Bees, and why you need to care about them

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I have been hearing about colony collapse disorder since the mid-1980s, when I lived in Tunisia and actually knew some beekeepers. Their hives were dying, and they had no idea why it was happening.

It’s now a worldwide problem. The European Union is voting on the subject soon, and I hope they vote sensibly.

Do you realize that our crops – our food sources – almost entirely depend on bees? Bees are the key to pollination. We farm bees just as we farm crops like corn and beans, but the bees are not so reliable anymore, because of this damned colony collapse disorder.

It may be a fungus. It may be the overuse of certain insecticides. It may be some mysterious illness. It may be Gaia’s revenge on mankind.

At any rate, the European Union is taking steps by banning certain pesticides which seem to be implicated in the colony collapses. An English friend of mine, Oma, recently posted a blog about the movement to ban these pesticides.

I know what you’re thinking: Who cares about bees?

Answer: if you don’t care about bees, you’d better change your mind, and fast.

You can follow this link to sign an American petition to ban certain chemicals connected to colony collapse disorder.

Please sign.

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Neanderthal DNA

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23andMe.com, the online DNA-analysis company, came back to us with information on our Neanderthal descent. Mine is 2.6 percent; Partner's is 2.8 percent.

There’s been lots of disagreement about our Neanderthal cousins. They were shorter than us and almost certainly stronger, with heavy brow ridges, and maybe larger brains. But Homo sapiens sapienssomehow swamped them, and now they’re gone.

Except that our H. sapiens sapiens ancestors (evidently) interbred with them.

The Neanderthal genome has been recovered from fossils and compared to the modern human genome. Result: most people of European and Asian descent have at least one percent Neanderthal DNA; some have as much as four percent. (People of pure African descent have none at all, or nearly none.)

It’s fun to think about our caveman ancestry. I even bought the t-shirts that 23andMe offered, with a cute Fred Flintstone-type caveman depicted on them, and Partner’s and my respective percentages printed alongside.

But maybe I’m proud of my Homo sapiens sapiensancestry too. Maybe I’m proud of all my ancestors, unicellular and multicellular, mammalian and primate. They all had one thing in common: they reproduced, and their offspring lived long enough to reproduce also.

I have not had children in my lifetime, and almost certainly never will. My genome (such as it is) will be lost. But hopefully my nephews and nieces will manage to carry on the odd and unique messages in our family DNA.

I feel like a caveman, thinking about a future I won’t share.

But maybe – just maybe – some fragment of my family inheritance will survive in that future.

Here’s hoping.

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Colonel Chris Hadfield

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When I was a kid, astronauts – in the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo missions – were all over television. You couldn’t escape them. They were always up in space, on endless dull missions, orbiting and spacewalking, and they pre-empted all my favorite shows.

This was lovely, and very exciting. But, god love them, they were so deadly dull. None of the astronauts had any personality to speak of; they were all big average-looking white men in puffy space suits. Later – much later – we found that some of them had personalities: Michael Collins could write well, and Alan Bean could paint, and Edgar Mitchell had interestingly creative ideas about spirituality and humanity and the Universe.

But that was later: much much later. At the time, in the 1960s and 70s, they were all just names and faces. NASA scrubbed all the personality out of them.

Well, it’s much later now.

Over our heads now orbits the International Space Station, crewed by Russians and Americans and – OMG! – Canadians. One particular Canadian, Chris Hadfield, has become an Internet celebrity. How? He takes pictures. Like this:

And this:

And this:

He sings with children on Earth (especially in Canada). He’s excited about being in space, and he enjoys it, and he communicates his enjoyment to us on earth.

Most recently, just before his return to Earth, he lip-synched a (slightly rewritten) cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” complete with zero-G guitar.

I wish those repressed/oppressed 1960s astronauts had been given the freedom to express themselves, the way Chris Hadfield is expressing himself right now. I’d have been a lot more involved, and excited.

Snow, glaciers, and the Elizabeth Islands

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We here in Rhode Island had a mini-blizzard in the middle of February, which dumped two feet of snow. A lot of it melted right away. But some of it remained, in big chunks and drifts on the roadside.

 

 

It melts, bit by bit, and the streets and sidewalks get wider and wider, thank God.

 

 

Have you ever noticed what happens when mounded snow melts? It almost always leaves debris behind, like this:

 

 

 

 

Flashback to the last Ice Age: the glaciers pushed all kinds of debris (rocks, etc.) out to their limits, and then they receded.

 

 

What did they leave behind?

 

 

Why, Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands!

 

 

 

 

 

Cape Cod and the Elizabeths are the fringe of debris  - the “terminal moraine” – left behind by the last glaciers.

 

 

The last Ice Age left behind all kinds of debris in southern New England: the teardrop-shaped islands in Boston Harbor, the big chunks of stone dropped at random throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut and Rhode Island (“glacial erratics”, and (most especially) the line of debris that created the ridges of Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands.

 

 

Debris. What a terrible word. Let’s just call it “landscaping.”

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Snowflakes

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I was waiting for the University shuttle the other day, and it was snowing very lightly. The temperature was probably twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

 

 

And the snowflakes were perfect.

 

 

I watched them as they landed on my jacket, one by one. Each was a six-pointed miracle, and all of them were different.

 

 

Did you know that you can actually preserve snowflakes? You can use something called Formvar, or even clear acrylic spray paint. If you do it right, you will have perfect little gems that will last forever.

 

 

(I first read about this in a children’s magazine in the 1960s. I have always wanted to try it. But I know in my heart that never in a billion years would I ever get something like that to work.)

 

 

It’s nice, in any case, to think of nature’s infinite variety: that every snowflake is different from every other snowflake.

 

 

Except – surprise! – it’s not true.

 

 

From Sciencebase.com:

 

 

The short answer is no. Despite what you may have heard some snowflakes are exactly the same shape and size as other snowflakes.

 

 

Of course they are.

 

 

Linus and Lucy knew this as long ago as 1963:

 

 

 

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The ACHOO gene

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Years ago, my mother used to hang her laundry out on the line in our backyard to dry. She wore sunglasses, even in the weak Northwest sunlight, because the sunlight made her sneeze.

 

 

It makes me sneeze too. Not every time, but often.

 

 

This is the “photic sneeze reflex.” It has a couple of other names, including (seriously) the Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst reflex (ACHOO!), as well as the Peroutka Sneeze Reflex.

 

 

Why? I’ve read many explanations over the years. First, it was said that blue-eyed people were prone to this, because (somehow) our pale irises let more light into the eyeball, which was somehow irritating. Well, I’m blue-eyed, so fine. But my mother was brown-eyed. So let’s try again.

 

 

How about this one? When you look into bright light, your pupils contract very suddenly. The muscles which control this don’t usually work that fast or that hard, and they twitch. This feels like a tickle inside your nose, and – achoo!

 

 

This theory doesn’t hold up experimentally either, apparently.

 

 

The reflex appears to be genetic. 23andMe, the genetic-assay project which both Partner and I joined recently, tests for this, and - guess what? - I have the gene.

 

 

So it's genetic. So what?

 

 

What else can you think of that's genetic and caused by sudden exposure to light?

 

 

How about epilepsy?

 

 

(And this, brothers and sisters, is what genetic research is all about.)

 

 

(And - you see? - I'm a mutant after all.)

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23andMe.com

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A year or more ago, Partner and I bought into a very bad gene-testing thing, which told us (ridiculously) that we were both of Iraqi origin. It turned out that the test was the same one that the FBI uses: it’s very good for identification, but it doesn’t really give you any information on heritage, or disease, or anything else.

 

 

Well, okay. I only paid about $40 for testing for the two of us, so I got what I paid for.

 

 

Now: behold! The much more reputable 23andMe.com is offering its much more comprehensive testing for only $99 per person! They give you info on your heritage, and your Neanderthal inheritance, and your likelihood to develop genetic conditions. They are very thorough.

 

 

For Xmas, I bought lifetime memberships for both myself and Partner.

 

 

Well, my results have come in. I can summarize them as follows:

 

 

1)    I have DNA.

2)    It appears to be human.

 

 

I have no genetic predisposition toward either Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease. This lowers my chances of contracting either, although nothing is certain.

 

 

I have a heightened susceptibility toward several cancers, including melanoma, prostate cancer, and especially stomach cancer. (There’s lots of cancer in my family, but none of these three. I am fascinated by this. There are risk factors that I can avoid for all three, and I need to think about this.)

 

 

I am genetically sensitive to the medication Coumadin / Warfarin, which is a commonly-prescribed blood thinner, which means that a regular dose would be too much for me, and I should be prescribed a lower dose. (I should tell my doctor. But will he listen, or just smile and pretend to listen?)

 

 

I have a three-times heightened likelihood to develop an especially nasty kind of glaucoma. Uh-oh. I’ve always had vision problems.

 

 

I am slightly taste-blind, especially toward bitter tastes. This is exactly correct. I love bitter flavors, and this is probably because I can’t taste them very well. People with “supertaste” can’t stand bitter tastes; they spit them out immediately.

 

 

I probably have blue eyes, moderately straight hair with a wave, B-positive blood, and I do not tend toward male pattern baldness. Correct, correct, correct, and correct.

 

 

They’ve churned up my national heritage too. I have a lot of northern European ancestry (my mitochondrial DNA hails from Doggerland, a place submerged beneath the North Sea, halfway between England and the Netherlands). I have a drop of Italian (not much), and lots of crazy eastern European (Czech, Hungarian, Russian, “Balkan”), and a surprising amount of Scandinavian.

 

 

Also I share tiny bits of other lineages. A tenth of a percent of something that might be Ashkenazi Jewish. A tenth of a percent of something that might be sub-Saharan African.

 

 

Gandhari says in the Mahabharata: Origins are obscure.

 

 

But sometimes we learn things about our origins, and they become a little clearer.

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Theory and belief

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People on the right/conservative side of the political spectrum have taken to saying that science is “just another theory,” and that religion – or craziness like “intelligent design” – is just as valid as any scientific “theory.”

 

 

But science is not “just another theory.”

 

 

Science is based upon observation. A real scientific theory begins with observed phenomena, and posits explanations for those phenomena, which can be disproved. (That last phrase is very important. Read it twice or three times.) If these explanations can’t be disproved by modern methods, then – huzza! – the theory is valid. (Until a better or more elegant theory comes along.)

 

 

Here’s an interesting statement: “I have a theory that Satan buried dinosaur bones to confuse us into believing in the false theory of evolution.”

 

 

Is this a real theory?

 

 

 

Well, is it based on observation? Not really. There are certainly dinosaur bones, but Satan’s fingerprints are nowhere to be found on them. 

 

 

Is it disprovable? Nope. The more I argue with this “theorist,” the more he insists that I’m a dupe of Satan.

 

 

Is this, therefore, a real theory? Nope.

 

 

Here’s another theory: “Dinosaurs existed hundreds of millions of years ago.”

 

 

Here are some facts:

 

 

-         Dinosaur fossils have been found all over the world, and have dated to the right periods, using reliable methods.

-         These fossils have been found in geologic layers which have also dated to the right periods.

 

 

(Is this disprovable? Yes, in many ways. Our dating methods might be found to be unreliable, or the fossils might be found to be fake. But, at this point, neither is the case.)

 

 

-         Thus: we have no reason to doubt that there were dinosaurs back in the Jurassic.

 

 

Except, of course, that the Religious Right tells us that God doesn’t allow for that kind of thing.

 

 

Here’s your friend and mine, Bill Nye the Science Guy, explaining sweetly and reasonably why science is important:

 

 

 

 

I respect people of faith, but I do not want to hear them dismissing science anymore.

 

 

Because they just don’t know what they’re talking about.

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Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov: a cautionary tale

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Once upon a time there was a Russian scientist named Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov.

 

 

He was a botanist and geneticist in the Mendelian days before the discovery of DNA, in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

 

Vavilov wanted desperately to be non-political, because he perceived – accurately – that to be political was to be vulnerable, in those early days of the United Soviet Socialist Republics.

 

 

He did remarkable work. He established beyond much doubt that the origin of the apple tree was in Kazakhstan, and he did much other excellent work.

 

 

But Stalin preferred the work of a man named Lysenko.

 

 

Lysenko wasn’t much of a scientist, but he knew how to use politicians to advance his own career. He came up with odd theories, but when challenged, he said his challengers were “armed with foreign ideas.” He claimed Mendelian theory was bunk. On what basis? Well, none, except that Uncle Joe Stalin was his buddy.

 

 

Vavilov ended up in prison. Under torture, he told his wardens what they wanted to hear: he was an enemy of the state. He ended up dying of dysentery in a prison camp in 1943.

 

 

If you are a Republican, you may hear this story as a defense of the brave scientists who have attacked climate change and shale oil and conservation. You probably see those defiant scientists who argue against the rest as Vavilov.

 

 

For me, and for Democrats in general I think, Vavilov is something else. He is Science personified. He is the method by which we try to discover what’s going on in nature. He is not political. He tells the truth, whatever it turns out to be, and whether or not it supports our political viewpoints.

 

 

What’s the end of the story?

 

 

Well, the whole Lysenko thing cost the USSR much time and trouble, since they were out of touch with the rest of the world’s scientific research.

 

 

Now, I ask you: is an American population, brought up on creationism and intelligent design, ready to do scientific work in the world community?

 

 

You tell me.

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A bumper crop of weeds

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Such a crop of weeds we’ve had this year!

 

 

There’s a yard down on Cooke Street, a few blocks from our house, with weeds like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of them are eight feet tall. There’s dwarf dandelion (it seems silly to call it “dwarf” when it’s that tall, although “dwarf” refers to the flowers, not the plant), and some pokeweed, and other things I don’t know the names of. I actually own a copy of the “Golden Guide to Weeds,” and I still cannot figure out what some of them are. They are like props in a horror movie, or background scenery in an episode of “Lost in Space.” They tower over me. (Fine. They’ll be dead in a few months, and I’ll (probably) still be here. So let them tower.)

 

 

I love weeds. I love the way they sprawl and occupy the space they’re given. I know they can be parasites, but they’re often lovely. (My father, a farmer at heart, hated weeds, and hated it when he saw me playing with things like quackgrass and cheat. I had no idea that I was doing anything wrong.) I love the resilience of weeds, and their vigor. Many of them are annuals: they grow from seed in a single season, and die. Imagine that! All that growth in a single year!

 

 

And they are common, and friendly, and green. They mean no harm. (Most of them, anyway.)

 

 

And why do you suppose we’re getting such a nice crop of them this year?

 

 

We’re getting warmer hereabouts; we’re getting a climate that’s more like the mid-Atlantic states. Climate change, you know. And the landscape, and the greenery, are responding with gladness

 

 

Lovely weather, if you’re a weed.

 

 

(Not sure if it’s so good for us people, though.)

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Neil Armstrong

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Neil Armstrong, the quietest celebrity in modern memory, died last weekend at 82. He was a household name, but a very private man, I knew him through books about the space program, especially "Carrying the Fire," the wonderful autobiographical / historical book written by Apollo 13 crew member Michael Collins.

 

 

You can tell in photos how guarded Armstrong was; even when smiling, there’s a sort of veil over his eyes.  In my favorite photo (at the head of this article), taken by one of his Apollo 11 crewmates, Armstrong actually looks exhilarated, and open, and exhausted, and happy.

 

 

I’d ask if you remember that evening in July 1969 when Armstrong first stepped onto the moon’s surface, but I remind myself that many of you are too young for that; it would be like you asking me if I remembered when the Confederates started firing on Fort Sumter.

 

 

But I remember it. We’d just come home from a day trip to my Grandma Boitano’s house. I was twelve years old. I remember sitting in our living room in the twilight, watching the spectacle on television – a man on the moon! – and then getting up to look out the picture window at the moon (which I remember as being maybe six days old, a little less than first quarter). I remember thinking: There are human beings up there right now.

 

 

And I got a little shiver.

 

 

Memory is tricky. I go online now, and check myself. What was the phase of the moon on July 20, 1969?

 

Six days after new.

 

 

I actually remembered my childhood accurately.

 

 

Woo-hoo!

 

 

Armstrong’s family has asked that, “next time you see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

 

 

I think that’s lovely.

 

 

And we have to keep the moon in its place, after all, as the following clip (featuring Tina Fey and Buzz Aldrin) demonstrates:

 

 

 

 

Rest in peace, Neil.

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The Darlingtonia preserve

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In 2005, on one of our trips to the Pacific Northwest, Partner and I were running up and down the Oregon coast: Lincoln City, Yachats, Florence. 

 

 

On our way to Florence I noticed an odd sign pointing to a DARLINGTONIA PRESERVE.  The name rang a very faint bell, but I couldn’t quite place it, and I suggested that we stop.

 

 

I am so glad we did.

 

 

It is a small park which serves as a natural preserve for a rare local plant, the Darlingtonia californica, aka the cobra lily.

 

 

Darlingtonia is a carnivorous plant resembling the pitcher plant.  Its body is a cup of water, topped by a cobra-like hood.  Insects blunder inside and fall into the water to drown; the hood helps keeps them inside if they try to escape.

 

 

Once they’re dead, Darlingtonia californica eats them up, slowly, by dissolving them and absorbing their delicious little bodies.

 

 

Bloodthirsty, I know. But the plants were gorgeous, and you have never seen so many together in one place in your life.  They were shining bright green in the fitful Oregon summer sunlight, hundreds of them in their damp little peat bog, humming to themselves, waiting for the little buggies to arrive for lunch.

 

 

Plants are remarkable.  We animals have always had an advantage over plants, seemingly; we move faster, anyway. But plants are sneaky and malevolent. Some are poisonous, like nightshade and datura and pokeweed. Some sting and burn, like nettles and poison ivy. Some are beautiful and dangerous, like the foxglove. Some can gash the hell out of you, like the cholla cactus. Some of them can poison the ground beneath themselves, so that nothing else can grow (many conifers do this).

 

 

But all of them, just like Darlingtonia californica, are beautiful in the sunshine.

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Cabbage butterflies

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I like butterflies, especially the big 747 models with snazzy colors, like the monarchs and the swallowtails. But I also have a nice feeling about the simple dull colorless ones; they give a pleasant fluttery feeling to the day when you see them, and they seem pretty harmless. (As Bart Simpson once said: “No one ever suspects the butterfly.”)

 

 

For example: now and then I see cabbage butterflies, AKA cabbage moths, AKA Pieris rapae. You know them: the white ones that swirl and dart through the garden like animated dinner napkins.

 

 

My parents used to grow basketball-sized cabbages, and the cabbage butterflies loved them. They don’t eat them, you see; they lay their eggs in them. Then their children (green oozy-looking caterpillars) eat the cabbage.

 

 

My mother hated those caterpillars. She had a giant salt-shaker of some infernal pesticide, which she used on the cabbages the way you’d sprinkle Parmesan on your spaghetti. It certainly didn’t kill all the caterpillars, and I marvel that it didn’t kill all of us. (One of our neighbors saw her strewing poison on her cabbages once, and wrote a letter to the local paper about “my neighbor lady who sprinkles poison on her vegetables.” He also said something like “I’d rather eat a bug once in a while than poison my own food.”)

 

 

(We thought he was crazy. Forty-five years later, I see that he was ahead of his time.)

 

 

Mom’s poison didn’t seem to reduce the population of cabbage butterflies, as I recall. And what’s a summer day, after all, without a few cabbage butterflies wheeling and pirouetting in the sunlight? 

 

 

I suspect that, if I’d been born a butterfly, I’d have been a cabbage butterfly: not extraordinarily beautiful, but with my own quiet charm.

 

 

And I do like cabbage once in a while.

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Listen to the mockingbird

Sometimes, on weekend mornings in spring and summer, when the windows are open, I lie in bed and listen to the birds outside: repeated notes, strange sliding calls, Morse-code beeping, alien whoops. 

 

 

I can recognize a crow.  Bluejays have a distinctive hoarse call, and I know the rusty-screen-door screech of a cardinal.  I know the scream of a hawk; believe it or not, there are hawks here in Rhode Island too. 

 

 

And I know the mockingbird.

 

 

I didn't at first.  Then, one day, sitting in a folding chair in a local park, reading a book, I was absent-mindedly listening to a bird singing in a nearby tree.  It went on and on.  It was pretty, in a way, but it had no continuity.  It'd tweet a few times, and then warble, and then do sharp repeated notes, and then peep, and then coo.  It never let up.  It went on for twenty minutes, and never repeated itself once.

 

 

It was like reading a story with the pages scrambled. 

 

 

This is the mockingbird's survival strategy.  A lot of birds sing to mark territory: Get out of here! This is my turf!  The mockingbird memorizes every birdsong it hears, and plays them all back in an endless random loop, and keeps all the other birds away, some through challenge, some through confusion.

 

 

And then it has all the delicious bugs in the neighborhood to itself. 

 

 

Mockingbirds are good at their work.  I heard one imitate the caw of a crow once.  Citydwellers have reported hearing them do the beep-beep-beep of a vehicle backing up.

 

 

 

They are dismal-looking, dull-colored, nondescript.  They perch high up in the branches, or on the tops of telephone poles, or on traffic lights, above the action, looking down.  I’m sure it's to ensure maximum coverage.

 

 

They drive me mad. 

 

 

I really sympathize with the other birds, who must really hate them. 

 

 

In “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Atticus tells Scout and her brother that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird, because it just sits in its tree and sings all day long.  And what's wrong with that?

 

 

Oh, Atticus.  I wish you were here right now. I could explain it all to you. 

 

 

And then I would eradicate all the mockingbirds.

 

 

Ancient aliens

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Partner and I like to watch those programs on Discovery and TLC and Syfy about Ancient Aliens.  You know: the aliens who built (or helped build) the Pyramids, and Machu Picchu. They designed the Nazca Lines. They fitted together the stones of Tihuanaco.  They brought Prescelly bluestone hundreds of miles, overland, to build Stonehenge. Our ancestors painted pictures of them, and told stories of them.

 

 

I am very happy to believe in alien life.  In fact, I think it’s silly not to believe in alien life.  The universe is utterly bloody vast, and it would be ridiculous to think that we were the only walking talking things in it.  I have two problems with the Ancient Aliens theory, however:

 

 

-        Where did they all go? They were (evidently) all over the place in our ancestors’ days; now they’ve keeping a very low profile.  How come?  Are they afraid of us?

-        Why in the hell would they come here? What do we have to offer? Water? There’s water everywhere in space; if they wanted water, they could probably mine comets.  Metal ore? Hydrocarbons? Nah. I’m with Douglas Adams on this one: the best thing you can say about Earth is that we’re “mostly harmless.”

 

 

I also have a problem with the UFOlogists who keep giving us humanoid aliens, and horse aliens, and elephant aliens, and kitty-cat aliens.  Alien life, if/when we find it, will probably be far more peculiar than we can imagine now. I’ll wager that it doesn’t even use DNA.  Scientists (human scientists) have already come up with a number of other molecules that can self-replicate. (Admittedly they’re amino-acid based, but it’s a step in the right direction.) The aliens, when we finally meet them, will be blobs, or sighing clouds of methane with rubbery coverings, or bundles of sticks, or potted plants.

 

And they will have absolutely no interest in building Stonehenge.

 

(But it’s fun to think about.)

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BeachBallWorld

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I was watching a TV show about the Cambrian Explosion the other evening.  This was a period in Earth’s history, about 500 million years ago, when the fossil record suddenly blossoms: there are all kinds of animals, all over the place – trilobites, things that look like early fish, everything.

 

 

Why this explosion of life?  There are lots of theories, and some are better than others.  The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book (which I devoured back in the early 1990s) called “Wonderful Life,” which analyzed a group of fossils called the Burgess Shale, and concluded that something at an early point of Earth’s history caused a huge proliferation of life forms, which have narrowed and died down since then. 

 

 

Do you see?  Instead of the usual tree arrangement – simple life branching out into forms of more and more complexity – Gould theorized that the tree exploded into a forest early on, and that the forest has become thinner and thinner since then.

 

 

His theory has failed on many points.  He misinterpreted a number of the Burgess fossils; one he turned upside down (he had it walking on long spine-like legs; turns out that the spines were – of course! – on its back).

 

 

Gould portrayed early life on earth as a drowsy microbial cloud, purring and oozing.  Along the way, and in among the other creatures, he mentions an especially interesting early form of life called only “the Ediacaran fauna.” 

 

 

These are interesting.  For maybe fifty million years, they were pretty much everywhere on earth.  Some were big globular things, and some were flat.  They lay in water, or on shoals (we don’t really know), and basked.  Maybe some of them remotely resembled jellyfish; some of them (maybe) resembled modern creatures called sea pens, big wavy feathery things that anchor themselves in the ocean floor. 

 

 

Ediacarans were soft, and didn’t leave fossils very often; it took a lot of looking to find them.  They have been found on every continent now. 

 

 

I like thinking of those ancient seas – pink? why not? – under skies filled with hazy tropical clouds, with waving forests of feathery creatures just under the water, and big flotillas of lazy pancakes and big pink beachballs bobbing in the surf. 

 

 

Because one of those big pink beachballs may have been your grandmother.

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The stars last weekend

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I don’t know if you were out after dark last weekend, or looked out a west-facing window.  If not, you missed quite a show.  The very young crescent moon, Venus, and Jupiter were all together in the western sky shortly after sunset.  On Friday it was (top to bottom) Jupiter-Venus-moon, in a long curving line; then, on Saturday night, the moon and Venus were making out, right next to each other, with Jupiter looking on from above; Sunday evening, it was moon and Jupiter, with Venus glaring down below; on Monday, another long curve, top to bottom Moon-Jupiter-Venus.  (Mercury was supposedly down there somewhere, but, as I’ve noted before, I am evidently destined never to see Mercury.)

 

 

It was beautiful, and scary, and brilliant.  I actually took pictures of it, and if you’ve ever tried to take pictures of the moon or stars, you’ll know that the photos usually don’t turn out.  You can see in the photo above how bright the conjunction was, and how remarkably beautiful.

 

 

It’s a cosmic optical illusion.  The moon is only a quarter of a million miles away. Venus is – what? – maybe thirty million miles away.  Jupiter is hundreds of millions of miles away.  But they all happened to be in the same line of sight at the same time .

 

 

We were watching a game of cosmic Skee-Ball.  All these planets and moons whizzing around in our line of sight!  Beautiful, eerie, mysterious.

 

 

From Diane Ackerman’s book “The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral,” the last few lines of “Asteroids”:

 

 

But now

                        They lumber

So wide apart

From each

To its neighbor’s

Pinprick-glow

                                                                        Slant millions

                        And millions

                        Of watertight miles.

                                                            Only in the longest view

Do they graze

            Like one herd

                                                On a breathless tundra.

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BatWorld

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At nightfall I like to watch the bats wheeling and swooping over the housetops.  Except that Partner says they’re not bats.  “They’re birds,” he says.

 

 

“Look at them!” I say.  “Birds don’t fly like that!  Also, most birds don’t fly in the dark!”

 

 

He shrugs.  It’s one of those disputes we’ll keep having even after we’ve been put away in the old ladies’ home.

 

 

It’s late autumn now, not really bat season here in southern New England, but I am reminded of this mostly because of the sudden passing of my old boss Sharon.  She and I shared a basement office on the main campus for a couple of years in the 1980s; it wasn’t much, but we got by.  One morning she came in with an odd look on her face.  “There’s something stuck to the wall outside in the hallway,” she said.  “I think it’s a bat.”

 

 

I raced out to see.  Sure enough, it was a tiny bat, clinging to the wall in the hallway, crumpled as if it’d been injured.  I’d seen it as I came into the office that morning, but I’d assumed it was some odd stain on the wall; it was a basement after all, and all kinds of odd things end up on the walls.

 

 

Anyway: Brown University had a bat-research project, and a bat hotline.  We called, and they came over with their butterfly net and gently removed the tiny thing from the wall.

 

 

Today, over twenty years later, Brown still maintains its bat research lab.  I was just reading an article in a campus publication about how carefully they care for the sick and wounded bats.  I can still picture that poor little fellow (or girl) back in the 1980s, who looked as if he/she was in pain, and how glad we were that someone came to take care of her.

 

 

I hope he/she lived to swoop above the treetops again.

 

 

Even if Partner doesn't believe those are really bats.

 

 

Bill O’Reilly versus the tides

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Bad science is nothing new; just ask Galileo.  I will say, however, that the American right wing, with its notoriously anti-intellectual bent, is making Galileo’s persecutors look positively enlightened.

 

 

Michelle Bachmann, to score some political points, threw the (not so old) canard at Rick Perry that vaccines cause autism.  Except that vaccines don’t cause autism.  But Michelle claimed that someone – a mother! - told her that they did.  And that’s that!  Take that, you stupid doctors and scientists!

 

Rick Perry himself, a Christian, prays for stuff.  He prayed for an end to the Texas drought earlier this year; he also prayed for the economy to improve.  (Prayer is so much easier than social action.  And you can always say, if nothing happens, that “God is working it out.”)

 

 

Mitt Romney, who once was almost rational on the subject of the environment and climate change, is creeping toward denialism.  He sort of acknowledges that the climate is changing, but says that we can’t possibly know with certainty whether the human race is responsible for it.  And, without this key piece of information, Mitt says that any attempt toward green living – CO2 reduction, for example – is silly, and a waste of money.  (Hey, Mitt, here’s some information for you: climate change means rising sea levels. Better get your ass back to Utah, where it’s high and dry!)

 

 

But the best, and worst, and most cringeworthy of all, is Bill O’Reilly, on the subject of the earth’s tides.  (This is old news – it dates back to January / February of this year – but he still hasn’t corrected himself, and it’s still a deliciously stupid story.)

 

 

It all began when O’Reilly had a guy named David Silverman on his show.  Silverman represented an organization called the American Atheists Group, which was mounting billboards around the country, some of which called religion a “scam.”  O’Reilly, he of the “war against Christmas” campaign, wanted to sink this guy in the mud.  So he chose an example of the miraculous in everyday life: the earth’s tides. 

 

 

To wit:

 

 

O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

 

 

But of course we can explain the tides, Bill.  It involves the moon, and the sun, and gravity.

 

 

Every fifth-grade science teacher in the country jumped on this howling gaffe.  It was just too much.

 

 

But (in the words of A. A. Milne): did O’Reilly blinch?  No no.

 

A few weeks later, on his website, he posted the following:

 

Okay, how did the moon get there? How'd the moon get there? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How'd the moon get there? How'd the sun get there? How'd it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn't have it? Venus doesn't have it. How come? Why not? How'd it get here?

 

 

A “pinhead” is someone who didn’t pay attention in science class when the tides were being explained.  A “pinhead” is someone who looks in the sky, sees the sun and moon, and says, “God put them here just for me!”

 

 

Also: a “pinhead” is someone who makes a howling mistake in public and then refuses to admit it.

 

 

As the Huffington Post put it: “O’Reilly: zero.  Science: infinity.”

 

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Science and economics: getting there is half the fun

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I have been inundated with science magazines lately.  I think I must be signing up for subscriptions in my sleep. 

 

 

In any case, I am learning a lot. 

 

 

For one thing, according to an article in a recent issue of Science, population growth turns out to be not a problem; people adapt to it, as technology continues to improve. 

 

 

Aren’t you delighted to hear this?

 

 

This study was based on a location in Kenya where, in the early twentieth century, overfarming and overgrazing looked as if they might overwhelm a whole area.  Experts were gloomy.  But!  Technology rescued everyone!  (After a while.)  Nowadays, it’s a thriving area!

 

 

Everything about this story is wonderful, except that middle term: “after a while.”  There was considerable human suffering and stress for perhaps ten, twenty, thirty years. 

 

 

That middle term worries me.

 

 

Macroeconomics has the same middle-term blind spot. Allow me to oversimplify: “Markets shift.  There are busts, and booms.  If you can just hang on long enough, recessions and depressions will ease, and the market will shift to an upward trend.”

 

 

Ah yes.  If you can hang on long enough.

 

 

And getting there is half the fun.

 

 

Re the Kenya story: how many people suffered / starved / died before the present optimal state was achieved?  Re the macroeconomics theory (let’s take the 1930s in the USA for an example): how many people suffered / starved / died before the economy recovered?

 

 

One does not have the numbers at one’s fingertips, but one seems to recall that, during the 1930s here in the USA for example, the human-suffering level was significant.

 

 

So: problem leads to solution.  The laws of nature, and demographics, and economics, take their course.

 

 

But getting there is half the fun.

 

 

And you had better dearly hope that you are not one of the (statistically insignificant) people who suffer, or starve, or die in the middle of the equation, during the time in which the situation is correcting itself from negative to positive . . .

 

Ah me.

 

 

Hang on.  It’s going to be a bumpy ol’ ride.

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