Pyramids, Hidden Tunnels, and All the Best Mysteries

By: | March 21, 2018

I love a good mystery. And in a weird way, I kind of hate it when they are solved. It’s a little like candy. I have a vicious sweet tooth and I love going into a candy story and looking for something to buy. But when I eat it, it’s always a let down. And I also feel like crap.

The point is that mysteries and candy are both more about the process than the resolution. Rock climbing too, I guess. Baseball, Sudoku, Wes Anderson movies – man, I guess everything in my life could boil down to activities that have amazing journeys and disappointing payoffs.

Maybe that’s why I love science so much. You never really get all the answers you want and even when you do there is always a bit at the end where you say, “Scientist still have a lot of questions…” And you keep coming back to see what’s around the next corner.

Nowhere is this more true than archeology. A couple years ago I wrote about a dynasty of Maya rulers that took almost 30 years to uncover. That’s a maddeningly slow process. At the same time in other sciences, measles was eradicated from the Americas, hadron colliders were built and detected Higgs bosons, and genetic engineering, CRISPR and the internet were invented.

But archeology takes its time. I like to think it’s all about the journey. Yesterday I went to my favorite site here in the mountains, Teotihuacan. It was packed and sweltering and I had a furious toddler strapped to my back but it was still just so amazing to stand atop the Pyramid of the Sun and looking out across an ancient metropolis. It was the first archeological site I saw here in Mexico, the subject of my first stories here and still just as stunning as the day I first saw it.

The reason I like it so much is because it was the most powerful city of the Classic Era and we have almost no idea who these people were. We don’t even know if they were ruled by a king or a committee. The Classic Maya, who lived 600 miles away, sort of mentioned a Teotihuacan ruler but the people themselves were oddly silent on the topic (partly because they didn’t have a writing system). As I wrote four years ago in Scientific American, the argument for a king boils down to: “No committee or senate could have coordinated such perfect construction – it had to be a king.” Meanwhile the other side boils down to: “Great, so then where is he?” Teotihuacan has no pictures of kings, no buried tombs, nothing to point to a specific ruler.

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Redux: The secret placebo experiment we call homeopathy

By: | March 20, 2018

Beginning in April, the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine will no longer be able to provide patients with homeopathic remedies funded by the UK’s taxpayers.

This is part of a larger UK crackdown on homeopathy that has gotten underway over the past 18 months. Late in 2016, homeopathy was banned in one of the country’s north-west boroughs. Later, England’s National Health Service concluded that general practitioners should not be prescribing homeopathic remedies anywhere.

If you’re wondering why the NHS ever offered pseudoscience on the public dime at all, you’re not alone! Almost two years ago, I wondered the same thing. 

This post first ran in March of 2016, but I thought it warranted a fresh airing, since the story now has a happy ending. 

 

If you suffer from low blood pressure or an inability to fly into a blind rage, I recommend an evening of fine dining while finding yourself backed into a serious conversation about homeopathy.

Difficulty: you’ve been instructed by your spouse to “keep your science in your pants” because it’s a social occasion with extended family, not Thunderdome.

It wasn’t easy, but I kept my cool in the face of “I just don’t trust Western medicine”. Remained placid throughout the mansplanation of how dilution increases potency. But then I got too cute: I asked why tap water, which must contain an enormous variety of ultra-diluted compounds, doesn’t give you a massive coronary with the first sip. The explanation, accompanied by non-homeopathic levels of scorn: that today’s tap water is obviously too polluted for the homeopathic effects of its ingredients to show efficacy.

Obviously I don’t understand homeopathy. Continue reading →

Finding the words

By: | March 19, 2018

Most of us probably remember the first word we spoke in our native language.

Mine was “Cat,” for I was fascinated by the ornery old Siamese that my parents kept when I was a baby. From there, I’m sure, I learned a child’s standard repertoire: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Doggie,” the colors red-yellow-green-blue, and those most basic early expressions of desire, “Love,” and “NO!”, and “I” and “Want.”

Most of us probably remember our first word in our native language, but I doubt many of us can remember a time when we knew so few words that we had to expand their definitions to cover an entire universe of necessary expression. When the word “Mom,” depending on how we said it, had to stand for everything from fear to hunger to whatever as-yet-inscrutable emotion was blowing through us.

I know I don’t remember. I work with words for a living. When I want to say, for example, that I’m cold, I have dizzying array of synonyms and phrases to call upon, each with different connotations and levels of extremity. I could be chilly or frigid, freezing or frosty, even glacial, hoary, icy, wintry, or just plain numb-lipped-club-footed-broken-fingered cold.

Then, I spent two weeks in Chile’s Atacama Desert this January. Only three of my five companions spoke English. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at based on context and hand gesture. Or from incessantly badgering the English speakers to help me out.

When Fernando grew tired of translating, he would turn to me and say drily, as if casting a spell, “By the end of this trip, you will be fluent in Spanish.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 17, 2018

March 12 – 16, 2018

Raise your kids to ask questions and they do.  Lots of questions.  Many many questions, many of which require you to decide something.  Emma lists every question and you could get tired just reading them.  Commenters also frazzled.

Michelle find a guy who sonifies weather data.  That is, he takes the numbers — temp, humidity, pressure, wind, rain, all the numbers — and turns them into sound, not music exactly but something more internal.

On a dig, Craig watches archeologists first discover, then backfill Native American remains. Then he tries describing what he sees and it turns out the only way is with poetry:  “Where I keep whispering, shhh, we were never here…”

Erik, man of science or at least science adjacent, dedicated to making decisions based on evidence and solid data, takes his little kid for childhood vaccinations and falls apart into a fear-ridden, emotional mess.

Oh my, Rebecca.  She looks for a word, can’t find one, makes up her own, a word we never knew we even needed but we do and more with each passing day, for the quality of grieving what’s not yet gone.

A Vocabulary for the Almost-Disappeared

By: | March 16, 2018


“Look, our snowman is still there,” I said Monday morning.

“Oh!” my daughter said. “It is! Mommy, will it be there for all the times?”

I picked her up. “No, it won’t,” I said. “I think it will melt. Remember how we talked about snow melting?”

“Oh,” my 3-year-old said. “Okay.” Her disappointment was audible.

I busied myself with her coat and hat, and stared extra hard at the Velcro straps on her shoes. Something must have gotten in my eyes.

“Maybe it will still be there when you get home,” I suggested. “Okay,” she said, but not that hopefully.

She has no idea, and I have no idea how to tell her, someday, who else will not be there for all the times. Some of them are too monumental to mention at all. It was enough, on this day, to consider things on a planetary scale.

I mean things like glaciers. Sea ice in the Arctic. Coral reefs. Truly dark skies. Vaquitas. Polar bears. Snows on mountains that I want her to know the way I have known them. She will not know them in the same way. I fill a ledger with the soon-to-be-lost, and I wish I could tell my daughter why it makes me so sad.

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Redux: In Defense of the Antivaxxer

By: | March 15, 2018

This story ran last year after an especially turbulent trip to the pediatrician. It has since appeared in a different form on the NPR Shots blog. I am a man of science. Okay, perhaps not of science, but certainly near it. I’m science adjacent. But regardless, I consider myself to be bound, in the end, by logic and facts.

As such, I like to think that I eschew my beliefs for what the facts tell me. As a very young man, I was very taken by the promise of herbal supplements. But as I came to understand the data (or lack thereof) behind them, I gave up on them. I used to worry about GMOs affecting my health until I dug into the actual science and realized that they are totally harmless (though not necessarily great for developing economies). I’m embarrassed to admit it, but in my overwhelmingly white college I thought that America was post-racial. But well-crafted arguments and data showed me I was wrong.

In every case, I abandoned what I thought for what I could prove. I try to keep an open mind and I tell myself I am ruled by logic. This was the mantra for my book on suggestibility and has become a guiding principle not just in my career but in my life.

It’s also utter self-delusion. The sight of one little needle turns me into a raging anti-vaxxer.

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Dig at Homolovi

By: | March 14, 2018

Today you get a poem, or prose with line breaks, about an archaeological dig and what happened there. Please take this post with a grain of salt, or sand, and enjoy.

 

East of Winslow, a tarp tied at six points pumps like an enormous drum

Wind does not stop, not even to breathe,

Hot Arizona dust-blower from the north, the land of the dead.

A crew fifteen feet down in the pit removes

Dry ochre soil an eighth of an inch at a time.

Below the tarp, masonry walls and ancient floors

Are beaten with bare feet long gone,

Strands of dark hair worked into hardpack around

Broken jars, kernels of charcoal, flakes and stone points,

And firepits lensed like dark eyes in the strata.

Room on room, people built atop each other over centuries

Where buckets of matrix are now hauled up for screening on a desert hilltop.

Katsina thunderheads rocket over the San Francisco peaks

One horizon away.

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Listening to the Weather

By: | March 13, 2018

When Matt McCorkle was growing up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, his dad often listened to the automated broadcasts from the local NOAA weather station. “The soundscape of my childhood was that little weather robot,” McCorkle remembers. Now an audio engineer and sound designer, McCorkle has worked with musicians including John Legend and Laura Izibor, and was a founding member of the classical-music comedy collective CDZA. He still listens to the weather, however: his latest project, a web application called the Weather Machine, riffs on his childhood soundscape by turning weather data into sound.

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