When I first decided to become a full-time writer, I did what any red-blooded American would do: I bought stuff. I purchased a bulletin board so I could pin up my to-do lists and story leads. I ordered a new planner to mark my new beginning. And I splurged on a new standing desk so I could become my best self. Once I became my own boss, I would stand all day, and be so productive! After all, a 2013 WIRED article declared that sitting was the new smoking; as an able-bodied person, I had the means to improve my health by standing, so why not take full advantage? Once I got the hang of the standing thing, I’d invest in a treadmill desk and reach my final actualized form. Becoming a freelancer meant becoming a master of my own fate.
The joke was on me: I quickly discovered that I cannot write standing up. Any time I had to get down more than a paragraph, any time I got stuck in my thought process, or even if I had to write a medium-stakes email, I found myself pulling up the uncomfortable, shoddily made chair I’d bought “just in case.” (As a meta note: I actually started writing this while standing, but once I sat down, I deleted almost all of what I’d written and started over.) Sometimes, back when I could still have company over, friends would see my desk and ask, “How do you like it?” I felt like a fraud admitting the desk wasn’t working out the way I’d imagined.
The universality of science – an obligation to produce identical results no matter the setting – removes a certain sense of place from science history. What does it matter where mitosis was first understood, if it could just as well be discovered anywhere in the biosphere? Furthermore, it’s hard nowadays even to pin down a location for scientific advances: authors are listed according to institutional affiliations, often spanning the globe to collaborate on a single journal article.
There is a place, I think, for recognition not only of great minds but also of the physical spaces that have witnessed some of their best work. While laboratory spaces look different now than they used to, it’s well worth revisiting the conditions under which pivotal discoveries were made. Our species is adapted for social learning based on modeling, and the more clearly we can visualize our personal heroes at work, the better we can put ourselves into their minds, applying their ways of thinking to our own professional questions.
I invite you to share in the comments section a building that inspires you in your own appreciation of science, and I’d like to share one of mine with you now.
Number One Spadina Crescent is a massive, ivy-covered Gothic Revival building erected in 1875 on the edge of Toronto’s university campus. It stands alone in the middle of a busy roundabout, and until 2007 it was impossible to reach it without jaywalking across three lanes of curving traffic and streetcar tracks.
Snow falls often where I live now. I love it, mostly. I do like to work, so I don’t love when it creates snow days. But I love its crisp delicacy, falling soft and softly falling. I love its silence and its brightness. I love the way it tattles on the deer and turkeys and bobcats and coyote and mountain lions and soon, the bears that walk by and around my house.
I especially love the way it falls upon the conifers. The sight of a snow-fattened tiny spruce, or a tall burdened ponderosa, were among the things I missed most during the years I didn’t live in Colorado.
I have always liked the word “foothill.” It evokes not only the low hills at the foot of a mountain, but the pleasure of footing over them. When the hills turn soft and green, I like to imagine placing a marble at the top of a hill and watching it roll. Last weekend, I followed the imaginary marble on a long, solo walk, intending to get at least a little bit lost. I followed a stream until I found a sunlit meadow, ate half my turkey sandwich, then fell asleep. When I woke up it was late, dusk coming on quickly. A pair of deer grazed a few feet from where I had been napping. All around me, a chorus of frogs sang wildly of spring, sex, and resurrection.
Frogs, I recently learned, can survive freezing temperatures because the sugar in their blood protects their vital organs from ice crystals. Their hearts may stop beating, they may stop breathing, but as soon as temperatures get warmer, the frogs wake up to mate and sing. Other frogs can survive long droughts by making themselves a dead skin cocoon, mummifying themselves until the rains return.
My first experience with automated transcription happened a decade ago. In 2010 I joined Google Voice and started getting transcripts of my voicemails. The results were, not surprisingly, underwhelming. Back then, most speech recognition software was underwhelming. Here’s my first transcript:
Hi Cassandra, this is Anna 10 calling to run. Thank you for the science now on a call if they were at. Just two little things that we were hoping you might be able to rephrase I’m gonna send you an email and let you know to see if it’s possible. I think both She She, Syria and, got the call, or felt a little bit. I’ve left out of the article so. I will send you an email. Thanks bye bye.
Thanks, Anna 10. Let’s loop in She She and Syria and circle back.
But oh how times have changed. AI got good. AI got astonishingly good. So good it is now, gasp!, useful. More than useful. For journalists, automated transcription tools have been a godsend. (You can find a comparison of various services here.)
These tools are good, but none of them are perfect. Some, in fact, are hilariously imperfect. Here I present a bevy of AI bloopers.* Enjoy. (And please add your own bloopers in the comments!)
The other day I hovered over the computer as the clock counted down. Was I on the right page? Refreshing, refreshing, refreshing. Was I logged in? At 7:00 p.m., the screen changed, and I zipped around with my cursor, checking the open slots, trying to check the right box.
It wasn’t a vaccine appointment. It was a lap lane.
I’ve always been an inconsistent swimmer. For many years, I moved so often that I never found a rhythm. It took me a while to get the lap swim schedule down—and then the snow would fall, or I’d start training for a long run, or move again. In the last few years, I only swam when I was pregnant or nursing an injury. Last year, I’d been thinking about getting in the pool again, and then you know what happened. Once the pool did reopen, it seemed too complicated to navigate the sign-up system, too strange to follow the many new rules.
The other day I was rifling through a drawer in search of a notebook — I have a filing system best described as “post-tornado” — when my hand touched an old external hard-drive. I plugged it into a USB port, and years of photos, many of which I’d assumed were lost forever, bloomed on my laptop. A couple of albums captured scuba-diving trips Elise and I took in the Before Times, back when the greatest risk of foreign travel was flygskam. We spent most of those dives hunting for nudibranchs, flamboyant sea slugs that hide among coral crevices like Easter eggs. Although we have been privileged to see many extraordinary things underwater — dolphin pods, mantis shrimp, turtles the size of coffee tables — nothing quite thrills me like finding one of these tiny gems, exposed gills waving kelpishly in the current. Their preposterous beauty and gentle panache have always sparked wonder in me; perhaps these unearthed pictures will do the same for you.
Material mirth: It has a nice ring to it. And there’s nothing wrong with buying new cork placemats or ridiculously overpriced hiking socks because new placemats or new socks make you smile. In fact, sometimes buying things you don’t really need is super rewarding. Like, if I could buy a tiny tropical white-sand island with a beach cottage and a friendly resident dolphin, I’d be happier than I am now, during this COVID-gray February in Maryland. Studies have shown that shopping actually can ease sadness–by giving us some control when we may feel we have none.
On the other hand, as a long-term strategy, shoving stuff you bought on a whim into the hole where dread and self-loathing dwell is bound to disappoint.
During the pandemic, I have not gone whole hog on online shopping to fill my own personal hole of discontent (okay, that’s a terrible way to put that), but I haven’t done none of it, either. So, to make it seem like I was shopping for scientific reasons, I thought I’d look for patterns in my purchases to try to explain my behavior–thus elucidating something essential about myself and about our species as a whole. *
What I found isn’t terribly surprising: Almost everything “extra” I’ve bought since lockdown began is related to beauty, to eating, or to cleaning, which makes sense for someone who is stuck at home with a Zoom camera, an inner hunger that only pasta can fill, and dog hair by the skein. (There’s also a smaller but still substantial “comfort” category that I’d submit needs no explanation.) It must be the sight of my pale, puffy face and tired eyes staring back at me daily, the messy desk flanked by stacked mail and laundry, the dog in the background giving off what can only be described as a “poopie” smell, that drives me to seek products that promise a healthy glow in the foreground and a sparkling clean setting (and dog) in the back.
That said, I’ve been known to fall into the ridiculous notion that having a certain thing will make everything that’s wrong suddenly okay. My pandemic purchases, then, have tried to serve two purposes–the one they were designed for and the anti-depressant, fix-what’s-broken, fill-all-voids one.
Some of the items are trying hard to at least fulfill that first part, with mixed results. The second part, not so much.
Here’s what I got:
Beauty/fashion-related:
Jade facial roller Phytopolleine scalp elixer
Full skin-care line by Mad Hippie Collagen supplements
Black cohosh supplements (for hot flashes, because nobody looks pretty during a hot flash)
**Nope.
Octopus tentacle earrings
Two sweaters I may never receive from a sketchy company advertising on FB (why, why do I do this??)
Overnight anti-wrinkle patches**
Tub of activated charcoal (for teeth plus)
This bag
(For the record: I did not purchase the cheek-lifting leggings that keep showing up in my “you might be interested in this” cue. And I take offense at Facebook’s suggestion, damn it.)
Food-related:
Two styles of garlic press, because it’s good to have a spare
Chef’s knife
Egg-bite mold, for Instant Pot
New rubber seal that doesn’t smell like aged chicken, for Instant Pot
Vat of tahini (pack of two) because of roasted cauliflower recipe seen on TikTok
Fancy pink Himalayan salt Case of red wine, through a friend who sells (gotta support my friends!)
Food processor (thankfully I already had a Vitamix and an Instant Pot or I would have bought those, too)
Actual old-timey silver plated silverware (in its own wooden box) to replace embarrassing hodgepodge from college, in case we ever have guests again
Cleaning-related:
Two different mop/bucket “systems” (when did mops reach the $50 mark?)
Magic Eraser (pack of six)for wall smears
Rug rake for loosening dog hairbefore vacuuming
Dog mouthwash
Cloths for dry dog “bath” (see a pattern here?)
“Green” laundry detergent pods, the subscription
Comfort-related:
Yup!
Eucalyptus sheets
The Comfy wearable blanket (which, actually, HAS been transformative)
A plant (mentally comforting, somehow)
Misc: Covid mask with Bob Ross silhouette and happy little trees
Gardening containers (they were thankfully free, left by the curb, and it’s too soon to tell…they may still be the keystone in the arc of my happiness, to borrow a phrase)
—
Okay, now it’s your turn. What have you bought on a whim since last March? Is it giving your life meaning? Is it at least making your hair curl or your rugs smell fresh? If yes, where can I get it?
