Chasing Transits

By: | June 14, 2013

CELESTE: How long this time?

LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more.

CELESTE: What if you miss it?

LE GENTIL: The transit? I won’t.

CELESTE: You missed the last one.

Transit of Venus

Venus (the small dark dot) crosses the Sun.

That lovers’ quarrel comes from Transit of Venus, a play by Maureen Hunter that chronicles French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil’s doomed quest to see Venus crossing the Sun. Le Gentil embarked on a voyage to India in 1760 as part of an international effort to observe the transits of Venus, which occur in pairs roughly once a century. By watching these rare celestial events from far-flung points on the globe, scientists hoped to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Continue reading →

New Person of LWON: Roberta Kwok

By: | June 13, 2013

RobertaWe are overjoyed to announce that Roberta Kwok has become the newest person of LWON (or LaWONian, as some of us like to say).  You’ve seen her here before. Her first guest post explained how a study to detect traffic patterns gave investigators new insight into a fatal car crash. Elsewhere, she’s written about synthetic DNA, mysterious fossils, and how plants and animals get their shapes. Her 2009 narrative about some astronomers who tracked a meteorite in real time won the the American Geophysical Union’s Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism. A person of many talents, Roberta also writes beautiful fiction and she once worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. We’re especially grateful for her computer savvy, since she has agreed to help keep the technology behind LWON running smoothly. Roberta hails from Calgary but recently relocated from northern California to Seattle, where she’s trying not to think about the coming rainy season.

Welcome, Roberta!

 

It Wasn’t The Junk Food That Made Me Fat – It Was The Bag

By: | June 13, 2013

2145502208_d0c8a216ae_bWhen I think back on the formative moments of my youth, it’s hard to top the Canada-Wide Science Fair of 1980. It was there, in Thompson, Manitoba, that I first truly experienced the transformative power of science to make daily life richer, better, more rewarding. No, it wasn’t my own engagement with the scientific method and R&D – sure, the physically accurate cloud simulation device my sister and I designed and constructed was nifty, and the experience helped shape my future education and blah blah blah. But it was the junior science on display in the booth next to ours that really changed the future for me.

I don’t remember his name, and I can’t recall where he was from. But I do remember his schematics almost well enough to sketch them for a patent application. Our neighbor’s popcorn popping optimization research went on to win first place in our division, and deservedly so. By painstakingly varying a score of conditions, from oil type and volume and preheat time to advanced notions such as pre-soaking the kernels and using a pressure cooker, my adversary simultaneously anticipated and outdid the Cook’s Illustrated trial and error approach to kitchen science. (The magazine launched the same year.) Continue reading →

Something Up His Sleeve, Part 2

By: | June 12, 2013

Yesterday I confessed my fear of magicians. Today I confront that fear by going to the source: Alex Stone, a magician I met at a party who, at my prompting, was kind enough to perform an impromptu set that thrilled me but that also, on the walk home, left me feeling uneasy. I later learned that Alex is the author of Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, a book that explains some of the hard-wiring behind the brain’s susceptibility to illusions.

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Left to right: Richard, Alex

Richard: Magicians scare me because they can manipulate my mind. Should I be scared? Or can you reassure me?

Alex: I don’t know how much reassurance I can offer you, given what I know about magicians. It makes sense, though. Magicians are experts in deception and lying. Some of them—most of them—do it to entertain people and make them happy. But many of the same techniques magicians use to manipulate people’s minds can also be used for more nefarious purposes, and have been. Magic also reminds us of how easy we are to fool, which is amusing but, as you noted, kind of scary, too.

Continue reading →

Something Up His Sleeve, Part 1

By: | June 11, 2013

Bullwinkle_Rocky

Magicians scare me.

Not magic. Magic is cool. I was at a party recently when I asked someone what he did and he said he was a magician and I said I hope he didn’t mind but would he possibly—and even before the request was out of my mouth he had produced a deck of cards. We cleared space on the bar in a corner of the room, and soon a crowd had gathered. The impromptu   show was typically mind-blowing. I loved the act. But when it was over and the magician and I resumed our conversation, I realized I was nervous.

The magician turned out to be Alex Stone, a former writer for Discover, an aspiring physicist who eventually dropped out of the PhD program at Columbia University in order to pursue magic, and the author of Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind (out in paperback today). He was kind enough to send me his book a few days after we met. I confess I opened it with a combination of fascination and dread: fascination, because I might find out how magic fools me, and dread because I might find out how magicians fool me. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 8, 2013

shutterstock_95070055June 3 -7, 2013

This week, Erik took on the Singularitarians.

Cassie saw the ugly future of drone journalism.

When you look out your kitchen window in winter, what’s out there looks simple. But Cameron told us what’s really going on under the snow.

If you’re a Neanderthal, you’ll like guest poster Jude Isabella’s dating tips for how to bag Homo sapiens.

And after reading an inelegant critique of psychiatry in the New York Times Richard — sorry, there’s no other way to put this — tore it a new one.

Chopper Journalism

By: | June 7, 2013

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On May 31, a flight instructor named Craig MacCallum and his 19-year-old student lost control of a single-engine plane shortly after taking off from a small airport in Linden, New Jersey. MacCallum put out a mayday call just before the plane plummeted from the sky. The student survived, but MacCallum didn’t make it. And I may have watched him die.

No, I wasn’t on the abandoned industrial lot in New Jersey where the plane crashed. I wasn’t even in the vicinity. But the News 4 New York chopper was, and the network interrupted my soap opera to deliver the breaking news. One minute I was watching Brady and Kristen’s relationship disintegrate on Days of Our Lives (guilty pleasure), the next I was hovering above the wrecked carcass of an aircraft. Continue reading →