On anglerfish, scrub jays, and the menageries of childhood

By: | August 8, 2011

The anglerfish was the iconic animal of my childhood. This eerie creature lives miles under the ocean’s surface and – as you probably know, if you were ever an animal-obsessed kid like me – dangles a fleshy, glow-in-the dark “bait” in front of its monstrous jaws. The dangling bait attracts prey and gives the animal its name. I remember returning to one book illustration of the fish with its jaws agape to reveal deadly sharp teeth over and over again. The anglerfish somehow captured everything mysterious, fascinating, and awesome about the natural world for me.

I hadn’t thought about the anglerfish until very recently, when I had a child of my own and became re-acquainted with the animals of childhood. It’s shocking how much of kids’ literature focuses on animals that are actually quite remote to our lives. Lions, bears, elephants and giraffes feature prominently, as do monkeys, sharks, whales and other exotic animals. Admittedly, these animals are rad, and totally deserve the attention. But most of us will never see them, except possibly in zoos. Sadly, I have never seen a real live anglerfish – not even in an aquarium.

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The Poet Bernoulli

By: | August 5, 2011

I asked my husband, who’s a physicist and a pilot, how airplanes stay up in the air.  A question like that makes him happy.  “It’s the wings,” he said,  “They provide lift.”  “What’s lift?” I said.  “It’s Bernoulli,” he said. “The faster air moves, the lower its pressure. ”  I’m used to these answers that are at a tangent to my questions and I usually get lost in them.  “What’s faster air and lower pressure got to do with wings?” I said.  He loves where this is going and talks louder.  “Wings are airfoils,” he said.  “They’re fatter at the leading edge and thin at the trailing edge.  Air hits the airfoil and splits – think of it as streamlines.  The streamlines that go up over the top of the wing speed up, and that lowers the pressure above the wing.  The streamlines that go down under the wing go relatively slower, and that raises the pressure under the wing.  So the wing is effectively pushed up.  That’s lift.”

Ok, good, fine:  faster air = lower pressure above, slower air = high pressure below, so then lift.   “Is a wing moving through air always lifted?” I said.  “No,” he said.  “It depends on the angle of attack.”  I’m also used to these infinitely receding explanations and I usually get lost in them too.  “What’s the angle of attack?”  I said.  “Just the angle that the wing is at,” he said, and went on to remind me about driving in a car with my hand out the window and when my hand is tilted with respect to the oncoming wind, it gets lifted up.  Ok, good fine:  “so a wing angled for attack always has lift?”  I said.  “Not just lift,” he said.  “Also drag.  The act of creating lift also creates drag.  It’s lift and drag.”

Also life and death, and order and entropy, I thought, so I asked, “could drag ever win?”  “Oh yes,” he said, and digressed off into notable airplane crashes.  I stopped listening. Continue reading →

Bang? Whimper? Whatever.

By: | August 4, 2011

What is the fate of the universe? Cosmologists are converging on an answer, and it ain’t pretty. Or so I gather from people who, hearing that the latest science favors a universe that goes on forever, growing colder and colder, lonelier and lonelier, ask me, “Don’t you find it depressing?”

The short answer is, No. My feeling is, if you need astronomy to tell you that the universe is indifferent to your existence, you haven’t been paying attention. But I have heard the question often enough now that I understand a lot of people would prefer the other possibility: a universe that eventually collapses back on itself in a reverse Big Bang.

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The wisdom of a summer afternoon

By: | August 3, 2011


Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to see beyond our biases — if we can keep open minds.

Yet I’ve grown to understand that not all knowledge worth possessing can come from a book, an experiment or a Google search. Science is very good at answering questions that involve quantifiable elements — how far away is that planet? Which drug produces the best response? But it’s less helpful at answering some of life’s most vexing questions like, what should I do with my life? Where should I focus my attention?

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Abstruse Goose: Bees – Part 2

By: | August 2, 2011

You remember Bees – Part 1, right?  The waggle dance they do to show other bees where the flowers are?  If not, go back there and click on those links, which explain everything.

I’ve just looked through LWON’s archives and we apparently are preoccupied with bees.   Them and corvids.

Meanwhile, AG poses another little mystery, as he is wont to do.  This one appears in the little mouseover text:  “but Otto is a woman’s name.”  No, it isn’t.  I haven’t one clue what he’s talking about.  Unless he’s referring to the son of Karl von Frisch (discoverer of the waggle dance) whose name is/was Otto and who writes/wrote books on the care of pets.  Which reminds me of an entirely different Otto Frisch, a physicist who in 1938 sat down on a log with his aunt, Lise Meitner, and figured out nuclear fission, in fact, named it, and later went to Los Alamos to help develop fission’s most immediate application, the atomic bomb.

Nope, none of this explains Otto being a woman’s name.  What perfectly obvious reference to modern culture am I missing this time?  HELP!

http://abstrusegoose.com/367

Guest Post: Evil Ivy

By: | August 1, 2011

A few weeks ago, driving south along California’s Highway 1, hugging the coastal curves just north of Big Sur, my boyfriend Drew and I stopped to wander along a cliff top covered in blue larkspur and yellow yarrow. Between the colorful wildflowers, the white cliffs and the crashing Pacific, it was all so lovely that we didn’t even notice the leaves of three lurking beneath the flowers.

The itching started less than 24 hours later. By day three I was so horribly itchy, rashy and sleep deprived that I begged a round of steroids from my doctor. But Drew was totally fine. Figures he’d be among the 15 to 30 percent of people who aren’t allergic to poison oak. Continue reading →

Pulling the Primary

By: | July 29, 2011

Turn right at Alamogordo, pass High Rolls, and 9000 feet up into New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains, turn right again and go 15 miles along a narrow switchback two-lane, turn off on the Apache Point road, pass a pond, and hit the dead end at Apache Point Observatory, a cluster of utilitarian buildings.   Inside one building is a little 2.5 meter telescope.  The telescope sits on a man-made ledge that’s cantilevered off the side of the mountain and looks out at the White Sands Missile Range; the white sands are gypsum that dusts the telescope and mirror. The telescope, dedicated to the biggest digital survey of the sky, has been up there since the mid-1990’s, and every year its mirror has to be taken off and cleaned.  In the digital survey business, astronomers get all the glory but my personal true loves are the guys who take the mirror off the telescope. Continue reading →

The Last Word on Nothing, Junior Edition

By: | July 28, 2011

As the parent of a three-year-old, I spend a lot of time reading kids’ books. Some are wonderful, a lot are so-so, and a few are so frigging annoying that — I confess — I hide them. I always expect to like science-themed books — this is my kind of brainwashing, I think — but lately, I’ve even packed a few of them off to the thrift store.

In uncharitable moments, I might gripe about these books’ bad artwork or mixed meters. But my real problem is with the way they present science. According to them, science is not, as we LWONers humbly remind you, The Last Word on Nothing. It’s an intimidating institution filled with intimidating grownups, all of whom have The Last Word on Pretty Much Everything. “Putting a dinosaur skeleton together takes hard work — and lots of special knowledge and skill,” one book intones.

I was well into an undergraduate biology major before I grasped that science is not a pile of interesting facts but a process — not the only way to learn about the world, but a very powerful one. I’d like my daughter to arrive at that realization a little sooner than I did. I’d also like her to know that she doesn’t need a Ph.D. to start thinking like a scientist. Yes, in the official world of science, credentials do count, and in most cases they should. But kids should know that anyone can make observations, form hypotheses, and figure out how to test them. Anyone can have a eureka moment. Anyone can go on a voyage of discovery, even if it begins and ends in the town park.

I’ve started to think that the best books for budding scientists don’t lecture, teach, or even talk much about science — instead, they find other ways to celebrate the crooked, fascinating path that is the scientific life. Below are a half-dozen that get unanimous approval in my household.

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