Stargazing to Randy Described Eternity [repost]

Marie-Claire is very busy educating the youth of Canada. Too busy to even listen to music, which is about her favorite thing to do, after educating the youth of Canada. She was not too busy to make it to ScienceOnline 2013. Because the Song of the Week concept traces its roots back to ScienceOnline 2012, we thought it would be fitting to take you back to that very first post – doodly-doo, doodly-doo, doodly-doo…

Emerging out the door of the pub on winter night, you bow your head and tighten your shoulders to keep the chill at bay. A few lilting steps might catch a dusting of snow. It takes a minute or so before the stars on the horizon catch your eye. It’s a crisp clear night. Swinging your head quickly upwards the stars take your breath away. The Milky Way is massive and scrawled across the sky.

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No song captures that feeling as well as Built to Spill’s Randy Described Eternity from their 1997 classic Perfect from Now On. A minute of slow, slightly off kilter guitar opens suddenly into full, expansive sheets of sound. The song kind of hits you in the chest. The lyrics themselves attempt to describe the longest time imaginable, but the feeling is actually one of infinite space. The guitar melodies are complex, layered and looped, creating an impression of boundlessness. In the repeated line “stop making that sound,” the sparse story even includes the requisite “shut up” for your friend who has failed to notice the sky and is chattering on about something irrelevant. After a night at the pub when the stars catch your eye and you look breathlessly up in wonder, this is the song that should be playing.

Science Caturday: We haz winner!

Over the weekend, we tried an experiment to let you caption the Science Caturday post. And we have a winner:

LOLCAT by Kim

For her efforts, Kim will be receiving a lovely, painted, old-school, glass petri dish in the unique style of our own Michele Banks. Continue reading “Science Caturday: We haz winner!”

Sunday Science Poem: The Epicurean theory of vision, plus bedwetting in ancient Rome

640px-Ercolano03For those of you looking for a break from the pre-game show, here’s this week’s reading of The Nature of Things.

Discard, for the moment, everything you know about vision – about light sources that emit photons of various frequencies, about photons that pass through or reflect from materials before impinging on the photoreceptor cells in your retina, stimulating your optic nerve, and generating an image in your brain. As we set aside our modern knowledge and begin from scratch to think about the surprisingly knotty problem of how visual images are faithfully transmitted and perceived across the distance between an object and our eyes, it’s not hard to understand why Lucretius’ Epicurean theory of vision is so convoluted and not very explanatory.

Lucretius didn’t know anything about scattered and reflected photons, but he deeply believed that the world could be explained by the action of particles. So his theory of vision in Book IV of The Nature of Things is based on objects emitting particles:

Let me begin
by saying there are images of things - a sort of skin
shed from the surfaces of objects, from the outer layer -
films that drift about this way and that upon the air…”
- Book IV, lines 29-32

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: The Epicurean theory of vision, plus bedwetting in ancient Rome”

The End of the World, 1985: A Post-apocalyptic tropical paradise

Beach_in_key_westWithin science fiction, there is a great tradition of the oddball post-apocalyptic novel, pioneered by Philip Dick in Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) and Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny, 1976). It is a tradition still thriving today in books like Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon (1995) and Ryna Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife (2012), and it includes Denis Johnson’s lyrical Fiskadoro. The oddball post-apocalyptic novel is not concerned with the gritty realities of survival; instead, it takes place in a less lethal and much more hallucinatory setting that is populated with various hucksters, grotesques, dreamers, and generally confused people who are trying to figure out just what the hell is going on.

The post-apocalyptic setting of Fiskadoro is a group of small fishing communities in the paradise of the Florida Keys, about sixty years after a nuclear war destroyed North America and probably much of the rest of the world. Life here is based on scraps of the pre-holocaust world: physical scraps, scraps of language, scraps of identity, and scraps of awareness of the birth of the present world. Salvaged car seats make up the living room furniture, and people speak in a combination of broken English and Spanish. The residents of these villages piece together their identities by assuming names of celebrities nobody can any longer recall, or grandiose but largely irrelevant titles like ‘Manager of the Miami Symphony Orchestra’. Continue reading “The End of the World, 1985: A Post-apocalyptic tropical paradise”

ChocolateFest: The Meat Lover’s Guide to Chocolate

Mmmmmm Chocolate by Tim Sackton (CC BY-SA)
Mmmmmm Chocolate by Tim Sackton (CC BY-SA)

Last weekend, I participated in Portland’s annual ChocolateFest. If you’ve never been to a chocolate festival and you like delicious things, I would recommend checking one out sometime. The Portland ChocolateFest, which I have been told is one of the largest in the country, is what I imagine a farmers’ market would look like if Willy Wonka put on farmers’ markets. As you might suppose, ChocolateFest is flush with sweet treats, confections, and rich sugary goodness, which is why I decided to highlight the other side of chocolate in my cooking demonstrations. The following recipes (along with the usual scientific and culinary snidbits), presented to both the denizens of this year’s ChocolateFest and the loyal patrons of this pub, are what I like to call The Meat Lover’s Guide to Chocolate. Continue reading “ChocolateFest: The Meat Lover’s Guide to Chocolate”