Local Food: Appetite for Infrastructure

By: | October 4, 2011

You notice the colors first. The crisp orange of carrots, the lustrous reds of tomatoes, the brilliant yellow of peppers and lemons, and everywhere, the thousand shades of green that seem almost to sing the word: fresh. Forklifts and hand trucks whir past crates of asparagus, long beans and onions; shouts ring out in English and Spanish and Chinese. It’s 2 AM, the air is nearly as cold as the walk-in coolers, and the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market, all 25 acres of it, is alive with the sights and sounds of bustling commerce.

Wholesale produce markets like this are the missing link of the fresh, local food supply chain, providing the crucial connection between producers and the people who live near by. If you don’t have one near you–and you probably don’t–then chances are that you’re paying too much money for produce that was grown too far away. Continue reading →

WWGD?

By: | October 3, 2011

 

Dear WWGD:

I am a postdoc working on an important scientific problem, one that I find rewarding and challenging. But a month before the end of the funding cycle, our team had a budget surplus, at which point my supervisor suggested that I find a way to spend it. Otherwise, he sighed, we’ll never see that kind of money from the NSF again, and he’ll have to eliminate a research assistant.

So I went out and bought the department a 3D photocopier. This purchase, as you might expect, has made me the heroine of the department—not just because I’ve saved an RA’s position, but because I’ve given us all access to a 3D photocopier. Could be cooler? Not much. Continue reading →

Groundwater and Gravity

By: | September 30, 2011

4/20:   I write an email to a scientist.   I explain that I work in an old building that sits in a sort of pit, partly surrounded by a hill.  Midway along the hill is a little terrace on which is a street, and along the street, a sidewalk and a wire fence; and they’re all held in place by a retaining wall.  The scientist is a hillslope geomorphologist.  He knows about how water moves underground; how it percolates through soil of varied porosities and permeabilities; and how, pulled by gravity, it imperceptibly carries soil from one place to another.   I suspect doom is unfolding.  “I have an odd question for you,” I write.

Continue reading →

The Middles of Nowhere

By: | September 29, 2011

As someone preoccupied with odd, mysterious places, I have a longstanding appreciation for an odd, mysterious organization called The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Equal parts arts organization, archive, and amateur detective agency, the Los Angeles-based CLUI (rhymes with gooey) runs bus tours of the Nevada Test Site, mounts exhibitions of hurricane-racked vacation properties on Gulf Coast barrier islands, and otherwise investigates our curious relationship with the ground beneath our feet.

In August, the CLUI crew and the Albuquerque-based Institute of Marking and Measuring organized a tour of the centers of the USA. Centers isn’t a typo: it turns out that visiting the exact middle of the country involves at least a few stops and a hell of a lot of trouble.

Continue reading →

Help Wanted: DIY Dinosaurs

By: | September 28, 2011

Have you ever looked at a chicken? I mean really looked, and not the kind that comes safely shrink-wrapped in a Styrofoam tray? There’s something in the eyes, something still-wild, almost menacing—no, really menacing. Given a little room to move around and enough conspecifics to elicit social behaviors, the animals are aggressive, territorial, and relentlessly voracious. If you spend much time around the birds, you start to feel grateful for our size advantage. These are, after all, the living descendents of dinosaurs.

And yet … there’s something a little underwhelming about the whole birds-are-dinosaurs thing. Living birds, chickens included, share thousands of traits with their extinct forebears. But there’s a certain chill-inducing it-factor that even the most dangerous modern birds just don’t have. One imagines it must be a little like hanging out with Muhammed Ali nowadays, or George Foreman. It would be great—fascinating, inspiring even. But nowhere near as awesome as being around them back in their prime, when they were huge, lethal and unpredictable. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Not So Fast

By: | September 27, 2011

The news of a detection of faster-than-light speed neutrinos by the OPERA experiment stunned the physics and astronomy community last week.  I read the paper, and I listened to the talk from Geneva over the Web. This is seriously weird stuff! Faster-than-light speed neutrinos!? The talk was filled with wonderfully arcane geodetic methods for measuring the line-of-sight difference between a proton beam in Geneva and a cave in Italy 730 kilometers away. We experimentalists eat this stuff up. It is so cool to say you can measure the underground distance to an accuracy of 20 centimeters over such a distance, just like it is cool to say that we can measure the changing distance to the Moon to a millimeter or so.

Immediately all scientists began to play with this concept. It is one of the most fun things in science—to be liberated from whatever fussy Standard Model we have, and be allowed to explore a possible new direction for our ideas and experiments.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Should We Clone Endangered Species?

By: | September 26, 2011

In 2000, the last Pyrenean ibex died. These were mountain goat-like mammals with fierce black horns that scampered around the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Some cells had been taken from that last animal, and in 2009 the world learned that scientists had been able to clone the creature: a Pyrenean ibex kid was born to a surrogate mother, a hybrid between Spanish ibex and a domestic goat. (see the paper here.) The kid was delivered by cesarean section. It opened its eyes, stuck out its tongue, moved its legs about, and promptly died of lung abnormalities. Continue reading →

Consensual Hallucination

By: | September 22, 2011

When William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1984 in the book Neuromancer, he described it as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.”

Decades later, Gibson declared that cyberspace was everting. Which is to say, entering the next phase of its evolution by creeping out of the virtual boundaries that once defined it and into what we consider “real life.” Sure enough, about 5 minutes later, the world proved him right, again, and the Internet of Things began to erode the distinction between the virtual and the real.

Most descriptions of the possibilities of the Internet of Things have centered on things like RFID-tagged Starbucks cups that let the company trace your steps through its corporate universe, both real and virtual. Usually the first groups of people to find anything useful to do with new technology are marketers and the military.

But earlier this week, a study out of Nottingham Trent University and Stockholm University hinted at what I think is the real potential of the internet of things: imbuing plain vanilla reality with an extra, shared dimension. Moving our consensual hallucination into reality. Continue reading →