Night terrors

By: | January 18, 2012

This is how it happens for me: I’m completely asleep, and then something terrible creeps across the room, reaches spindly, pincer-like fingers for my hand, and pinches. That pinch is what wakes me up in terror, gasping and whimpering and trying desperately to pull my arm under the covers. But I can’t. I can’t do anything because no matter how I struggle, I can’t move a muscle. The light in the room is slanted so wrong it makes my skin crawl and all I can do is feel that thing hovering there, grinning horribly just beyond my field of view. I’ve tried to scream but my voice doesn’t work either. The only sound I’m capable of is a dog-pitched whine. The thing doesn’t leave until I lose consciousness.

I didn’t know this the first couple of times it happened, but my experience is by no means unique. It goes by many names, known variously as night terrors, the incubus, witches’ pressure and Old Hag syndrome. It happens when a few important wires get crossed in your brain and you accidentally wake up in the middle of dreaming. Old Hag syndrome is usually explained away as an evolutionary hiccup, a terrifying but harmless side effect of a mechanism that evolved to protect you. But the story might be a bit more complicated than that. In one case, those night terrors may have led to a series of deaths. Luckily, if you’re like me and the Old Hag plagues you, there are ways to fight her off.  Continue reading →

Making a Renaissance

By: | January 17, 2012

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one above: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.

Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls,   making a continuous low roar. When the Arno does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another.  And after disaster came the Renaissance.

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Guest Post: The Scientist in the Garden

By: | January 16, 2012

I can’t remember why the seed catalogs started showing up, but once they did, I was a goner. If you haven’t ever gotten one, imagine full color photo spreads of produce, like the striped Tigger Melon and and the orange-red lusciousness of the French pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I suppose the names don’t have quite the ring of “Miss September,” but compared to some centerfold beauty, these fruits and vegetables are much more alluring — maybe because some September, a new variety might appear in my own garden, one that I could give any name I wanted. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Rear Window

By: | January 13, 2012

Granted that Abstruse Goose is being a little juvenile — I prefer to think of him not as immature but just young — and certainly Galileo occasionally had non-astronomical thoughts, even if AG is making them up.  But the writing and the drawing of Jupiter and its little stars, its “stellae,” Galileo  called them, are all real.  At least I think they are.  I’m not going to admit how much time I spent trying to find this exact writing and drawing in Galileo’s notebooks, which he called Observations.  I can’t find them.  The writing matches Galileo’s and Galileo drew the stellae that way, so I don’t think AG made them up too.  You try, here.

[UPDATE:  No, don’t try.  With the formidable help of Google Translate, I have belatedly concluded that in fact not only did AG imitate Galileo’s handwriting, he made up the sentences too.   I still think the part below the stellae is real but I’m not betting on it.  AG himself is pretty formidable:  not everybody can talk dirty in Latin.]

Meanwhile, you know how the story ends but Galileo was, if nothing else, a superb grant writer and I thought you’d like it in his own words:

“Here we have a fine and elegant argument for quieting the doubts of those who, while accepting with tranquil mind the revolutions of the planets about the sun in the Copernican system, are mightily disturbed to have the moon alone revolve about the earth and accompany it in an annual rotation about the sun. Some have believed that this structure of the universe should be rejected as impossible. But now we have not just one planet rotating about another while both run through a great orbit around the sun; our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth, while all together trace out a grand revolution about the sun in the space of twelve years.”

He closes the argument:  “Time prevents my proceeding further, but the gentle reader may expect more soon.”

______

http://abstrusegoose.com/414

 

Trash, Recycling and the Heartbreaking Lessons of YouTube Ethnography

By: | January 12, 2012

I live in a bubble. Its name is San Francisco, a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I’m surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. I come from the outside world, so I know my current behavioral baseline is a little skewed. But still, I was recently reminded that some Americans continue to use incandescent light bulbs, and I was genuinely surprised.

A far bigger shock came, as they usually do, unbidden from the Internet. Continue reading →

Inside the World of Poverty

By: | January 11, 2012

A few years ago, one of my Scottish cousins decided to delve into the murky waters of family history. For a time, I received regular emails from him, dispatches containing faded photos of long-dead relatives; biographies pieced together from birth and death certificates, and short sad notes on the lives of the working poor in Edinburgh. Most of my Scottish forebearers—candlemakers, housepainters, laundresses— struggled to make ends meet in Edinburgh’s tenements. I long suspected as much. But my through my cousin’s research, I learned something unexpected and disturbing: two of my relatives died as paupers in a Victorian workhouse.

I began thinking about this again this week, for the literary world is just now beginning to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, a novelist who knew all about the social injustices of Victorian England. As a boy, Dickens saw his insolvent father hauled off to debtors’ prison: Dickens was then forced to work in a blacking factory. The experience opened the young novelist’s eyes to the plight of the poor, a world that later populated his novels.

In 1850, at the height of his fame, Dickens paid a visit to a London workhouse where as many as 2000 paupers resided. In a grim piece of non-fiction writing entitled “A Walk in a Workhouse,” he later described the experience. Continue reading →

Seeing What We Want to See

By: | January 10, 2012

Do we choose to blur this image?

Over the weekend, I listened to the latest episode of This American Life.  The segment was titled, “Where Your Crap Comes From” or “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.”

The entire show was devoted to an adaptation of Mike Daisey’s monologue, the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Daisey is a self-professed technophile and Apple aficionado, and his TAL story recounts his journey to the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where his favorite Apple products are made in giantic factories. You know what comes next.

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Guest Post: What a Five-Generation Study Reveals About the Scars of Disadvantage

By: | January 9, 2012

Britain in March 1946 was a dank, hungry, but optimistic place as people grappled with winter, rationing and the aftermath of World War 2. It was also the time that the country gave birth to something historically and scientifically remarkable. 13,687 babies born during one March week were weighed, measured and enrolled into what has, today, become the longest running study of human development in the world.

Last year I researched and wrote a feature for Nature about this group and its impact on science. I was able to talk to members of the study about their ordinary — yet extraordinary — lives as they reached 65, Britain’s official retirement age. And in the last couple of months, I’ve been learning more about the series of later British ‘birth cohorts’, born in 1958, 1970, 1991-2 and at the turn of the millennium. Each has its own story.
Continue reading →