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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Every decision my kids made me make in one day

By: | March 12, 2018

Decision fatigue is real. Decision fatigue is the mental exhaustion and reduced willpower that comes from making many, many micro-calls every day. My modern American lifestyle, with its endless variety of choices, from a hundred kinds of yogurt at the grocery store to the more than 4,000 movies available on Netflix, breeds decision fatigue. But it is my kids that really fry my brain. At last I understand that my own mother’s penchant for saying “ask your father” wasn’t deference to her then husband but the most desperate sort of buck-passing–especially since my father dealt with decision fatigue by saying yes to pretty much everything, which is how my brothers and I ended up taking turns rolling down the steep hill we grew up on inside an aluminum trash can.

I decided to write down every question that required a decision that my my two kids asked me during a single day. This doesn’t include simple requests for information like “how do you spell ‘secret club’?” or “what is the oldest animal in the world?” or the perennial favorite, “why do people have to die?” Recording ALL the questions two kids ask in a day would be completely intractable. So, limiting myself to just those queries that required a decision, here are the results.

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The Last Word

By: | March 10, 2018

Greetings, Folks! Here’s what’s on offer from this past week:

I can’t tell you how much I love this post from Ann. It’s about a metaphor related to gravity, or, really, not-quite gravity, what she describes as “still grounded but hair stuck straight out about to lift off….” Nice!

Then Rebecca takes us on a walk with the diverse and lovable stray dogs of Chile, charmers, every one.

Jessa considers Robert Boyle’s “Desiderata”, a 17th Century wish list of scientific breakthroughs, and provides an LOL update on how we’ve done so far ticking off the goals. (Good drugs: We’ve got that one covered.)

Sally recalled, in a redux, a fall into the Thames, and open wound, and a whirlwind trip through the toxic history of London’s famed public sewer. (Hint: Don’t drink the water.)

And to end the work week, I (Jenny) shared thoughts on the ways we writers build characters in science stories—with some kind help and examples from my fellow LWONers. Watch out for those excess adjectives, is what we’re sayin’.

With Hair Like New Pennies? Thoughts on Describing People

By: | March 9, 2018

Describing people, actual people you’ve sat across from and interviewed, can be really hard to do well. We writers keep trying, with mixed results.

But it’s worth the effort. Here’s what I think: Especially in a tough science article, getting to know people—by way of a simple “tidy brown beard” (though I’d vote to use physical traits sparingly), a telling quote, or, beautifully, by “a stride that [gives] the impression of imminent flight” (from a recent New Yorker article)—helps humanize our subjects and adds reader-sustaining oxygen to our prose. The neurologist tapping her index finger against her head for emphasis. The archaeologist’s jaw muscles dancing under the skin as he concentrates. These might be nice and even useful to share, if they don’t feel burdensome where they fall.

I appreciate writers who neatly weave illustrative words or phrases into a sentence without them jarring the reader; they’re integral, not extra. Descriptions of people can also be “chunkified”—a bigger commitment of real estate—especially in a profile. I like graphs like this one from another New Yorker piece, about Paul and Patricia Churchland (a couple studying the relationship between the brain and conscious experience). Few words speak to physical traits, but the picture is clear:

Pat is constantly in motion, throwing the ball, stepping backward, rubbing her hands together, walking forward in a vigorous, twitchy way. She has pale eyes, a sharp chin, and the crisp, alert look of someone who likes being outside in the cold. (Even when it is sunny, she looks as though she were enjoying a bracing wind.) She seems younger than she is: she has the anxious vitality of a person driven to prove herself—the first to jump off a bridge into freezing water. Paul stands heavily, his hands in his pockets. He is still. He nudges at a stone with his foot. He looks up and smiles at his wife’s back. He has a thick beard. He looks like the sort of person who finds it soothing to chop his own wood (and in fact he is that sort of person). (Feb 2007)

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Redux: Pro-Tip: Don’t Fall in the Thames

By: | March 8, 2018

This post first ran November 30, 2011.

Last week, I fell in the Thames. I only fell in up to my thighs, but the gaping, bleeding puncture on my shin, inside which I could see geologic-looking layers of anatomy — that was a bad sign.

So I found myself at the A&E (that’s ER to you, fellow ‘Mericans) at 4 in the morning in Hackney, where everyone was bored by my lack of gunshot wounds. Until, that is, I revealed that I’d taken a dip in the Thames. Then, even hardened nurses blanched and rushed off to confer with other medical professionals.

As the morning wore on and I kept seeing those expressions of pure horror every time I pointed at my leg and said the word “Thames,” I started to get pretty well creeped out. It culminated with the nice NHS doctor lady giving me my marching orders.

“If you see any red streaks, if you get any shooting pains in your leg, or anything feels wrong, come back immediately,” she advised, eyeing my bandage warily. “No one’s going to mind. Just tell them you’ve had your leg in the Thames.”

I started doing some Google-based investigation. Just what was so bad about inviting some Thames water into my gaping, bleeding flesh? My findings led me to conclude that my leg was either about to shrivel up and fall off, or spontaneously sprout 8 smaller legs. Or eyes.

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An update for Robert Boyle

By: | March 7, 2018

In September 2000, the UN came up with eight Millenium Development Goals. Things like solving malaria and reducing infant mortality. Perhaps out of despair for the scale of these problems–but I fear out of something worse in me–I show no signs of dedicating my life to such noble goals. They’re more important than anything I’m doing, and yet I can’t hold them in my mind for more than a few seconds before I tire of the earnestness and squareness of the whole thing. I do feel pretty strongly about war, but that’s not on the list.

I can, however, get behind the general idea of setting goals as a species. For instance, I’ve written and spoken extensively about the idea of lengthening the effective human lifespan by reducing our need for sleep. One of DARPA’s goals is “to enable soldiers to stay awake, alert, and effective for up to seven consecutive days without suffering any deleterious mental or physical effects and without using any of the current generation of stimulants.” That’s a goal I would rather see made collectively, for any of us civilians who wish it.

So you can imagine my delight when I came across a post on BoingBoing about Robert Boyle’s “Desiderata”, a 17th Century wish list of scientific breakthroughs. Though still working out things like his eponymous Boyle’s Law–the rule that pressure and volume are inversely proportional–he had the imagination to set some millennial goals of his own. Continue reading →