The Last Word

By: | March 24, 2018

March 19-23, 2018

Sarah knows so many lovely words, and on Monday, writes about learning even more. 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. 

A crackdown on homeopathy in the UK spurs Sally to redux a post about the subject. The idea appears to be “hair of the dog”. So for example, if you’re an insomniac, get a little tiny bit of insomnia, mix it with some water, dilute it to nothing, and take your potion. What the hell is a “a little bit of insomnia”? Oh, of course – owl.

Erik is thinking about how he likes mysteries, especially the unsolved ones. 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.

Two of Jessa’s college friends died have died in the last three years, and she describes how those friendships were different than any other. We had yet to learn the language of emotion that later relationships would teach us, so we couldn’t articulate much of what we felt. In fact, without that intimacy, we didn’t yet know the extent to which others even experienced the world as we did.

Earlier this month, Ann was in the dark. Maybe a squirrel did it. The shutters rattled, the birdfeeder went sideways, trees across the street bent by 45 degrees, from 12:00 over to 2:00.  Sure enough, 5:19 p.m., came the BANG with which I am well-acquainted, the BANG of the transformer at the top of the alley blowing up.  

See you next week.

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Drawing of the Atacama by Sarah Gilman

 

 

 

 

 

My March 2 Nor’easter

By: | March 23, 2018

March 1, from the data-driven, unexcitable Capital Weather Gang: “On Friday and Saturday, a powerful storm will lash the Northeast with destructive coastal flooding, wind and heavy snow. It is shaping up to be the most destructive nor’easter of the season, perhaps the most destructive in decades for some along the coast. The National Weather Service is calling it a life and death situation along the coast.”

March 2, a Friday, the mid-Atlantic had the first in a series of three nor’easters (update: at time of publication, four), storms that barrel down the coast from the northeast looking like a sort of cold-weather hurricane.  The Northeast has been whacked with exactly what was forecast, the mid-Atlantic has been getting off easy (update: at time of publication, not getting off easy).  What the mid-Atlantic was getting – and got in excelsis on March 2 — is wind. 

Local CBS affiliate: High wind gusts are being reported of 69 mph in certain parts of Maryland. The gusts will be the strongest around noon on Friday. The wind has a sustained force at 30-40 mph across the region but isolated wind gusts could reach 80 mph. 

The shutters rattled, the birdfeeder went sideways, trees across the street bent by 45 degrees, from 12:00 over to 2:00.  Sure enough, 5:19 p.m., came the BANG with which I am well-acquainted, the BANG of the transformer at the top of the alley blowing up. BANG. Call the local power company, Baltimore Gas and Electric, BGE. 

March 2, 2018 – With wind gusts exceeding 60 miles per hour in the BGE service area still expected this afternoon and evening, it is likely additional outages will continue to occur. Based on the number of customers affected, this is the worst storm to impact the BGE region since 2012.

I have a landline and sneaky ways of getting to talk to BGE customer service, who used to be in indirect touch with crews who would fix your transformer but now, I think, just reads information off the website.  Trying to find out what’s going on with the crews is now like being in an airport or train station and the arrivals are late, later, never coming, no way to know, nothing to do but wait and trust the corporate entities you don’t trust.

March 3, a BGE truck is in front of the house, not where it needs to be but oh glory, it has a guy who knows about transformers.  It might not be as simple as one transformer, the BGE guy says, it might be something farther up the line.  Anyway the bucket trucks can’t work around wires in this wind. No Estimated Time of Restoration, ETR as we say.

March 4, Sunday, two days later, I use precious laptop juice and log into my BGE account.

March 4, 2018 –  More than 435,000 outages occurred due to high sustained winds and gusts exceeding 70 miles per hour.  The vast majority of customers are expected to be restored by tonight with final repairs to pockets of more heavily damaged areas continuing into mid-week.

I am apparently in one of those pockets of more heavily damaged areas.  Still no ETR.  A neighbor snarls, “I don’t believe anything they say.”  I am eating dinners out with friends – cooking and eating in the dark and cold is sub-optimal – then entertaining myself in the evenings by going to bed at 8:00, under as many blankets as I have, and I have a lot. Continue reading →

When Friendship was Different

By: | March 22, 2018

Within the last three years, two of my closer university friends have died. I moved away from Toronto a decade ago, and with those moves I was less frequently in touch with my college friends, but I always assumed we could go on picking up where we left off whenever I was in town. In attending their memorials and hearing more about their lives, I marvel at the changes they made since I lived nearby.

One friend who was unlucky in love all through university met his true match shortly before a rare cancer struck and separated them forever. The friend who died this month once enthused to me that if he put a phone book on his lap, he could eat his Kraft dinner straight out of a hot pot. But in the final years before his fatal drug overdose, he apparently took up cooking as a hobby.  Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →