Fruit Fly Walks into a Bar . . .

By: | March 7, 2012

When I lived in Madrid in college, I read several guidebook descriptions of Café Gijón and knew I had to go. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be a writer, but I sure liked the idea of being a writer, and a “famous literary café” with artists and writers still meeting up to drink and philosophize sounded like somewhere I needed to be.

I showed up one winter afternoon, ordered a coffee in my shy Spanish, and waited. When nothing happened but the arrival of my coffee, I didn’t know what to do, so I pulled out a notebook and began to write.

What happened next might be a little blurred by years and vino tinto, but suddenly there was a balding man sitting across from me holding out a tiny glass of sherry. I found myself trying to tell him about the one philosophically-oriented book I’d read recently, The Quantum Society, but I got mixed up somewhere between the particles and the waves.

Whatever I said must have sounded as bad as that does, because he said, “You’re not very articulate. But you’re still very young. Why don’t you come sit with my friends?” Continue reading →

New Person of LWON: Cameron Walker

By: | March 6, 2012

We’re delighted that science and travel journalist Cameron Walker has joined our ranks as a regular contributor, bringing the People of LWON to an even dozen. You’ve already read Cameron’s graceful, quiet, funny prose in her popular guest posts. Elsewhere, she’s written about the physics of stone skipping, a marathon swimmer who fuels his river swims with Slovenian wine, the pleasures of weatherspotting, and, well, many other curious and charming subjects that she’ll share with us soon. Cameron lives with her husband and two young sons on the central California coast, and two truths and a lie about her are: As a teenager, she founded an all-girl surfing club that was featured in People; in college, she was accidentally assigned to a boys’ dorm; and one of her LWON guest posts has inspired a real-life romance.

Welcome, Cameron.

 

Even a Worm Will Turn

By: | March 6, 2012

This worm is born to travel. It begins life in human lymph, only to seep out of the lymphatic vessels into the grimy fluid that bathes our organs. From there, it drifts into the blood stream. During the day, it keeps to deep veins. Once darkness falls, it migrates up to the skinny veins just under the skin.

Then one lucky night, a mosquito will find the sleeping human and feast on its blood. The worm will end up in the insect’s gut and, eventually, in its muscles. It will reach adolescence there, and then travel to the mosquito’s head, stinger and, finally, to the next person the insect bites. From the blood stream, the worm will find its way back to the lymph to mate and, after such a long journey, retire. It will stay there for six to eight years, the rest of its life, and pump out millions of new little worms to embark on the same cross-species adventure.
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Surveying the tree of life, with envy (Or, why can’t a boy be more like a … copepod?)

By: | March 5, 2012

A few recent experiences in the realm of potty training have me thinking about the shortcomings of the human machine. Evolution, for the most part, has been kind to us. But the intelligent designer was missing in action, apparently, when it came time to assign our powers of excretion and elimination.

The fish and birds have it easiest, I suppose—combining liquid and solid wastes into a single stream just makes sense, and whether your medium of movement is water or air, each free-flowing deposit drops or washes away clean.

Not so with the human toddler, a remarkable creature seemingly capable of shitting its own weight on a daily basis. And save me, someone please, from the rivers of urine. I love my son, but does he have to be so hard to keep clean and dry? If only he’d been born more like one of those desert lizards, the ones that have done away with liquid waste altogether, secreting solid dabs of uric acid instead.

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The Last Word

By: | March 3, 2012

Feb 27 – March 2

This week, Richard wondered who explores in a world that no longer has undiscovered country

Michelle considered the people who are lured by open, arid landscapes, even as the land tries its best to shake them off

Christie explored the ongoing consequences of Agent Orange in Viet Nam, and the politics that continue to steamroll scientific consensus of what really happened

Heather’s reminder that, in Egyptology,  as in life,  one man’s loss is another man’s gain was so good the first time that we ran it again this week

And Abstruse Goose explored the profound likelihood of coincidences.

See you back here Monday, everyone. Have a lovely weekend.

Leaving a Mark

By: | March 2, 2012

“Because it’s there.”

Not good enough.

The traditional explanation for our species’ imperative to go to the ends of the earth no longer holds, and it hasn’t held for a long time. An isolated population or two might still be lurking out there, somewhere, in a jungle or on an ice floe, harboring a “Because it’s there” impulse—though, if so, they haven’t done a very good job of acting on it. But for the rest of us, it would be difficult to find a place on the surface of the Earth that’s not terra cognita.

I’ve found myself thinking about the ends of the earth lately as I’ve been writing an essay for a book of photographs by the New Zealand photographer Anne Noble. Anne and I were both recipients of an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant from the National Science Foundation in 2008. My grant led to a chapter in my book The 4 Percent Universe, a magazine article, and a couple of LWON posts. Anne’s grant is leading her to a suite of three books. The first, Ice Blink (coming in April), juxtaposes images of genuine Antarctic environments with images of artificial ones, such as installations at museums and aquariums. The second book—the one for which I am writing the essay—captures the human imprint on Antarctica, including the examples from the South Pole that accompany this post.

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Into the Big Empty

By: | March 1, 2012

I grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York State, and went to college in western Oregon — both beautiful places, beloved by many. But I never knew what it was to love a place until I spent a college summer in southern Utah, where I worked as a field tech on a wildlife research project. The red rocks, the blue sky, the dry, quiet air, the weather building on the horizon — why had no one told me this place existed? I was a goner.

Ever since that first Utah summer, now close to 20 years ago, I’ve lived in places that remind me of it. I’ve come to appreciate not only desert landscapes, but also the people who hang on in them, even as the land tries its best to shake them off. Only once has my love of the Big Empty wavered: When I had a bout of postpartum depression, the arid Colorado mesa top around my house turned monochromatic, suddenly choked with weeds and crumbling to dust. This is how other people see it, I thought. When the depression lifted, the beauty came back, and stayed.

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I don’t know why the caged girl screams

By: | February 29, 2012

 

They called her the girl in the cage. “How about her?” the Vietnamese official asked, flipping the book to an image of a girl crouched behind bars. The thick album in front of me featured photographs and short bios of purported Agent Orange victims. There was the boy with no arms, the girl with the squished head and eerie, enlarged eyes, and dozens of other kids with heart-breaking birth defects. Neatly dressed members of the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin were offering these children to me like they were shoes in a catalog. It was 2007, and I was in Vietnam to report on the environmental consequences of the conflict the Vietnamese call the American War.

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