Pictures with an 8-Year Old: A Failure of Citizen Science

By: | April 28, 2016

I’ll start this at the beginning.  Recently Friend of LWON, Chris Arnade, posted a picture of himself — which itself was not unusual because Chris is, among other things, a photographer and posts pictures of himself right along with pictures of other people. But the picture was unusual.  Chris is a very serious guy and always looks it.  This recent picture, though, was something else.

Chris by a friendChris by an 8-year oldHere are the pictures. The one on the left is the serious Chris, taken by another adult, the way I’m used to seeing him. But the picture on the right, the recent one?  “Chris!” I said. “Look how delighted you look!”

“The picture was taken by an 8-year old,” he said.

I had an epiphany.  I’d take a bunch of pictures of people, an 8-year old would take pictures of the same people.  The ones I took would look sternly grownup.  The ones the 8-year old took would look like they’d seen full-on blooming lilacs for the first time.

I couldn’t find an 8-year old, but Nora was nearby and she’s 10 — close enough.  Then oh joy! Cameron generously said she’d add data; she has a 7-year-old.  We conducted citizen science.  Continue reading →

The Biography of an Ice Pile

By: | April 27, 2016

2016-01-23 08.35.06I love snow and cold (although I hate ice) and, for the most part, this winter did not come through for me.

But there was one exception: a blizzard in late January that dumped a couple of feet of snow on Washington. I ran around in the snow with dogs and did snow angels and appreciated, yet again, living in an apartment where snow removal is someone else’s problem. Indeed, snow removal was a big problem for a lot of people. It took a long time; the commute was messed up for days after the snow stopped.

At the transit center in Silver Spring, Md. a whole lot of snow had to be removed from the top deck of the concrete structure. Someone apparently thought the best thing to do with all of that snow was to dump it over the side, onto a bit of land that was originally supposed to hold a hotel or something but is currently holding a very steep hill and a lot of weeds.

And that is where our story begins. Continue reading →

Shakespeare Was a Journalist

By: | April 26, 2016

ds0926_b-1This past Saturday, the world celebrated the birthday of a guy named William Shakespeare. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon in England on April 23, 1564, and died on or about the same date in 1616. Pretty much every reputable Shakespeare scholar and literary historian argues—based on historical evidence—that this William Shakespeare was the author, alone or in collaboration, of the plays we know today. But since at least the mid-1800s, a few of those who love Shakespeare’s plays have insisted otherwise.

Shakespeare, these dissenters say, was just a frontman for the plays’ true author or authors, who were surely more educated, better traveled, and more distinguished than the glover’s son from Stratford. This is a minority view, to be sure, but it’s kind of like climate-change denialism—it’s sustained by a few prominent backers, some real and imagined uncertainties, and we the media’s love of controversy.

I don’t know if it really matters whether Shakespeare the man wrote Shakespeare’s plays. We have the plays, and the play, as someone or other said, is the thing. And as a purely recreational appreciator of Shakespeare, I’m in no position to argue the authorship question point by point (far more knowledgeable people have done so here and here, and the multi-generational back-and-forth is thoroughly summarized here). But as a journalist, I’ve always been annoyed by this kerfuffle.

Continue reading →

Shop Owner! Bring Me a Sheet of Table!

By: | April 25, 2016

This is the second in a series of posts about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally (if you missed it, here is part 1 ).  Guest Veronique Greenwood begins at the pro level, with Chinese.

The character for "study," which appears in the words "student," "university," and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr)
The character for “study,” which appears in the words “student,” “university,” and many others. (Credit: Steve Webel, Flickr)

A month into learning Mandarin, I notice that something has changed. When I am out riding my bike now, the sea of sound that surrounds me at all times sometimes parts, and words leap out. On my way to teach English to some kids the other day, I heard the word “now” three times. It’s staggering the clarity with which I hear things I would not have noticed a few weeks ago.

On the university campus, the azaleas and camellias are blooming. The place is full of birds whose songs I hear but whom I can never see in the thick foliage. And today it rained like there was no tomorrow, starting with a hiss and rising to a roar as it pounded against the courtyard tiles. I picked my way through leaf litter and bent ferns to reach the teaching building. In the lobby, I encountered an army of umbrellas, like the tents of a very damp invasion force. Spring is definitely here. Up in the classroom, the windows were open, and the calls of the birds distracted me while I was trying to understand a new measure word.

What I’m realizing now, having never thought about it before, is that nouns in English fall into two categories. There are things like “a sock” or “a table,” and there are things that you preface with a unit, like “a cup of water” or “a pound of flour.” You wouldn’t usually say “a flour” or “a water” (unless you were really saying “a [bottle of] water”). If you think about it, you’ll see that English nouns fall mostly into the first category.

But in Mandarin, a huge proportion of the objects in the world, from paper clips to computers, falls into the second. Each is spoken of as if it were part of a greater whole—a drop from the great well of sock or table. To say “a sock,” you must say “one unit of sock.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 23, 2016

shutterstock_286988390April 18 – 22, 2016

Guest Veronique Greenwood starts the week with the first in a three-part series of posts about learning Chinese. (Look for the next installment on Monday.)

Erik doesn’t like parenting books, except when he does. And he really likes The Informed Parent. (But he still doesn’t know how to set up the playpen.)

Stories of people risking their lives to leave their homelands might make us think that humans in ages past had it easier. But our species has always struggled to find safe harbor, says Craig. (“Pleistocene stragglers who survived an attack from a dire wolf pack must have fled into the nearest unknown country, unsure if they would find refuge, their eyes as shocked and sharp and exhausted as those now struggling onto the shores of Greece.”)

Rose spends a few days at the Future History Festival imagining what the present will look like from the future. (“Throughout it all, the task was to step outside of your 2016 body and mind, to peer down at it. . . By the second day, the line for coffee seemed very strange to me.”)

I interview a graphic designer who makes art out of science and music. (This post includes a Prince tribute.)

 

**

Image via Shutterstock

This is what it sounds (looks) like

By: | April 22, 2016

KM_WhenDovesCry[1]I’m a recent convert to Instagram as my main form of social media. After spending a lot of the day reading and writing, listening and talking, sometimes I just can’t take any more words. Facebook sometimes seems too complicated, Twitter too fast—but looking at images feels restful. I’ll follow most anything—photos of kids, vacation scenery, what’s for lunch, sketchbooks of working artists—and like it all. On a quick check Thursday afternoon, I saw a friend’s Tarot card, tributes to Prince, a yawning dog, the sunrise in Joshua Tree and a brand-new baby. Even writing that down feels inspiring.

I’ve been particularly inspired by the work of San Francisco-based graphic designer Katrina McHugh. As part of the 100 Day Project—a project that encourages people to make and share creative work and talents—she started a series of infographics called 100 Days of Lyrical Natural Sciences. (For those interested in the 100 Day Project, the 2016 edition started at the beginning of the month, and there’s still time to jump in.)

At first glance, McHugh’s work may seem like illustrations that you might come across in a textbook. But instead of explaining a single phenomenon, like the dew point or the phases of the moon, they’re showing something perhaps more inscrutable: song lyrics. Continue reading →

Sankofa Futurism

By: | April 21, 2016

Sankofa_bird

One of my favorite futurist quotes comes from a 1956 Ford commercial called Design for Dreaming. In it, the main character sings (yes, it’s a musical) the line: “Everyone says the future is strange, but I have a feeling some things won’t change.”

I love this quote for a lot of reasons, and I use it often when I talk about the future. It reminds me that despite all the hand wringing and promises, progress is slow. And there are a lot of things that don’t change about humans. It reminds me that change takes work, it won’t just happen purely as the result of time. I also like to think about flipping the idea around. The future will be strange, but not because it will be so different from the present. But because the present is already incredibly strange.

Continue reading →

Damage Patterns

By: | April 20, 2016

shutterstock_310271303The other night I was in the midst of writing about the Ice Age when I strayed to the internet. Up came the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography that went this year to New York Times photographers Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter for their coverage of the European refugee crises.

Fresh from writing a paragraph about early boat use — people are thought to have reached the West Coast of the Americas about 17,000 years ago — I was drawn back from the Pleistocene to here and now. The boats that tip over with migrants and refugees now take the lives of thousands. Space on our continents is running out, seas seeded with the drowned of Afghanistan and Syria as survivors by the millions crowd trains and buses, concertina wire propped up as tear gas and rubber bullets fly back across the Serbian border keeping out families and lone travelers desperate for a way through.

A long way from the paleo sciences I’d been scrolling through, these Pulitzer images arrived with startling clarity, railroad tracks turned into a walkway where Syrians pass through Serbia on their way to Hungary, babies hanging from front carriers worn by moms, a man with a young boy on his shoulders, nothing in their hands, nothing to own but a purse, a satchel.

I have seen people walking from Mexico into the Camino del Diablo where the Arizona desert holds their corpses. From mountaintops, they always looked small, so far away they could have been seeds. They carried water jugs, walking north into country they’d never seen. I woke in a canyon bottom to their footsteps. Looking up from my sleeping bag, I saw a train of men passing in the moonlight, water jugs in their hands, weight on their backs. Workers sweeping these borderlands have found hundreds of undocumented bodies, papers gone, names unnamed.

It would be easier to be an archaeologist and to discover in 10,000 years a few footprints preserved in ancient mud, a cache of water bottles buried beneath what was once a tree, disarticulated bones and skulls on the underwater shelves of Lesbos. It would be easier to see all this in hindsight. Continue reading →