Science(ish) Poem: Right Then

By: | March 28, 2022
A blue jay perched on a wooden fence, looking back at the camera.

Many of my poems are not autobiographical, but this one is. I can still remember that moment: the early-morning air, the flash of blue. The pang I felt.

In the intervening years I’ve gotten to know blue jays much better as a species and as individuals. I’ve spent endless hours reading about them, watching them, talking to them, and listening. I’ve studied an audio glossary of jay calls and songs in the vain hopes of learning to understand at least a little of their language. Still, the birds of this poem have their own private, gleaming little niche in my memory, vivid and tender as a bruise.

Right Then

Ransacking the grass
at the edge of the parking lot,
the loveliest jay
I’ve ever seen.

His features,
so fine. His blues,
so bright.

He cocks his crest
at my idling car
:

I sigh behind the wheel.

He screams.
Another bird flutters down.

She is smaller than her mate,
her neck feathers
mute and iridescent
as shade-grown violets.

Two hops and he is gone
into the brambles. She follows
:

Right then.
That’s when I miss you.

*

Image via Unsplash. A version of this poem originally appeared in Passionfruit.

Sick, Tired and Tyrannical

By: | March 25, 2022
The beach, 1976 by James Rizzi on artnet

In 2016 America, fitness status was strongly correlated with presidential voting preferences.  Citizens of counties with high rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity tended to vote for Donald Trump, regardless of their race or education level.  Citizens of counties with low rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity tended not to vote for Donald Trump. This led me to wonder—are we underestimating the influence of suffering bodies on the body politic?

Years before Trump became a viable candidate for anything other than the world’s worst coiffed tax cheat, presidential hopeful Barak Obama was accused by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets of being “too fit” to garner a majority of voters.  After all, at the time 66 percent of the nation’s voting population was overweight and 32 percent obese.  In other words, most of us looked nothing like Obama, with his gazelle grace and silky three-point jump shot.  So despite the many carefully orchestrated visits to junk food emporiums and his self-avowed penchant for greasy burgers and fries, many Americans had their doubts that Obama actually swallowed that swill—and remained suspicious that a man who claimed to be one of us was really nothing like us at all. 

How is it, I wondered, that physical fitness and stamina became linked to the effete? 

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Bad Science Poet

By: | March 23, 2022

6a011168597440970c0147e2e96a32970bThis sampling of doggerel originally appeared in 2015. It was one of a series of such samplings from the journals of Bad Science Poet. Just remember: “It’s not the science that’s bad—it’s the poetry!”™

ODE TO AN ANTARCTIC FRIEND

Penguin, oh penguin, you’re so black and white.

Your colors remind me of both day and night.

For six months a year you live without light,

Like butter inside a fridge that’s shut tight.

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Waiting for deepfakes

By: | March 21, 2022

After five years of breathless headlines about the deepfake threat, it finally happened. Earlier this month, a video purporting to show Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering to Russia was broadcast on a news station in Ukraine, from which it swiftly jumped to social media. Well, it kind of happened. An army of researchers was at the ready, and immediately found the original (real) video that had been used to generate the fake. They debunked it, but also issued a stark warning: the technology is only going to get more convincing and harder to spot.

That line has been in every single article about deepfakes since 2017, when a redditor struck nominative gold by sticking the word “deep” (which was associated with AI) in front of the word “fake”. It sooon became the name for the general practice of using software (AI or otherwise) to create a digital doppelganger of anyone or anything you could possibly desire, and make them do or say anything you want. The face swapping technique that put Zelensky’s face on another actor to puppet him is probably descended from the original used by “deepfake” to swap famous actresses’ heads onto bodies in porn videos. These early videos were only convincing to the people who really wanted to be convinced, but any day now, the story went, such AI-generated images and videos and voices would become so utterly convincing that they would bring the world down around our ears. There would be fake gotcha videos of politicians saying something they never said; public nonconsensual pornography to silence and humiliate marginalised people; fake voices and faces to aid high-tech robberies and phishing scams. It was inevitable.

Three years later, I was working on an article about the evolution of the AI under the technique’s hood. By then, the election loomed (you know the one). Everything was a whirlwind of congressional panels, multimillion-dollar technology accelerators launched to detect and defend against the threat, and impassioned senators railing photogenically against the coming technological calamity.

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Walking Home From Work

By: | March 18, 2022

Last week, I was one of the small minority of American workers who was continuing to work from home because of the pandemic. And I didn’t really feel like I was in a rush to get back. But then my company announced that we could go back if we wanted, and I thought…actually, maybe it would be nice to work somewhere other than my living room for a day. So, this Tuesday, for the first time in two years and six days, I went to work.

So I worked. And at the end of the day, I packed up my stuff, rode down in the elevator, headed out the door, turned toward the southeast, and walked home.

I used to do this pretty often. I’ve written about it before. The walk takes me past restaurants and car repair shops and train tracks and parks, and I get to catch up with the plants and buildings along the way.

A few things have changed in the last two years in that mile-and-a-half stretch of suburbia.

Whoever’s running the community garden seems to have gotten more fearful. A new sign warns that only people with permits are allowed to enter, and says to report vandalism, theft, or suspicious activity to Park Police. The garden has always seemed like such a nice place, and I’m a little sad that they’ve had the kind of trouble that made them feel like they should put up a sign. And I wonder what the trouble was. Stealing tomatoes? Sleeping behind the compost bin?

The storage place across the street from that garden used to have one redeeming feature: a stretch of lawn, maybe 10 feet wide, running along the front of the big ugly block of a building. Against the wall was a row of low shrubs. Sometimes in the afternoon, I saw rabbits in the grass. Now they’ve replaced all of those plants with gravel. This building’s current count of redeeming features: zero.

A few businesses closed, and a few opened. New apartments buildings went up. The community college is putting up a new science building. When I was almost home, I ran into an old friend. She didn’t have a dog the last time I saw her, months ago, and now she does.

a friendly chihuahua with big brown eyes

A lot of pandemic life has been fine, really. I kind of like being at home. I work just fine from my living room, and expect to continue doing so a few days a week, as I did before the pandemic. I’ve taken up a lot of hobbies. But I’ve also lost touch with a lot of the mundane sights and encounters that make up part of my connection to my community. It was refreshing to see them again.

Photo: Helen Fields, moments before meeting the dog

Bloom Where You’re Planted

By: | March 16, 2022

In spring 2021, I wrote about my pandemic obsession with my echium plant. I realized how happy this plant made me, so now I’ve got several all over the yard, in different stages of their spiky lives. A few days ago, I noticed that one of them was starting to make that skyward move that means that it, too, might begin to flower. I’ll be keeping an eye on it (although maybe not so obsessively), and hoping that many more things come into bloom for all of us this spring.

Last spring, I wasn’t sure how to use Instagram. I mean, I technically knew how to use it. When I logged on, it was honestly keeping me going each day, watching everyone try to figure out what to do at home and seeing that they were just as uncertain as I was. People made sourdough bread, they knitted, they drew rainbows and put them on their windows, they banged pots and pans. But when it came to responding in kind, I wasn’t sure what to do.

Then one of my plants started to grow.

The best way to describe the way I garden is salutary neglect. This phrase, it seems, came from the British loosening their enforcement of trade relations with the colonies in the early 1700s. I have no enforcement whatsoever. I love to buy seed packets and new, hopeful plant starts, and plant them in the garden. I tend them in the first few days, but then something always comes up. (Perhaps not unlike the British—according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, some historians think it would have been impossible for the British to enforce trade across spread-out colonies, others say “a greater cause of salutary neglect was not deliberate but was instead the incompetence, weakness, and self-interest of poorly qualified colonial officials.” Gardening incompetence, weakness and self-interest, that’s me!)

So seeing a thriving plant is always a pleasant surprise. This one started as a low-growing spiky thing, and had stayed that way for a year.  In March 2020, it started shooting up toward the sun.

The plant was an echium, a biennial plant which shoots out a flower spike during its second year. These species—there are six of them—are native to the Canary Islands and parts of the west coast of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. This one, called Echium wildpretti is known for its size—its flower tower can grow up to seven feet.

So I started taking photos of it. And there was much more drama than I thought. In a rainstorm, the spike fell over. A few days later, the tip started to lift skyward again. (Personal drama: I wrote and deleted several penis-themed captions while giggling to myself.) Huge buds grew in a spiral around the spike. Pink flowers appeared, and then an underlayer of purple. The echium toppled over again, and again, it reoriented toward the sun.

This is the kind of drama I would not have noticed otherwise. But in taking photos of E. wildpretti each day, I could see the small changes. I started looking forward to what would happen next, even when there wasn’t much else to look forward to.

Finally, the tower faded. By then we’d fallen into something of a rhythm at home, or at least something that felt less desperate. Elsewhere in the garden, a few small apricots appeared, and then a surfeit of figs. Sunflowers and pumpkins, then the dump of seed pods from the elm that signals the start of fall.

And now it’s spring again. Because of my incompetence and weakness, I could not remember what year I planted the next set of echium starts. Would I have to wait another year to see a bloom? Then about a week ago, an unassuming plant in the shade started growing upward instead of out. Now it is up above my knees, reaching toward the light.

A Serendipitous Song-Dog in Yellowstone

By: | March 14, 2022

On March 1, 2022, Yellowstone National Park celebrated its 150th anniversary. I was privileged to work briefly for the Park Service there after college, and Elise and I make a point of returning every year; our honeymoon even revolved around a backpacking trip up Slough and Pebble Creeks. Until we visited last February to cross-country ski for a few days, though, I’d never been to Yellowstone in winter. The wildlife viewing was sublime: Not only was the park unburdened by its summer crowds, the snow had pushed animals down to lower elevations, and the valleys teemed with elk, muleys, pronghorn, and wolves. We couldn’t set out from a trailhead without bumping into a herd of bison.

One afternoon, as we skied back from Tower Fall, I had an odd premonition. There was one common critter we hadn’t seen, though conditions seemed prime for its appearance: Canis latrans, the coyote. I turned to Elise and said as much. Not more than two minutes later, as though summoned, a handsome, thick-furred song-dog popped from the brush and sauntered toward us.

We were skiing uphill. The coyote was cruising downslope, adhering instinctively to the hard-packed snow of the groomed ski track, which was, after all, nothing more than a game trail forged by human animals. In her mouth she clutched a thick scrap of half-frozen hide, elk or bison — peeled off a winter-killed carcass, maybe, or snatched from a wolf pack’s victim as the larger canids snapped at her heels. Focused on her hard-won prize, she seemed completely oblivious to our presence, or, more likely, so acclimated to people that she knew we posed no threat.

She drew ever closer, the hot steam of her breath billowing from around her slab of meat, head upright and carriage noble. Now thirty feet, now twenty, fifteen, ten. We stepped out of the ski track’s grooves and into deeper snow to let her go by; as our vectors crossed, she, too, deviated a step or two from the trail, like a pedestrian courteously making room on the sidewalk. Though we could’ve grazed her luxuriant pelt with our gloved fingertips, not once did she so much as glance in our direction. Never have I seen such an intent and purposeful creature, nor one so heedless of nearby humans. Down the trail she went, around a bend, and gone, ephemeral as fog, leaving behind only a line of pawprints and a single photo by which to prove her existence.

Attention & Executive Function: Beware

By: | March 11, 2022

This first ran July 2, 2018, back when UNCONTROLLABLE STRESS was only politics, not yet politics/election or politics/election/insurrection; and before the pandemic and way before the pandemic/alpha/delta/omicron; and of course before Putin invaded Ukraine; and on and on, far into the night. It really has been a LOT for a LONG time, hasn’t it. These days, if I get the sock with the little “L” on it on my left foot, I’m brilliant.

The latest of many, many tweets by many, many people all saying the same thing:  “Ok, but for serious: is anyone else having trouble writing anything at all because everything is just Too Much right now?”  Or:  “I’ve tried to make coffee 4 times so far & failed. Writing is just Not Going To Happen.”

Google “attention,” “distraction,” and “psychology,” find a nice, scholarly, psychology article:  “That is, do we use up general attentional resources when we attempt to block out unwanted stimulation, thereby leaving less of a limited supply to fuel the main task . . .?”  I take that to mean, attention is a zero-sum game, so if you pay attention to – just blue-skying here – politics [update: and pestilence and war], do you have less “fuel” for the “main task”? 

Yes.  Jeez.  Sometimes I worry about the questions psychologists ask.

How about the reverse question:  does the main task ever take up so much fuel, you can’t simultaneously blink and speak?  I know the answer and I’ve done the experiment, so I’ll make up the psychology.  I’ll define my “main task” as the directions issued by what psychologists call “executive function,” which is jargon for the brain boss, the project manager, the general contractor that coordinates the separate workers to get the job done.  No, nobody knows whether executive function really exists or where in the brain it might be. They just know that something is in charge. Anyway, here’s the experiment.

My executive function last week:  Editor hasn’t edited draft, other editor hasn’t replied to proposal.  HEY LET’S GO BUY A CAR!

Worker:  I never bought a car before.

Executive function:  How hard can it be? Get out there and gather information.

Worker:  Um.  Ok.  The old car is still good and my car-loving friend’s expert advice is that cars are good in general so a new one would be good too.

Executive function:  Right then.  Buy a new car, sell the old one. Get back out there and get me the logistics.

Worker:  Ok.  Here’s three dealerships and 4,298 emails from each one; the Kelley Blue Book estimate for the new and old cars; car-loving friend’s expert advice about dealing with dealers; brother who wants to buy old car; and in all, five scenarios with 16 options each.

Executive function:  Go with dealership #2, here’s the price range for new car and price for old car.  Go.

Worker:  Navigate out to the county, test-drive new car, try to learn every single electronic thing the saleman says, negotiate slightly lower price. Tags-title-registration-insurance for new car tags-title-registration-insurance for old car State of Maryland oh dear I’m losing focus Motor Vehicle Administration regulations not written clearly get someone on the phone title and registration are different things please repeat it please may I quit now please Hartford Insurance Company no I can’t un-insure the old car I have to insure both oh golly that’s a lot of money yes that mileage is correct my signature seems to be degrading no way I’ve got enough fuel left to drive the new car home.

Executive function:  The salesman will drive it.  Just go home and get the old one in shape to sell.

Worker:  Ok.  Dings and scratches bad windshield wipers dicey tire thorough cleaning out of gas look up car cleaners ok gas station then cleaners.  I JUST CLOSED THE DOOR AND IT LOCKED AND I HAVE NO HOUSE KEY!  SPARE KEY!  NO SPARE KEY!  ALL FORTY SPARE KEYS LOCKED INSIDE HOUSE!  Um. I will fall to the ground and sleep until magic happens.

Executive function:  Phone the neighbor who has another spare key.

Worker:  PHONE LOCKED INSIDE HOUSE WITH ALL KEYS!

Executive function:  Then for chrissakes walk over there and knock on her door.

Worker:  Not answering door not home not answering not answering not home.

Executive function:  So go find a neighbor who’s home and ask to use her phone to call the spare-key neighbor.

Worker:  Neighbor not home next neighbor not home farther neighbor not home farthest NEIGHBOR HOME!  Oh thank you yes please if you wouldn’t mind I’ll just follow you trip over glass coffee table no I’m fine everything’s fine. Call spare-key neighbor no answer call no answer call no answer.

Executive function:  Don’t be obsessive, when the call is not answered then calling is not working. Find out if a different neighbor has a spare key.

Worker:  Walk to a different neighbor’s house not home ring again not home still not home go back to neighbor who’s at home trip over same glass coffee table this time full-body splat am I ok I’m ok ouch is that blood not really ouch it’ll heal I’m fine really I’m fine. NOT ONE MORE THING!  DON’T TELL ME ONE MORE THING!

Executive function:  No telling when the spare-key neighbor is coming home and knowing you, no telling whether you ever gave her a spare key in the first place.  Stop calling her. Call a locksmith.

Worker:  Be polite ask these nice people for one more favor no two more favors no three more favors can you google locksmith may I borrow a piece of paper may I borrow a pen may I use your phone to call the locksmith smile act normal no answer try another locksmith stop limping don’t think about cognitive impairment.

Executive function:  Go sit on your porch and wait for the locksmith. Pull yourself together here, you’re embarrassing me.

Worker:  Thank you dear neighbors thank you good by thank you. Locksmith is not coming not coming not coming LOCKSMITH CAME. He can’t get in front door keep trying can’t do it go to back door oh crap screen door is locked he can’t even get to back door so he can’t unlock it good God I didn’t know people could do things like that HE GOT IN!  Pay the man pay him a lot try to forget the last time this happened does cognitive impairment start like this?

Executive function:  Deep cleansing yogic breaths, you neurotic. Take the old car to get cleaned.  Then come back and see if you remember how to drive the new one.

Worker:  No no no no no no no not in a million years no no no no no.

Executive function:  Sissy.  At least take the at-home neighbor a bottle of wine.

Worker:  I can do that then I’m flipping your switch to off and unplugging you and taking out your battery I don’t even care get away from me.

Conclusion of experiment:  attentional resources are depleted not only during unwanted stimulation but also during episodes when executive function becomes excessive and issues inoperable operational directives, in which case attentional resources should be withdrawn before reaching the limits of the fuel supply and resulting in behavior that is suboptimal.  Fucking pessimal in fact.

__________

Photo credit: “Out of the Western Skies comes ‘Sky Corvette’” by Timothy K Hamilton via Flickr