The Last Word On Nothing

The Last Word

By: Jessa Gamble | September 26, 2015

September 21 – 25, 2015

According to John Locke, a man’s labor is his own, and so when it is embedded in the land he works, that land becomes his own. Guest Julie Rehmeyer contends the connection goes both ways – we belong to the land we tend.

Abstruce Goose demonstrates the correct response to sarcasm in any argument.

There is wonder in the thought that we share a landscape with those who lived thousands of years ago, and that their material culture surrounds us still. Craig traces the journey of a Clovis tool collection.

Ann’s local coffee shop is a haven for scientific speculation and a positive hypothesis factory. It highlights one of the scientific method’s most socially-oriented steps.

My son takes his first small plane ride and lobbies for aerobatics. I explore the developmental nature of fear.

Image: Shutterstock

Coffeeshop Science

By: Ann Finkbeiner | September 24, 2015

Somewhere in the deep pits of my mind, I still think of “scientists” as remote people whose sentences I won’t understand, and of “science” as an incomprehensible body of knowledge I have to memorize. This is probably also the public’s image of science. But if 1000 years as a science writer have taught me nothing else, it’s 1) that science is the way people think when they’re admiring their worlds, when they’re thinking of explanations of their worlds that they can most reliably believe. And 2) that scientists are just specially-educated versions of the guys in the coffee shops. Continue reading →

Your Daily Time Machine

By: Craig Childs | September 23, 2015

For me, geography is a time machine. The shape of the land sets the dials. Artifacts are keys.

A few days ago I was watching for mammoth hunters out a train window. Climbing through the Rocky Mountains on the California Zephyr, I looked for spear bearers in the bony canyons and pine woods along the eastbound line. I thought I might catch a glimpse of them as they found gaps between glaciers, a way across the mountains where glaciers are now all but gone. They were on their way to Boulder, CO, or at least the Ice Age location of the city when it was a slope of retreating permafrost in a country of mammoths, camels, and giant bears.

In 2009 a landscaping job at a private residence in Boulder turned up a cache of Clovis stone tools dating to around 13,000 years ago. The types of rock found in the cache reveal a route followed in part by the Zephyr up and over the Rockies. Traced back to quarry regions where they were first picked up, the farthest rocks in the cache come from western Wyoming and northeast Utah, 300 miles and many mountains from where they were ultimately dropped. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Argument from Obliviousness

By: Ann Finkbeiner | September 22, 2015

I’d use this tactic on my nearest and dearest but it takes a certain emotional composure and psychological distance, and right when I should be doing killer obliviousness, I get irate and jump in with both feet and lose the argument entirely. I personally see this as a virtue.

http://abstrusegoose.com/558

Guest Post: The Lords of Yesterday

By: Julie Rehmeyer | September 21, 2015

As my husband and I drove into Ouray, Colorado recently, we both gasped. The red-grey cliffs of 14,000-foot mountains cradle the old mining town, with waterfall lacework tracing down the mountainsides — one of the most gorgeous spots on Earth. But it was the stream tumbling through the valley we were gasping at: It was yellow, only a few shades less intense than the Tang color of the Animas River when mine tailings had poured into it earlier this summer. Has there been a spill here that I haven’t heard about? I thought, horrified. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Cameron Walker | September 19, 2015

A new butterfly clings to its chrysalis September 14-18, 2015

This week was a blend of the old and the new, the past and the present—and how the two connect.

On Monday, Christie reduxes a post about her former life as a researcher, and the mundaneness that is a part of science.

Erik was thinking about Donald Trump before the rest of us needed to—so on Tuesday, he brings us up to speed on The Donald’s true identity.

Helen said she would buy the flowers herself, but she got more than flowers. On Wednesday, she watches the chrysalis that came along for the ride become a monarch.

What will our former selves say to our future ones, and what does it matter? On Thursday, Jessa contemplates time capsules.

And on Friday, I write about marching bands. Why? I don’t know. But I will say that a four-year-old watching The Music Man today has the same enthusiasm for trombones as the fictional people of River City, 100 years ago.

Image: Helen Fields

March On

By: Cameron Walker | September 18, 2015

4088806261_14a21c7dec_z

The first time I ever saw a marching band I ran away and cried. The band wasn’t even really marching–it was cooped up inside a small music hall. Maybe that was the problem. The timpani and the tubas, trapped in a single room, were far too loud for a little kid’s ears.

When I finally saw the same band, a few years later, it was marching across a college football field. I remember being worried. But this time, when they started to play, they swirled and spun, together looking like a series of falling dominoes, an expanding square, even an enormous flag. This time, the drums sounded like the faint pops of champagne corks in the enormous stadium. Continue reading →

A time to remember

By: Jessa Gamble | September 17, 2015

A year ago this month, I followed some random link and came upon 10Q, a site that promises to ask you 10 questions over a period of 10 days and then send your answers to your inbox after a one-year interlude. The questions were generic but reflective: “Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you?” “Is there something you wish you’d done differently this past year?” “How would you like to improve yourself and your life over the next year?”

I’m sure I forgot about 10Q the day after I answered the last question. Then this week, true to its word, 10Q sent me a little care package from the past. It felt grounding to read all of those familiar but dated sentiments. Though one year isn’t all that long in adulthood, the intervening time had brought all kinds of new elements into my life that I could never have predicted a year ago.

There’s something about time capsules that evokes wonder. Ancient voices speaking from beyond the grave – or the childlike sentiments of one now elderly – trigger a deeply engrained awe. Perhaps it’s a holdover from ancestor worship. The most mundane object takes on grave significance as part of a missive to the future. It’s even become a hackneyed movie trope: The dying parent records himself: “I’ll never meet you, son, but happy 16^th birthday. Enclosed is the watch my own father gave to me.” Continue reading →