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Science Musings Blog
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The omnivore's dilemma -- 2
The omnivore's dilemma -- 1
The eye of the mind
Making a me, cell by cell
X marks the spot
Growing up in the Milky Way
Debauched on light
Happy New Year -- from Anne (and Chet)
Everything is holy
Growing up
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The omnivore's dilemma -- 2
posted by Chet at 11:46 AM UTC
The new dietary, world-saving mantra is "Eat local." This, for example, is the theme of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, a good read that -- if nothing else -- makes one think about what goes in the mouth. As much as possible eat fresh food from nearby sources, preferably produced and distributed organically, Mr. Pollan advises.Easier said than done. Give me a big Exumian cabbage, some Exumian onions, peppers and tomatoes, and I could eat happily for a week. But one does not live on veggies alone. And the sources of local food are fast disappearing as the island is sucked into the global vortex of industrially produced and distributed food.In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan visits Gene Kahn, who started out in the 70s as a countercultural farmer in Washington State, producing and selling organic food to local markets. His New Cascadian Survival and Reclamation Project eventually turned into the large and successful Cascadia Farms, and was gobbled up by the industrial food giant General Mills, with Kahn as a wealthy VP. Organic farmer to agribusinessman."Everything eventually morphs into the way the world is," says Kahn by way of explanation. A sad thought, but one with the irresistible force of truth.Cabbages and onions grown in sandy soil with a watering can and a machete stand little chance against the global food industry. Nor is it fair to expect Exumians to forego the variety of foods and ease of acquisition that those of us in the megasupermarket culture enjoy. And how, pray, to feed 7 billion people without the food science and technology that is both the blessing and the bane of the contemporary world?I will leave the omnivore's dilemma to wiser heads than mine, and for as long as I can stick with my big sandy heads of Exumian cabbage. I know exactly where they came from and how they were grown, because I can walk through the fields and see the farmer bent over the ground plying his or her machete. But I know little or nothing about the big block of strangely-colored cheddar cheese and processed turkey "bacon" that I buy at our market to go with the cabbage -- except that the turkey may have suffered less than the smarter (and tastier) pig. Oh dear."Everything eventually morphs into the way the world is," says Mr. Kahn. The best we can hope for, I assume, is one by one to nudge the world in whatever direction we want it to go.
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The omnivore's dilemma -- 1
posted by Chet at 12:01 PM UTC
Onions, cabbages, pigeon peas, corn, bananas, papayas, goats, chickens, conch. Until surprisingly recently these locally grown, raised or fished foods constituted the essential diet of most of the people who lived on this island in the central Bahamas. By "surprisingly recently" I mean mere decades. It was a poor island, with limited electricity and brackish water drawn from shallow wells, pits really, chiseled from the soft carbonate rock. People lived in clusters of homes on the ridges, and farmed the few low-lying areas where there were snatches of semi-fertile soil. A simple life, remembered with fondness by the old people of the island. A hard life, too, no doubt. Two tiny government clinics supplemented by bush medicine. The nearest dentist in Nassau, 275 miles away.All changed now. The electrical grid has reached the most remote settlements, along with cable television. Sweet water is piped from a central reverse osmosis plant. I know of only one remaining person on the island who is familiar with native remedies. Farming has pretty much gone by the board. The community packing shed, where local produce was available, was damaged by hurricane flooding a few years ago and has not reopened. The industrial food chain -- bane and blessing -- has this little island firmly in its grip. New Zealand butter. Long-life milk from Italy. Frozen fish from Indonesia. Strawberries from California. Asparagus from Argentina. Water from Fiji. And every sort of packaged junk food you might want to eat made from Iowa corn and Persian Gulf oil.When we came here twenty years ago we caught the very end of a unique traditional way of life. And, of course, we were part of the cultural squeeze that brought it to an end. We came for the simplicity -- basic local food, gentle tempo, dark skies. We carried the virus of globalization. And the locals love it.(More tomorrow.)
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The eye of the mind
posted by Chet at 12:09 PM UTC
In recent days we have been watching Mercury, Jupiter and Venus in the western sky at sunset, with the crescent Moon moving from evening to evening along the line of planets. Together, planets and Moon slipped one after the other below the horizon as we sped on the spinning Earth at a thousand miles per hour to the east.The Moon and planets mark the plane of the ecliptic in the sky -- the plane of the solar system -- and night by night they drift among the stars as they and we make our great circuits around the Sun. On the darkest nights we can see a band of faint light reaching up from the horizon, the zodiacal light, sunlight reflected from meteoric dust lying in the plane of the solar system, leftover debris from the pancake of whirling dust and gas out of which the solar system was born.Another band of pale luminescence, the winter Milky Way, arches overhead from north to south, the light of billions of stars individually too faint to be visible to the unaided eye -- another plane, the plane of the galaxy, another whirling journey.A spinning Earth, in a spinning solar system, in a spinning galaxy! Wheels within wheels within wheels, like the vision of the prophet Ezekiel.And my flight isn't over yet. In the northwestern sky, in the constellation Andromeda, I can just make out a blur of light, too fuzzy to be a star, like a smudge on the dark windowpane of night. This is the central part of the Great Andromeda Galaxy, the closest spiral galaxy to our own, towards which we fall in another mutual motion.I stand in the darkness and try to feel my vertiginous flight. And I think of that blind old man kneeling on the floor of the Office of the Inquisition in Rome in 1633, having renounced his belief in the motion of the Earth, whispering -- as legend has it -- under his breath, "And yet it moves."
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Making a me, cell by cell
posted by Chet at 12:07 PM UTC
"A self, I thought, that's what I want: a pure/ production of the cells, like ivory/ or copper claws..." So begins a poem in Erica Funkhouser's newest collection of poems, Earthly. She is a splendid poet, with whom I once had the pleasure of spending a few lovely days. She teaches at MIT, and has an acute sensitivity to the natural world. Earthly, indeed.This particular poem, in which she longs for a natural self -- "I wanted her to show herself, to ache/ to brim, to banish all ambivalence..." -- is one of a number of sonnets in the new volume that pay homage to the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. The self she wishes for, this pure production of the cells, would "master me, and in her mastery/ I'd flourish like the brilliant spiral tusk/ advancing from the narwhal's alchemy/ to penetrate the sea's perpetual dusk."And like any good poem, this one makes me think, about just what is a self, and how a self is to a large extent a production of the cells, not pure perhaps, because in interaction with non-self from the first moment when the progenitor cell starts to divide -- two, four, eight, sixteen -- and a self begins emerging, like the tiniest tip of a narwhal's tusk, spiraling into a waiting world. Cells, oh yes, trillions of cells -- blood, bone, flesh, ivory teeth, copper nails, and more neural synapses that you can count, each one carefully potentiated by genes or experience -- a completely natural thing, no ghost in the machine, and yet, and yet, so tangled in ambivalence, in pangs of longing for the undefinable thing, in the seemingly perpetual dusk that haunts the darkest hours of the night. All those scientists at MIT working busily to discern the substance and dimensions of the natural self, and over there in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies the poet does her own burrowing into the mystery.
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X marks the spot
posted by Chet at 1:17 PM UTC
Another look at the Crab Nebula in this week's Musing.
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Growing up in the Milky Way
posted by Chet at 12:50 PM UTC
In early July, 1054, a blazing new star appeared in the constellation Taurus. For a time it was far and away the brightest thing in the night sky, except for the Moon. Then it faded away. This spectacular event was recorded by Chinese and Japanese astronomers, and perhaps in a pictograph by native Americans. It is a mystery why European records are silent, although I did describe here one potential reference from Ireland. Today, photographs show the remnants of an exploded star, still racing outwards, called the Crab Nebula. At the center is a city-sized pulsar, the collapsed core of the star, as dense as the nucleus of an atom and spinning furiously. The Crab is available to the amateur astronomer with a decent scope and a dark sky as a faint blur. Many a cold winter night I have gone looking for it.When I used to teach an introductory astronomy course, I had the students work with two photographs of the Crab Nebula, taken decades apart. They identified nodes of the twisted gas and -- carefully, very carefully! -- measured the distance from the central pulsar, using background stars to establish a common scale. Then they calculated backwards to the moment of explosion (assuming a constant rate of expansion). And, sure enough, got dates somewhere near the 11th century.A glimpse of the blur and the exercise with the photographs made the supernova come alive.The goal of my astronomy course was not just to convey a bunch of facts, but to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the imaginations of the students to accommodate cosmic space and time. Reaching out to that roiling cauldron of gas, 10 light-years wide, 6000 light-years away, was just one small step. Did they come away from these mind-stretching exercises as true children of the Milky Way? I doubt it. I taught the course for 30 years and I can't say that I fully appreciate what it means to live in a universe of 10 billion galaxies (at least) and more exploded stars than one can number. (Tomorrow: The Crab's ghostly X-ray aura.)(A cloudy yesterday cleared gloriously overnight for the Quadrantid meteor shower this morning between 4 and 5 AM. We saw approximate one per minute, including several bright enough to leave trails across the sky. A New Year's fireworks.)
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Debauched on light
posted by Chet at 12:40 PM UTC
And so it begins, The International Year of Astronomy, with the theme "The Universe, yours to discover," marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first observations through a telescope in 1609.According to the IYA2009 website, the celebration will portray astronomy as "a peaceful global scientific endeavor that unites astronomers in an international, multicultural family of scientists, working together to find answers to some of the most fundamental questions that humankind has ever asked."As upright primates, the sky is half of our visual field, but we give it only a tiny fraction of our attention. Food, drink, clothing, shelter, sex are all to be found close to the ground. What goes on above our heads is mostly irrelevant. Irrelevant to the body, that is. To the mind, and whatever it is we call spirit, the sky is supremely important. Every culture has put their chief gods in the sky. Sun, moon and stars figure prominently in the history of religion. Mathematics and science began in the sky. Few things evoke so profound a sense of awe as a dark sky ablaze with stars.In A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman writes: "To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes." Vision is the sense that puts us in touch with infinity.Ackerman suggests that perception is a form of grace. In Catholic theology, one must be disposed to grace to receive it. The International Year of Astronomy has as its purpose disposing us to grace -- grace capacious enough to contain the universe.
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Happy New Year -- from Anne (and Chet)
posted by Chet at 12:55 PM UTC
 Click to enlarge.
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Everything is holy
posted by Chet at 11:52 AM UTC
In writing my book Climbing Brandon, I drew heavily upon the work of John Carey, a scholar of early Irish Christianity at University College Cork in Ireland. According to Carey, for the early Irish Christians exceptional events do not occur because of the interventions of a supernatural being who suspends the ordinary course of things, but rather because of the astonishing (and holy) potentialities inherent in nature itself. For the authors of the early Irish Christian texts, a reluctance to believe in "the full extravagant strangeness of existence" amounted to blasphemy, say Carey. "The full extravagant strangeness of existence." I love that phrase. It should be engraved over the door of every science building in the world. And, as a matter of fact, something similar was carved over the door of the physics building at UCLA where I spent two years as a graduate student, Michael Faraday's familiar epigram: "Nothing is too wonderful to be true." Most religious people look for confirmation of their God in miraculous exceptions to nature's laws -- water to wine, resurrection from the dead, answered prayers, and so on. For the early Irish Christians, still in thrall to their druidic past, God was to be discovered in the extraordinary quality of ordinary events -- the rising and setting of the Sun, the call of the cuckoo, the rainbow, the aurora, the dew on the grass.The full extravagant strangeness of existence! I was thinking of that phase a few days ago when I held the walking stick insect in my hand. Who needs miracles when every jot and tittle of existence is shot through with glory? We should walk through the world with our jaws agape, breathless, singing alleluias. What the early Irish Christians had in common with modern scientists is a willingness to admit our ignorance about the greatest mysteries, and a sense of dumbstruck awe in the presence of the commonplace.
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Growing up
posted by Chet at 11:21 AM UTC
Two summers ago in Ireland I watched a mare give birth. Within minutes the foal was finding its legs. Soon it was scampering about. This past summer it was hard to tell the mother from her offspring.Meanwhile, for all of that time and more, human parents would be cuddling, feeding, burping, changing diapers, and otherwise tending a child toward eventual independence. Street children in big Third World cities cannot survive on their own unless they are at least six years old. In the developed nations we continue to coddle our kids until they have made it through puberty and adolescence.What's the deal? Why do we get stuck with such a long period of maturation on the part of our kids? Our nearest relatives, the chimps, are pretty much on their own by age 4. Female chimps are moms at 11, half the age at which the average human female breeds. Of course, chimps are dead of old age at 45, so they pay at the end for their faster start.Paleontologists exhaustively study the fossil fragments of our humanoid ancestors, especially children, for clues to childhood. The result seems to be that our nearest ancestors were more like chimps than like modern humans in the duration of dependence. An extended childhood appears to be unique to us, and the big question is why.One possibility is that delayed reproduction creates higher quality moms. Also, humans wean their infants twice as fast as chimps, which means human moms can pop out successive babies more quickly. No wonder then that we live so much longer that chimps and are so overwhelmingly numerous.I would guess that prolonged childhood has more to do with the development of culture. That little foal galloping around the meadow on day two pretty much already knew all it needs to know. We are still teaching our human kids at age 20, not just stuff like speech and the three Rs, but also Shakespeare, constitutional law, computer science, and the difference between right and wrong. Perhaps extended childhood and acculturation evolved together. By the way, I wrote last year about the Homo erectus fossil youth I called Nari, one of the most complete hominid fossil skeletons ever found. I said he was thought to be 11 or 12 years old, an estimate based on his height compared to modern humans. Now, microscopic study of Nari's tooth enamel suggests he was 8 years old. Kids grew up faster in those days.(These thoughts inspired by an article by -- appropriately -- Ann Gibbons called The Birth of Childhood, in the November 14 issue of Science. Nari photo credit: John Gurche.)
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Knowing the mind of God
posted by Chet at 11:53 AM UTC
 This photo appeared in Nature (or was it Science?) some months ago. Pope Benedict blessing Stephen Hawking on the occasion of the October meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The subject: "Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life." I dragged the photo onto my desktop, where it has been sitting ever since. I know it means something. I have not been able to figure out what.Which is to say, I've been trying to sort out my own reaction to the photo, which seems to reside somewhere between unworthy cynicism and congenial approval. The most powerful and revered religious person on Earth laying his hand upon one of the most brilliant minds in the history of humanity -- a mind locked in a body almost totally incapacitated by motor neuron disease. Which way is the energy flowing? Or does it flow both ways? Intellectuality and spirituality meeting and merging at that spot where thumb meets forehead.In his chair, the author of a book titled The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe. Standing with his left hand on Hawking's voice synthesizer, a man who understands himself to be custodian of the essential story of the origin and fate of the universe. Both men profess to be interested in knowing the mind of God. For Benedict, God's thoughts have been revealed directly in scriptures and tradition, and it is his responsibility as successor of Peter to see that the content of revelation is transmitted intact to future generations. For Hawking, God's thoughts will be discerned with increasing clarity by the ongoing theoretical and empirical pursuits to which he has given his remarkable life. Alas, as we know, there is an uneasy tension between the two readings of the mind of God. It would be lovely if we could forego all claims to knowing God's mind, and discern in the photograph a complete circle from pope's right hand to Hawking's mind to Hawking's voice-synthesizing computer to the pope's left hand to the pope's mind -- always-advancing empirical cosmology circling endlessly with the Christian message of human love.
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Is infallibility a virtue?
posted by Chet at 11:48 AM UTC
See this week's Musing. Expect Anne on New Year's Day.
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Where's Waldo
posted by Chet at 3:47 PM UTC
This morning I posted a pic of a walking stick. He (she?) must have been a juvenile, 'cause look at what I have now. This one is still alive and well and released to the wild. What grabby legs he has. When on my shirt, impossible to pull off. 
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Give that man a new drawing table
posted by Chet at 11:42 AM UTC
 Gabriel: Your Divine Excellency, you may remember a fellow who showed up here seventeen years ago by the name of Theodor Geisel. Calls himself Dr. Seuss.God: Well, of course I remember him. I remember everyone, in all 100 billion galaxies. I'm omniscient, you know.Gabriel: Yes, Sir. Of course. Anyway, this guy Geisel has some artistic talent so we assigned him to Earth Design, Animalia, in the Arthropoda department.God: I love that department! I have a particular fondness for beetles. Have this Geisel fellow design me some beetles.Gabriel: I suggested beetles, Sir, but he has come up with something so phantasmagorical I decided I better run it past you. Have a look. (He opens a box.)God: A stick? I though you said Animalia, not Plantae.Gabriel: Not a stick, Sir. It's an insect.God: No kidding, let me have a closer look. (He peers.) This fellow Geisel has a sense of humor, doesn't he? I doubt if even I could have come up with this.Gabriel: It has certain advantages, Sir. For the insect, I mean. It is virtually invisible when perched on a bush. Invisible to predators.God: But I love seeing my creatures eat one another. Tooth and claw, and all that.Gabriel: Yes, I know, Sir. But this adds a bit of fun to the chase. Or so says Geisel.God: And look. The "stem" is brown and the "twigs" are green. How cunning!Gabriel: Just like a real bush. God: What does he propose to call it?Gabriel: A walking stick. (Chuckles.) But I think something like Phasmatodea is rather more dignified. God: I like it, I like it. One of the more intelligent designs we've seen from that department. I think it's a keeper.
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What is it about tomatoes?
posted by Chet at 4:20 PM UTC
There's something about growing tomatoes that's different than growing onions, say, or green peppers. It must be that brilliant bloom of red -- tomato red -- amidst the green. Those little buds of improbable color that swell into fat crimson globes. And for no other reason, apparently, than that we can argue about whether they are fruits or vegetables.The first thing I do when I arrive on the island is acquire a half dozen tomato plants, usually from Marco the nurseryman, but this year from the friend of a friend. Then fill the pots with last year's compost and potting soil from Marco. Nothing but sand on our scruffy acre. All of which I mention so that I can recommend Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, a thick compendium of everything a curious and scientifically-inclined person would want to know about food. My wife has her Fanny Farmer and Julia Child. I have my McGee.So I know that tomatoes started out as small, bitter berries growing on bushes in the west coast deserts of South America, that they were domesticated in Mexico (the name comes from the Aztec term for "plump fruit", tomatl, and that Europeans were slow to adopt them because of their resemblance to deadly nightshade, a poisonous plant. In fact, tomatoes are in the nightshade family, plants that stockpile chemical defenses, mostly bitter alkaloids. It took many generations of selective breeding to render tomatoes harmless.Do you want to know what chemicals give tomatoes their flavor? McGee has it all. He'll tell you too the chemical reason why vine ripened tomatoes are more favorable than the ones you buy at the supermarket. So what? you say. Shut up an eat. Not me. I love knowing the secret history of what goes into my mouth. Where it came from. What it's related to. And why a particular arrangement of atoms -- carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, almost entirely -- stuck together like Tinker Toys, accounts for the flavors we enjoy. Citrus. Eucalyptus. Mint. Clove. Cinnamon. Anise. Vanilla. Thyme. Oregano. Tarragon. My wife has her herb garden. I have McGee's lovely diagrams of organic compounds.
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