Redux: Survivor Woman

By: | March 5, 2013

Heather posted this on July 16, 2010, a time when we had probably 13 readers so apologies to all 13. She’s referring to a post Ann wrote about being dead wrong about some science. She also testifies to the physically horrifying life of an archeology writer.

Where I’d love to stay while doing fieldwork

Yesterday, my colleague Ann Finkbeiner fessed up to one of the great travails of being a science writer. So today in the spirit of full disclosure I thought I’d fess up to another pitfall, one that I should have anticipated before I became an archaeological writer, but didn’t. So here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: tagging along with scientists in the field often requires fortitude, real fortitude–not to mention pretty good footwork.

Before I give you an example, let me put all my cards on the table. I’m not a particularly athletic person. I rarely go hiking for recreation and I loathe camping. (I like my beds comfortable with at least two good pillows, please.) I don’t like spiders, scorpions, centipedes, leeches, cactus spines, stinging nettles, or poison ivy,  all of which I have encountered in the field. And I cower when it comes to bears and poisonous snakes. I don’t relish squatting to pee in the woods: I hate doing it in the desert where there is no cover. And I completely lack essential survival skills. I have no sense of direction whatsoever, and I never learned how to read a compass.

In other words, I am an archaeologist’s worst nightmare. But I never let on about any of this, maintaining what I imagine to be a kind of “hail fellow, well met” manner. After all,  I love seeing archaeology on the ground and wouldn’t trade my job for anything. And most days my bluffing works. But there are moments when I can’t quite rise to the occasion, and the carefully constructed mask comes a little unglued. Continue reading →

Cry the Beloved Porcupine

By: | March 4, 2013

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In 2001, fresh out of college and yearning for adventure, I moved to South Africa. My recollection is that I had seen Cry the Beloved Country and The Power of One several times and decided that I had to go to Africa to intern at the University of Cape Town and write bad poetry. I’ll admit, the entomology professor I called to inform that I would be volunteering in his lab was a bit confused but when I told him that I wouldn’t cost him a cent (or a rand, in this case), he said fine.

It was during this odd sort of internship that I signed up for my great porcupine adventure. It seems that occasionally documentary films draw from grad schools for cheap labor tracking and tagging animals that they will be following for a show (if you truly love nature documentaries and believe they are all spontaneous, stop reading now before I shatter your illusions). Many documentaries send able and moronic young people into the bush months beforehand to implant tracking devices into animals to make them easy to follow and habituate.

I’ll get to “habituate” in a second, but first we had to catch the little bastards. I was hired by a company doing a BBC documentary on aardvarks and the animals that live in their burrows (thrilling, right?). Our focus would be the porcupine. Continue reading →

The last word

By: | March 2, 2013

25 February to 1 March

This week, Ann blew all our minds with the story of the Farm Hall tapes, the greatest-ever lesson in counterfactual thinking.  Also, just off the cuff, who else thinks a dubstep group called “Hitler’s Uranium Club” lurks in our future?

Cameron says no one does austerity quite like the people who lived through the Depression.

Why is it so funny when people fall down? Christie investigates.

Whether it’s science journalism or photojournalism, getting the good stuff means there are no shortcuts. No matter how much the internet makes it seem like there are. Erik makes the convincing case that the media outles that really understand this will have the last laugh.

And this week, Michelle made what I suspect will be a lasting contribution to the field of science writing, demonstrating that the plight of the science writer is nowhere more apparent than in Dr. Watson’s painful dealings with prototypical source Sherlock Holmes. According to Michelle, Watson deserved the equivalent of the Purple Heart for science journalism.

Farm Hall: the Fall into Failure

By: | March 1, 2013

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You probably know this.  In August, 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to the American government.  German scientists had announced that the energy holding an atom together could be released – in fact, 2.2 pounds-worth of uranium atoms would equal 10,000 tons of TNT.  Einstein said this implied a new kind of bomb that Hitler’s government was surely building.  In December, 1941, the American physicists figured out how to build one themselves and coalesced under the auspices of the Manhattan Project.  The feeling on the Manhattan Project, wrote one physicist’s wife, was, “You’ve got to get it done; others are working on it; Germans are working on it; hurry! hurry! hurry!” In August, 1945, American atomic bombs flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a couple hundred thousand people died.  One Manhattan Project scientist said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

You might not know this.  In April, 1945, the Alsos mission run by American scientist/spies scooped up the German atomic scientists, imprisoned them for six months in an English country house called Farm Hall, bugged their rooms and taped their conversations.  Turns out the German scientists had never gotten anywhere near a bomb.  In 1992, the transcripts were made public.

Dear God, somebody get hold of those transcripts and write a play! Continue reading →

Teach Your _____ Well

By: | February 28, 2013

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When I was a teenager, my dad installed a timer on my bedroom light. After 45 minutes, the light would flash a few times. Then, darkness. My dad was tired of me falling asleep with my light on. It was such a waste of energy. This, he said, was the perfect solution.

I started thinking about this light and my dad’s many quirks after reading a recent study about how knowledge about conservation passes among generations. In the current issue of Environmental Research Letters, researchers looked at how environmental education aimed at kids influences parents, too.

In what researchers report as the first controlled trial of environmental education’s reach, parents and kids in the Seychelles completed questionnaires about local wetlands and about their family’s water use. If kids had participated in a wetlands conservation program through a Seychelles wildlife club, the adults in their homes knew more about wetlands and also said they used water more efficiently—taking showers instead of baths, for example. And parents, the researchers say, weren’t aware of having learned about any of this from their children.

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The Adventures of Dr. Watson, Science Writer

By: | February 27, 2013

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Sherlock Holmes is having another cultural moment, and as usual, I’m all in. I was raised on the original stories — thanks to a family friend who was a Baker Street Irregular — and this winter, I’ve treated myself to another trip through the canon.

This time, though, my sympathies aren’t so much with Sherlock as with the stories’ chronically underrated narrator, Dr. John H. Watson. For my dear Watson is, in many ways, a science writer like me — and he’s dealing with (not to mention living with) the world’s most exasperating source. For his equanimity in the face of withering insult, and his calm insistence on telling the human story behind the scientific solution, Dr. Watson deserves our profession’s equivalent of the Purple Heart.

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Why is falling so funny?

By: | February 26, 2013

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The other morning while we were walking our dogs, my husband slipped on some snow and fell down in front of me. One moment he was stepping over a log, and the next he was on his back, feet up in the air. I laughed hysterically.

He wasn’t hurt. Nor was he amused. And his grumpiness just made the whole episode that much more comical. I couldn’t stop laughing, even after he pointed out that it was actually kind of mean to giggle over his misfortune. I agreed that it was rotten of me, yet I couldn’t stop smirking.

And that got me wondering — why is it so funny when someone falls?

Turns out, scientists are on it. I’ll explain their findings in a minute. But first, notice how many examples of this kind of humor circulate on the internet. Here are three of them, starting with the Ice Man. I dare you not to laugh.

 

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Not Every Day Is A Good Day

By: | February 25, 2013
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On the best days, journalism is a roller coaster of excitement and possibility – a front row seat to the entire human endeavor. Science journalism, on a good day, is especially so. You never know if you will be interviewing a Nobel laureate about the universe’s stretch marks, inspecting boxes of lethal scorpions, or strapping into an experiment in pain thresholds.

But not every day is a good day. For good journalism, you will have entire days wasted on logistics, getting lost, or just plain sitting on your butt. That’s kind of what happened a couple weeks ago.

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