The Last Word On Nothing

I’m with stupid

By: Sally Adee | April 2, 2013

What is stupidity?

That’s the question I set out to answer this week for New Scientist. The idea was to look at the science of stupidity, but it took me a good couple of weeks to stop hitting brick walls in my research. Respectable scientists don’t like to talk about stupidity. “Stupidity is an evaluative term,” Alan Baddeley told me, “not a scientific one.” Baddeley is a psychologist at the University of York who studies working memory. “[Stupidity] has not been studied because it is neither sensible nor useful to do so,” he says. So instead, psychologists study intelligence.

I sympathize with Baddeley’s aversion. Attempts to locate stupidity somewhere specific — whether that’s people, cultures or other groups — often seem to leave us in problematic territory.

My next stop was Professor Google. Another bad idea. Depending on your search terms, the first results lead you to the Darwin awards. A funny idea at first blush, but there’s something soul-crushing about the idea that someone has gleefully assembled a compendium of these terrible tragedies. And apart from lending support to some ugly stereotypes, the Darwin awards provide no great insight into the nature of stupidity, merely confirmation of its existence.

This was frustrating. How could something so ubiquitous be so elusive? I mean, there’s no shortage of examples in my own life — both committed against me and by me. Stupidity seems like it should be added to the list that includes death and taxes. Why isn’t anyone studying it? Continue reading →

Guest Post: Family Man Who Invented Relativity and Made Great Chili Dies

By: Jennie Dusheck | April 1, 2013

In an obituary for veteran rocket scientist Yvonne Brill this weekend, the New York Times disastrously failed science writer Christie Aschwanden’s Finkbeiner test for profiling scientists.

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said. —New York Times

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Family Man Who Invented Relativity Dies

He made sure he shopped for groceries every night on the way home from work, took the garbage out, and hand washed the antimacassars. But to his step daughters he was just Dad. “He was always there for us,” said his step daughter and first cousin once removed Margo.

Albert Einstein, who died on Tuesday, had another life at work, where he sometimes slipped away to peck at projects like showing that atoms really exist. His discovery of something called the photoelectric effect won him a coveted Nobel Prize.

But his ~~devotion to family~~ personal and professional balancing act also won him notice. In 1950, Boys’ Life and Sears Roebuck awarded the former patent office employee their Leafblower SuperDad Award for his steady financial support of his ex-wife and schizophrenic son all through the long years of his happier second marriage to his cousin Elsa Einstein. Also noted by the prize committee was his success in finding a new job after losing his job in Germany in 1933.

Mr. Einstein—or Dad, as his step daughters and long-estranged sons called him—is believed to be the only person of Jewish descent to have developed the theory of special relativity. When Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels targeted Einstein’s work for book burnings, Mr. Einstein shrugged it off, writing, “… I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise. But you can’t take these things too seriously, can you? You just have to be cheerful and not get upset when you get insulted.”

Mr. Einstein never got the medical degree his parents had hoped he’d get, but he picked up a teaching diploma in math and physics that allowed for some surprisingly competent work. “Nobody had the right degrees back then, so it didn’t matter,” he told the Times.

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Photo, Einstein’s apartment in Bern: Jacek.NL

The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | March 30, 2013

March 25 – 29, 2013

Thomas does his own (gasp) statisics and finds that journalistic attention to the environment sharpens up and fades out, if not with sunspots, then with the normal journalistic attention span.

London’s institute for making stuff with your hands (manu-facture, right?) is so intriguing, energetic, and adventuresome, that Jessa considers sitting in a corner and writing a story.

Christie is writing mad again. If the Iraq War is enumerated — its civilian deaths, soldier deaths, amputees, trillions of dollars, mental health injuries, and now moral injuries — would the war have been worth it? Not even close.

Oh the Broomway! the centuries-old path that Michelle wants to walk, from solid daylight land into the utterly foreign and lethal sea.

In a squidy moment of intimacy, in fact in flagrante delicto, a sperm whale crashes down and squishes you — Cameron wants to hide under her desk just thinking about it.

TGIPF: A Deep-Sea Squid Does It Upside-Down and Backward

By: Cameron Walker | March 29, 2013

Let me start with the squid “penis” and get to the mysterious grooves on the seafloor later.

Last April an ROV called Little Hercules, cruising around the seafloor in the northern Gulf of Mexico, spotted a distant, possibly cephalopod-like shape. As Little Hercules got closer, NOAA researcher Mike Vecchione reports in the mission log, “the apparition resolved into a pair of large squid, similar to the one from the previous day. One squid was holding on to the other.”

Continue reading →

The Xenotopian Impulse

By: Michelle Nijhuis | March 28, 2013

Until last week, I’d never heard of the Broomway. Now I long to walk it.

The Broomway is a paradox: a path through the ocean, a six-century-old walkway that disappears each day. It begins on the southeastern coast of England and heads straight out to sea, crossing about three miles of sand and mudflats until it washes up on a marshy island called, picturesquely and appropriately, Foulness.

Known as the deadliest path in Britain, its walkers have been swept away by tides, lost in thick white fog, and stuck in sucking mud when they strayed from the Broomway’s relatively stable ground. Accounts of Broomway adventures lean heavily on moonless nights and crab-nibbled corpses.

Continue reading →

Was it worth it?

By: Christie Aschwanden | March 27, 2013

Ten years ago this month, the United States invaded Iraq on false pretenses. On December 15, 2011, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared the war officially over.

In the March 16 issue of the medical journal the Lancet, researchers examined the war’s consequences for human health. While politicians argue about the meaning of war, one thing is certain — it’s a public health crisis.

The damage from the Iraq war:

-At least 116,903 Iraqi non-combatants dead.

-More than 4,800 coalition military personnel dead (including 4,409 Americans).

-Minimum of 31,000 U.S. military members injured.

-About 950 military personnel returned home with at least one amputated limb.

–High rates of mental health problems among veterans, including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression and generalized anxiety.

-Significant psychological distress to children and family members of the deployed.

–$810 billion spent.

-An ultimate economic cost of ~$3 trillion. Continue reading →

The Institute of Making

By: Jessa Gamble | March 26, 2013

The first commercial object I remember coveting – and receiving – was a Spears toy hand loom. I must have been about eight. My family was not one in which children made wish lists for Christmas, let alone by brand name, but my friend Kathryn had this thing and I needed one. I was actually kind of amazed when my father agreed and produced it.

There’s a beauteous mathematical truth in the way that alternating pinholes and slots could turn into a machine. Push down on the shaft, and the warp threads would cross like closing spikes on a venus fly trap. Send the shuttle through, and let the shaft spring back up. In three seconds I had done the same work as if I had threaded a needle and painstakingly run the obstacle course, up and down, across forty-odd woolen strings.

The elegance was very appealing, to a mind that was just learning to think about dividing things in half. Continue reading →

Correlation, Speculation and the Periodicity of Environmental Journalism

By: Thomas Hayden | March 25, 2013

These are down times for environmental journalism – or so you’d think, judging by recent news and the attendant hand wringing. The New York Times not only disbanded its environmental desk in January, but shut down its popular Green Blog early in March, also. Meanwhile the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, longtime environmental correspondent a reportorial force of nature in her own right, decamped for the White House beat. Quite probably a lot of other bad-seeming things happened, too.

But the reality is that significant swings in attention paid to environmental issues are the norm, and not necessarily a sign of Some New Bad Thing. Sure, to young reporters who hopped on the recent Long Boom of interest in environmental journalism, a Google Trends graph such as the following, showing the relative volume of web searches for the term “environment,” could be alarming: Continue reading →