Trust no one, and other lessons I learned from physics reporters

By: | April 18, 2012

As I’ve been thinking about the challenges facing science journalism, a little voice in my head has been murmuring, “Yes, but isn’t all this navel-gazing a bit biology-centric?”

Number one on my list of lessons from the “limits of DNA” story is that datasets are getting bigger, and few of us reporters are well-equipped to cope with the statistics behind analysis of these datasets on our own. But datasets in physics have been huge for a long time now. And while it’s definitely becoming more difficult to trust traditional scientific authorities in biology and biomedicine due to the splintering of disciplines and the struggle for funding, some of the forces that are driving fierce competition in biology don’t apply to physics. Physicists don’t have to pretty up their data to try to win drug approvals, for instance.

But I only know what I do, and all I do is biology. So I asked a highly unscientific sample of my favorite physics reporters and writers (n=4) what they thought about these issues. And what I learned surprised me.

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tl;dr — a manifesto

By: | April 17, 2012

Spend enough time on the internet and you’ll spot one. They tend to sprout in the comments beneath articles like little text cabbages:

tl;dr
tl;dr
tl;dr

Unpack them and you’ll find an accusation: “too long; didn’t read.”

This isn’t some hot new trend I’m cluing you into: tl;dr hasn’t been de rigeur since it became Urban Dictionary’s word of the day in 2005. Unlike most slang of the moment, however, over the past seven years, it has proliferated. Its enduring popularity and ubiquity is a testament to the fact that this concise little construction calls out what might be the fundamental problem of the internet age. As such, tl;dr is the battle cry of the internet generation. And the concise way it encapsulates the problem might also be a hint to its ultimate solution.

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The Last Word

By: | April 14, 2012

April 9 – April 13

Oh, are you having a bad day? JUST BE GLAD YOU’RE NOT A BIRD. Because if you were a bird, as Ann points out, you would go through puberty every single year of your life. Nature, Ann correctly summarises, is one mean mother.

Maybe you’re just irritable because people keep noisily eating and clinking their silverware around you. Cassie takes a fascinating look at the making of a nascent new disorder. Is there really such a thing as misophonia or are there just really prickly individuals?

But don’t worry: your mood won’t stay gloomy for long when you read Christie’s life-changing news that there is a Spam Poetry Institute. “I am a wandering English” needs to be shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize.

And Heather warms our hearts some more with the tale of kindly, gentle St. Death, who accepts all those cast out by the Catholic Church–from gay men and women to drug dealers and prostitutes and people who kill legitimate scientific enterprise–and is said to work miracles on their behalf.

And now you’re ready to read Richard’s unraveling of the ultimate cosmological paradox.

Extra credit: So you figured out how to unravel the head-asploding multiverse paradox. YAWN. How about explaining why homochirality implies planets ruled by advanced monster dinosaurs? The ball, Panek. It is in your court.

The Springtime of Robins

By: | April 13, 2012

The granddaughters came to visit for the weekend.  They’re hitting puberty hard.  One of them suddenly has a throaty voice, long magenta hair that she wants to cut all off, just leave the bangs, and is currently grounded for injudicial actions.  The other one’s glasses slide down her nose; she’s wearing white cut-off leggings with a turquoise blue tutu.  They both sit curled on the couch reading, completely inert; and then for no reason, they rocket up and charge around.  I walked with one of them to the mailbox up the hill; by the time we got there, I was out of breath; she sprinted the last twenty feet because she couldn’t help herself.   They’re cheerful, surly, truly helpful, want to be left alone, need to tell you everything they know.  I can’t tell if they’re happy or not, because they’re so intense.

Meanwhile, outside is a Baltimore spring, all pink poufy cherry trees and golden green grass.  The birds are bug-nuts and among the worst are robins.  They’re rocketing around too and if you don’t duck, they’ll smack into you.  They land with more energy than a landing needs; they bop around in the grass, stick out their chests, and act important.  They sing like they want to be heard 40 acres away.  I mentioned all this to a neuroscientist.  “Oh yes,” he said.  “They’re going through puberty.  They do it once a year.”  Isn’t puberty once a lifetime enough? Continue reading →

What’s In a Number

By: | April 12, 2012

“Since there is an infinite number of alternative universes, there must be one in which there isn’t an infinite number of alternative universes. Perhaps this is it.”

No, that speculation didn’t come from the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag. It’s from a reader of New Scientist, courtesy of LWON’s own Sally, who is an editor at the magazine. She forwarded it to me because, she said, “it kind of made my head asplode.” After receiving reassurances from her that her head hadn’t actually spontaneously detonated—this is, after all, someone who is capable of falling into the Thames without any help—I sat and thought and tried to find the flaw in the logic.

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Redux: A Catholic Saint and an Aztec God

By: | April 11, 2012
Santa Muerte

A few days ago, while I was out hiking in southern Arizona’s early morning heat with Jason De Leon and his students, I heard mention for the first time of Mexico’s Santa Muerte, or Saint Death.  Our destination for the day was a small archaeological site hidden away in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, but De Leon, an archaeologist and ethnographer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wanted to stop in first at a small outdoor shrine.

Hollowed out from the soft limestone, the shrine glittered with silvery scapulars, bright rosary beads, and large glass candles. A rough wooden cross leaned against the rock, and beneath it,  pictures of saints lined the lower ledge–gifts from those craving divine assistance in the desert. And as I studied the faces of these unfamiliar saints,  De Leon brought up the subject of Santa Muerte.  She was, he explained, “the patron saint of all things seedy,” a saint loved by the marginal and the criminal in Mexico. Continue reading →

Spoetry

By: | April 10, 2012

It’s commenter appreciation day here at Last Word on Nothing. If you’ve ever wondered why there’s a delay when you leave a note in the comments section, it’s because live human beings monitor them. We reject spam and nastygrams.

But those poor spambots try so hard that today I think it’s time to recognize their efforts. The following spoems are crafted entirely of spam left in the comments section of LWON (and one disconcerting spam I found in my own email inbox). If you doubt the literary nature of spam, consider this announcement from the Spam Poetry Institute:

“Using state-of-the-art spam poetry analysis tools, our staff has determined that some of the spam-embedded poetry that we’ve received actually corresponds to parts of Jules Vernes’ classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. These spammers, working independently, have begun to weave the fabric of one of the greatest works of literature. We will continue to monitor this remarkable phenomenon and will provide updates as we identify subsequent passages from that great book.”

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Hear No Evil

By: | April 9, 2012

When I was in junior high, my family moved to a house in the country. The dining room table sat beneath a vent designed to allow heat to rise from the main floor into my mom’s bedroom upstairs. Unfortunately the vent also served as a conduit for noise. The soft clink of metal spoons against glass bowls as my stepbrother and I ate cereal in the morning drove my mom nuts. So she instituted a new rule in the house. Thou shalt not eat your morning cereal out of glass bowls. Use the plastic ones.

This didn’t seem all that peculiar to me. My mom has always had weird issues with noise. Dinnertime was the worst. Forks scraped plates, mouths slurped, teeth crunched, lips smacked even when they didn’t mean to—something was always bothering my mother. I used to think she was just easily bugged.

But last week my mom forwarded me a New York Times article about a disorder called misophonia. The article begins like this: “For people with a condition that some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating — chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling — can send them into an instantaneous, blood-boiling rage.” She added a short note: “I think I have some form of this.” Continue reading →