Damn You, Predictive-Text Typewriter!

By: | January 4, 2013

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I don’t care if they’re real. I’m just grateful for the texting fails collected on DamnYouAutocorrect. Maybe a guy really did offer to cook his girlfriend “chicken vaginas” instead of chicken fajitas; maybe a mom described her toddlers as having “pornstaches” instead of milkstaches in their Christmas photos; maybe a dad told his kids that his wife’s allergic reaction was treated with an “epic penis” instead of an EpiPen. Or maybe not. Either way, my inner copyeditor and my inner potty-mouthed teenager, normally not even on speaking terms, are collapsing against each other, embracing as they weep with laughter.

So I was fascinated by the recent news that embarrassing autocomplete errors probably predate the iPhone. In fact, they probably predate the computer. And they very likely didn’t start in the Western world. Continue reading →

What’s in a Tattoo?

By: | January 3, 2013

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A few years ago, when I was working in a somewhat gritty part of downtown Vancouver, I spotted a tough looking man with an unusual set of facial tattoos. On the right side of his face, someone had inked two or three teardrops falling from the corner of his eye. I wasn’t sure what these tattoos meant to him, but my instinctive reaction was to give the guy a wide berth. I had read somewhere that such crocodile tears were a criminal emblem, something to do with the number of people the tattoo wearer had murdered.

Over the past year, I have gotten to know someone with similar teardrop tattoos. The markings, to my surprise, had an innocent meaning, but they had played a tragic role in his life. B, as I will call him, is a Native American, a member of the Cherokee people. In his youth, B had lost in quick succession the two most important people in his life: his adopted father and his grandfather. He struggled with grief and wanted be reminded always of all they had meant to him.  He chose to do so with two tattooed tear drops.  A few years later, at the age of 23, B was arrested for a serious crime he says he did not commit:  he was convicted, and at his sentencing the judge referred to his facial tattoos as a reason for doling out an especially harsh sentence.

After hearing B’s story, I began thinking and reading about tattoos and their meanings, particularly those tattoos favored by other cultures. Continue reading →

Water, Water, Everywhere

By: | January 2, 2013

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Water level rises, a river is fuller and fuller, until it’s something else, and the world is transformed. It’s a threshold effect: when quantitative sliding becomes qualitative step change. I’m lucky that on this map, my house falls in the light-blue rim of the darker floodplain, protected by a high-walled canal.

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I’ll only get washed away in a 1 in 1000-year flood which, granted, could happen two years in a row. The main blue floodplain has a 1% chance of flooding in any given year, and insurance rates reflect this, but it’s only recently – on the timescale of a Medieval city – that planning and development decisions have reflected the danger. My son’s nursery is in a field that doubles as a flood storage area, where water is intentionally redirected to spare crucial infrastructure. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Rendered Speechless

By: | January 1, 2013

photoLast summer, I spent nearly a whole day sitting by the river in my hometown with an old friend from grade school. For most of it, we didn’t talk.

It was not an easy task for me at first. Although I like quiet, the river I usually swim in is made of words: writing, talking, reading, listening to the radio. On this summer day, however, I had to make do without them. Earlier in the year, my friend had had a stroke. In addition to control over the right side of his body, he had lost most of his ability to speak or write.

Not knowing how much he could understand of what I said, at first I barraged him with nervous chatter. Most of the time he shook his head, and eventually I calmed down enough to be quiet. We sat under the flood-bent alder trees, watching the light glint on the water. When it got too hot, we got up and waded in, stacking river rocks in balanced towers. I left for DC a few days later without seeing him again. Continue reading →

Secret Satans: Math

By: | December 31, 2012

shutterstock_113762158For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are writing about our most daunting science-related subjects and why they scare us.

The advice came to me within the first few months of starting as a science writer: always be on the lookout for good math stories, the wonderful Sharon Begley told me. No one else ever covers them, she said, so the niche is wide open for a young writer to exploit. I had loved every little thing about science journalism up to that point, and perhaps working with Sharon most of all. But my gut clinched a little when she spoke those words.

It’s not that I’m math phobic, exactly, nor entirely innumerate. Some of my best friends, favorite colleagues and best-loved family members perform or write about math on a regular basis. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | December 29, 2012

shutterstock_50515912December 24 – 28

This was Secret Satan week, in which we science writers confronted our secret fears; which subjects do we find most daunting? Why do they scare us?

Ann got us off to a great start last week with an erudite explanation of why biology’s not for her.

Richard goes into a cold sweat when someone says ‘here’s how it works.”

I consider all the trap doors and open manhole covers offered by neuroscience.

Michelle insists that her hatred of archaeology has nothing to do with mummies.

Christie and Heather tell harrowing tales of bad chemistry .

And Cassie and Cameron dread physics.

Hope you’re all having a lovely holiday season! Come back next week for the dramatic finale of Secret Satan, when Tom will confront his fear of math!

Secret Satans: Physics

By: | December 28, 2012

For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us.

Oh, physics. It’s flummoxed both Cassie and me.  First, you’ll see Cassie’s delightful video about a not-so-delightful experience that soured her on the subject. Then, I write about how my negative feelings toward physics might be related to bad beer. Vomit features in both of our stories. Continue reading →

Secret Satans: Technology

By: | December 27, 2012

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For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us.

My father wasn’t a physicist, but he could work wonders with gravity. He’d be showing me how to change a flat, or fix the boiler in the basement, or tune a carburetor, and I could feel the time-space suck gathering itself beneath my feet, buckling my knees and shrinking my shoulders, tugging me toward the center of the Earth.

The cause of this peculiar effect, I now realize, wasn’t my father but the subject. I have had the privilege of receiving guided tours of some of the coolest technology on the planet—telescopes on Mauna Kea, tabletop gravity experiments at the University of Washington, the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab. I know they’re cool because my tour guides told me so. The passion of these guides—the scientists who know the instruments most intimately, who have nurtured them from spitballing sessions in the faculty lounge to $50 million, multi-ton, producing-results-in-peer-reviewed-journals reality—is very much parental. And if any scientists who have graciously given me tours happen to be reading this, thank you. Really. You’ve been great. You’ve given my tape recorder all the information I would eventually need in order to make sense of your babies. It’s not your fault that some of the time you were talking, I was thinking about the dinner of hot wings and beer I’d be having that evening at the dive bar down the street from my hotel.

Continue reading →