Without Learn’d Astronomers; Or, Walt, Shut Up

By: | November 11, 2010

A book I just read said that while the sun once held a gloriously central place in the lives of men, it has now been sidelined and downgraded by science — which I disagree with, you can’t find a more dedicated sun worshipper than a solar scientist.   The  book’s complaint is standard English major stuff, that science with all its measuring and calculating has taken from nature its meaning and mystery, its poetry.  Best example:  Walt Whitman’s famous poem about hearing a “learn’d astronomer” talk about proofs and diagrams until he (Walt) got sick and tired; and “rising and gliding out,” he wrote, “I wander’d off by myself/In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time/Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” ‑‑ the implication being that he (Walt) and not the astronomer appreciated the stars’ true inner poetry.

I too have heard the learn’d astronomer and my opinion is that Walt would have been better off if he had quit gliding around and learn’d a little science.

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Must Come Down

By: | November 10, 2010

About ten years ago I was killing time in the sprawling Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan.  I had pushed my chair away from a little table, crossed my legs, and opened a book on my lap.  I don’t remember which book.  I can’t even remember whether it was one I’d grabbed off a shelf or, because I was deep in research at that time, one I’d been carrying around all day just in case I found myself with a few free minutes.  I do remember that I was trying to understand what gravity is.  Or, as I was beginning to appreciate, isn’t.

Because I don’t have a background in science, I pretty much have to start from scratch when I’m researching a topic.  In my investigations into gravity, I’d already discovered that Isaac Newton had been making it up as he went along, and that he had admitted as much in one of his letters to the theologian Richard Bentley.  The notion of a force of attraction existing between two distant objects, he wrote, is “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”  Yet fall into it subsequent generations of physicists did.  Nearly two centuries later, the German philosopher-scientist Ernst Mach wrote, “The Newtonian theory of gravitation, on its appearance, disturbed almost all investigators of nature because it was founded on an uncommon unintelligibility.”  Now, he went on, “it has become common unintelligibility.”

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The Fly, Redux

By: | November 9, 2010
I am tsetse, hear me buzz.

Yesterday I shared a room with 3,000 buzzing tsetse flies – the bugs that carry the sleeping sickness parasite.

Tsetse flies live in Africa, but these guys are Yalies. They buzz and breed in racks of mesh cages on the 6th floor of Yale’s School of Public Health. (They also recite some Goethe – it’s the Ivy League, after all). By studying their inner workings, scientists like Serap Askoy hope to figure out how to stop them from spreading the parasite. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: A Great time To Be Alive

By: | November 8, 2010

The last time anyone proclaimed the end of science — at least, this is what I hear — was just before the arrival of  relativity and quantum theory.    Abstruse Goose’s brave new islands, quantum gravity and dark energy, are going to require new physics, and new physics is like seeing outside the optical, hearing outside the audible, and suddenly living in 27 dimensions.  Woofies.

Credit:

http://abstrusegoose.com/308

The Brothel, the Madam and the Doctor

By: | November 5, 2010

In the summer of 1993, just weeks before bulldozers began rolling in for the largest transportation project in Boston’s history–the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel–archaeologists discovered what appeared to be two 19th century privies and a cistern along the old waterfront. Unable to come up with funding to dig them, Boston archaeologist Martin Dudek and his colleagues decided to excavate the sites on their own time, recovering nearly 3000 artifacts, from leather shoes and cosmetic jars to a host of imposing looking syringes.

It now turns out that the privies and cistern belonged to a thriving Victorian-era brothel. In an ongoing research project, Boston University archaeologist Mary Beaudry and her students are now analyzing the artifacts, combing old census records and other documents, and shedding new light on the lives of the women at 27 and 29 Endicott Street. Continue reading →

Sharing Microbes (The Hard Way)

By: | November 4, 2010
Bad bug: Clostridium difficile

The procedure, developed in the late ’50s, is called fecal transplantation. Those of you who watch Grey’s Anatomy will have heard of it. And, yes, it is what you think it is. A physician takes poop from one person, and then he puts it into another. Don’t worry. The recipient doesn’t have to swallow the donor’s feces (an act that might put a positive spin on the phrase ‘eat my sh*t’). Blessedly, it goes in through the rectum instead.

“Why, for God’s sake why!?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. Poop is teeming with microbes. The typical human gut houses trillions of bacteria — more bacteria than the human body has cells. Together they form the gut’s “microbiome.” These bugs keep you happy and healthy. They aid in digestion, immunity, and much more. Continue reading →

The Language(s) of Time

By: | November 3, 2010

Time flies; it passes; it marches on. Time can be hard, ripe, rough or sharp. It can be saved, spent, managed.

I make dinner reservations ahead of time, and push back deadlines. I look forward to Christmas in New York. My teenaged years are over (woohoo!).

‘Time’ is the most common noun in English, and all of the various ways I talk about time feel…right. But other languages have different (and to me, peculiar) ways of describing the concept. In Indonesian, for example, verbs don’t have tenses: ‘I sit’ equals ‘I sat’ equals ‘I am going to sit’. In Aymara, a language spoken in the Andean highlands in South America, the past is said to be in front of you, and the future behind you. Mandarin speakers use vertical metaphors: earlier events are ‘up’ (shàng) whereas later events are ‘down’ (xià).

Do these sorts of linguistic variations reflect differences in the way we think?

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Old Weather & Citizen Science

By: | November 2, 2010

Galaxy Zoo — the citizen science project with hundreds of thousands of citizens classifying galaxies, catching supernovae, mapping the moon, finding solar storms, and so on far into the night – has sprouted a new project called Old Weather.  The reason old weather is more interesting than, say, old socks, is that yesterday’s weather is grist for tomorrow’s climate model:  no climate model is any good without masses of data.   So some hardy soul scanned the Royal Navy’s logbooks of 238 ships — the day-to-day weather in the early part of the last century — put the scans up on oldweather.org, and you transcribe one page at a time:  neat entries, spidery handwriting, HMS Tarantula, 19th day of December, 1919, winds N, blue sky, 10:45 a.m., weighed and proceeded from Hong Mun heading for Canton – taking notes on all of it, next page, next day, same neat handwriting whose “4’s” look a little like “7’s,” and before you know it, you’re in, hook, line, and sinker.  So to speak. Continue reading →