Mare Incognitum

By: | March 11, 2014

Lenox_Globe_(2)_BritannicaThis week, a great white shark named Lydia may be the first white shark seen crossing into the eastern Atlantic. Scientists tagged her a year ago in Florida; since then, she’s swum 19,000 miles and as of yesterday morning, she was about 1000 miles from the Irish coast.

White shark populations, along with those of many other shark species, are dwindling because of bycatch and other threats. The more we can learn about them, the better we can help protect them. But there’s a small part of me that wants to toss a fig leaf over Lydia’s sensor, so that something about her journey is still unknown. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Put Your Money Where Darwin’s Mouth Is

By: | March 10, 2014

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In the fourteen years that I’ve been teaching high school biology, I’ve been asked a lot of weird questions about evolution. But, until recently, I’ve not been asked whether Charles Darwin could make you rich. Is evolution good for business? In a recent debate, Bill Nye, the popular science educator, argued it is.

Actually, Nye first offered this argument against creationism in a Big Think interview from August, 2012 entitled, “Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children”.  Nye claimed that evolution deniers promote a worldview that is not just ignorant and inaccurate, but positively harmful—especially for children. Since creationism interferes with the public’s understanding of a fundamental and well-established scientific fact, Nye argued, it undermines our economic competiveness. “We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future [and] we need engineers that can build stuff– solve problems.”

Eight days later, the Creation Museum published a video response.  Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | March 8, 2014

macro/microMarch 3 – 7

This week, Ann’s love letter to the capital weather gang made me want to understand far more about the weather.

You can either be totally secure, or you can be plugged into a network. Pick one, says Abstruse Goose.

Helen says art about the Artic ice melt is beautiful and awful, which is not the same thing as depressing.

Richard’s first day in journalism is the day the Chicago Tribune releases 274,000 words of Watergate. There’s an unexpected cliffhanger.

So why did Harry say what he did? The answer lies in something none of you, dear LWON readers, ever knew about Kepler.

Kepler on the Moon, Part 2

By: | March 7, 2014

(Part 2 of 2; Part 1 appeared yesterday.)
Reproduction_of_Kepler's_Somnium_1634_Title_PageHarry’s utterance “Damn damn Kepler on the Moon damn damn” immediately entered the lexicon of our little messenger world. I then introduced it to my non-work friends, who likewise adopted it as an absurdist catch-all. For years afterward my only knowledge of Kepler was as a punch line to a prank phone call. Only when I began researching astronomy for a book project, deep into adulthood, did I come to understand Johannes Kepler’s contributions to the history of science, including the three laws of planetary motion that provided the foundation for Newton’s universal law of gravitation.

Even then, however, I remained ignorant of Kepler’s contribution to the history of literature: He was the author of the first work of science fiction.

A year ago a student in the Science as Narrative course I teach first brought Kepler’s Somnium to my attention. I’m teaching that course again this semester, and in the past few weeks we’ve been discussing Kepler. This time I looked up Somnium online, and what I found was a truly transgressive work of literature. Also, the evidence in Harry’s favor.

Continue reading →

Kepler on the Moon, Part 1

By: | March 6, 2014

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My first job, post-paper route, was as a messenger in the advertising department of the Chicago Tribune. As a 15-year-old aspiring journalist (and, yes, underage hire), I thought the experience might be a career path to Woodward and Bernstein heights. By coincidence, the day I started—May 1, 1974—was Watergate Wednesday, the same day that the Tribune was the only newspaper to publish the just-released transcripts of the Nixon White House secret tape recordings in their 246,000-word entirety. I walked into an office where my future-fellow messengers were frantically stuffing copies of the broadsheet supplement into enormous manila envelopes, the kind with string clasps on the back. The office’s mission was to deliver those envelopes, that very afternoon, as part of a vast promotional strategy, to advertising clients ranging from the heart of the Loop to the outermost suburbs. The scene in the office was bedlam. My new boss told me that my job that day was to take a seat on the bench and stay out of the way.

Like me on the bench that afternoon, the journalism dreams went nowhere, at least via my messenger job at the Tribune. The era of the copy boy rising through the ranks to foreign bureau chief was over. But that messenger job did offer life experiences that I couldn’t have imagined.

Continue reading →

Love Song for the Capital Weather Gang

By: | March 5, 2014

Sleet_damage_at_Postojna_train_stationThe latest snowstorm was only somewhere around 5 inches, depending where in the yard I stuck my ruler, and as usual the Capital Weather Gang had nailed it.  I’d written them asking if I could interview them for this post, but at the time they didn’t answer, so intent they were on predicting the upcoming storm down to the last flake, path, county, minute, percentage, and error bar.  This time they’d said 5 to 9 inches – the National Weather Service was going with 8 to 12 but eventually came down – unless the dry, cold air got here faster than the models showed, which it did.  The Weather Gang are open about their passion for snow, but they earnestly consider all scenarios and their pronouncements are such that one can have faith in them.  I take the Weather Gang as my personal savior. Continue reading →

Voyage of Discovery: Art and the Arctic

By: | March 4, 2014

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Right now at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, here in Washington, D.C, is an art show about climate change in the Arctic. Three local artists worked together on the show, called Voyage of Discovery.

I know, art about climate change in the Arctic. It sounds depressing at best and preachy at worst. But it’s not.

Artist Michele Banks does lovely work with the strange blues of Arctic ice. In the windows of the gallery hang “Micro/Macro,” a series of ink-on-mylar paintings about the transition between ice and water (one is above). Elsewhere, in a series of cute little round watercolors set in petri dishes, her patterns suggest algae and other critters that live in the Arctic sea.

Climate change has human effects, too, of course. In a piece called “In the Balance,” a boat made of handmade paper over a steel frame, based on a native Alaskan fishing boat, is tossed by giant waves; this was inspired, says artist Jessica Beels, by hearing that people in Alaska have found they can’t predict the behavior of the weather and the water as well as they used to. Global climate change has meant local weather changes and more dangerous encounters with the sea for people who make their living from it. Continue reading →