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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TEDGlobal

By: | July 26, 2011

I’ve been back for a week, now, from TEDGlobal: an ideas conference that is fast becoming my annual clarity retreat. Moved from its original host city of Oxford, the event was held in Edinburgh, Scotland and my arrival – to paraphrase John Denver – felt like coming home to a place I’d never been before.

Thinking to avoid drinking conference coffee, that foul internationally uniform brew, I picked up Starbucks on my way to the complex, only to find that TED had flown in elite baristas from around the world to make our coffees. It is just that ridiculous.

TED Talks online have become familiar household discussion items, but if you ever get the chance to go to in person, I highly recommend it, including the fast-proliferating TEDx events that are independently organized by local groups. Because the real value of these ideas festivals, which I happily see are becoming a form of tourism, is in the mixing of people who generate the ideas.

The magic doesn’t happen when Malcolm Gladwell gets up on stage and hypnotizes everyone with his speech rhythms, clothes hanging limply off his fragile frame. It doesn’t even happen when we learn that flying cars, just like the ones we were promised so long ago, are finally ready for market.

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Guest Post: Jumping Spiders in Love

By: | July 25, 2011

When it comes to complex courtship displays, birds of paradise are right up there. They do this whole hanging-upside-down-from-a-branch thing. And granted, the mantis shrimp has an impressive suite of wooing manoeuvres, used to communicate amorous intentions to the potential mate in question (otherwise the wooer might come across as an aggressor to the wooee). But complexity for size, the jumping spider (family Salticidae) has got to take the cake.

“The first time I would have seen a habernatus dance would have been in 1974,” says Wayne Maddison, zoologist and Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He recalls that as he watched, transfixed, the male spider’s dance just kept going and going. “It was this thought of: Oh my god is this complexity ever going to end?” Continue reading →

The War on Potatoes

By: | July 22, 2011

I am totally in love with potatoes. I’m getting married in two weeks, so I guess I love my fiancé more, but potatoes are a close second.

Bolivians love potatoes too. They buy them by the sackful. Bolivia has the distinction of being home to both the best potato and the worst. The best is called a papa rellena, which means “stuffed potato.” To make a papa rellena, you start with two globs of mashed potato. Take the globs and shape them into cups. Fill one half with beef and onions or a hard-boiled egg or some cheese – whatever you have on hand. Then fit the other cup on top so that you have a tennis ball-sized object. Then you fry the whole thing in oil.

Woman selling chuño

To make the worst potato — chuño — travel to the frigid and barren altiplano. Take a normal potato and lay it on the ground in the sun. Leave it there for several days until its soul has evaporated. You will have a shriveled porous thing that resembles a bleached shrunken head. Now rehydrate and serve. On second thought, just chuck it in the wastebasket. Continue reading →