The Last Word

By: | March 30, 2013

Wakering_Stairs,_The_Broomway_-_geograph.org.uk_-_307600March 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: | 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.”

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The Xenotopian Impulse

By: | March 28, 2013

Wakering_Stairs,_The_Broomway_-_geograph.org.uk_-_307600Until 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.

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Was it worth it?

By: | March 27, 2013

WarDead_shutterstock_50298499

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: | March 26, 2013

467625106_oThe 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: | March 25, 2013

sunny boyThese 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 →

The Last Word

By: | March 23, 2013

Bed_bug,_Cimex_lectulariusMarch 18 – 22

FOLWON* guest poster Brooke Borel introduces the world to the bed bug hockey stick graph. Read it and you will understand why data journalism is about to change the world.

That’s highly relevant for Erika’s post, because as she tells us, you only have control over your data until you become a patient. What’s more, as she informed us in February, in the age of Big Data, there is no way to keep patient information anonymous.

Christie tells us about invisible flu, the kind that leaves you symptom-free –and dangerous.

Beer is the new wine. Or so we think. Heather tells us that the Natufians knew that 13,000 years ago.

Have you ever wondered who holds the patents on the atom bomb? That’s only the least crazy thing in Ann’s post about what might be the most sinister conspiracy of the atomic age.

*Friend of LWON, i.e. multiple guest poster

 

The sniffle, hack, sneeze blame game

By: | March 22, 2013

Sneezers_shutterstockThe storytelling begins the morning you wake up with a slight scratch in your throat. Oh, this is nothing, you tell yourself, as if denial was the best antidote to a virus. If I just sip some throat-soothing tea, I’ll be fine.

When the runny nose starts, you load up on oranges or Fisherman’s Friend and promise yourself an early bedtime. When evening rolls around, your head is on the verge of exploding with mucous. You can try to hit the sack early, but it’s no use. The mucous is flowing fast and furious now, and perhaps you’re coughing too. You’ll get no sleep tonight.

When morning arrives, you’re exhausted and cranky and this is when the next phase of storytelling begins. You need an explanation — what is it, and why me?

Without a bunch of lab tests, you won’t find any certainty. But that’s ok, because you’ll invent an explanation that at the very least feels true. Oh, it’s that flu that was going around at work. I must have caught this from that coughing bastard on the plane. Obviously, my husband’s little cold mutated into this nasty flu.

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