Florida’s Python Problem

By: | August 22, 2013

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Last weekend I heard a story I won’t soon forget. Bob Freer, who runs an animal rescue shelter in the Everglades, appeared on a rerun of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and he began to talk about Florida’s python problem. Of course, I knew Florida had a python problem. But there’s knowing, and then there’s the kind of knowing that can only come from hearing about an encounter.

About 15 years ago, Freer received a call from a homeowner who claimed to have a snake lodged under his home. Freer and his team went to the site and shined a flashlight into the crawlspace to see if they could spot the snake. It was just out of reach, and Freer soon realized that none of the hefty adults he had brought with him would be able to shimmy in to grab it. “But at that time we had a young kid with us, a volunteer,” he told the host. You can see where this is going, right? Continue reading →

Johnny and Oppie

By: | August 21, 2013

JAW-1981.9.17-copyOppie
Physicists, like the ancient Greeks, like to gossip about their gods.  A few days ago, three physicists* were talking on Twitter** about a review by a fourth physicist, Freeman Dyson, of a biography of one of these gods, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and about his war with another one, John Archibald Wheeler.

Physicist #1: Oppenheimer did the breakthrough work on black holes.

Physicist #2:  Isn’t it ironic that Wheeler gets credit for inventing black holes?

Physicist #3: Dyson’s review doesn’t talk about Wheeler’s bitter rejection of Oppenheimer’s black holes and Oppenheimer’s antipathy toward Wheeler.

Physicist #2:  So interesting. Maybe Oppenheimer wasn’t accustomed to challenges?  And then Wheeler invents the phrase, “black hole”, and Oppenheimer never uses it.

Physicist #1: “. . .[the star] like the Cheshire cat, fades from view. One leaves behind only its grin, the other . . .”

Physicist #1:  “. . . only its gravitational attraction.” – John Wheeler 1967

Physicist #3:  I heard Oppenheimer sat outside the auditorium when Wheeler was giving the talk that conceded that black holes form.

Physicist #2:  I remember now, that story is in Kip Thorne’s book***.

Me: Oh my what a story!

Physicist #1:  I’d just like to 100% endorse @AnnFinkbeiner’s tracking it all down.

And off I go to find Kip Thorne’s book. And Wheeler’s autobiography.  And Dyson’s review.  And the Web of Stories online interviews.  And to fall thoroughly down the rabbit hole, where it’s dark and lonely but, you know.  Interesting. Continue reading →

This week’s worst press release (so far)

By: | August 20, 2013

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I get a lot of ridiculous press releases, but the headline that made its way to my inbox today, “New Cancer-Fighting Game App Goes Global,” represented a new level of nonsense. The press release described a “ground-breaking” smartphone “cancer-fighting game app” that promised to “help young cancer patients fight their disease.”

If you’re like me, you’re thinking — how on earth can an app fight cancer? Here’s how an MD quoted in the press release explains it. “[These] games are a fun way to help you understand what it takes to fight the disease. Playing these games can help you or someone you care about fight and beat cancer.” Continue reading →

Hot Times in the Cotswolds

By: | August 19, 2013

is that what I think it isOne morning last month a friend and I took a train from London to the city of Gloucester, in southwestern England. The next morning after breakfast we started walking on the Cotswold Way, one of the UK’s National Trails.

On its way to Bath, 60-some miles away, the trail passes through quiet beech forests, open cow pastures, and fields of grains, with a sprinkling of prehistoric sites and an awful lot of disused quarries, the source of the lovely, creamy limestone that buildings in the region are known for.

At times I wondered why I had chosen to spend a week slogging up and down hills on aching feet. But moving through the countryside at ground-level and a snail’s pace is great. You notice things. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 17, 2013

GribblesAugust 12- 16

Snark week! In which we tell you what happens when cute animals get ugly.

Christie introduced us to the creature that goes Cock-a-doodle DIE.

Roberta told chilling tales of the gribble: chubby, adorable scourge of the sea.

Cameron explained whys we should fear the bunny.

Michelle warned us about petting the pretty ants in the Sigried-and-Roy furs.

And according to Erik, the shoulder parrot of Satan thinks of nothing all day but death and destruction.

Snark Week: The Souless Flesh-Eating Kea

By: | August 16, 2013

KeaIn the Southern summer of 2004, my then-girlfriend and I were camped in a shelter near a rock climbing area in New Zealand called Flock Hill. It was a gorgeous landscape, sweeping grassy hills made famous as Rohan in the “Lord of the Rings” and glacial erratics from the final battle scene in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

Itinerant climbers regularly blow in and out with the good weather so no one at the camp noticed late one night when a hulking black pickup rolled in or when its occupants set up a tent and passed out.

It’s a pity. Because we could have warned them.

The next day, they woke up to the wreckage of their vacation. The straps connecting their tent to the stakes in the ground were chewed out, such that half the tent had collapsed in on them. One hiking boot was found mangled 30 feet away and another was never recovered. The rubber around their windshield was shredded and their antenna had been ripped off and dropped in the truck bed. When they woke, the perpetrators – a group of mountain parrots called the keas – were gathered on their truck to inspect their work and drop branches on the hood from 10 feet up.

Continue reading →

Snark Week: Don’t Pet the Ants

By: | August 15, 2013

8536040278_bab77fd976_b 500pxIt’s small, it’s fuzzy, and it hurts like hell. Variously known as the “cow killer,” “mule killer,” and “motherf-ing thing that just stung me,” the velvet ant packs more pain per pound than the meanest great white.

Don Manley, a professor emeritus of entomology at Clemson University, recalls his run-in with Dasymutilla sp. as the worst sting of his career:

I had heard from others who had been stung by a velvet ant that ‘it hurt so bad for about twenty to thirty minutes that I just wanted to die and get it over with’ … I had worked with [velvet ants] for over twenty years before I was finally stung. I concur with the description. I have not been stung by a velvet ant since—I will not be stung by a velvet ant again.

The sting was glancing, but the resulting knot on Manley’s thumb lasted for almost a month.

Continue reading →