The Last Word On Nothing

The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | May 23, 2015

May 18 – 22, 2015

Erik started the week off by offending bee scientists with a wasp scientist whose object of study is solitary and sleek, definitely not just an ant with wings. The scientist has some issues, don’t we all.

LWON turned five this week and in joyous celebration, alumnus Thomas Hayden lists the top five posts he never wrote, artfully illustrating this with some lemons I wish I’d never seen. We miss him.

Alumna Ginny Hughes continues the joyous celebration of LWON’s fifth with the top five May 20th’s in history. Who can forget the May 20, 1875 Treaty of the Meter? or the May 20, 1990 release of the Hubble Space Telescope’s unimpressive first images? We miss her.

In the third day of joyous celebration, five LWONers listed the best sciences to write about, according to them. They also listed the worst sciences to write about, and counting Erik and the bee scientists, the number of offending LWONers is now up to 6.

Surveys are dumb and stupid and hard to believe, says Sally, and that’s not the worst. The worst is when the gold standard of all surveys turned out to be an actual fraud. And after that, it’s just Katy-bar-the-door.

Survey Says

By: Sally Adee | May 22, 2015

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being “not at all” and 10 being “very much”, how much has the sight of this question made you die inside?

You’re not alone. Surveys are dreadful; often badly-worded, usually tedious, always demanding more of your time than they deserve. Yet they’re a pillar on which a lot of soft science rests. Epidemiologists use them to track disease behaviour. Sociologists use them to determine rates of breastfeeding. World governing bodies use them to determine world rankings of countries’ education systems.

A few days ago a scandal broke about falsified survey data in a study of attitudes toward marriage equality. Turns out this is more common than you’d think. So should you trust any survey?

Continue reading →

The Best Science to Write About and the Worst

By: People of LWON | May 21, 2015

As of yesterday, May 20, LWON has been alive for five years. LWON is a little surprised at this and pretty pleased with itself. In celebration, two of our brilliant alumni wrote guest posts listing the Top Five Things They Wanted to List the Top Five Of. Today, Five People of LWON announce the best sciences to write about, and the worst.

Craig:
Archaeology: best. It is pure inquiry, unadulterated curiosity, a science of imagination on a perfectly human scale. To write about it, if you can handle the backbiting and occasionally irate, red-faced scholars, feels like liberation. You can look across an empty field and out of its slight rises and depressions recreate a city. It’s like Minecraft, only real. Or kind of real. As I’ve heard from many archaeologists studying a piece of edged rock or bone, Is it real? (Archaeology is where the drinking happens. A couple months ago I spoke to a symposium of Alaskan archaeologists and afterward about 50 of us dropped into a rowdy Anchorage bar where shootings and stabbings were weekly. The archeologists took the place over and before midnight I’d auctioned off my boxer shorts, and I had to produce in situ. I held interviews at the bar that night where a Russian archaeologist who’d moved to Alaska slammed vodka with me and stated, “Migration is a sickness!” How could you not love that.)

The worst: physics. It’s the numbers. I’m sorry. It’s more math than anything, and math is hardly a science. I mean, if you are Ramanujan, Fermat or Pythagoras, you’ve got a hypothesis to prove, and you use a proof as an experiment to get to your conclusion, it’s all scientific. But if you’re like me and you have to count on your fingers, you are out of the game. A former astrophysics faculty at University of Colorado once drew out an equation for me to prove a point and asked for me to solve it, as if it were plain as day. “Zero?” I asked. “No, the answer is infinity,” he said. “What’s the difference?” I asked. He just stared at me. (Maybe physicists drink, too, and maybe they demand speakers produce their boxers. Maybe it’s all the same, but I’m still trapped in that moment with the astrophysicist wondering how I could mistake everything for nothing, a conundrum archaeology and physics may have in common.) Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Top 5 May 20ths Ever

By: Virginia Hughes | May 20, 2015

Five years ago today, The Last Word On Nothing was born. I’ve been Googling around, trying to figure out why anniversaries are a thing, but most of what pops up is drivel from couples counselors. Wikipedia offers some facts about Latin names. But what I’m really looking for is why we celebrate anniversaries, why they make us feel so many feels.

Every day, newspapers and websites the world over publish “this day in history” lists. And every morning, Facebook sends me a “You have memories with” so-and-so notification, accompanied by old photos of so-and-so and me that were posted on this day in years past. These photos make me feel happy, and sad, and somehow…special?

It’s arbitrary specialness, of course: Every day is an anniversary for a long list of personal and historical events, significant and trivial. But we love to remember them regardless. It’s nostalgia, sure, but more analytical than that. We’re looking for patterns, connections with the past — either in the way that things have changed, or haven’t.

As it turns out, May 20 has historically been pretty important for science and technology, and not just because of LWON’s arrival in 2010.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: A Litany of Posts Not Written

By: Thomas Hayden | May 19, 2015

As of tomorrow, May 20, LWON will have been alive for five years. LWON is a little surprised at this and entirely pleased with itself. In celebration, two of our brilliant alumni have agreed to write guest posts listing the Top Five Things They Want to List the Top Five Of. We are, and always have been, grateful to them.

ugly lemon-3 When top LWONian Ann Finkbeiner asked if I would contribute a top-five list of something in honor of LWON’s fifth anniversary, I immediately said yes. Not just because I love and am a little afraid of Ann, but also because of a writerly phenomenon that she may already have coined a clever name for. It’s the mind’s tendency to go blank when deadlines loom and then start generating story ideas once no outlet exists. To wit, the following list of the top five posts I think Ann would have liked, if only they had occurred to me when I was still an active person of LWON:

1. Abundance without perfection. I have a lemon tree in my backyard. Even in the California drought it produces bushels of fruit, sustained by the pee and spent bathwater of my children. I grew up long ago and far enough north to remember times of the year when fresh lemons couldn’t even be found in the grocery stores, let alone dangling in their abundance just outside my back door. Having a lemon tree is perfect, even though the lemons themselves are decidedly not.

Some are shrunken, as small and hard as golf balls. Some grow with thin skin and are quick to turn brownish and musty: others are bigger than softballs, swollen with inch-thick layers of pith beneath the rind. And some, their developmental pathways hijacked by a citrus mite from the genus Aceria, twist and extend their segments into wild forms. At most, two out of five of our backyard beauties conform to traditional supermarket standards of acceptability. Many of the rest are simply odd, while a few are truly, gorgeously, grotesque.

Developmentally speaking, they are failures. And yet I’ve come to love the lemons all the more for their departures from the expected form. Like the people who populate our lives, they don’t have to be perfect to be full of value. They just have to be. Continue reading →

Manifesto of a Wasp Scientist

By: Erik Vance | May 18, 2015

The following was inspired by my recent purchase of the clever and entertaining book, The Bees, by Laline Paull. All characters are fictional and should not be confused with real scientists. I especially ask that no bee researcher take offense, as 80 percent of science writers would shrivel up and die if you stopped talking to us.

I sat alone again in the cafeteria again today. Ordered the schnitzel. No one wanted to sit next to me. Of course. No one ever wants to sit next to me. They all want to sit with the bee scientists.

Stupid bee scientists, like they are all that great. All clustered together at the other table like stupid little drones, buzzing about who’s cool and who’s not. All the pretty evolutionary psychologists and ethologists at their table. Talking about complex social dynamics, solar navigation, and collective intelligence. Chicks love that stuff.

Then they just get up in their stupid little hive and all leave together. When they walk past my table one of them is like, “hey, how are the yellow jackets?” Which totally a stupid thing to say since vespula isn’t even that big a part of vespoidea, like everyone always thinks. But then someone else snickers and says, in a really low voice but not that low, “ants with wings.”

Unbelievable.

People don’t understand that wasps are so much cooler than stupid bees. Wasps are shiny and clean. Like a sports car. Or a really expensive espresso machine that’s never even been used. Wasps have jaws. Which is cool. Bees are furry and disgusting. Like a monkey, except without the tool use. They’re also fat and can barely fly and have gross, alien mouths. Little pricks – they’re not even native. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Jessa Gamble | May 16, 2015

May 11-15, 2015

This week, LWONers had a variety of encounters with nature. Jennifer enjoyed a transcendent moment with a tiger shark, and Cameron’s van was mobbed by sphinx moths. Craig’s new location isn’t home until he has learned to read the calendar of his natural surroundings. With each shifting Spring dawn, he gets closer to home and Niki Wilson gets closer to putting away the blinding SAD lamp with which she bludgeons her eyes every winter morning in the Rockies. Memories of those same mountains psych me up to take on new challenges after a series of failures.

Image: Jennifer Holland with tiger shark, Bahamas, shot by Brian Skerry, on assignment for National Geographic

A Visit from the Sphinx

By: Cameron Walker | May 15, 2015

15272834745_be1a418287_z One night this spring I left all the doors open to the van. It was stinkier than usual, and I figured anyone who thought they might peer inside would have found little of value before being frightened off by the smell.

But the next morning when I turned the ignition on, the kids gasped. Our car was full of wings. Continue reading →