The Newest of the People of LWON

By: | October 15, 2010

May we present the newest of the people of LWON, Richard Panek?  Richard thinks that the history of the telescope is a history of mankind’s view of itself; that Einstein and Freud introduced us to the possibility of things both important and invisible; that our knowledge of the universe is constrained by the cosmological Dark Sector; and that the New York Society Library’s open stacks of books talk so loudly he can’t think:  “All of history, all those voices, all at once,” he says.  We are proud to have him and I’m personally a little worried he’s going to make me and Abstruse Goose look silly.  His first post is on Monday.

Photo credit:  Tom Murphy VII

The Ladder of Incompetence

By: | October 15, 2010
Incompetency is the rule in Dilbert's office.

While browsing this year’s list of Ig Nobel awardees (improbable research is so much more fun than the kind that wins Nobels), I stumbled across a quirky little study on The Peter Principle. What’s The Peter Principle? I’m glad you asked.

In 1941, a man by the name of Laurence Peter became a teacher. He noticed almost immediately that his supervisors were ignorant boobs (ok, he may actually have used the word “incompetent”). This seemed paradoxical. “When I was a boy, I was taught that the men upstairs knew what they were doing,” he later wrote. Yet in the school where he worked, it seemed they did not. What’s more, the epidemic appeared to be widespread. Peters found numerous examples of top positions filled by blundering dum-dums who weren’t doing their jobs—or at least weren’t doing them well. Peter pondered this phenomenon, and then he came up with a theory—”The Peter Principle.”

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It Started with a Cat Bite

By: | October 14, 2010

This is the story of Massachusetts General Hospital case #31-2010: a 29-year-old woman whom I’ll call Melissa.

I’m telling Melissa’s story not for its common-sense lesson—avoid interactions with cats*—but because it shows that doctor detective-work happens outside of TV Land.

Melissa was a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital. One day, at work, a cat bit her right hand, in the meaty part where the thumb meets the palm. Bad kitty.
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The Observer: John Huchra, 1948 – 2010

By: | October 13, 2010
Map of the universe, at present, in theory

“The universe is what it is, and we’re trying to find out what it is,” John Huchra told me.  “The explorers of the new world weren’t trying to prove theories, they were looking at what was out there.”

Huchra was an observational astronomer, as opposed to a theorist.  Theorists say that, given physics, the universe ought to look like this.  Observers go to telescopes and look, and report back, no, actually it looks like that.  Theorists put those observations into a theory and say, then if so, you observers should also see this other thing.  Observers look and say, yes but it looks more like that thing.  And so on, back and forth, their court, our court, until the whole tennis game – Huchra liked the word, “game” — results in a theory, an explanation, a lovely story we can all believe because it’s so thoroughly grounded in observations. Continue reading →

Not Tonight, Dear, I’ve Lost My Mucus

By: | October 12, 2010
Knit your own snails

A few years ago a friend of mine gave a party and screened the movie Microcosmos for the revelers. Perhaps it was the punch I had imbibed, but I seem to recall that the film – a montage of mesmerizing bug scenes including ants drinking from a dewdrop and caterpillars moving in single-file – had a strangely psychedelic effect on my brain. Especially hypnotic was the sight of two snails mating, their slimy bodies roiling and coiling around each other on a carpet of moss.

I thought of that snail sex scene when I read about some spiffy mollusc research recently published by a group of Swedish marine ecologists at the University of Gothenburg. This group of intrepid scientists have discovered that the females of the marine snail species Littorina saxatilis, or rough periwinkle, conceal their gender identity in order to avoid mating too much. They do this by refusing to label their mucus trails with chemical signals indicating their sex.

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The Immense Pleasure of Glass

By: | October 8, 2010

Each week, I’m torn between two warring emotions as I bear a large blue box of empty wine bottles and other glass detritus into the back alley. As I set the bin out for pick-up, I feel a certain satisfaction in a civic duty well done, dispatching this jumble of glass to the recyclers. But this personal pleasure battles with a something far less noble.  I pray the neighbors aren’t monitoring my alcohol consumption.

I always assumed that such recycling (soul-baring) was the brain child (fault) of modern environmentalists. But nothing could be further from the truth, as I discovered this week.  Some 1700 years ago, inhabitants of Roman Britain were dutifully recycling their glass too. And the more things crumbled and fell apart in the Roman Empire,  the more these ancient Brits recycled. Continue reading →

One Roman Helmet, Going, Going, Gone

By: | October 7, 2010

It’s hard not to feel depressed. As regular visitors to LWON know, British school children recently raided their piggy banks to help the Tullie House Museum buy an absolutely stunning Roman cavalry helmet discovered last spring in northwestern England (see here for the background). Well, the helmet went up on the auction block at Christie’s today, and the news isn’t good. All those donations by adults and kids alike hardly made a dint in the final selling price–a staggering $3.2 million,  far above the pre-sale estimate of some $470,000. Continue reading →