Guest Post: Warm Feelings About the Void (A Rebuttal)

By: | October 23, 2017

Last week Cassandra Willyard wrote that space bores her, and argued that astronomy writers need to highlight the human drama to hook her and other spacephobes. This is my response.

This essay being one exception that probes the rule, I am a writer who does not get assignments from editors. At best, they ask me to think up something, and then they decide whether they like it enough to want it. But I send those initial emails more often than I receive them: “Just checking in!”

Editors don’t give me assignments not for a shortage of news; they don’t give me assignments because there’s usually no inherent reason for people to care about my subjects, at least not the way there’s an inherent reason for people to care about genomes, or climate change, or earthquakes.*

Beyond our limited self-interest, there are other reasons to ignore space news. It can be hard, both because of pervasive math-phobia and because of its scale and vast remove. It is tenuous and ungraspable, literally by definition. It is unfriendly. The other planets are hellholes, empty but for desolation and death. Galaxies aren’t cute; they don’t spiral around you the way a pangolin might. They don’t make you cough like viruses and bacteria, they don’t change the seasons where you live. They are so far away. So I get it: You don’t have a reason to care. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 21, 2017

October 16-20

Hello readers of LWON, here’s what kind of mischief we cooked up this week:

Helen started off Monday by showing how she will live forever by eating salad. Not just eating it, but stashing her toppings at work for daily salad prep. The life of a modern agriculturalist, and immortality!

It’s a big year for acorns, and Jenny is being hailed on by many oak seeds. Some trees are putting out 10,000 acorns. Why this year? Read and learn.

Cassie faces her own empty feelings about space and finds herself worked up about  “the neutron star thingamajig.” Not so much a post about stellar collision and gravity waves (though an excellent reading list is included), this is about the generation of interest and respect for a discipline. Who knew there was such human emotion in the tortured void?

Michelle does some serendipitous footwork to find the family story behind the coining of the word “endling” and finds a grandson who remembers the walking encyclopedia of his grandfather.

Christie finishes off the week by lifting our heartbeats into a panic as she has what she describes as the scariest wildlife encounter of her life on a ranch outside of Cody, Wyoming. “HOLY F-ing SHIT!! It was HUGE. And it was’t just barking at me, it was running toward me.” Did she and her dog run into an aggressive wolf?

I Cried Wolf

By: | October 20, 2017

On August 21, 2017, I woke up shortly after dawn. Peering at the sky through the window in my tent, I saw that it was pale but clear, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I’m not usually an early riser, but on this morning, I was anxious. I’d been anticipating this day for years and had come to this cattle ranch outside Casper, Wyoming to view the Great American Eclipse.

The previous evening, we’d had thunder and a few raindrops after dinner. The forecast for eclipse time was favorable, but still I worried we might wake up to clouds. So when I saw the clear skies that morning, I felt elated. What to do, but go for a run?

While my husband continued snoozing, I laced up my running shoes and called my dog, Molly, out of the tent. Let’s go for a run, I told her. She leaped in the air, as she does, and then led the way.

We ran down an ATV track along a small creek surrounded by open meadows and vast vistas. The air was clear and the sun was bright. My anticipation of the eclipse put a spring in my step. And then we turned a corner and I heard a scary, weird bark.

At first, it struck me as the sound of an aggressive dog. I called Molly close, and the sound continued. I assumed that we’d crossed some other human campsite and their dog was now staking its claim. This worried me so far as it might mean a dog-to-dog encounter, but I wasn’t particularly frightened. Then I looked to the creek on my left.

On the hillside on the other side of the creek, I spotted the coyote making these sounds. Although the aggressive barking sounded nothing like any vocalizations I’ve heard from the coyotes that frequent the space around my farm in Colorado, I felt reassured. It’s just a coyote, I thought.

I kept running, and for a few minutes, all was well. Then I looked down the road and saw the coyote had crossed the creek and was coming for me. Except it wasn’t a coyote. HOLY F-ing SHIT!! It was HUGE. And it wasn’t just barking at me, it was running toward me. It was at least as large as my Catahoula Leopard dog/standard poodle mix — that is, BIG! I looked at Molly and looked at it, and then my heart rate rose to about 230 beats per minute.

Continue reading →

The Beginning of the Endling

By: | October 19, 2017

Last spring, I wrote a story about the origin and evolution of “endling,” a word used to describe the sole surviving member of a species. Endling was coined in the mid-1990s by Robert Webster, a Georgia doctor who, during his work at a convalescent center, realized that there was no precise English word for a person who was the last surviving member of his or her family. Webster wrote a letter to Nature about his neologism, and since then, scientists, writers, artists, and others have used the word to capture the poignancy of species extinction.

Webster died in 2004, but a colleague—the co-author of his letter to Nature—told me what he recalled about Webster and the invention of endling. Weeks after the story was published, I noticed a comment under a friend’s Facebook post: “I’m Robert Webster’s grandson,” John Thompson wrote. “I remember when he came up with endling.”

Continue reading →

Tepid Feelings about Neutron Clashes

By: | October 18, 2017

Newbie journalists love to ask where seasoned journalists find their story ideas. I’ll tell you where I find mine: Editors. They have really good ideas and sometimes they’ll just hand them to you. That’s called an assignment, and I take a lot of them.

Unfortunately, LWON doesn’t give assignments. So when you sign up for an open slot, you have to think of something to fill it. I had nothing for today, until Craig asked me to write about the neutron star thingamajig. (If you haven’t heard, scientists announced on Monday that they had, for the first time, observed evidence of a neutron star collision. Such clashes seem to be responsible for most of the universe’s heavy elements).

I laughed because I don’t do space. (Remember, I’m the one who was surprised to learn that Hubble is a space telescope.) So I responded, “The day I write about a neutron star collision is the day hell will freeze over.”

I don’t understand physics or astronomy, and I don’t care about them.  Continue reading →

It’s Raining Baby Oak Trees

By: | October 17, 2017

These early fall days have been especially musical here, in my house under the trees. The mornings ding and clink and the afternoons ping and donk and the nights are broken up by knocks, clangs, and cymbal crashes that startle me awake. (Part of my roof is metal.)

It’s the acorns falling, but in a relative hail storm rather than the usual drizzle. The massive dumping of seeds and occasional strike on the head might suggest I’ve totally pissed off some squirrels.

But squirrels pretty much just make grumpy noises and twitch their tails when annoyed. Instead, it’s the oaks showing off their progeny, with gravity’s help. The trees are shedding fruit as though it’s their last chance to seed the land.

That’s not too far from the truth. It turns out we are in a mast year—the boom of the boom-and-bust cycle describing oak (and beech) tree reproduction. The trees weighted down with acorns this fall (a big oak might produce as many as 10,000 of them!) will most likely support a much lighter load for the next three to five years. This is a parent tree’s best chance to spread her genes and grow the neighborhood forest before lean times commence. Continue reading →

How I Eat Salad At Work

By: | October 16, 2017

salad with half a donut

I’ve always had trouble with lunches at the office. No matter what I took from home, it was almost always not that good. Reheated leftovers? I wanted more. Peanut butter and jelly? Just sad. At my current job, if left to my own devices, I would go to the pizza place across the street every day. Which would be delicious.

But a few years ago, Bethany, a woman at my office, convinced me to start eating the salad she brought every day, and now I am super healthy and will live forever.

Salad?!? I know! And sometimes it even keeps me full until dinnertime!

When I figure out a system for something, I get excited and tell people about it, like I did when I figured out how to eat vegetables a few years ago. So here you go: How to Eat Salad at work, if you happen to have the kind of office job I have, which provides a fridge and plates and forks.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 14, 2017

Greetings, Gentle LWON Readers,

Here’s what happened this week on your favorite science blog:

Guest blogger Elizabeth Svoboda made us a little woozy (in a good way) in her post about seasickness. In her essay she dives into the psychology of her own gut-wrenching experiences.

Then Rose rolled her eyes at the shock many men express when other men behave badly toward women. Women, she reminds us, aren’t surprised one iota because it HAPPENS ALL THE DAMN TIME. (Emphasis mine.)

Our dear Ann got compared to a grandmother, and it takes her a little while to accept that maybe that’s a compliment. (Really, I’m sure it was!)

Cassie gave us a fascinating Redux about the tragic deaths decades ago associated with the Elixir Sulfanilmide, pointing out that in some ways not much has changed. She writes: “Tragedy is still a key driver of new regulation.” Indeed.

And finally, Helen revisited a museum of bones, or, really, revisited her visit to a museum of bones. She learned a lot of cool stuff there, so give her nice piece a read.

See you next week!