Ye Olde Scientific Writing

By: | February 5, 2015

Quill penA few weeks ago, biologist Stephen Heard blogged about beauty in scientific writing. Among his examples, he cited an elegant explanation of quantum mechanics research and a playful description of a snake surveying a “disconsolate line” of frogs. More details can be found in Heard’s paper on the subject, which calls for scientists to strive not only for beauty, but whimsy and humour.

I’ve often found that the most enjoyable scientific papers are those written more than a century ago. Sometimes I come across them while researching an article that demands historical backstory, and sometimes I just go down a rabbit hole and find myself downloading half a dozen smudged-looking PDFs on early dental prosthetics. Reading these fusty manuscripts nearly always yields some amusement, whether because the authors use a quaint word, a pleasing turn of phase, or writing conventions that strike me as funny today. Continue reading →

Tongue in Beak

By: | February 4, 2015

4658390366_11d14832d1_zThe other day while we were playing at a nearby park, a woman got out of her car and swooped over to where my sons and their friends were trying to flip over small boulders. She had these awesome knee high boots, and bright red lipstick. Seeing her reminded me what happens to everyman hero Emmet in The Lego Movie’s everyman when he first sees master-builder WyldStyle—the world goes fuzzy, and the screen is filled with her smile, her stiffly swooshing hair and an angel choir soundtrack.

Now, in the park, the woman pulled out a pair of binoculars and peered up at the sycamores. Continue reading →

Picking Your Brains

By: | February 3, 2015

head explode

Dear LWON readers, I’d like to ask you a question.

Twice recently I’ve written about properties of black holes that blow my mind. In each instance, my inspiration was a detail from a movie.

First was Interstellar. The great gravitational grip of the black hole in that movie, as is the case for all black holes, distorts space to such an extent that objects on the side opposite the observer become visible. What blew my mind, though, was what happens when you take that idea to its extreme: One of the sources of light looming into view would be the far side of the accretion disk—the blindingly bright ring of debris encircling the black hole—in its entirety.

Next I wrote about A Brief History of Time, a documentary about Stephen Hawking. During a discussion of what you would experience if you were to fall into a black hole, a physicist says that time would appear to pass normally to you, but that the passage of time in the rest of the universe would appear to be speeding up. What blew my mind, though, was what happens when that idea is taken to its extreme: As you reach the very lip of the black hole’s event horizon, time would be accelerating at such a rate that you would witness the future of the universe in its entirety.

In both cases, however, what didn’t blow my mind was the underlying assumption: Gravity distorts space and time.

That concept used to be the extreme—a side effect of general relativity that would blow anybody’s mind. Now I accepted that assumption almost without thinking. Which, when I thought about it, blew my mind.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 31, 2015

Snow Shelter

January 26 – 30

In guest writer Lesley Evans Ogden’s essay meditation, an Ontario girl builds a bond with the West Coast rainforest through her trail running.

We have come to understand that Craig does nothing in half measures. When he wants to understand the Younger Dryas, naturally he drags a sled onto frozen Lake Superior and spends a night – true to Pleistocene conditions – without a tent.

Christie gives us her favorite words and reports on a few we’d all rather strike from the dictionary.

Our fates are more indebted to our names than we know. Specifically the letters of our first and last initials.

When Helen lived in Japan, she listened to a pop group called SMAP – presumably an onomatopoeic name, akin to Wham! – and Friday’s launch of the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite brought it all back.

 

Image: Craig Child’s not-so-cozy accommodations on Lake Superior.

What Does Today’s Possible Rocket Launch Have to Do With Japanese Pop Music? (I’ll Tell You: Very Little)

By: | January 30, 2015

Delta II Rocket with SMAPFriday morning, if all goes well, NASA is launching a satellite with the name SMAP. As I write late Thursday night, it’s perched atop a Delta II rocket an hour up the California coast from Santa Barbara. It was supposed to launch this morning, but high-altitude winds got in the way.

Like so many things in NASA world, SMAP is an acronym. It stands for Soil Moisture Active Passive. The satellite is monitoring soil moisture, and it’s using both active and passive methods to do so.

I don’t know any more about the science than a quick perusal of NASA’s website got me, but I do know this: SMAP is a really silly-sounding name.

This is not a new opinion. I would like you to know that this is an opinion I have had more than 15 years to develop. This is not the first thing named SMAP to enter my life. Continue reading →

Sassy Smocks and Moist Panties

By: | January 28, 2015

Sashay_Britt.Reints

 

Words are a writer’s currency, and we each have our favorites. The first word I remember falling in love with was onomatopoeia. It had a satisfying rhythm, plus there was the delight of discovering, oh — there’s a word for that.

That joy of discovery was exactly what I felt reading Lost in Translation, a delightful new book by Ella Frances Sanders, who draws illustrations to help explain “untranslatable word from around the world” like trepverter (Yiddish for the perfect retort that comes to you later, when it’s too late), iktsuarpok (Inuit for the act of repeatedly going outside to check if anyone’s coming), cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish for a man who insists on leaving his shirt tails untucked) and tsundoku (Japanese for leaving unread a book you’ve bought, perhaps piling it on top of a stack of other books you haven’t read).

English also has no true equivalent to my own favorite foreign word: gemütlichkeit, a German term that connotes the kind of warm coziness you feel when gathered around a fire with your dearest friends, perhaps drinking Glühwein. It must exist in some language, but I’m still seeking a word to describe a dog’s joy while frolicking in fresh snow.

Many of my beloved English words are onomatopoeic ones like flicker, boing, ripple, riffraff, guffaw and clusterfuck. As a kid, my favorite part of art class was the smock. Not the thing itself, but the occasion to say the word aloud, repeatedly. Smock, smock, smock. I don’t know why I love it, but I do. I also love sassy and saucy and, especially, sashay. I could say that word all day. Continue reading →

Hard Times in the Younger Dryas

By: | January 27, 2015

Lake superior with arrowThis time last year, most of North America was buried in an unusual cold period. The jet stream had hemorrhaged in early January and the Polar Vortex that usually sits atop the hemisphere like a halo came pouring down. Known as the 2014 North American Cold Wave, temperatures plummeted, particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest where double digits below 0 °F appeared for weeks. Lake Superior froze more solidly than it had in decades.

That’s when I went to the Superior shore of northern Wisconsin where nearby temperatures had reached -37 °F. If I wanted to get the feel of a cold spell, I figured this was my moment. At the time, I was writing about the Younger Dryas, a cold anomaly that hit the Northern Hemisphere 12,800 years ago and continued for a thousand years. The world at that point had been gradually warming, the Ice Age coming to an end. Suddenly, within the space of a decade, ocean currents reversed in the Atlantic, probably triggered by cold, meltwater flows coming off the shrinking Laurentide Ice Sheet. This reversal sent the world back into the Ice Age, and brought the end of the Clovis tradition in North America, the climate upheaval speeding up megafauna extinctions.

I don’t like writing about events without witnessing them, so I set off across frozen Lake Superior out of Ashland, Wisconsin, pulling a sled behind me with enough gear to last several days. I wanted a taste of the Younger Dryas. Continue reading →