Fifty years ago today, President Kennedy, speaking before a joint session of Congress, said, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Love that “the.”
I see two problems here. Number 1 is that no squirrel ever slipped and fell off a tree. Squirrels’ understanding of gravitational physics is hard-wired and mathematically immaculate.
Number 2 is with AG’s mouse-overed comment, “Not even an insatiable thirst for knowledge can compete with our innate affinity for cute fuzzy little animals.” I agree the affinity is innate: cute fuzzy animals have always been proxies for babies, and babies are an obsession for Mother Nature. I don’t really agree with “our:” naturally the affinity is most intense in people of baby-making age. Our sweet AG, now I know how old he is; and the problem is, I don’t think Newton was ever that age.
http://abstrusegoose.com/338
As part of LWON’s first birthday celebrations, Ginny set a question for me:
Your upcoming book is about experiencing time in different cultures. I can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, could you tell us which country/city/village, in your opinion, has the best conception of time? (However you’d like to define best.) In other words, where should I move to feel more sane?
I’d be happy to help you shop for cultures that might suit your sanity, Ginny. The results won’t be the same as my own assessment of their coolness, though, because like many science writers, I grew up as a sci-fi kid and see biological limitations merely as rough design guidelines ripe for meddling. I resent the third of my life stolen by sleep and love that we, through the ever-expanding use of artificial light, have colonized the night.
Perhaps you’d prefer somewhere with a concept of time that fits human activities, rather than a soulless number on a digital clock. In Sudan, the Nuer people are cow herds and tell the time according to the day’s work schedule. The clock might read milking time, pasturing time or cattle-moving time. According to anthropologist Wade Davis, Borneo’s Penan people measure time using subjective perception. If a hunting trip reaped a lot of meat, it’s understood to have taken a shorter time, even though it could have lasted several days. Continue reading
One year ago today, the People of LWON published their first post. It was by Josie Glausiusz, it was on flesh-eating algae, and we thank her for setting that tone.
Writing LWON — that is, writing what we want to and in the way we want to write it — turns out to be a release and blessed relief. And since writing is no good unless it’s read, we hope you’ll keep reading; we love it when you do that. And talking back; we love back-talk too. We don’t love our pay scale but we don’t see what to do about it.
Anyway, to honor the occasion, we offer two lists. Continue reading
When my husband and I moved to a suburb of Vancouver eleven years ago, many of our friends ribbed us wildly about our decision. Instead of living in a leafy urban neighborhood, a short walk from a good cappuccino, an organic fruit and veg store, and a pilates studio, we had, it seemed, forsaken civilization and migrated to the far barrens of Carland. Our friends could barely place our neighborhood on their mental maps, although it was a mere 20 minutes on the Skytrain–Vancouver’s rapid transit system–from where they lived. Others got hopelessly lost when they tried to drive here, even though the route was relatively straightforward, simple and entirely lacking in freeways. It was as if we had fallen off the edge of the known world.
But in spite of all the jokes, I’ve grown to love this peaceful suburban life. It’s quiet here. The air is clean. And I love the way kids play ball hockey in some of our streets. So I was a little puzzled this week to read that some researchers now view the suburbs as “sick zones” that promote diabetes and as “obesogenic environments” that actively encourage many North Americans to forego exercise and pack on the pounds. Continue reading
When antiretroviral drug cocktails hit the scene in 1996, they were so effective they became known as ‘the Lazarus drug.’ Many AIDS patients recovered seemingly overnight. Over the past 15 years, these drugs have saved the lives of millions of people infected with HIV. Several new studies suggest antiretrovirals could save millions more if we start using them for prevention as well as treatment.
Last July, researchers reported that a vaginal gel laced with an antiretroviral called tenofovir reduced HIV acquisition among South African women by 39% overall and by 54% in women who used the gel faithfully. Then, in November, a separate team of researchers reported that an oral antiretroviral pill taken daily reduced the risk of HIV infection among men who have sex with men by 44%. This year, on May 11, researchers announced the results of another study. They found that HIV-infected individuals — both men and women — who took antiretroviral drugs were a whopping 96% less likely to pass the virus on to their partners than individuals who didn’t take the drugs. The results are preliminary, but Myron Cohen, the HIV researcher who led the study and spoke on Monday at the New York Academy of Sciences, said he is confident that the large effect will hold.
These fantastic results beg the question: Can we drug our way out of the HIV epidemic? Continue reading
A study published last week in Archives of Disease in Childhood is the latest in a long line of research to provide evidence for the benefits of breastfeeding. In the study, researchers analyzed data collected through the Millenium Cohort Study, a long-term investigation of child development that includes a large sample of babies born in the U.K. in 2000-2001.
Parents of more than 9,500 children were surveyed about infant feeding when their children were 9 months old. Then, when their children were 5 years old, the parents completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), a well-known survey designed to identify behavior problems such as anxiety, hyperactivity, and lying and stealing.
The researchers found that mothers who breastfed their babies for at least 4 months were less likely to report that their children had serious behavior problems at age 5.
How much less likely? Media accounts of the research tended to focus on the finding that 16.1 percent of children who were formula-fed had behavior problems, compared with only 6.5 percent of children who were breastfed.
That’s a dramatic difference, suggesting that formula-fed babies are two and a half times more likely to develop behavior problems. No wonder one reporter suggested that “a woman who chose to bottle-feed would have to be a real boob”, a phrase that caused me to suck in my breath in shock—I like a bad pun as much as the next person, but wow, that does not move the conversation forward.
Continue reading
Socrates (according to Plato) is explaining to a follower, Glaucon, an overly-complex but famous metaphor. Prisoners who have been raised in a cave sit chained facing a wall, which is lit only by the fire behind them. For the prisoners, says Socrates, reality is “only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another.” And if a prisoner does leave the cave, “his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.”
Isaac Newton, quoted by a biographer: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Abstruse Goose must be the first person in the history of mankind to say that Newton answers Socrates. And I think I get it, at least emotionally: let’s bust outa here and oh lordy! whammo! will you look at that!
Except AG has a sneaky little mouseover balloon that says, “Y’all lying and getting me pissed.” That, I don’t get. Does anybody?