I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve learned.
1. Don’t try to see everything. Continue reading
Oct. 22 – 26
This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny.
Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to make a movie about solving a math problem.
Junk food everywhere = epidemic in obesity. “We don’t know which foods to ban,” says the govenment. “Yes, you do,” says Cassie.
Migrations of hawks, of people: “How fragile they are,” Cameron writes. “How amazing that they know the way home, that some of them make it, and that then they do it all over again.”
Young men and young elephants both are subject to raging hormonal imbalances, says Thomas, leading sometimes to mayhem. Obvious, cheap, and lovely solution: the presence of older men and older elephants.
An Ixil Maya farmer finds under the paint on his living room wall an ancient mural of the subversive Dance of Conquest. He’s trying to preserve it, says Heather. The government isn’t helping.
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Photo: Lasse Christensen
This is the kind of story that I love, a story about an ordinary person doing something perfectly ordinary, digging out the last of the potatoes from the garden, say, or chasing off after a dog that’s bolted into the woods, and suddenly stumbling on something wonderfully unexpected, something almost magical, something that abruptly, almost shockingly, slides open a portal of time.
These are rare, rare events, of course. But five years ago, Lucas Asicone Ramirez, an Ixil Maya farmer who lives with his young family in the remote, highland village of Chajul in Guatemala, stumbled on just such a portal. Asicone was working on some improvements at the time in his one-room home. He started by opening up a wall, and as he stripped away layer upon layer of plaster, with fine white dust flying everywhere, he spotted something colorful underneath, something odd. It looked like part of a painted human figure.
Puzzled, Ascione removed more of the plaster, then more. Along the wall, stretching for several square feet, was a lost, ghost mural—a strangely familiar scene painted in vivid color. Continue reading
The outline of the story is as familiar as it is tawdry: a group of high school boys turn sexual insecurity into a contest, and a contest into emotional brutality. Adults in their orbit express shock and outrage, and observers pretend that the migration of teen sleaze onto the Internet represents something new. But why are we surprised by something that is a persistent feature of the (young, male) human condition, and a staple plot in teen raunch movies?
Piedmont is a small town in Northern California, completely surrounded by Oakland the way Lesotho is encircled by South Africa. Only in the Californian case, the surrounded entity is an island of relative prosperity, calm and really, really good schools. It has been around for over 100 years but still, the city seems to exist primarily to justify its own public school district.
That’s probably why a recently exposed “fantasy slut league” at Piedmont High School has caused a significant furor throughout the state. (That, and because it gave a lot of people the chance to say “fantasy slut league.”) In the competition, modeled after fantasy sports leagues, male students apparently “drafted” their female classmates and earned points for “documented engagement in sexual activities” with them, according to a letter sent to parents by the Piedmont High principal. Continue reading
When Iben Hove Sørensen flew to Ghana for her work with Dansk Ornitologisk Forening, a partner of BirdLife International, she couldn’t help but think about the birds. The passerines that she was headed south to study follow a similar course that her plane took to their wintering grounds–over the Mediterranean, sometimes through cloud-choked skies, for thousands of miles. “You can’t see trees, you can’t see water,” she said. “If I was a bird, I’d be so scared.” Continue reading
The country is in the midst of a public health crisis. Two-thirds of adults and a third of all kids in the US are overweight or obese. Although no single factor is responsible for the nation’s weight gain, soda seems to be at least partly to blame. A decades-long study published earlier this month found that soda consumption amplifies the risk of obesity in people genetically predisposed to gaining weight. And a multitude of other studies suggest a link between soda and obesity.
From a nutritional perspective, soda is evil. We can all agree on that, right? It’s nothing more than delicious flavored sugar water—perfect if you’re a hummingbird, but awful if you’re a modern-day human surrounded by calorie-laden foods.
So it seems counterintuitive that the government program aimed at putting healthy food in the homes of low-income individuals, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has almost no limits on what foods its 47 million participants can and can’t buy. Doritos, ice cream, pop tarts, even soda are fair game. Some participants undoubtedly make wise choices. Others don’t. Continue reading
Continuing a preoccupation with movies about science, but this time about math. According to this very nice YouTube person, the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous unsolved problem in all of math and whoever solves it wins a $7 million prize. I not only can’t solve it, I can’t even understand it. It has to do with prime numbers — those numbers which can’t be divided evenly by any other numbers except themselves and 1 — and with what patterns might be in a long line of primes, or on a plane of primes or something. Beyond that, I remain obdurately innumerate and I don’t even know what Riemann was hypothesizing, except that the phrase “non-trival zeros” is involved.
The Fields Prize is math’s Nobel. Kazanski is a character in the movie Top Gun. IMDb publishes the following conversation.
Iceman: You two really are cowboys.
Maverick: What’s your problem, Kazanski?
Iceman: You’re everyone’s problem. That’s because every time you go up in the air, you’re unsafe. I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.
Maverick: That’s right! Ice… man. I am dangerous.
“Et al.,” of course, is “and all the little people who helped me achieve the glory I have today.”
So Riemann isn’t the point anyway. The point is the difficulty of presenting math or science as a narrative, a story. And that, I understand all too well. Plus the phrase “non-trivial zeros” is deeply moving.
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October 15 – 19
“People who expose fraud are often ostracized and harassed and may find themselves fired or blacklisted. They have stress-related health problems, including shingles, psoriasis, autoimmune disorders, panic attacks, asthma, insomnia, temporomandibular joint disorder, migraine headaches, and generalized anxiety.” Christie examines why whistleblowers do it anyway.
Cassie explains why people run marathons when they don’t even like running.
“At no other time in the history of science was there a single point at which a whole field could potentially come to a screeching halt”: Ann gives us a preview of Particle Fever, the Higgs movie.
Jessa welcomes Aeon to the science writing world. The world needs more tilling.
“Back then, after all, dinosaurs were amazing, but so were the school bus and the toilet.” Michelle rediscovers dinosaurs, and finds they’re even cooler now than they were when she was five.
