May I ask a favor? If you spot a spider web today, avoid barreling through it and take the time to look it over. Crouch down, really examine it. Imagine the making of it, that Sisyphean task that the web builders face day after day. Say hello to the spider—she’s around there somewhere, hiding off to the side if not smack-dab at the web’s center–and wish her well in her hunt for a meal. Appreciate her tireless persistence. Who among us humans is as committed to work? A spider is, after all, always on the job. And for any species that makes one, a web is both its greatest asset and, familiar to every homeowner, its most time-consuming project.
I’m taking my own advice this morning. The spiders in my yard work through the night, some in two dimensions, others in three. By dawn there are silken purses, spirals, and mad scribbles filling otherwise empty spaces, with connective strands reaching every which way. Sheet webs bind up the grass. Dense silken layers fill corners with wide-mouthed funnels and miniature tents. And the orbs–so many orbs!–are perfect, still fresh and whole. The display is testimony: Nature’s best architects are artists with a flair for math.
Ann: The first thing I have to say is, that is a glorious title. Was it yours? I ask because with every book I’ve written, the title was a matter of intense negotiations which I usually lost, and I wonder how you got away with such elegance and relevance both.
Chris: It was my editor’s choice, despite it being one of two words on a post-it-note attached to my computer I used to remind me while writing (the other was Humility). We went back and forth for weeks with me in denial about how important a title is and also being cynical in assuming it would have to be something I hated. All along I was fortunate to have an editor (Bria Sandford) who not only got what I wanted to write, but helped me write it, even though I think some of the decisions we made wouldn’t have been approved by marketing worried only about increasing book sales.
Chris: I wrote most of the book sitting in the back corner of my local McDonald’s and that of course attracted lots of questions. When I told people I was writing a book they just looked at my blankly, like I was crazy, and then would ask me what was it about or the title. I tried various things, and eventually found what resonated most was, “You can learn everything about America in a McDonald’s.” So that was also my working title in my head for much of the process.
Ann: And I know, because you’ve guest-posted on LWON several times, that this preoccupation of yours with the south-side of the class divide started pre-Trump. So you’ve spent years, looking with your ex-physicist, ex-Wall-Street-quant’s eye at people you call the back row — who are not the kids in the front row waving their hands because they’ve got the answers, who are also people you grew up with. And you called what you saw, Dignity.
Fucking cancer. It just killed one of the finest editors I’ve ever known, and the sadness weighs on my heart like an anchor to this terrible world. Cancer also claimed the life of my dear friend Karen Hornbostel. I’ve been thinking about Karen lately, and what she might have thought of Lance Armstrong’s recent comeback. (Various media outlets are offering him a platform from which to spew his opinions. Apparently his doping and general terribleness are not a reason to turn away clicks.) This post originally ran on October 12, 2012.
In the photo, Karen is smiling. We’re clowning around, engulfed in a spring day with nowhere to be but out on our bikes. Breast cancer has already pushed its way into Karen’s life, but the demon is on hiatus, and she has gleefully stuffed her bra to announce that cancer can take her breasts but never her sense of humor.
This month marks six years since Karen Hornbostel died. I’ve been thinking of her this week as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released 1,000 pages of evidence showing a vast doping conspiracy by Lance Armstrong and his entourage. The affidavits, emails, bank records and other documents paint a picture of Armstrong as a bully and a cheat.
I wish Karen was around to discuss Armstrong’s downfall. She admired Lance, and in many ways, she modeled her cancer fight after his. In 2003, the Lance Armstrong Foundation (now Livestrong) awarded Karen its “Spirit of Survivorship” award. It was an honor she proudly accepted from Armstrong himself. Like him, she vowed never to yield to cancer, and indeed she fought it to her last breath.
I was at the Getty Museum in LA not long ago, and inside its cavernous entrance my kids and I found a spot where we could stand one at a time, speaking, making sounds, snapping, clapping, and hearing ourselves bounce back in surround-sound. Since this post originally ran November 21, 2017, I’ve found numerous more places like this.
In caves and rock walls of the southern Utah desert, pictographs have been painted, added to the backs of clamshell-shaped sandstone enclosures. Many are noted to have acoustic properties, meaning these ancient, Indigenous images seem to be correlated with the way sound reflects around them. I’ve spoken in a normal voice back and forth from one sheltered rock art panel to another an eighth of a mile downcanyon. The way sound spreads and is refocused, we could hear each other’s every word.
James Farmer, from the Utah Rock Art Research Association, wrote that panels from the ghostly and enigmatic Barrier Creek tradition in Utah (pictured above) contain what he sees as thunderstorm motifs. At one of these Barrier Creek panels, he witnessed a cloudburst with thunder, waterfalls, and falling boulders. He wrote about the intensification of sound from the storm around the rock art, “it seems inconceivable to me that any ancient archaic hunter-gatherers witnessing a similar event would not have been just as astonished as me, and would have naturally invested the location with divine, supernatural powers.”
The nascent field of “archaeoacoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. I look at this as not just an ancient feature, but one that we walk through everyday. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. By happenstance or not, resonance is part of the way we relate to architecture, whether human made or carved by nature.
Perhaps 500 yards from my door—up an icy, winding driveway, a short
way down a gravel road, beyond barbed wire fences and snow-skirffed
pastures and the wind-twisted trunks of piñon and juniper trees—is a
barn that shelters two sailboats in the middle of the Colorado desert. I
first spotted them on a walk and stopped to stare. The nearest large
reservoir is more than two hours away from the house I am borrowing
here; the ocean, more than 16 hours away.
But as freezing gusts combed fingers through my hair, grasped and
numbed my hands, the sailboats began to make a certain sense. This
desert breaks in waves to the horizons like an ocean, troughed with
canyons, crested with rimrock and foamed with sage and rabbitbrush. And
since I arrived two weeks ago, its surface has been slapped by just the
kind of steady wind that would make those sailboats fly across water.
Perhaps, I thought, they’re waiting for their moment to take wing
through the air, instead.
This post (published in May 2018) seemed worth resurfacing after the astonishing recent news that the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library had flown to our celestial neighbor with Earth life aboard.For the record, I love the Lunar Library concept (cf., below). But I think the tardigrades were a bad idea.
After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, how strange mistakes in those copies lead to endless forms of life. We know who won the 1998 World Series and how to calculate area and the best way to make a beef bourginon. This is a lot of information to have in one brain, so humans also invented a way to offload some of that information and store it someplace else, through writing.
The loss of collective knowledge, either through deliberate acts of destruction or via accidents, remains one of the most potent sources of psychic pain — at least on a humanistic level. So there was something so touching about the press release I got from Astrobotic Technologies this week.
Sometime in 2020, Astrobotic will launch its small lander off the Earth, send it to the moon, and set it down, marking a leap forward for commercial space travel. Along with cargo for some private companies, some governments, a few universities, and some rich institutions and individual people, it will be carrying a library.
They are calling it the Lunar Library, but for now it’ll just be a digital copy of Wikipedia (which edit date, I don’t know) and a beautiful object called the Rosetta Project. The latter is a project of the wondrous Long Now Foundation, and it is a CD-sized solid nickel disc inscribed with data on 1,500 human languages. You can only read its pages using a microscope.
The Lunar Library consists of tens of millions of pages of text and images, which are stored in a decidedly retro fashion, essentially a 21st-century style … nanofiche, if you will. Each page is laser-etched onto thin sheets of nickel at 300,000 dots per inch, using a patented nano-lithograph, according to the small concern that is building it, the Arch Foundation (pronounced Ark). All a library patron would need to read it is a 1000x optical microscope.
Astrobotic was at one point a leading contender for the Google Lunar X Prize, which would have awarded up to $30 million in prize money for a private robotic jaunt to our satellite. That didn’t happen, but Astrobotic is still planning its mission, because why not, and because there’s money to be made.
The Arch Foundation apparently flew a mission called Solar Library earlier this year, which used a new memory architecture called a 5D memory, so the foundation wants to add one of these for the moon, too. The company also wants to use DNA storage, encoding information in the four-letter code that serves as the backbone for all of life as we know it. But for now, the Library is just the nickel pages.
Nickel is impervious to cosmic radiation and can withstand wild temperature fluctuations from the lunar day to night, so an etched physical disc will last far longer than any computer or current memory chip. They will last longer than the Pyramids. In fact, it may last much longer than our planet, according to the foundation.
This is all cool and good, but the press release still didn’t tell me why.
The Peregrine — that’s the lander’s name — won’t need to reference this lunar library. It will have all the information it needs stored within its brain, because this is a thing we can do with robots. No human settlers (I don’t want to say colonists) will need it, either, at least for a long time, and maybe forever. By the time we send humans back to the moon on the regular, Apple Watches will have more memory than today’s supercomputers, and we will just bring our knowledge with us.
It could last for billions of years, according to the Arch Foundation: “the ultimate in cold storage for human civilization,” said Nova Spivack, cofounder and chairman. The foundation’s mission is “to preserve and disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and space.” So this library will exist on the moon just because it can.
I think it’s important to note that this knowledge is our most important knowledge as of now, in 2018. This is not a reflection of all we have known and understood, nor what we will come to know and understand in the future. But there is something eternal about this library, all the same. It is a reflection of our most fundamental desire, the deepest ache in all our hearts that ties us to everyone who has ever lived. It is a way for us to send versions of ourselves into the future. It’s a path to immortality. Taking a collectively edited compendium of knowledge and sending it off the planet forever is probably the most human thing there is.
Image credit: E Schokraie, PLoS One, via Wikimedia Commons; bottom, Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
This was my first guest post for LWON, in 2015. I’m reposting it because there’s yet another update: A few days ago, my mother revealed that, CONTRARY TO ALL HER PREVIOUS CLAIMS, it was the cat.
…
This week, while working on a little story for Science about hamster emotions, I decided to do some hard-hitting journalism, so I called my mother.
“Mom, I want to know what happened to Hamlet,” I said over the phone, interrupting her dinner party in California.
A pause. “Really?”
Hamlet was my childhood hamster. He looked a lot like the tawny fluffball pictured above. I named him Hamlet because, well, I was a pretty melodramatic kid.
The official story was that Hamlet disappeared. I remember my clever mother speculating that he had escaped into the black widow-infested crawlspace under our house by slipping through a vent. After learning the truth about what really happened to one of our dogs, however — a story for another time — I harbored suspicions.
Hamlet had always seemed pretty depressed. He didn’t appear to enjoy his colorful cage, complete with a tunnel, wheel, and ramp. He was sullen and ornery — a biter. He was a pretty lousy pet.
My mother confirmed my childhood impressions. The only thing he did with any enthusiasm was gnaw at his plastic cage in an attempt to escape, she said. Eventually, he did. “One morning, I came in to wake you girls up and he was not where he belonged,” she said. “Then I found his body.”
Hamlet hadn’t been obviously mangled or chomped on by our two cats, she said (SEE UPDATE.) “Maybe it was old age,” she said. “Or a broken heart.” (Reading this in light of what I know now, I am struck once again by my family’s emotional flair.)
“Do you think that Hamlet committed suicide?” I (unwittingly) said. Continue reading →
After my voice lesson Sunday afternoon, I heard bells. Eight bells, ringing on and on. My voice lessons are in the bowels of Washington National Cathedral – a real live Gothic cathedral, hand-carved over the last 107 years by bearded Englishmen, or at least the group included one bearded Englishman who lives in my neighborhood. The cathedral’s tallest tower holds 10 bells known as peal bells, because they’re for playing peals like this one.
Peal bells are used for mathematical playing, not melodic; as the website of the North American Guild of Change Ringers explains, a peal goes through the bells by number, switching the order each time, so a four-bell “method” – apparently the little bits of music are called “methods” – might start like this, where each number is a bell:
I’m taking my own advice this morning. The spiders in my yard work through the night, some in two dimensions, others in three. By dawn there are silken purses, spirals, and mad scribbles filling otherwise empty spaces, with connective strands reaching every which way. Sheet webs bind up the grass. Dense silken layers fill corners with wide-mouthed funnels and miniature tents. And the orbs–so many orbs!–are perfect, still fresh and whole. The display is testimony: Nature’s best architects are artists with a flair for math.
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