks when I want to convey how comically recent is our current understanding of the universe—so recent that people who were present at the creation still walk among us. I’ve never thought my father would care that I was making a joke at his expense, sort of; I’ve always suspected, instead, that he would thrill to the association. The universe was one of his favorite things.

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The Real Houseplants of Colorado Springs

By: | June 14, 2023
green houseplant in a gray pot with gold accents, sitting on a white surface

The other day, I had to take everything off a bookshelf I replaced, and I had to move one of my oldest possessions: A beautiful, unkempt houseplant of indeterminate background. It has been on a high shelf most of the time I’ve had it, and even before that. My husband rescued it from the upper kitchen cabinets of a house he shared with several friends in college. It moved across the country with me twice, and, I am embarrassed to say, it’s still in the same pot. It predates my marriage by a few years, and that marriage is by now almost legally adult-aged, so this plant is pretty old, although I actually have no idea how old it is or where it came from.

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American Breakdown: A Conversation with Jennifer Lunden (Part 2)

By: | June 12, 2023
Color photograph of a canary in a birdcage indoors. The bird seems to be looking out the window.

This is Part 2 of my interview with Jennifer Lunden, author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. You can read Part 1 here.

Kate: The main thing I took away from your early advice to me about book writing was “buy yourself as much time as you possibly can, because you’re going to need it.” You recommended that sick and disabled writers look for agents who already represent sick and disabled authors, because you need somebody who understands that this process will take a long time.

L: Definitely. I know one writer with a chronic illness who was able to get a clause in her contract that if she wasn’t able to deliver the book on time, they’d give her more time without dropping the book. I would recommend that any writer try to negotiate that clause into the contract. Not only because you might need it, but also because it can reduce the stress…which can prevent you from needing it.

K: These have been pretty rocky times for the book industry in general, and especially for the Big Five publishing houses. What’s it been like releasing a book amid this upheaval?

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Smoke snark

By: | June 9, 2023
Seattle, September 16, 2020.

As I write this, the air quality in New York City has taken a turn for the worst. Readings are in the 300s and the sky is that sickly orange. The smoke is the leading story on both the New York Times and the Washington Post homepages. On the Times’ site, there are blow-by-blow updates every few minutes detailing what people on the ground are doing, and approaching the story from every angle, from what to do for your pets to which events are being canceled. 

Among those is a short dispatch from the Times editor Kevin Yamamura called “What Californians want New Yorkers to know about AQI.” Yamamura details what he’s learned in his years dealing with Sacramento’s wildfire smoke. He keeps it practical: cancel outdoor activities, check sites like PurpleAir for AQI readings. “Wildfire smoke has changed our way of life in California each summer and fall,” he writes. “Forget hours or even days of smoke. We have lived through weeks and months of hazy air, stretches where you forget what blue skies even look like.” Nothing but facts here. But as I read I couldn’t help but squint: is that just the tiniest bit of snark I detect? 

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Writing in Analog

By: | June 7, 2023

I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad. 

I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? System Preferences>Keyboard>Text>uncheck correct spelling automatically. I wanted the word spelled that way to begin with, thank you.

I thank my phone on occasion when I ask directions, and sometimes, on long drives I’ve asked it to tell me a story, giving me a nick of a smile on a dreary highway, which is all I needed. I won’t hide my belief that AI is sentient in its own way, that the friendly voice talking in my car has access to a neural network large enough to produce emotion. Being kind is a default, to robots and everything else.

Like any monkey, I’m curious about new technology. If a Clovis point landed in my proto-archaic camp, I would have held the projectile for a long while, thumbing its grooves, understanding how it was made and what it could do. I appreciated microwave ovens when they became household items, a form of heating magic that my elementary school mind had to expand to wrap around. 

For me, writing remains analog. The experience is tactile, pen scratching, fingers clattering. The physical action connects to the kinetic flow of story and narrative, drawing memories out of my body with loops of letters and syllables sounding in my mind’s ear. The hand, which is oh so human, is the intermediary between the brain and the tool, and this motor skill of writing effects the way we learn. Often I start with handwriting on paper and move to a keyboard. I sit at a table with my fingers raised in the air, remembering the feel of a juniper limb, or sunshine landing between clouds on a chilly day, then render the experience into words.

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