The Last Word On Nothing

The Ghosts in the Machines

By: Richard Panek | June 26, 2014

Early one evening a couple of weeks ago I was sitting on a bed in a hotel room in Aspen, laptop in lap, when I started hearing voices. I raised my head, listening closely. At first I assumed the voices were coming from the street, but then I saw that the windows were closed. I got up and partially circumnavigated the bed, trying to trace the voices to their source, until I found myself standing before a radio on a nightstand. At this point I recognized one of the voices as belonging to an architect of the Iraq invasion eleven years ago. Back then he had warned of mushroom clouds, and talked about being greeted as liberators, and argued that the war would pay for itself, and promised the discovery of weapons of mass destruction. Now he was criticizing President Obama for wrecking the Middle East. That’s crazy, I thought. I don’t remember turning on the radio.

I’d heard the hotel is haunted. Another guest had told me that she refused a room on the third floor because she’d read on the internet that that’s where the ghost is–or, perhaps, ghosts are. Google “Hotel Jerome,” she told me, and look at the autofills. One of them, she said, will be “Hotel Jerome haunted.” I did, and sure enough, there it was: Continue reading →

Redux Post: The thin white line

By: Sally Adee | June 25, 2014

This first ran 12/17/2012. The subject is timely and so is the take-home: don’t be too ready to hand over the keys.

It was hardly the first time a ref had gotten it wrong. But the error at the 2010 World Cup was the last straw. Germany (the machine) was only beating England (the perpetual underdog) by a single goal. No fewer than five refs were milling about the pitch when Frank Lampard, an England player, took a shot on goal. It went in – for a moment. The ball hit the underside of the crossbar, bounced about two feet behind the goal line, and then bounced back out. But because all five refs were looking somewhere else at the crucial moment, it wasn’t a goal.

England probably would have lost that game anyway. Probably. But who can say? A crazy underdog goal can change the emotional trajectory of a game.

When officials make such infuriatingly bad calls, and we have technology that can do better, it’s time to use it. So this year, Fifa, football’s global governing body, finally caved on its protracted resistance against goal-line technology. This neat little piece of engineering gives officials highly accurate, real-time intelligence on whether a ball has crossed the goal line. Two contenders are making their debut right now at the Club World Cup championship in Japan. The winner will probably be used in all future high-level football games – and chip away a little more at the human animal’s willingness and ability to trust its own judgment. Continue reading →

Report from the Solutions Summit

By: Christie Aschwanden | June 24, 2014

Back in early 2013, an email discussion among friends turned into a realization. We were having the same tired discussions about gender bias, over and over. The details might vary slightly, but it was the same story, again and again, and nothing was changing. It was time to go public and start looking for solutions. We began by inviting others to join our discussion.

We think the journalism community could use more women voices. We know that this can be uncomfortable to discuss out loud–you’re accused of being militant, bitchy or bitter. But it’s time to move beyond the good old boys club. The question is, how? How do we get more female bylines into the big magazines? How do we get more women on the mastheads? How do we get our work taken more seriously? And how do we do this without sounding like complainers? How do we get women working together on this? And how can we recruit some men to the cause?

We don’t have answers, but we’d like to start a conversation.

That initial conversation spurred a proposal to hold a public discussion at the 2013 National Association of Science Writers meeting. In the meantime, a sexual harassment scandal rocked the science writing community, and our panel at Science Writers 2013 meeting was moved to the ballroom before a standing room-only audience.

We presented data on gender bias in our community, discussed sexual harassment, and recounted times when our ideas went unheard or were not taken seriously until they came out of the mouth (or pen) of a man. Attendees stood up to share their own stories, and people of all genders approached us to ask, “How can I help?”

The next step, we decided, was to develop some plans to change the status quo. So organizers of that original NASW panel — Deborah Blum, Maryn McKenna, Kathleen Raven, Florence Williams, Emily Willingham and I — applied for and received an Idea Grant from NASW to hold a working summit to come up with solutions. Tom Levenson and Seth Mnookin joined us and offered to host the summit at MIT.

The first Women in Science Writing: Solutions Summit took place at MIT on June 13-15. The events began with an evening keynote from Caryl Rivers, author of The New Soft War on Women. [A link to Bethany Brookshire’s summary of the speech will be posted here soon.] Continue reading →

Guest Post: Death of a Fig Tree: My Climate Change

By: Christine Grillo | June 23, 2014

This winter in Baltimore we suffered. We steeled ourselves against record-breaking cold, and our heating bills were scandalous. There was so much snow that the children got tired of sledding. (It snowed on Tax Day, for Pete’s sake.) Months later, the potholes are punishing, and my fig tree is at death’s door.

As far as the fig is concerned, I’m in good company. My friends along the Eastern Seaboard have shared similar tales of woe. In Baltimore, the fig trees are bare and blackened. In Staten Island, my cousins have cut theirs down to the bottom hoping for new growth. And in Virginia one old friend is mourning the dearly departed tree that survived every winter since 1976.

You could say it’s a sad, mass die-off, but on the other hand—duh! I knew better. For decades I’ve admired my Uncle Sal’s Old-World horticultural savvy: fig trees shrouded in tarpaper and topped with buckets for the winter. He knows that fig trees aren’t supposed to grow in the mid-Atlantic, while I cavalierly figured the mid-Atlantic had warmed up. As he would say, “Stunata.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Cassandra Willyard | June 21, 2014

June 16-20

This week, Craig follows an undammed South American river from beginning to end. “The water itself did not know to whom it belonged. It obeyed gravity, streaking mountain sides with streamers and cascades.”

Cameron investigates all things feet, those much-abused appendages that carry us swiftly across the soccer field or not so swiftly down the aisle of a grocery store. Until one day they don’t. “Most of us don’t give our feet much thought until they start complaining.”

Ann’s marriage might be in a rut. She looks to the stars for metaphors and comes up with a doozy. “Astronomers would say we’re all tidally locked.”

Abstruse Goose nicely asks his brain to shut the $&#* up.

Can science and the big screen coexist? Sometimes they can. Michelle tells the story of a NASA researcher who injected some life-saving thermodynamics into a Tinkerbell movie. “He gave them a PowerPoint presentation whose title he remembers as ‘Thermodynamics, or Why You’re Going to Kill the Fairies.'”

Freezeproof a Fairy—With Science!

By: Michelle Nijhuis | June 20, 2014

Tom Painter, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, studies snow hydrology in mountains around the world. He’s also a leading expert on the thermodynamics of fairies and princesses.

Painter started his fairy-princess sideline a few years ago, when he was asked to lend his expertise to Tinkerbell: Secret of the Wings. In the movie—bear with me here, okay?—Tinkerbell makes a forbidden crossing into the Winter Woods, where she meets her long-lost twin sister Periwinkle, a Frost Fairy. Problem is, Tinkerbell can’t survive in the Winter Woods without a coat, which interferes with flying, and Periwinkle can’t survive outside them without a snowmaking machine that Tinkerbell and her friends fashion out of a cheese grater and a lump of ice. The snowmaking machine goes haywire and somehow creates a snowstorm all over Pixie Hollow (I didn’t catch the cause and effect there, but it made perfect sense to my five-year-old). The storm spells big trouble for the Home Tree and its all-important fairy pollen, neither of which are, shall we say, cold-tolerant.

What’s a brave pair of seasonally mismatched sister-fairies to do?

Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Game of Thrones = Dragons + War of the Roses

By: Ann Finkbeiner | June 19, 2014

When I can’t sleep, my brain thinks it’s fun to enumerate all the things I’m afraid might happen. I’ve taken to thinking about the derivations from the same Latin root — application, complication, explication, implication, replication — but sometimes get hung up on not knowing what “plicare” means. I do think the Yorks and the Lancasters would just keep me awake.

_____

http://abstrusegoose.com/523

Science Metaphors (cont.): Tidally Locked

By: Ann Finkbeiner | June 18, 2014

I’ll go home tonight, I’ll open the front door, I’ll yell, “Hey sweetie, hi!” Then Sweetie will yell, “Hello, young Ann.” I’ll look at the mail, then I’ll yell again, “Did you pick up the salmon?” And he’ll say, “Yep, it’s in the refrigerator.” And then I’ll look over the mail and start to throw away the junk and he’ll come downstairs and say, “Don’t throw away anything with my name on it,” and I’ll say, “But it’s junk and it just sits around for days,” and he’ll say, “I want to look at it.” So I’ll put it on the hall table where it will sit around for days, and then I’ll go into the kitchen and start dinner, and I’ll say, “Can you come peel some onions?” And he’ll come peel the onions, and I’ll say, “How was your day?” and he’ll say, “Fine. The replacement brakes haven’t come in yet.” And I’ll say, “I wrote New Scientist again about getting paid.” Then he’ll go into the living room and read his book, and I’ll get the rest of dinner because I like good food better than he does, and we’ll sit down at the table and I’ll say, “God I’m tired,” and he’ll eat salmon. We do this every night – bar the salmon — and I’ll guess with a high degree of confidence that a high percentage of all people who live together do exactly the same.

Astronomers would say we’re all tidally locked. Tidal locking means one side of the planet always faces the star, the other side always faces away. The moon is tidally locked to the earth and not until 1959 did anyone on earth see the moon’s other face. Continue reading →