A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food. An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out.
To distract you from making a judgment about whether AG is a dick or not — maybe he’s just going through a phase — here’s a nice video by Andrew Quitmeyer and Tucker Balch, showing how the bees talk to each other via dance. And here’s a charming NPR show by Robert Krulwich on bee decision-making processes which make the human processes look outright lame.
In that post, I pointed out the contrast between two meetings I’d recently attended and tried to extract some lessons for how to make conferences better. After some more thought and a lot of feedback from LWON readers, I have put together some rules of thumb on how to make a good conference.
Last September, I posted to my (now defunct) personal blog a cheeky theory: scientists can be categorized into four types, which roughly agree with some of the Myers-Briggs personality test buckets. I’ve re-posted it here, with a few updates and tweaks based on reader comments.
I took my first Myers-Briggs personality test in the seventh grade, on the one afternoon of the year my teacher had set aside for us to go ahead and choose a future fulfilling career already. We all sat down at a computer, answered a few hundred multiple-choice questions, and finally discovered which of the 16 types best fit our preferences.
I’m an ISTJ. In the system’s jargon, that’s ‘Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging.’ In plain English, the type is often referred to as the inspectors, the truth-tellers, the ‘Just the facts, Ma’am‘s. Continue reading →
It’s a sunny evening in Fairbourne, a coastal village in rural Wales. Inside a small food shop, I’m listening to the owner and his wife discussing the true nature of the holy spirit.
I reach for a packet of breakfast cereal. “The woman just didn’t understand,” says the shopkeeper.
I place a tin of tomatoes into my basket. “I told her the holy spirit is not a thing,” he says.
I wander along the narrow space between the shelves into the back of the shop. It’s quiet here and there are no windows. On the left, a line of dusty red wine bottles sits opposite bags of bread. On the right, racks of stationery and cheap plastic toys. In the corner there’s a disused Post Office counter. In a village, it’s common for a shop and postal service to run from the same premises. That used to be the case here.
My basket is full, so I return and place it on the till. “I explained to her that it is Him,” the shopkeeper says to his wife. Continue reading →
Galaxies are the universe’s basic units. (True, they’re made of stars, but all the stars are in galaxies.) So if you understood why galaxies look the way they do and how they’ve changed with time, you’d probably understand the history of the whole damn universe. Oh boy. And astronomers believed they sort of did but for years the belief was just that, mostly supposition and hope.
Astronomers did know that, the way people are (with notable exceptions) either male or female, galaxies seemed to be (with notable exceptions) either spiral or elliptical. They also knew that galaxies are the color of their stars. So spirals are blue because they’re full of stars being born out of gas in a hot shower of ultraviolet light. And ellipticals are red because they burnt up their gas and are full of dying or dead stars whose light had cooled to red or infrared. Astronomers inferred, reasonably, that spiral galaxies were young and elliptical galaxies were old, old, old. Spiral galaxies also seemed to live in the universe’s rural fields and ellipticals, in cities of other galaxies. Nobody could put it all together and explain why young, starforming galaxies would live in the field and old dead ones in cities. But astronomers had only small samples of tens or a few hundreds of galaxies, so they didn’t have leave to generalize. Continue reading →
What is it about modern homesteading that drives so many women mad?
There are a lot of ways to shrink a carbon footprint. Bike instead of drive. Eat low on the food chain. You know the drill. Where I live, in the boondocks of Colorado, a lot of people — myself included, but I’ll get to that in a minute — go on a carbon diet by purchasing some cheap land, rigging up a few solar panels, and getting off the grid.
Most of these people are well-educated, well-meaning, and idealistic, determined to build and garden their way toward some version of a better future. But after living here for more than a decade, I’ve noticed a disturbing susceptibility among these modern homesteaders. I’ll call this recurring disease Not One More Winter In The Tipi, Honey (NOMWITTH).
Here’s what happens: A couple arrives in our valley, young, strong, in love, and full of plans to build an ultra-energy-efficient house out of straw bales, rammed earth, adobe bricks, or, heck, used bottlecaps. They set to work with equal enthusiasm, buying land and setting up temporary quarters in a yurt or a tipi. The weather’s good, the views are great, and the new house is humming along.
But at some point, the weather turns, or the project slows. Or a baby arrives, and everything gets more complicated. For whatever reason, their brio fades, NOMWITTH sets in, and what was once a joint project becomes a battlefield, XX vs. XY. In mild cases, help is hired, the house gets a roof, and all ends well. In more serious cases, one person — inevitably XX — splits town for a fully-furnished condo with central heating, leaving XY alone with the low-carbon dream.
I’ve seen many couples, and carbon budgets, fall prey to NOMWITTH, and the predictability of its gender roles has always bothered me. Women may have different strengths than men, but we don’t lack for toughness — we demonstrate that in feats ranging from mountain-climbing to childbirth. So why does NOMWITTH always seem to strike women first? Continue reading →
(This post is the second in a two-part series. I adapted it from a keynote address I delivered in the summer of 2010 at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont, where I teach in the MFA Writing program. The essay is part of a collection of talks by Goddard writing faculty that have been collected in Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing. Part 1 appeared yesterday.)
Over the decades, Niels Bohr’s examples of complementary relationships became more and more philosophical: “In the great drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.” He found applications for the concept in “wider fields,” far beyond physics—psychology, biology, history, the arts. I don’t think he would have objected to applying it to the act of writing—to the relationship between the writer and that thing the writer has been working on.
Whatever you’re writing, and at every moment you’re writing it, you face a virtually infinite number of choices. You can choose among hundreds of thousands of words, you can put them in any order you wish, you can punctuate them senseless or sensible, you can break them up into chapters, stanzas, scenes, sections, lines, acts, paragraphs.
And there’s more. You have a universe of choices. But you have to draw the line somewhere.
(This post is the first in a two-part series. I adapted it from a keynote address I delivered in the summer of 2010 at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont, where I teach in the MFA Writing program. The essay is part of a collection of talks by Goddard writing faculty that have been collected in Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing. Part 2 will appear tomorrow.)
During the final faculty meeting of the residency*, we always discuss ideas for the theme of the following semester’s residency. Last semester someone suggested “The Spirit of the Thing.” The response around the table was instantaneous: That’s it! The vote was swift and unanimous. Then we all laughed. We’d never seen such a response to a possible residency theme. A theme that, we might have noticed if we’d thought about it at all, consisted of two abstractions. If a student had written that phrase, any one of us would have scrawled “vague!” in the margin. I don’t remember now who suggested “The Spirit of the Thing,” but I doubt that she or he would have been able to say what it meant. I doubt that any of us could have said what those two nouns in that combination meant. But they sounded good together, and sometimes that’s enough.
It was for me, anyway. Even as the program director asked if I would be one of the keynote speakers, I knew the topic I wanted to address. Earlier in the week, another faculty member had invoked the Heisenberg uncertainty principle during her own keynote address, and I’d been thinking about it all week—or thinking near it, anyway: its less famous but, to my amateur-historian-of-science way of thinking, more profound corollary.
A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food. An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out.
