What Do We Owe Our Octopus Teachers?

By: | December 6, 2021

Two weeks ago, late to the zeitgeist as ever, I watched My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary about a relationship between a human and a cephalopod. Probably you’ve seen it (and if not, you should!), but, in brief, it’s about the yearlong friendship filmmaker Craig Foster strikes up with a female common octopus who lives in a South African kelp forest. The fascination (and, dare I say, affection) is mutual: The film’s most stirring shots depict the octopus clinging to Foster’s hand and sprawling against his chest, a pose that’s hard to describe as anything other than “cuddling.” It’s a gorgeous movie, and, as an octopus-loving diver myself, I watched it with a lump in my throat, both admiring and envious of Foster’s interspecies connection.

That said, there were two scenes that left me dismayed, and have continued to rankle since I watched the film. I’m talking about the shark attacks, and, specifically, Foster’s refusal to protect the octopus.

For the uninitiated (spoilers to follow), the kelp forest is also inhabited by packs of pyjama sharks, beautiful little black-and-white predators with a sense of smell that would awe a bloodhound. The sharks are the greatest threat to the octopus’s survival; they’re constantly sniffing around her rocky lair and trying to pry her out. Twice, they nearly succeed in killing her. The first time, one seizes her in his jaws, goes into a death roll, and rips off one of her arms. The octopus survives, but on death’s door (happily, she recovers and eventually regrows the arm). During the second attack, the film’s most astonishing sequence, the octopus reaches deep into her bag of tricks to escape: She crawls on land, camouflages herself beneath shells, and, incredibly, rides on the oblivious shark’s back. The scene has the vibe of Jerry outwitting Tom; all she needs is a falling anvil.

In the end, the octopus endures the attacks and lives long enough to breed. No harm, no foul, I guess. Still, I was disturbed that Foster never chased away the sharks. (Pyjama sharks aren’t exactly great whites; he could’ve run them off at no personal risk.) His friend, or at least his playmate, was assaulted, and he did nothing to save her.

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Following Shadows Around the Room

By: | December 3, 2021

Daylight Savings Time swapped out almost a month ago and I’m still off kilter. Who thought of such an assault on the senses? We’re sapiens and all, masters of adaptation, but mind and body don’t like to be parted.

I prefer watching light shift day by day, squares of sunshine stepping forward and back across the floor, a waltz of seasons luring the body’s rhythms. Autumn shadows are coaxed out of their corners like shy rabbits, and then we slam an hour ahead and it feels like the entire house shudders. It takes weeks for me to match the sun’s movement to my own. Shadows and light are all over the place and I feel like I’m running around trying to collect all the hopping rabbits. It’s now dark before I start thinking about dinner.

On the plus side, my morning drive taking my kid to school on winding rural roads leads us into the shadow of a nearby 11,000-foot-tall mountain. The apex of the shadow lands exactly on an intersection at the time we drive through, margin of error hardly a minute. We know the pinnacle casting the shade because we’ve climbed it, so we both marvel each morning as we pass through this intersection. We can almost see ourselves up there. Thanks, Daylight Savings for that. An hour earlier and we’d miss it entirely.

The shadow of Mount Lamborn in western Colorado is, of course, transient. The sun is rolling south, rising a minute later every day and farther out on the winter horizon. By next week, our alignment will be over. We won’t see it again until shadows swing back into February, the summit pointing onto our intersection, and then Daylight Savings Time will slam us again.

Once or twice a year, I come out with a post about time and seasons because I can’t help noticing the second hand of the moon pushing the big hands of sun and stars. Maybe we all notice, but I feel the need to stand up and say something, which we’ve been doing as a species for a long time. A few months ago, Autumnal Equinox light fell on ancient rock art near where I live. Just across the way in Utah, a thousand-year-old bird petroglyph releases an egg of sunlight, the bird pecked into red rock to line up with the sun twice a year, March 21 and September 21. A friend sent me pictures this year, letting me know it was still happening. This isn’t an isolated occurrence. The desert out here is littered with prehistoric imagery lined up with seasonal light and shadow patterns. The study is called archaeoastronomy. Summer Solstice in June is like a fireworks show across the whole of the Southwest, an arrowhead of light piercing a petroglyph snake in Utah, light dagger through the middle of a spiral in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. On that same day, northernmost position of the sun, the final minute of sunset lands squarely on a piece of framed art made by our own Person of LWON, Sarah Gilman (her art on that day is pictured above). It wasn’t planned that way, and it lasts only for a few days in our house. Serendipity, I believe it is called. Synchronicity for those so inclined.

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Live-Tweeting🚀the🛰️Space💥War😠

By: | November 29, 2021

Twitter, 11/15/2021, 7:42 a.m.  [Time zone? Who knows.] 

A German satellite watcher says Russia hit one of its own old spy satellites, Kosmos 1408, with a missile and blew it to bits.  I wanted to say “blew it out of the sky” but the satellite was of course in orbit so the exploded bits don’t fall down, they stay in the sky, still orbiting. 

The German watcher says 14 bits, debris objects, have been tracked and though “my  unofficial source has been pretty reliable on topics like this in the past,” the whole event is still unconfirmed.  An American satellite watcher who’s also an astronomer adds that Kosmos 1408 was, and all its pieces might be, in a 465 x 490 km orbit.  The debris, he added, will almost certainly intersect with the orbit of the International Space. 

And, as it turns out, the ISS crew had already been told to expect eight minutes-worth of “debris field transit,” to get out of the space station and into their little lifeboat modules, every 93 minutes.  NASA later posts an audio with the usual flat, factual voices, “ Hey Mark, good morning sorry for the early call, we were recently informed of a satellite breakup, need you to review safe haven procedure; read back; that’s a good read, we’ll let you know when to start; sounds good,” and another flat voice says, “thanks for the heads-up.” 

And finally confirmation: a newspaper space reporter writes that a commercial satellite company called LeoLabs “spots a field of objects where the Kosmos 1408 satellite used to be.”  The U.S. Space Command issues a press release, saying it’s working on it and it’s notifying everybody else with satellites not all of which can maneuver out of the way.

Then a good fraction of Twitter notes that other countries, including ours, have done this kind of satellite skeet shooting before, which accounts for the million billion gazillion pieces of debris going over 17,000 mph, circling the earth like a giant cloud of bats out of hell.  If you run into one of these bats, depending on its size, it can either knock a hole in you or turn you into another debris event.

This kind of thing is against the rules which are more like “we really should avoid doing these kinds of things shouldn’t we” than they are enforceable regulations in real treaties.  Turns out neither the U.S. nor Russia can get treaty discussions on their busy calendars.

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X-ray Vision

By: | November 26, 2021

My daughter had her braces removed a couple of weeks ago. This was a big occasion for her and to mark it I told her she could have whatever heretofore verboten food she wanted. She asked for gum—her first in about two years. I handed her the pack when she came out of the orthodontist’s office and watched in horror as she stuffed four pieces into her mouth. “Thanks!” she said.

A few minutes later we pulled out of the parking lot, she shlomp-ing gum in the backseat. “What a relief, eh, bug!” I said. “How’re you doing?”

“Fine,” she said. She was looking out the window. Shlomp, shlomp.

“Your teeth feel okay?” I asked. “Kinda slimy?”

“Yeah,” she said. Shlomp, shlomp.

My parental instincts told me to stop pestering her with inane questions. Even though she is just nine, my daughter can play things close to the vest. When she was a baby I usually had a pretty good idea of what she was thinking, but maturation has proved to be something of a paradox. The older and more articulate she gets, the less I know how to interpret her gnomic hints and observations, the nuances of her thought.

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Poem: Parking Lot, Deception Pass

By: | November 24, 2021
The shining head of a seal bobbing in blue water.

In 2019, some science writer friends and I took a trip to Whidbey Island, just north of Seattle. I spent the drive there bargaining with my chronic illness, calculating how much I’d be able to do, and how much I’d have to miss. My need to survive grated against my need to actually live, as it does every day. Then the car approached the sign for Deception Pass, and I knew there would have to be a poem.

That poem took the form of a haibun, a Japanese form blending descriptive prose and haiku. It’s a wonderful, vivid, nuanced form, ideal for travelogues and nature writing. It’s also my second-favorite poetic form, edged out narrowly by the haiku itself.

If you want to learn more about haibun, this piece by Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a terrific primer.

Now, the poem:

Parking Lot, Deception Pass

Hotter today than anybody expected. Sun the same. Pain perfectly on schedule, doing what it does. Now the multivariate calculus of taking part. Odds are I will never stand in this clear place again. Will get no second chance to breathe these trees or bathe in their shade. To wend upward through this forest and see the jade waves from above. My friends pointing. The shiny speckled seal bobbing in the water. Boats just below us. The horizon, so blue. But no matter the prize, there is the price to consider. Tonight, tomorrow. The next day. I will still need my legs then. Such as they are. I will still need my shoulders. My ragged heart.

Sunscreen-scented toddlers
go past, blowing kisses—I pick
gravel from my palms

*

Image by Keith Luke via Unsplash. This poem originally appeared in Moonchild Magazine.

Finding My Friend’s Unwritten Poems

By: | November 22, 2021

For as long as I’ve known her, my best friend has written a poem each day and then sent it out into the world. For more than a dozen years, she wrote a daily poem. On the day her teenage son ended his life, she stopped. 

I’d grown accustomed to opening Rosemerry’s poems in my inbox each morning, but after Finn died, I found lines from the poems that she was no longer writing everywhere.

There was a poem in the tiny wooden box that was delivered to her door on a day I was visiting, and in the tears we shed failing to understand how a boy who was more than six-feet tall and always in motion could possibly fit inside such a tiny vessel.

There’s a line of poetry somewhere in the Legos scattered across the back of my car after they spilled out of the box of Finn’s belongings I dropped off at the animal shelter thrift shop. I find another stanza in that split-second decision I make when the stranger who’s helping me sees the strewn pieces and jokes about the messiness of kids, and I just nod and smile, rather than burden her with the truth of how those toys ended up in my car or saddle myself with the task of shouldering her sympathies.

I know there’s a poem in our trip to the grocery store, when an object as ordinary as a carton of orange juice becomes a tunnel into grief. Another afternoon, I detect lines of poetry in the story Rosemerry tells me about digging up the potatoes in her the garden without her son, and I’m verklempt when they surface in the first poem she writes, seven weeks after his death.  

Rosemerry is back to writing daily poems, yet I still find unwritten ones scattered around. I notice one this evening, in the shooting star that lights up the sky at the exact moment I look up. Rosemerry calls Finn a comet, but in that moment I know that he’s really a meteor who flashed brighter and brighter as he fell to Earth.

And as I watch the meteor fade into dark, I understand that poetry is the only vessel that can contain grief.

Image by Ollie Taylor

Pamela McCorduck (1940-2021)

By: | November 19, 2021

Artificial Intelligence historian Pamela McCorduck has died. Author of Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence and other seminal works, I had a request in to interview her for a number of projects but never heard back. Now I know why.

In a pitch for a Netflix show, my creative partner Briana Brownell and I drew from her fascinating interview with Lex Fridman, which I leave for you below, along with McCorduck’s New York Times obituary, a more thorough accounting of her achievements than I can offer.

The image above is from the 1994 Computer Bowl, a fundraiser for the Computer History Museum.