The Last Word On Nothing

Getting Cultured

By: Jennifer S. Holland | June 12, 2015

Recently, I’ve been making my own yogurt.

I’m on one of those annoyingly limited diets, trying to get my messed-up gut to cooperate. I can’t have many of the things I love. Noodles. Huge pieces of bread slathered with butter (and then one more piece even though it’s going to spoil my dinner). Cereal—not even oatmeal, so Captain Crunch is definitely out of the question. Muffins with Skittles on top (or without). Anything with flour. Milky things. Feta cheese. That sweet-tart powder that comes in a pouch with a little white candy stick that you lick and dip. Rice. ‘Taters. Chocolate. I can use a little honey if I need sweetener, and I can put almond milk in my coffee. (Lesson: No honey in coffee. Terrible.) Almost all fruits and veggies are fine, as are meat and fish and hard cheese, plus most nuts. And bone broth. I’m supposed to make and eat bone broth. (It’s made with chicken or beef bones, you sicko.)

But I’m already pretty tired of the “legal” foods. I constantly want to break the rules. Because my sweet tooth is the size of my head.

Continue reading →

Truth vs. Beauty, Again

By: Ann Finkbeiner | June 11, 2015

I haven’t got much on my mind today that I want to think about so I distract myself with pictures. This one, as science pictures often do, conflates beauty and truth and let me repeat, beauty. It’s a result of letting the Hubble Space Telescope take repeated pictures of a single cluster of galaxies. Clusters are like families of galaxies, bound together by gravity. I could go on for a long time about clusters but in a way I’m more interested in this picture on account of a personal belief that if you have to choose between truth and beauty, you should choose truth. Continue reading →

The Tyranny of Planned Obsolescence

By: Christie Aschwanden | June 10, 2015

The post has taken me entirely too much time to write. Not because I’m procrastinating or writing slowly, but because I’m being held hostage by the spinning beach ball of death. I bought my current iMac in early 2011, which means that enough time has elapsed that the Apple Care warranty I purchased with it has expired and nothing works quite right any more. I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time seeking solutions in online forums, to no avail.

I generally avoid software updates on older machines, but when it was no longer possible to write 200 words without lobbing a string of expletives at the computer, I upgraded to a newer operating system. If anything, this just made the computer slower. In desperation, I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled the operating system, which helped not at all.

The body of my iMac is practically brand-new. The screen is beautiful, it’s only the guts that need upgrading. It seems tragic and wasteful that I can’t just replace a few of the internal parts.

I wish it was just the computer, but my four-year-old iPhone 4 has also become almost unbearable. It’s slow to respond to the touchpad, and it regularly freezes when I try to move from one app to another. But the body is still in perfectly good shape and I don’t really want to get another phone. Why can’t Apple make devices that last? These are the tools of my profession, so I can easily justify (and deduct) the expense of replacing them, but it makes my stomach churn to think about turning these devices into toxic heaps of garbage. Continue reading →

The Lies Maps Tell

By: Helen Fields | June 9, 2015

I’m fascinated by those maps of places people have visited. You know the ones. Mine is below. You can make your own to show how much of the world you’ve traveled, or haven’t. There’s an element of bragging – why, yes, I have been to New Zealand, the Middle East, and more than one country in Africa.

But what’s so interesting about them is the lies they tell. That vast swath of red, drifting north from the U.S.-Canada border and all the way off the top of the map? The places I’ve actually been in Canada are Vancouver Island and southern Ontario. If you spend a few days in Saint Petersburg, Russia lights up from the Gulf of Finland to the Kamchatka Peninsula, the same as if you’d crossed seven time zones on the Trans-Siberian Railway, or, for that matter, lived your entire life in Irkutsk. Continue reading →

Redux: June Gloom

By: Cameron Walker | June 8, 2015

It’s Monday. And it’s June. And it’s gloomy. Or maybe it’s just that I’m gloomy about our recent oil spill and I can’t quite figure out how to write about it. So here’s a post that ran in June 2012 about June Glooms past.

5830140124_e5a6679df1 I used to think the weather was something adults talked about because they were boring. And now that’s me, commiserating with neighbors about the state of our sky, which gave us a glorious, bluebird May and then rolled out a thick cloud carpet on the first day of June.

June Gloom isn’t just a Southern California phenomenon, and it doesn’t only happen in June. But perhaps we give it a name (and May Gray, and, in dire situations, No-sky July and Fogust) because we complain about it the most. The response from an Oregonian friend who visited this week: “Talk to the hand.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Jessa Gamble | June 6, 2015

June 1 – 5, 2015

The wind in the Columbia River Gorge is not the kind that garners fame with its own poetic name, but Michelle thinks of it as the secret wind of the desert. I look at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and what it would mean for wolves and ungulates.

Sally’s lifelong fascination with forensic scatology finally finds an outlet on the streets of Barking, London. Erik consults his old friend William of Occam about Chinese traditional medicine and gets evasive answers.

Finally, guest writer Stephen Ornes weighs in on the John Bohannon sting debate.

Image: Shutterstock

Guest Post: The Trajectory of the Sting

By: Stephen Ornes | June 5, 2015

Who doesn’t love hijinks? Last week, science journalist John Bohannon brought the hijinks. He wrote on io9.com about how he joined a sting operation designed to reveal the lightning-quick path from bad science – about fad diets – to big headlines. Here’s the short version. They ran a short clinical trial on 16 volunteers, collected some data, and a statistician abused the data until a statistically significant result popped out. It was juicy: Eating chocolate can accelerate weight loss! Science says so!

The finding was sensational, counterintuitive, and flashy. They’d followed what Bohannon calls “recipe for false positives,” and found a zinger. In short order, the tricksters published their findings. They whipped up a press release and let the hijinks unfold. The first few lines of Bohannon’s story tell us that the subsequent reportage was an unequivocal triumph: “It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages.” He told NPR: “My goal was to show that scientists who do a bad job and get their work published can end up making headlines because it’s us — journalists like you and me — who are failing.”

When I first clicked on the story, I didn’t read it very closely. Continue reading →

The Simplest Answer

By: Erik Vance | June 4, 2015

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an old friend of mine named William of Occam. You know the guy I’m talking about, right? Skinny little kid in the monk’s robe who doesn’t say much. Sure you do. Some guys call him “Sharp Willy” or “Billy the Knife.” I’m not sure why, I assume it has something to do with the fact that he’s so skinny.

If you don’t know him, man, you’ve missed out. He’s quiet guy, keeps to himself unless he’s drunk. But once he gets going he’s hilarious. “Why say something if silence will accomplish the same thing?” he used to say to me. He was full of those kinds of quotes, which were awesome once you got him to stop saying them in Latin.

Anyway, in college Will and I would go drinking together and shoot pool every Thursday. I remember he was careful and fastidious – a real Type A, you know? He hated wasting anything. Time, words, pool cue chalk, all of it had to be just so. No more, no less. Continue reading →