Still In There

By: | March 8, 2021

“Is today Sunday?” my dad asks. Here we are again, having the usual phone conversation, when we go over the day of the week, the time, and whether it’s a “shower day” at the nursing home.

If we talk two hours later, the same questions are bound to come up. What day is it? Do I have a shower today? What time is it where your brother lives? He hasn’t forgotten, exactly. He just can’t quite remember. If that makes sense.

Yep, this is where we are.

He survived COVID-19, but I think COVID-19 took something with it when it left. The changes are subtle if you don’t know him, perhaps, but they are there. No doubt. Interest in puzzles, books, and politics has slunk to the edges where it used to be front and center. And nothing simple stays put. Not the capital of Arizona, not where he keeps his hats, not why it’s essential that he keep getting up and moving around.

I guess it could just old-man brain worsening, as it would have done regardless of the virus and the isolation and the loss of his partner. Who can say.

But now, if it is a shower day, that’s all there is. We will discuss it ad nauseam. He’s going to have to “wrangle” them to come do it, he insists, even though they have a 5-hour window to fit him in: He decides if they don’t come get him in the first 10 minutes of the first possible hour, they have forgotten him. So, he’ll push that little button by the bed, jab, jab with his finger, prepared to “give them hell” for skipping him. Sometimes he shuffles into the hall to complain, because often the button push is fruitless. (I suspect the call light above his door is lit all day long. Remember the boy who cried wolf?) The nurses must love seeing him suddenly appear outside his door calling “hello, hello, is someone there? Is anyone coming to get me?”

And so, as our conversation begins that way, again, I feel a little panicky that this is how it’s going to be from this day forward, nothing to talk about but the shower schedule, the date, and what time it is in Germany.

And then, suddenly, he’s humming a tune, and then come these words:

Ell-ee-a-zer Wheelock is a bargain-hunting man
His cousin, name of Fealock, makes the footwear for our clan…

“How‘s that for a start?” he says. “I’m not sure where I come up with these gems. I’m just lying here thinking of rhymes and there it is.” (Fealock’s family, in real life, had some kind of shoe business, he tells me. So, it totally makes sense.)

“Maybe when I finish it we can sell it and make a few mil,” he says.

And finish it he does, during our next call. Here’s where he lands:

Ell-ee-a-zer Wheelock is a bargain-hunting man

His cousin, name of Fealock, makes the footwear for our clan.

Cut a deal for his relations? Never Fealock. That’s a laugh.

While if I had near his money, I would slice my price in half!

That’s so dad, remarks my brother when I read it to him.

Yes, indeed it is. Which means everything.

—-

Photo by Daniel Öberg on Unsplash




Alternative Realities at the NRO

By: | March 5, 2021

We begin, as we so often do, with a tweet.

Jonathan McDowell @planet4589: Interesting that the NROL-44 patch description makes explicit reference to FVEY, the ‘Five Eyes’ spy alliance of US/UK/Aus/Can/NZ.

Brief explainer: Jonathan McDowell is a certified Harvard x-ray astronomer who also keeps an eye on satellites in space. NROL stands for National Reconnaissance Office Launch.  NRO sits somewhere in the murky middle space between the defense department and the intelligence community.  Its job is to launch spy satellites.  The spy satellites are secret and the NRO doesn’t especially acknowledge them.  But the satellites are launched on rockets and rocket launches aren’t subtle and come with warnings to pilots, so NRO acknowledges the launches with a statement and a mission patch.  For launch #44, the patch was this wolf.  An annotated version of this patch says that those five wolves (note the four lurking in the back) “shows the solidarity across the FVEY community.”  The annotation continues:  the wolf is howling into space where the satellite is, and the howl is a warning to the wolf pack of signs of trouble.

Well then. Well-a-then. My my my.  I have questions, I do.

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Shaman Balls
Penspective #2

By: | March 3, 2021

Part of a series of ‘penspective’ posts using a pen for scale

The earth is a producer of oddities. Crystals curl around each other like fiber optics and groundwater stains rock like Van Gogh. Geologic byproducts come out faster than Linnaeus could name off species, lava bombs, pseudomorphs, barites that look like roses, and copper that grows like mushrooms. When you find fields of little geologic eggs, you begin to think Darwin may have been short-sighted focusing only on organic life. 

What are these oddities, ball bearings of the desert? You find them all over the Colorado Plateau, iron-rich concretions that erode out of parent rock in the form of spheres. Some are red, some orange, and some so black sunlight gives them a purple sheen. I’ve seen them small as peas or bigger than bowling balls. They can be as hard as musket balls or crumble to the touch. On Mars, they are called blueberries. On Earth, they are known as shaman stones, Moqui balls, or, my favorite from a hibiscusmooncrystal website, shaman balls. To quote the unnamed source on the site: “Shaman balls contain hematite and silicate in their outer shell (the center is sandstone).” Absolutely right. Mostly. Some are iron through and through, squeezed into the sandstone like seeds. When the sandstone wears away, the harder iron concretions remain. 

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Winter Sunsets Are the Best Sunsets

By: | February 26, 2021

This post began with a question from my dear friend, the novelist and documentary filmmaker George Lerner. 

Looking over two years of footage from South Texas, I noticed something striking: I have lots and lots of glorious images filmed around sunset, but scant few decent shots at sunrise. Why is this, I wondered — is there a difference from an optical or geophysical perspective between sunset and sunrise?

George copied me on this question he sent to my dad, who has taught atmospheric physics. (How the three of us became close like family is a story for another day.) 

I had a knee-jerk answer to George’s question: the reason that sunsets are more amazing than sunrises is that you just see a hell of a lot more of them. So I chuckled to myself when I saw that Dad’s reply to George began, “I try to avoid the early morning hours so I do not see many sunrises.” (Neither of us are morning people.)

But it turns out that there’s more to it than just selection bias. There are scientific reasons that sunsets might be more scenic than sunrises. 

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Stander’s block

By: | February 24, 2021

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. 

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Redux: Places of Worship

By: | February 22, 2021

This post originally ran in November of 2011.

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.

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How Snow Falling on Pines Changes the Forest

By: | February 19, 2021

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. 

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