Oh no! Not another Iraq

By: | February 2, 2011

For the last five or six days, I’ve been searching the web for good, reliable news about what is happening to Egypt’s antiquities as the turmoil deepens in Cairo.

Are Egyptian artifacts safe in the country’s many museums, protected by soldiers perched on tanks or by human chains of young Egyptians? Or are gangs of looters taking advantage of the legitimate quest for democracy in Egypt,  and breaking into the country’s many museums and plundering its archaeological sites? In other words, are we about to see a dire loss of archaeological data similar to the one that took place in Iraq shortly after the American- and British-led  invasion in 2003? Continue reading →

Railroads, brownfields and the healing power of vegetable oil

By: | February 1, 2011

It has been a long time since railways in North America counted as anything like new technology or even, in many areas, crucial infrastructure. Still, even as recent U.S. funding for high-speed rail lines seeks to make rail travel cutting edge again, the deep legacy of the golden age of rail still marks the continent in persistent, and sometimes surprising ways.

Many of the small towns in my home province of Saskatchewan, for example, exist only because they fell at regular intervals along nascent trunks and spurs, and they still bear the names of foreign places and railway functionaries doled out by surveyors in alphabetical order. Allan, Bradwell, Clavet … on to Zumbro, and repeat.

Larger centers, such as my current hometown of San Francisco, were marked by rail lines in different, but equally lasting ways. Few people other than riders of the Caltrain commuter service here are aware that the gleaming, high-tech Bay Area has its own rust belt of derelict and barely-hanging-on industrial sites, stretching along the rail line from near downtown south into San Mateo County, along the marshy shores of San Francisco Bay. Many vistas in the San Francisco region, whether shaped by nature or man, are deservedly renowned for their splendor. Those along the Peninsula rail line, equally deservedly, are not.

Continue reading →

This Is Not About Climate Change

By: | January 31, 2011
Scientist advising

I read a nice essay saying that scientists make their advice to politicians too simple.  What scientists over-simplify, said the essay’s author, is their uncertainties.  I thought the author might be right: surely politicians don’t believe flat statements like, say, “climate change is making the world warmer and we’re all going to die.”  Not that this post is about climate change because it isn’t.  And anyway, don’t we all know that climate is more complicated than that? and that the science of its change is deeply uncertain? And wouldn’t politicians like knowing which uncertainties can be measured and which are so uncertain they’re not even measurable?  Distinguishing measurable from unmeasurable uncertainties is, for me, both thrilling and disturbing.

I have digressed.  Could the essay’s author – Andy Stirling, a policy researcher in the UK — kindly give me an example of science advice that isn’t simplistic?  He could, and I closely paraphrase: the chances that climate change will make the world A degrees hotter in region B over period C in relation to baseline D are in a range between E and F.  And interpretation G tends toward the E end of the range because of reason H, based on perspectives associated with context I.  “Good luck with telling politicians that,”  I thought. Continue reading →

In Defense of Hippie Cigarettes

By: | January 27, 2011

Yesterday I stumbled on a Mancouch blog post (don’t ask) in which ‘the_static’ — a young mohawk-ed guy who rides motorcycles and plays video games — sings the glories of electronic cigarettes. E-cigs, in case you haven’t heard of them, are cigarettes without the smoke. You put in a few drops of a liquid nicotine solution (‘e-juice’), and a battery-powered ‘atomizer’ heats it up. You suck in the vapors to get your fix.

Static says e-cigs are “ridiculously cheaper” than regular cigs. (It’s true in the long run: the e-cig device runs $50-100, but the liquid refills cost about $2.50 for the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes. Regular cigs cost $4.50/pack in Virginia, and $11/pack here in tax-crazed New York.)

Plus, static says, the vapor “doesn’t stink,” and you don’t have to worry about those pesky smoking bans in bars and restaurants. “Of course, a few friends of mine teased me that I was smoking a ‘hippie cigarette’,” he writes. “But then it didn’t really matter when they had to step out of the club just to smoke while I continued socializing, enjoyed my drinks and kept my urges at bay with my new e-cig.”

Oh, snap!
Continue reading →

Guest Post: Bottle Insouciance

By: | January 26, 2011

Are scientists who work with living organisms less germ phobic than civilians? When a science-writing colleague (okay: LWON’s own Ann Finkbeiner) apologized to an infectious disease specialist for giving him an insufficiently rinsed coffee cup, he responded, “Nothing in there I’m worried about.” I once watched a microbiologist cut her bagel with a butter knife after using it to pry the top off a terrarium teeming with termites, whose hindguts she’d soon slice up and examine under a microscope. Such insouciance bolsters my general sense that most of us worry way too much about getting sick from “germs.” They are definitely out there, but most of them are definitely not out to get you. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Band of Brothers

By: | January 25, 2011

Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons.  And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers.  The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the band leaps toward it in a flash of tiny lightning.  It really is the same as lightning, just smaller — for which we can all be grateful.

Also we can be grateful the electricity is static.  Imagine if it were dynamic, like in an electric wire, and just kept coming.

Credit:  http://abstrusegoose.com/324

Freeman Dyson: It’s Complicated

By: | January 24, 2011

What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is.  His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes?

Dyson is hard to describe:  he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say.  He’s spent his career and so far, his retirement, in one of the most intellectually-rarified places on the planet, the Institute for Advanced Study.  But he doesn’t have a PhD – he says that doctoral students end up middle-aged, over-specialized, trapped, discouraged, and mentally deranged; and not having a PhD is “a badge of honor.”  He’s extremely smart and the few people smart enough to understand just how smart he is, are generally in awe of his intelligence. His manners are exquisite and never fail; in conversations he’s omnivorously interested and listens with a sort of stunned joy, surely this person is about to say something delightfully original.  He is the subject of profile after profile after profile, some startlingly good.  One of the latest is in The Atlantic, and I’d like to suggest it’s incomplete – an easy shot since every profile is by nature incomplete.  But still. Continue reading →

The Battle Brewing over Tutankhamun’s Treasures

By: | January 21, 2011

It was a great moment, maybe one of the greatest that any Egyptologist has ever experienced. Peering into the newly breeched tomb of Tutankhamun, Howard Carter gazed in rapture at all the wondrous objects lining the pharaoh’s tomb. There were “strange animals,” he later wrote, “statues and gold–everywhere the glint of gold.” As Carter held out his candle, he was lost in exhilaration, lost in a moment he would never ever live again. But just then the voice of reality intruded. The man behind him was getting a little impatient. “Can you see anything?” the voice inquired.

That voice belonged to Lord Carnarvon, a lover of antiquities whose buckets of money and enviable political connections had allowed Carter to trudge up and down the Valley of the King for five years before finding Tutankhamun’s  tomb. Most people tend to forget about Carnarvon, Carter’s generous patron, largely because the British aristocrat died just three months after the great discovery.

But there’s one person who has not forgotten the British aristocrat. Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has just this week declared war on the Carnarvon family, specifically the current Earl and Countess. Continue reading →