Road Trip

By: | September 2, 2016

379646636_2aa41a8b67_zSeveral times in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself driving Highway 101 from Santa Barbara to Berkeley, a 320-mile route. The trip starts out along the ocean, then dips in and out of oak-dotted hills. Later, the road slices through the Salinas Valley and then into Silicon Valley.

The last part is my least favorite—the lanes multiply, and so does the traffic. But the rest of the trip is pretty ideal. The road rolls gently beneath circling red-tailed hawks and past farms. Even the less-scenic roadside attractions make compelling landmarks—the bobbing heads of the oil derricks near San Ardo, the battered billboard on a hillside before King City. (And there’s a Starbucks almost exactly halfway between my start and end points. At home I avoid the place, but three hours on the road and it becomes a green oasis. There’s even a drive through.)

I guess those are the qualities that make a good road tripping road for me: interesting things to look at, easy driving, and a good place to stop along the way. Last year, data scientist Randal Olson took long-distance driving up a notch by using a genetic algorithm to find the optimal road trip across the 48 contiguous U.S. states. Continue reading →

Mystery on 39th Street

By: | September 1, 2016

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Maybe we were delirious. It was after two in the morning and I had my kids out on the street in Manhattan. With how hot August was, we tried to stay out late, taking advantage of cooler nighttime temperatures. This was our eighth night knocking around the city, urban exploration I called it, an extracurricular crash course in subways and public restrooms. We’d been staying at a different place almost every night, moving from friend to friend across Brooklyn and New York City and carrying our belongings on our backs.

Along the way, we explored nooks and crannies, whatever oddity caught our senses, at one point chasing a paper bag a few hundred yards down the street, sticking with it for half an hour. We were playing a sort of Pokémon Go, but without Pokémon, just Go.

I don’t know which of us saw it first, but on 39th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues we found ourselves staring at a small toy airplane hanging high above the street. It was one of those rubber-band-powered balsa toys you get at the grocery store. Its propellor spun a little, but that was the breeze. Its rubber band, if it ever had one, had disintegrated and fallen off. Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): The Anthropocene

By: | August 31, 2016

8242775175_a06b24c766_oOn Monday, at an international meeting of geologists in Cape Town, South Africa, the 35 members of the Anthropocene Working Group summarized their seven years of work. Chief among their preliminary findings is that the current human-dominated chapter in our planet’s history, informally known as the Anthropocene, is geologically real. That’s “real” as in “recorded in the earth’s rock layers.”

The report is the latest step in the excruciatingly slow — or, from an earth sciences perspective, blindingly fast — process of declaring a new geological time interval, which begins in a designated working group and moves through the Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, and finally the International Union of Geological Sciences. (Got that? Good, because I keep having to look it up.) The stratigraphic powers-that-be may one day designate the Anthropocene as an official epoch, like the Pleistocene and the Holocene, but that day is still many years off.

The job of the Anthropocene Working Group is both scientific and linguistic: it’s trying to bring a metaphor down to earth. After Paul Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate, coined the term “Anthropocene” in a 2000 article, it quickly escaped from scientific supervision, appearing in popular book titles, museum exhibits, and everyday conversation. Many of us, apparently, had been looking for a word to describe our own time — a time of seemingly unprecedented, expanding, and irreversible human impacts on the planet. The notion of a new chapter in geological history neatly captured the magnitude of our influence. Who cared whether or not that chapter was written in the rocks?

Continue reading →

The Four Stages of Twitter Grief

By: | August 30, 2016

2016-dead

2016 has been ruthless. Yesterday, Gene Wilder died. In July it was Elie Wiesel and Miss Cleo. In June it was Muhammad Ali. In April it was Chyna and Prince. In January it was David Bowie and Alan Rickman.

In 2016 we grieve in public, on social media. When Prince died people wrote millions of Tweets about his life and impact. We also grieve quickly. And I’ve recently noticed we grieve in a cycle.

Yesterday I drew a silly graph about that cycle. But I wanted to break it down a little bit more here. Continue reading →

River time, river tongue

By: | August 29, 2016

Stikine mooseIt was a bird of confluences. Nameless, to us. Gray as cloud belly, large as raptor, with eyes streaked over black as if with a stick of charcoal.

The first time I saw it, I stood shin deep in the narrow, clear Pitman River, steps away from the line of opaque jade water marking its union with the Upper Stikine River. The Stikine flows through a landscape sawed at the margins by endless mountain ranges, and is one of three great salmon-bearing rivers that originate in a swath of northern British Columbia known as the Sacred Headwaters. My present purposes were neither great nor sacred, though: I had splashed into the water to pee, or rinse my face, or both, but not in that order, when the bird caught my attention.

It moved while remaining nearly motionless. Its body was fixed in a soaring cross, with narrow, scythe-like wings and a long bill, and it swung in slow arcs a dozen feet above my head, out over the main current, then back. A juvenile gull maybe, or some searching ocean bird thrown improbably far inland. If silence were a creature, it would be this one. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 27, 2016

IMG_0699August 22-26

This week several LWONians had kids on the brain.

Guest poster Divya Abhat wondered how to curb her kid’s screen time . . . and her own.

Erik waxed nostalgic about the good old days, when packing for an adventure involved grabbing a fistful of carabiners, not a fistful of diapers.

And I scanned my daughter’s junk-food-filled daycare menu and then promptly freaked out. Since when is tater tot casserole appropriate fare for one year olds?

Meanwhile, Helen and Ann sat on a porch in the heat and drank mint lemonade, a liquid so refreshing it can also be used as a salve for unhappiness.

And Jessa discussed the misinformation and untruths that get lodged in people’s brains. Last week many news outlets reported that the Bering Strait theory of human migration had been debunked. Not so, writes an exasperated Jessa. It was all a misunderstanding.

The Million Dollar Spaghetti Conundrum

By: | August 26, 2016

baby high chairEarlier this month my daughter turned one. She spent nine months inside of me, and since she’s been on the outside I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what goes into her body. As a newborn, she nursed until my nipples bled because “breast is best!” And when she was away from me, I pumped so she could have breastmilk out of a bottle. Each day I took supplements to ensure she would get enough vitamin D and iron.

And then she began to eat solids. I bought organic. I blended spinach and peas and sweet potatoes into homemade purees that I froze in BPA-free vessels. I baked bread. I cooked without salt, because tiny kidneys can’t process it. I pressed turkey and quinoa into mini muffin cups to make tiny turkey meatloafs. I did everything I could to ensure that she was getting the right mix of nutrients at the right time and in the right order.

But two weeks ago everything changed. I dropped my daughter off at a daycare center for the first time. And I watched in horror as her teacher placed a small mound of raisins and a scoop of cornflakes on my daughter’s tray. This was breakfast. Grapes devoid of water! Processed corn mixed with addictive sugar! She might as well have heaped her tray with crack cocaine. I held it together until I reached the parking lot, and then I sat in my car and wept. Continue reading →

Sliding Baselines

By: | August 25, 2016

pacifier-158379_1280Most days we here at the Last Word on Nothing write engaging non-fiction about the scientific questions of our age that vex us and inspire us. Most days we blend excellent reporting with excellent writing told with heart, guts, and a dash of humanity. Most days, you the reader get to the end of one of our stories and feel smarter than when you started.

This is not one of those days. I give you …

 

Erik Vance and his wife Liz prepare for an adventure: Age 29.

Erik: Harness?

Liz: Check.

Continue reading →