Abstruse Goose: Cosmic Backyard

By: | June 8, 2018

Ok, I thought, I’m an astro writer, I got this.  For one thing, you wouldn’t use astroseismology to look at the pulses of a pulsating white dwarf: pulses are relatively long, astroseismology looks for little jitters. For another, AG spelled it “asteroseismology,” laughably wrong.  After further investigation, the astro writer learns a lesson: never second-guess AG.

Abstruse Goose had a couple sneaky messages always.  One is a floating caption-thing, the other is the name of the download.  The name of this download was: Dramatic Re-enactment of Actual Study on BPM-37093.  Googled BPM-37093.  It’s an all-but-dead star, out of fuel, gravitationally-collapsed so hard down to carbon that it’s essentially a diamond.  So without further googling, I give up and assume that diamond stars would sort of ring, not pulse in and out, and so astroseismology would be useful.  I may be making this up.  What I’m not making up is, 1) with googling, I learn that astroseismology’s jitters come in all sizes; and 2), for chrissakes, “asteroseismology” really is the correct spelling.  I haven’t a clue why.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/581

Powerless And Fully Dark

By: | June 7, 2018

The hail was the first thing to wake me up. First a light patter, like pennies falling off the counter and onto the floor, but then it got worse. Thunk. It sounded like someone had thrown a rock at my window. For a second I thought it might shatter, spilling wind and rain into my hair. It didn’t. It was 2 a.m.

I listened to the hail, took a deep breath and tried to fall back to sleep, and I think I did, for maybe 4 minutes. Then in an instant, I heard everything stop: onrushing quiet, like a door closing on a soundproof room. All the electrons flowing to my house were cut off, and silence descended. The ceiling fan slowly spun to a standstill. For a moment I heard nothing but the wild onslaught of rain and hail. I waited.

Beeeeeeeeeep. I got up. I walked in the darkness to my office, where the beeeeeeeeeep was presently emanating from the backup battery attached to my computer. The storm howled beyond my office windows, and I stood for a moment and gaped at the positively gigantic, seven-story oak tree two backyards over.

Have you ever seen a humongous broadleaf tree swaying in a Midwestern summer storm? It is an incredible sight. The canopy oscillated back and forth at an impossible-looking frequency. The trunk seemed like it was tilted 45 degrees. Damn, live wood is flexible. This thing was really holding on. A less healthy, more brittle tree would have broken, but the neighbor oak merely leaned. Its main limbs, rising from the trunk like a sun salutation, flapped absurdly. The tree looked like one of those flaccid windsock guys at a used car lot. I almost laughed.
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Loose Ends

By: | June 5, 2018

I usually avoid talking to people at the gym. But a few weeks ago, the man next to me had his shoes untied, and I couldn’t help myself. The laces were bright red, and extremely long. He was doing side steps that looked like they had high trip potential. And I was extra-sensitive to falls that day–my mother-in-law had ended up in the hospital after losing her footing in her backyard, and this gentleman looked about the same age, and was approaching his exercises with the same determination I imagined she would.

“Could I tie those for you?” I asked. I felt like I needed to give some sort of explanation. “I tie a lot of shoes,” I said.

He laughed, and thanked me. “You must have kids. I remember that,” he said. “When my son was little, even if I double-knotted them, his shoes always came untied, too. I don’t know how he did it.”

That’s the thing, we don’t even have to do anything. Except move our feet. Continue reading →

Redux: Fasting – The New Fad Diet?

By: | June 4, 2018

This story was originally published in 2013. Since then, evidence for the benefits of fasting has mounted. See here, here, and here. But so many questions still remain. What is clear? Dieting is hard. For example, this study, which examined an every-other-day-fast regimen and a more traditional calorie-restriction diet, lost 31% of its participants.  

 

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A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a beautiful rural home that belongs to my parents’ friends, a slim and sophisticated couple who enjoys bird watching and international travel. I was meeting this pair—let’s call them George and Marsha—for the first time. I’m inherently nosy, so while the rest of the group chatted, my eyes scanned the room. On the fridge, I noticed a slip of paper that looked to be George and Marsha’s weekly dinner menu. That night they’d be having polenta and pork roast. The other days had meals written next to them too, all except for Monday and Wednesday. Next to those two days, Marsha (or George) had scrawled “Fast.”

Fast as in not eat? Marsha and George didn’t seem like the type to fall for juice cleanses or fad diets. My parents said the couple had probably seen the same documentary they had. The show follows Michael Mosley, a BBC journalist and former physician, on his quest to become slimmer and healthier through fasting.

I’ve never heard of Michael Mosley, but I’m not sure how I missed him. Lately Mosley is everywhere — on the BBC, on PBS, in the news. In January he launched a bestselling diet book co-authored by journalist Mimi Spencer. Here’s the approach they’re advocating: To lose weight and improve health, dieters should fast two days each week. On fasting days, women should consume no more than 500 calories. Men are allowed 600. The other five days dieters have no restrictions. Continue reading →

The last word

By: | June 2, 2018

May 28 – June 1 2018

This week, LWON guest contributor Robin Meija takes a look under the hood of the Puerto Rico death toll numbers – and finds something disturbing in the statistics 

On a lighter note, do you like insane apocryphal philosophy and AI? Then you’ll love my story about Descartes’ robot daughter.

Environmental thinkers sometimes dream of communicating with other species about our common problems and shared fates, but few have imagined the everyday practicalities: who would translate? Who would speak first? And what in the world would we all eat for lunch? Michelle tells us about the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference, as imagined in a new play that I now really, really want to go see.

Three years after her first cry for help, Christie is still digging out from her email</a>, and may never surface. There’s got to be a better way!

Emma, LWON’s anthropocene correspondent, interviews Christopher Preston about his new book, which asks for a conversation about geoengineering that’s a little less enthusiastic about technology and intervention.

 

Guest Post: What’s the Story with Puerto Rico’s Death Toll?

By: | June 1, 2018

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last fall, it killed power to most of the island. The toll was catastrophic. Damages have been estimated at $90 billion. For months, entire cities had no electricity, sanitation, and access to health care. Which is why the government’s official death toll from the storm—64 people—always seemed suspect.

On Sunday, a team from Harvard confirmed those suspicions. In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, they showed that the hurricane killed more than 4,600 – 70 times the government’s number.

Why the difference? How can one entity count 64 people and another 4,600?  When what they’re counting is something as important as dead American citizens? It turns out counting disaster deaths is harder than it sounds.

To be fair, the government and public health researchers used different definitions for what counted as a “hurricane death.” The government only counts those deaths it can attribute directly to Maria. The academics looked for something called excess deaths: the total number of deaths beyond what should have happened if there’d been no hurricane. To get at this number, researchers don’t even require a complete count of deaths, they just do a survey.

In an ideal world, when disaster strikes, we’d always know exactly how many people died and what from. However, that’s an ideal we never get. As the government response in Puerto Rico shows, it’s just not realistic to expect officials combating a hurricane to accurately track all individual deaths and find each root cause.  And sometimes, getting to an individual root cause is impossible. In the wake of a natural disaster, more people die from almost every cause you can think of. Certainly people drown, but rates of stroke also increase. Rather than trying to tease out if a given stroke was caused by the hurricane, an excess death estimate simply notes how many more there were than would have been expected. Continue reading →

The Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference

By: | May 31, 2018

We’re in the very near future, on a quiet beach, with seven young interns from the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference. In many ways, this conference is like any other; there are misunderstandings, arguments, and moments of insight. There’s some weird food, and some sleeping around.

This conference, though, isn’t just for humans. It’s for representatives of almost every species on the planet, and it aims to save life on earth from a toxic slime that, accelerated by climate change, is quickly taking over the oceans. The interns are studying various animal languages—toad, dolphin, seal, seabird—and they’re here to translate for the delegates. “We’re second-generation animal communicators,” one intern says proudly. “So, like, linguistically evolved.”

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