Guest Post: Can an Equation be a Poem?

By: | April 1, 2014

“The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form.” —Henry David Thoreau

Sator Square in Luberon, FranceApril is Mathematics Awareness Month. April is also National Poetry Month. Coincidence? Yep, almost definitely. But it’s also an opportunity: I’d like to propose that we—you and I, at least until the end of this blog post—merge the two and celebrate the first-ever Mathematical Poetry Month. No fooling.

Connecting math to poetry isn’t a new idea. Archimedes did it, committing the mother of all word problems—a Diophantine beast—to verse. The Sator Square, a mysterious Latin palindrome written in a square that can be read in multiple directions, is a pattern poem with mathematical underpinnings. (The oldest-known Sator Square was recovered from Pompeii. The one pictured here contains the same words, but was found in France.)

In a letter to his brother dated March 31, 1791, Samuel Taylor Coleridge called math the “quintessence of truth.” As a demonstration of his enthusiasm for said quintessence, he declared his intention to refashion Euclid’s Elements, which contained most of those propositions and proofs we met in school, as a series of Pindaric odes. The letter even included his first stab at versifying the first of Euclid’s propositions. As far as anyone knows, that’s as far as he got. (Read Coleridge’s letter here. Did he improve on Euclid?) One of the most famous pieces by the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, similarly besotted by the great Greek, is “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”

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Kepler on the Moon, Part (Who Knew?) 3

By: | March 31, 2014

bide for keplerKepler strikes again! A couple of weeks ago, in a two–part essay, I wrote about a 1608 book by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler that scholars consider the first work of science fiction: Somnium—Latin for The Dream. This past week, I got to thinking about Kepler’s book again, after the discovery of dwarf planet 2012 VP113 (which the discoverers have nicknamed VP, as well as Biden, because of all the stars in the background of his official portrait) (or maybe not), an object that redefines the edge of the solar system.

In Kepler’s book, a narrator recounts a dream in which he reads a book about a boy who hears a story from an alien who often travels to the Moon. Kepler had good reason to keep his distance, authorially speaking. To imagine the universe from a perspective other than Earth’s was a radical notion—so radical that The Dream wasn’t published until 1634, four years after Kepler’s death.

I don’t think the discovery of  a dwarf planet—or the idea of there even being such a thing as a dwarf planet—would have surprised Kepler. In The Dream, he’s open to exotic possibilities. The alien describes enormous creatures with spongy skin that turns brittle in the sun. Instead, I think if you told Kepler that a planet-like object would be discovered at the edge of the solar system, his response would have been pleasure at the use of the term “solar system”: The system really is solar, as in, you know, revolving around the Sun? (Okay, the “you know” might be anachronistic.)

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The Last Word

By: | March 29, 2014

CORiverDelta1_pmcb-500x332March 24 – 28, 2014

Richard’s redux post:  he went to the real true South Pole, had a chance to stand on it and didn’t but it changed his perspective anyway.

Erik went to Tulsa, met a bookseller who had gone to the third world and done the best thing he ever did, better than most anyone has ever done.

Cassie found out that when we can put someone who’s noncompliant with his meds for TB in prison, and she got mad.

Jessa went to a floating neighborhood in Yellowknife and considers the hazards of rusted-out, seagull-pooped cities.

Guest Adam Hinterthuer found out the Colorado River stops flowing at the Mexican border, except for when they open the dam and change the landscape.

 

Guest Post: The Year of the Flood

By: | March 28, 2014

Until last Sunday, the Colorado River ended in Yuma, Arizona, backed up against an unremarkable span of concrete called the Morelos Dam on the Mexican border. Every drop of water above the dam was already spoken for -– supplying water to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Denver as well as irrigating farm fields in both the U.S. and Mexico. Barely a trickle of the river that had carved the Grand Canyon continued past the dam. And all of that was headed toward Mexicali farmland, not the last seventy miles to the Gulf of California.

After being allocated for municipal needs in major American cities and irrigation in the U.S. and Mexico, the Colorado River runs no more south of the border.
After being allocated for municipal needs in major American cities and irrigation in the U.S. and Mexico, the Colorado River runs no more south of the border.

But, on March 23rd, the gates of the Morelos Dam lifted, sending a pulse of water downstream that will mimic the increased flow that used to be provided by spring rains and Rocky Mountain snowmelt. After the pulse, the gates will remain open for roughly two months, giving the lower Colorado enough flow to, perhaps, complete its run to the Sea of Cortez. Continue reading →

A Pirate’s Life For Us

By: | March 27, 2014

futuristic floating cityEngineers and architects have been facing the question for years. “When we were designing the Tate Modern, there was a moment when someone said, ‘What will you do when the water is a metre or two higher?’” remembers Stuart Smith, a director at global engineering firm Arup. “As an individual building, there’s not much you can do — you have to rely on sea defenses and civil engineering.”

Sea level rise is just one of the reasons posited for a future where cities extend into the sea on floating platforms, or even become independently seaworthy. In a story I wrote for the Guardian last week, I explored some of the sci-fi visions and futuristic schemes going to create floating cities. A wise commenter pointed out that real floating cities wouldn’t look like the slick artists’ renderings in the slide show. They’d be rusted out and encrusted with seagull crap. Continue reading →

Infected and Imprisoned

By: | March 26, 2014

Man in mask

The outbreak that shook the tiny town of Ninety Six, South Carolina, probably began in the spring of 2012. An elderly janitor at the local elementary school fell ill and began unwittingly spreading the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. By June 2013, more than 50 students were infected and at least ten had developed signs of the disease.

To prevent further spread, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) ordered the janitor to take medication and stay home, but he didn’t. According to an emergency public health order, he left his house without DHEC’s permission and refused to answer some of the department’s many questions. When he did answer, his responses were “evasive, vague and inconsistent.” What happened next probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did: The state arrested the janitor and threw him in a medical detention facility. Continue reading →

The Long Now of the Tiburón Bighorn

By: | March 21, 2014

Bighorn skull on Tiburon IslandIn the spring of 2012, botanist and graduate student Benjamin Wilder was camping on Tiburón Island, a large island in the Gulf of California whose flora he has studied for most of a decade.

Wilder wanted to find out more about the evolutionary history of the plants on Tiburón, so he was looking for fossil woodrat middens—piles of vegetation and other debris collected by woodrats, glued together with woodrat pee, and cached away for tens of thousands of years. For scientists, woodrat middens are like care packages from the past.

In a shallow cave in the foothills of the Sierra Kunkaak, Wilder, a lab mate, and two friends from the local Seri community found something that resembled a midden, but didn’t look quite right: It had a lot of dung in it, and not many plants. Wilder took it back to Tucson, Arizona, and showed it to his mentor Julio Betancourt, who recognized it with a look and a sniff. “That’s bighorn sheep dung,” he said. Its identity was confirmed by DNA analysis, and when samples were radiocarbon dated, they turned out to be 1,500 years old.

Which was, as far as anyone knew, impossible.

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