Falling

By: | November 15, 2012

From “On Being the Right Size,” by J.B.S. Haldane:  “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away.  A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

Recently, a couple of my friends have fallen.  One, a woman, maybe 5’5″, maybe 130 pounds, tripped on a sidewalk, fell forward, and caught herself on her hands.  Both wrists were shattered; she had surgery, now has casts on both arms with titanium plates holding both wrists in place, and will have surgery again to remove one of the plates, but the second plate is permanent and she thinks she’ll never be able to bend that wrist.   The other, a man, maybe 5″8″, maybe 180 pounds, also fell while walking, and hit his head.  Two days later, he was found to have a diffuse bleed into his right brain, was hospitalized, had another bleed, and somewhere in there, a stroke.  His language, memories, and concepts are all fine, but his spatial orientation is off and now, a month after the fall, he’s still in a rehab hospital and will be for the foreseeable.  Neither of these people fell down Haldane’s thousand-yard mine shaft; they fell only the lengths of their bodies.  Both of them are going to be fine and functioning, though as Haldane says, they’re a little broken.   And the fault lies completely with gravity. Continue reading →

The Trainman and the Nobel Laureate

By: | November 14, 2012

According to his discharge papers, he stood five feet, eight inches tall. He had a pale complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, two moles on his back, his sole distinguishing marks. In June 1918, he was discharged from the British Army with a disability received in the Great War–a sadly innocent term that people used before they became accustomed to slaughter on an industrial level.

I barely knew my grandfather, James Cooney. He was a distant man who spent much of his time in his room reading, as I recall. I don’t know exactly when he became so distant and remote, but I am pretty certain that it began in the Great War, most likely  on a spring day in 1915, when he discovered for himself the brilliance of a renowned German scientist, Fritz Haber.

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Abstruse Goose: Disproportionate Reaction

By: | November 13, 2012

I should never argue about anything whatever with someone who understands math, especially someone who understands it as well as our boy, AG, here.  But I wonder whether “disproportionate” isn’t confusing statistics with neuroscience.

Let’s say AG is 30 years old, meaning he’s lived for 10,800 days, so finding the spider one day out of 10,800 and thereafter checking his shoes daily?  Yes, statistically his reaction is disproportionate.   But the reaction to spiders isn’t statistical.  It’s hard-wired since birth, a little neural pathway with its little neurotransmitters locked in the hippocampus or amygdala or some place that Virginia knows about that has been programmed by natural selection over eons of evolution to know that a skittery thing with too many legs is just deeply wrong and to react accordingly, proportionately.  God.  I get jumpy even thinking about it.

Conan’s Umwelt: How a Dog Sniffs

By: | November 12, 2012


This is my puppy, Conan, and the reason I’ve been buying a lot of dog books. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure, dog books are for skimming, not reading. They’re hokey, repetitive, poorly written and peppered with pseudoscience. But Friday I found an exception: Inside of a Dog, a fascinating, science-rich story of how dogs think and perceive the world.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. The author, Alexandra Horowitz, worked for the New Yorker before becoming a scientist specializing in canine cognition. Unlike the other books, which focus on how to make a dog do what you want, this one asks, what does a dog want to do, and why?

Early on, Horowitz introduces German biologist Jakob von Uexküll and his concept of umwelt. The word translates to ‘environment’ or ‘surroundings’. The concept is that two animals can share the same environment but experience it quite differently.
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The Last Word

By: | November 10, 2012

5- 9 November

In the most heartwarming post of the week, Cassie considered post-election bitterness and wondered what would happen if we treated politics less as a competitive sport, and more as an expedition.

Ginny wrote an amazing examination of the fundamental mismatch between stories and science.

Cameron noted that owls are trending.

Michelle pondered whether the $300,000 artificial bat cave is a harbinger of peak conservation.

And guest poster Callie Leuck looked at what emergency responders can learn from the zombie apocalypse.

Happy weekend everyone!

_____

Office Zombies by Callie Leuck

 

Peak Conservation

By: | November 9, 2012

So the election’s over, the days are getting shorter, and it’s about time for a nice long nap. May I suggest an 80-foot-long concrete chamber, tucked neatly into a hillside in Tennessee? Clean, cool, and cozy, it’s the perfect winter hideaway … if you’re a bat, that is. Yes, The Nature Conservancy of Tennessee has opened the world’s first artificial cave for hibernating bats. Now they just need some bats to move in.

The cave is intended as a refuge from white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that’s devastated bat populations in the northeastern U.S. and beyond. Since the first diseased bats were found in an upstate New York cave six years ago, white-nose syndrome is thought to have killed more than 5 million bats from seven species, and it spreads especially quickly when bats gather in caves to hibernate. TNC hopes that some Tennessee bats will spend the coming winter in the new, fungus-free artificial cave. When the bats leave in the spring, the cave can be disinfected and safely used again. Continue reading →

Coffeewise by Owl-Light

By: | November 8, 2012


Owls are trending. At least that’s what a grumpy barista told my husband when he tried to get his owl coffee mug filled up. I used to like them before, she sniffed.

We do seem to have accumulated a fair amount of owl paraphernalia in the last few years. Before, our house was an owl-free zone. Now a mobile featuring a parliament of owls swings above my bed. A stuffed owl on the dresser top has glow-in-the-dark eyes. Another plays “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” And, along with the offending mug, there are other owls in our kitchen cabinets.

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Election Hangover

By: | November 7, 2012

Hello world. Yesterday was election day in America. One guy won and another guy lost. But the race was hard fought, and our already divided country remains as polarized as ever. Did you listen to the last episode of This American Life? We don’t just disagree, we barely see each other as human beings. And somehow that impartial lady we all love, Science, has been sucked into the partisan fray. Did you know that in America climate change is something you can choose to believe in — or not? It’s downright depressing.

So today, dear readers, I’m giving you a present. I’m giving you a break from thinking about all of this baloney. Because we all have election hangovers, especially my poor friends in Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin.

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