The Last Word On Nothing

Hell Is Murky

By: Richard Panek | September 17, 2013

A woman with red hair was charging up the stairs towards me. I stepped aside to let her pass, and then, because she wasn’t wearing a mask, I reversed course and followed her. Good choice on my part: She turned out to be Lady Macbeth.

For more than an hour I had been wandering the halls and rooms of the McKittrick Hotel, in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, turning pages in a desktop ledger, pulling books off a bedroom shelf, fishing candy from the glass jars behind a pharmacy counter, losing myself in a maze of Birnam wood. I later learned from the family members and friend who also attended the event that evening that I had missed the rave/orgy. (Twice.) By the time I caught up with Lady Macbeth, I was wondering if I would ever be able to make a narrative out of what I was experiencing. I had also begun to wonder why I would want to.

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Birth Of The World’s First Underwater Museum

By: Erik Vance | September 16, 2013

A few months ago, I got my dream assignment. Well, okay, it wasn’t really an assignment – I cajoled an editor into letting me write about Cancun’s famous underwater museum, Museo Subacuatico de Arte, or MUSA. The idea isn’t really new – put some stuff underwater that fish like to hide under and watch as fish populations bloom. But Cancun has taken another twist – make the objects themselves so beautiful that people will come to see them even before the fish do.

It was a good story and a fun update on a well-covered topic. But I walked away feeling like something was missing. Today I want to give you the story behind that story. The story of the three dedicated – nay, heroic – people who made the place happen. There was Jaime Gonzalez, a biologist and hard-nosed bureaucrat sickened by the damaged reefs in his country; Roberto Diaz, the entrepreneurial tour operator and closet artist who knows everybody in town; and Jason Taylor, the outsider with a new idea and the talent to pull it off. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Sally Adee | September 14, 2013

9 to 13 September

This week began and ended with bugs: guest poster and insect illustrator Mayaan Harel dissected cultural notions of disgust, which she had to overcome in order to pursue her chosen field. I revealed my abiding desire and thwarted quest to eat them.

Roberta watched avian tornadoes.

Helen found a museum that houses, alongside other unexpected treasures, the world’s only submarine piano, a “hot gasoline balloon” for deep-sea exploration, and a silk map for downed pilots.

And Ann gave us Herman Heyn, a sidewalk astronomer in an off-kilter town, who soothes Baltimore’s existential fears night after night: those stars, they’re real, they’re really there.

I, entomophage

By: Sally Adee | September 13, 2013

I spent the summer cultivating an increasing desperation to eat an insect.

The first hankerings developed as I spent a couple of months researching and editing a feature on entomophagy for New Scientist — after sifting through enough butter roasted locust risottos and lemon pepper cricket broths, the idea went full spectrum from hilariously gross to somewhat intriguing to egg-and-bacon sandwich for a hangover. By the time the feature came out, I was full-on jonesing. Continue reading →

Down by the River at the Navy Museum

By: Helen Fields | September 12, 2013

I love museums, and my hometown, Washington, D.C., is full of them. You’ve heard of the big ones—the Air and Space Museum with the Wright Brothers’ plane, the Natural History Museum with its elephant and dinosaurs. We’ve got privately-owned tourist bait, like the Spy Museum and a branch of Madame Tussauds. Then there’s a pile of more obscure museums for everything from textiles to bonsai to individual government agencies.

One of those lesser-known government museums is the National Museum of the U.S. Navy. The museum is in the Washington Navy Yard, a former shipyard—and still a Navy installation— in Southeast D.C., on the Anacostia River.

The Anacostia, a tributary of the Potomac, is flat and tidal, which is why the Navy could build ships there. But that’s also part of the reason why it’s so darn polluted; its waters are slow and they rise and fall with the tide, rather than carrying all the crud out to sea. In recent years, the river has started to transform. There’s a new path along the right bank and way less trash than there used to be, although you still shouldn’t swim in it or eat the fish. On the walk to the museum with a friend, I saw gulls, cormorants, and two ospreys. Continue reading →

Down the chimney

By: Roberta Kwok | September 11, 2013

Tomorrow, I’m driving to Oregon for a friend’s wedding. While I’m there, I may get a chance to witness what has been described as an “avian tornado”: thousands of Vaux’s swifts dive-bombing a chimney at a Portland elementary school.

A Vaux’s swift is a petite, grayish bird with sharp swooping wings and a stubby tail. Honestly, it’s not much to look at on its own. But when the swifts amass in teeming spirals in the evening sky and then suddenly rush tail-first down a chimney, like a genie being sucked back into its bottle, it is a sight to see. Continue reading →

The Sidewalk Astronomer

By: Ann Finkbeiner | September 10, 2013

The sidewalk astronomer – usually a star-haunted amateur setting up a personal telescope on city sidewalks for both money and love – is familiar with doubt.

Mr. Tregent, 1856: “Sometimes when I have been exhibiting, the parties have said it was all nonsense and a deception, for the star was painted on the glass. If the party has been anything agreeable, I’ve taken the trouble to persuade him. I’ve, for instance, placed the star on the very edge of the glass, and then they’ve seen it travel right across the field; and as I’ve told them, if it was painted it couldn’t move and disappear from the lens.”

Joseph G. White, 1921: ‘”This is a fake,’ he exclaimed. ‘There isn’t any such thing in the sky. You’ve got this thing fastened here in the tube to fool people.’ The sidewalk astronomer proved that Saturn was real by telling the man to watch it move out of the field of view by himself moving the telescope tube.”

Herman Heyn, 2012: “Frequently Asked Questions: ‘Is that the real Saturn? I don’t believe it!’ Used to try to prove to them 5 different ways that it is real. Now I just say, ‘If it looks fake, it’s in good focus!’ I also say that if I was going to fool you I wouldn’t need to bring 70-lbs of equipment down here but could do it with a paper towel roll! These days it’s helpful when someone comes along with an iPhone with a sky app which shows Saturn where my scope is pointing.”

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Guest Post: Are You Still Drawing Those Bugs?

By: Maayan Harel | September 9, 2013

My studies and work in science were limited to the physical until last year, staying far away from those messy life sciences. When I started studying science illustration, a field which has traditionally accompanied biology, it became clear that nausea was something I had better put aside fast. In fact one could consider my year in the science illustration program as, amongst other things, a rather successful study in disgust management. When your school no longer has a specimen freezer due to an extremely unpleasant malfunction, you know you’re in for an interesting year. The changes in how I experienced disgust made me curious about this strange emotion and I wondered: if I can alter my reactions, are they really involuntary? Continue reading →