Guest Post: The Lion Counters

By: | September 12, 2011

My friends like to joke that I have a problem when it comes to carnivores, not of the human variety but of the order Carnivora. I’m the first to admit an inordinate fondness for predators (to paraphrase the possibly apocryphal trope attributed to evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane), particularly of the Felidae family. But my fascination relates more to their cryptic nature and our complicated feelings about them than to wanting to make them part of my family. (Full disclosure: I did take care of 21 neighborhood strays during the nineties, on a mission to spay and neuter as many feral felines as possible in San Francisco’s Sunset District, cat colony central at the time. But that’s another story.)

Our species has a love-hate relationship with big carnivores that has little to do with their true nature. More and more Americans are treating tigers, African lions, and cougars as little more than scaled-up housecats, a disturbing trend that shows no sign of abating since U.S. Fish and Wildlife implemented a ban on the interstate trade of the formidable felines in 2007. U.S. laws prohibiting the trade of exotic wildlife hadn’t included big cats presumably because officials never imagined anyone would consider raising 500-pound predators as pets. (Possession falls under state jurisdiction.) Today, animal protection groups estimate, as many as 20,000 wild felids, from Siberian tigers to snow leopards, live in American backyards and basements.

You know it won’t turn out well. It’s just a matter of time. Continue reading →

Fight Club

By: | September 9, 2011

For the past two weeks, I’ve been riveted by an annual spectacle played out in an arena seating 22,547 of the most rabid tennis fans in the universe. The U.S. Open in New York City is one of the world’s four great tennis tournaments, and each year as the glorious days of summer begin to fade, I spend my evenings perched in front of the television, marvelling as David Foster Wallace once did at “the liquid whip” of Roger Federer’s forehand and “the human beauty” of a sport played at an almost godlike level. But beneath all this wonder and awe is something a little baser — a grim fascination that has its roots in something much, much older.

Tennis at its highest level is a sport of barely controlled aggression.  It pits two rivals in a huge arena, all alone, without coach or spotter, sometimes for hours on end, sometimes nearly deafened by the roar of hostile fans, until one finally walks off the court as victor. Continue reading →

Bracing: A military brat remembers 9/11/01

By: | September 8, 2011

It’s a blue sky day and I’m looking out on an ocean of rolling green hills. All is calm, until suddenly I hear a  jet approaching from behind. The moment I sense the plane, I know that it is going to crash. I brace myself for the inevitable. The plane is careening toward the ground. I want to stop it. I want to scream. But I have no voice. I can’t move. I can only stand and watch as it smashes into the ground in front of me.

Continue reading →

Natural Hazards in the Age of Social Media

By: | September 7, 2011

At 1:52pm on August 23, my office began to shake. I saw the photos on the walls gently swaying right and left. Since my walls typically remain motionless, my brain had trouble making sense of what I was seeing. Construction, I thought? No, too much shaking. To cause that much motion, a machine would have to be digging below me, deep in the earth. Yes, in the earth. A tiny cartoon light bulb appeared above my head. That was it! Earthquake.

Now that I had unearthed the cause, I didn’t know what to do. I quickstepped it through my undulating house. By the time I reached the living room, the shaking had stopped. I felt suddenly off balance – a sailor thrust off a boat onto dry land.

I flung open the front door. A nanny was standing on the sidewalk with a baby. “Did you feel that?” I asked. “I think it was an earthquake.”

She hadn’t felt anything. Was I crazy? Maybe I had imagined the whole thing. I needed to find out. Google can be quite useful if you’re trying to find your friend in a city struck by an earthquake, but on this day Google failed me. I tried to call my husband, but too many callers had jammed the lines. That’s when I logged into Facebook and posted the following message.

Continue reading →

The Calligraphers and the Apple

By: | September 6, 2011

uring my first year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I wrote a lot of term papers and played a lot of Tetris on Mac Classics. Squat, sturdy, and pallid, with a postcard-sized monochrome screen, the Classic was three times as heavy as the aluminum-bound MacBook I write on today — with a mere 1/2000 of the memory, poor thing. If anyone ever left it behind in a bar, it was on purpose.

But were my MacBook transported back to the grungy early 90s, I imagine, it would immediately recognize the Classic as its ancestor. The DNA is perhaps expressed most strongly in a few enduring fonts: New York, Monaco, Chicago … you know them, even if you don’t know their names. Even if you’ve never owned an Apple product. In the windowless Reed computer labs, they became a familiar but rarely noticed part of my daily life, as they have been ever since. (Incidentally, if my life were filled with uglier typography, I might have a better memory, as our own Virginia Hughes reported last year.) Little did I know that these archetypal fonts were born, in a sense, in a jam-packed classroom not far from where I sat. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Microscope, DIY, 3 Minutes

By: | September 5, 2011

The University of Victoria conservation field class is rapt. A blowtorch has just been ignited, oomph, and Patrick Keeling, champion of eukaryotes and microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, feeds a straw-thin glass capillary pipette through the hot blue flame. He removes the pipette from the flame and stretches it apart into spun hair. Whoa, the students gasp. Next he snaps the strand of glass in two and feeds one of the ends into the flame again, where its end pools into a little ball “like a lollipop.” An orange comet tail forms in the umbra of the glass.  “When your hand gets hot you stop, and that’s your lens,” Keeling says, shaking his hand out and examining his handiwork. He guesses its powers of magnification at 150x. Not shabby. Continue reading →

Exo-Freakshows

By: | September 2, 2011

I’ve had occasion in these pages before to write about searches for alien planets and alien life and for both, to register the loftiest disdain.  I mean, crissakes, the universe is jam-packed with philosophy-shattering freakshows, and we’re looking for things we already know exist?  Planets and life are not news.   I learned this outlook from astronomers: until a few years ago, this was the astronomical majority view. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Part of Me Forever

By: | September 1, 2011

This summer I put my Lilkid, as I call him online, on the school bus for the first time ever. Evidently I have “socialized” him enough with other lilkids, because he got on without a backwards glance, ignoring his mother getting all teary and father waving goodbye. He chose a seat and then mouthed through the window with a huge grin, “MOM! I am ON THE SCHOOL BUS! And IT HAS NO SEAT BELTS!!!”

When you have a kid, people tell you various clichés about how your child will be part of you forever. Ladies, in your case, it’s true, and it’s supported by science. Continue reading →