The Last Word On Nothing

The Greatest Athlete in the World

By: Erik Vance | January 16, 2015

On Wednesday, at 3:25 Pacific Standard Time, two scruffy, skinny men embraced atop Yosemite’s El Capitan. To the casual observer, just a couple dudes in a national park trying to get off the mountain before sunset. Yet, these men had accomplished something so amazing that the sitting US president would call and congratulate them. So difficult that people thousands of miles away would have to re-evaluate what is possible. And so impressive that that at least one writer is considering adding it to his list of the greatest sports acheivements of all time.

For non-climbers, let me break down what happened. People climb El Cap all the time. I’ve done it, paraplegics have done it, even Ozzy Osbourne’s kid did it. When mortals like us climb it, they stick equipment in the wall and step on that equipment. You might call that cheating, we call it “aid” climbing. To use only your hands and feet (with a rope to catch your fall as we saw last week) is called “free” climbing (no to be confused with climbing ropeless, which most people call “kinda crazy”). Thus, poetically enough, when someone climbs an aid route without cheating, he/she has “freed” it. Continue reading →

Freelancing Sucks. Long Live Freelancing.

By: Michelle Nijhuis | January 14, 2015

Last month, Fast Company senior editor Reyhan Harmanci published a column called “Freelancing Sucks.” She wrote:

Everyone knows this: the freelancers, who are forced to beg for months-late checks; the editors, who surf on an endless sea of referrals, looking for unicorn writers who turn in copy clean and on time; the readers, who get the short end of the content stick when writers are rushing to work quickly to justify their unlivable wages and editors don’t have the room to build relationships with writers more than one story at a time. It’s a broken system, based on bad economics.

To me, a freelance science journalist who works as both a writer and an editor, this is an all-too-familiar list. The publishing industry’s increasing reliance on the “gig economy” isn’t good for journalists, and it’s not good for journalism. (For war correspondents, it’s arguably life-threatening.) Harmanci is happy that digital-media organizations like Vox and BuzzFeed are bucking this trend with new staff hires, and so am I.

Staffing up is only part of the solution, though. Journalism needs freelancers, and staff editors can make freelancing a whole lot better. Here’s why they should, and how they can.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: In Praise of Snow Geese

By: Colin Norman | January 13, 2015

On New Year’s Day, my friend Randy Roberts and I put on white hazmat suits and went out to shoot snow geese. We were told that the birds regard a human in a white suit as one of their own and they let you walk freely among them, something hunters supposedly discovered a while back. We had no intention of killing any snow geese, though: Randy, an accomplished wildlife photographer, was armed with a camera, not a gun.

We caught up with a gaggle of several hundred birds blanketing a field across the road from the local high school in Lewes, Delaware. To the amusement of passing motorists, we crept up to them in our white suits, looking like inspectors at a superfund site. Just as we got close, they took off in a squawking, whirling blizzard. Nevertheless, Randy got some great shots with the sun setting behind the rising flock.

We have since learned that we should have parked ourselves in a field with some decoys and waited patiently for the geese to come to us. It could have been a long wait: Snow geese are wary birds, and they are consummate survivors. Their numbers, once dangerously low, have increased so dramatically in recent decades that they are now the most numerous waterfowl in North America. They migrate thousands of miles in huge flocks, communicating noisily with each other as they go. And they even have a natural feel for physics. Continue reading →

Yelping My Eye Surgeon

By: Stephanie Paige Ogburn | January 12, 2015

For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of waking up, opening my eyes, and seeing clearly. I’ve worn glasses since age 8. Without them, I can’t see my partner’s face in the bed next to me. I can’t see the clock on the phone sitting on my nightstand, or stargaze when I’m sleeping outside. I’ve been saving up for laser correction surgery for many years, dreaming of the day where I can wake up with the world in focus.

I’m also very cautious. These are my eyes, after all. The procedure is expensive, and I want to choose the best surgeon possible. As I recently learned, that is no easy task. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Christie Aschwanden | January 10, 2015

January 5-9, 2015

Roberta tried out the Japanese art of decluttering and offered vindication to pilers like me with news of a study finding that people who organize paperwork in piles accumulate less stuff than those neatniks who file them.

Guest poster Anne Sasso told us about her devotion to a pocket calculator so beloved that it sometimes induces magical thinking.

Washington DC had a snow day, and Helen got giddy like a kid.

Craig sets out on a paleolithic adventure, notices that the tasks involved unwittingly split along gender lines, and that gets him thinking about “the incredible shrinking prehistoric woman.” (No word on whether his group tried the “paleo” diet.)

Erik compares movie clips to footage of rock climbers falling in real life to illustrate what Hollywood gets wrong about falls.

Debunking Hollywood: Falling!!!

By: Erik Vance | January 9, 2015

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes.

Our hero is in dire trouble yet again. He stands on the rooftop, a villain in front of him, his feet inches from a seven-story fall. Sweat glistens on his brow as he fearlessly throws a punch but the villain is too quick. In a swift movement, the evil man kicks our hero in the stomach and he plummets toward the pavement below, the villain cackling with glee and twisting his mustache.

Ah! But just as his fate looks sealed, 20 feet down he catches the bottom of the fire escape and hangs precariously by one arm. Whew!

This kind of last-ditch-grab-for-safety is standard fare in almost any action movie. (The scene you’ve just read was an excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished trashy detective novel, Blades of Courage, part of the Slade McGee series. No, no, make that Icy Hot, part of the Chet Heartstrong series. I’m still ironing out the details.)

But how possible is it in reality? As a former rock climbing instructor, I’ve taken my share of falls – always with a rope firmly attached to me. Every time it happens, I’m shocked by just how fast a person can fall. Most times I don’t even know what’s happening until the rope catches me five or ten feet down. Continue reading →

Gender in the Paleolithic

By: Craig Childs | January 8, 2015

Camped with seven adults and five children on the south-central coast of Alaska, I was doing a little writing experiment. I had been following possible Paleolithic routes, taking off with adventurers across glaciers and mountains to get a sense of living and traveling in the same landscapes people faced tens of thousands of years ago. One thing was missing: families.

Following a hypothesized coastal migration route from 16,000 years ago, we headed out in a gaggle of sea kayaks. We’d been dropped off three hours by boat out of Whittier, Alaska, for a 9-day trip. By day 5, we were running low on food, turning to foraging, digging up clams, setting a shrimp pot, and catching whatever we could by hook and line.

As if going through a house after a nightly rampage of children and pajamas, one evening we put away toothbrushes and picked up stray, damp articles of clothing, hanging them on guy-wires from the kitchen tarp. And not like living in a house at all, we collected all food that wasn’t in hard-plastic bear boxes and packed it into bags to hang as high and as intricately as we could. We had a pulley system rigged up over the water, about a hundred pounds of food suspended from a rope thrown over a sturdy spruce hanging 30 feet above the incoming and outgoing tide. It was as far as we could get food from bears.

Gender was an issue from day one. Our tasks divided by male and female. It was never discussed. It just happened. That evening, I sat with Becky Ela, a mother of two from a farm family in Western Colorado. Becky and I sat at the edge of the kitchen tarp. I was on the dry ground and she was on a cooler whittling a stick into a rug of wood shavings. Rain fell in dusk light darkening into an early-July midnight. Tent lights went out, other parents putting kids down for the night. Continue reading →

A Snow Day

By: Helen Fields | January 7, 2015

The first snow of the year, and the first noticeable snow of this winter, fell here in D.C. on Tuesday. Yes, we know that our reaction to snow makes no sense. No, we don’t have enough snowplows. No, we don’t know how to drive in snow. You’re very clever for noticing, People Who Live In Consistently Snowy Places.

A few inches of snow wreaked the usual havoc. Screenshots of the traffic maps this morning showed red spaghetti. Schools delayed, then closed, or didn’t close and earned their very own trending hashtag (#closeFCPS). Some find the chaos profitable–“body shop weather,” an acquaintance who manages such a business called it. Many, I gather, find it annoying.

With no car to keep out of the ditch or kids to worry about, snow still holds that joy of childhood for me – the promise of a special day, just because the moisture and the cold collided in just the right way in my part of the world. Even though I don’t get days off for meteorology anymore, because I work for a company headquartered in a place that gets serious snow. But a snow day still feels special, a cold, white present from the sky, a literal gift from above. Continue reading →