1960 PopSci offers a glimpse into optimism, darkness of Cold War America

September 08, 2012 in Blog, Science & Environment, Writing

The most immediately notable thing about this 1960 issue of Popular Science I picked up a vintage market is the smell. It smells, heavily, of chlorine. Not just chlorine, it smells like an indoor whirlpool Jacuzzi, like filmy chlorinated water and aqua blue PVC, with a vinyl cover holding down vapors that make the nose and eyes burn.

The smell isn’t relevant to the content, and it’s specific to this one water-damaged copy. But it’s a fitting smell, and it conjures images of spilled martinis, one-piece bathing suits and foamy wet chest hair. Consumer products awash in chemicals and exciting new compounds, promising joy and leisure.

Blue Ant > Faraday Pouch

August 30, 2012 in Geek, Science & Environment, Writing

Zero History operative Milgrim is kept on a tight leash by his handler Ollie Sleight. He supplies Milgrim with nothing but an unusual phone and what he calls a “Faraday pouch” for carrying his passport.

Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. passport…You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.

The pouch plays a role in Milgrim’s evolution as his involvement in corporate espionage deepens.

Blue Ant > Floating Bed

August 25, 2012 in Geek, Science & Environment, Writing

Hollis Henry stays at Bigend’s Vancouver apartment toward the end of Spook Country, and gets a mysterious warning call on the way there:

“Do you have any piercings?” he asked.
They took a right.
“Excuse me?”
“Piercings. If you do I must warn you about the bed in the master bedroom. The top floor.”
“The bed.”
“Yes. Apparently you don’t want to crawl under it if you have any magnetic bits. Steel, iron. Or a pacemaker. Or a mechanical watch. the designers never mentioned that, when they showed me the plans. It’s entirely about the space underneath, visually. Magnetic levitation. But now I have to warn each guest in turn. Sorry.”

Blue Ant > I started a Tumblr

August 23, 2012 in Arts & Culture, Blog, Geek, Science & Environment, Writing

I've been wanting to start a Tumblr about a particular topic as a hobby because I have such an overabundance of free time. Nothing was really striking me, but I've been reading "Zero History" by William Gibson, and I remembered, particularly in his newer novels, how dense they are with references. Some are real, some are not real, some of them are right on the brink of being real. I remember when I saw Gibson do a reading for the release of the new book, and during the Q&A, he was asked about the potential of hyperlinks in ebooks. He sort of shrugged at the idea, but answered that, since the Internet became widespread, when he writes, he doesn't feel the need to explain everything he mentions. It's as though novels are now are somewhat suspended in a cloud of information readily at the fingertips of almost every reader.

Fifty pages in and I found myself on the subway, googling references on my phone to see if he made it up or if it's a real thing that's out there. Also in his newer novels, he writes in present day. Gibson is noted as saying "The future is here — it's just not evenly distributed." His books are filled with existing items that are on the very fringe of awareness, or on the brink of becoming mainstream. It makes for a participatory reading experience, and it's a reason he's one of my favorite authors.

And so, the Tumblr. The very geeky Tumblr. For now known as Blue Ant after the corporate identity of eccentric, wealthy puppet-master Hubertus Bigend, whose curiosity drives the events of Gibson's most recent three novels. In it, I'll pick some little item mentioned in the book and explore the story behind it. It will be fun. And it will let me write little pieces about cool things. The general topics will be fashion, marketing, computing, design, corporate espionage, all great stuff even if you have no clue who William Gibson is.

I'll repost stuff on the website. Here's the inaugural post:

Where do those songs stuck in your head come from? Everywhere.

June 02, 2012 in Science & Environment, Writing

Even something as tuneless as reading a psychology research paper can get a song stuck in your head. In my case, it was “Mistaken for Strangers” by The National, which has a quirky drumbeat that is particularly sticky. It’s like, bum BUM bumbum badabum, bum BUM bumbum badabum. And so on, you get the idea.

Ok, this particular paper is about getting songs stuck in your head, so while it may be ironic, it wasn’t completely counterintuitive that it would happen to me while reading it (the song is mentioned in the study).

But the research in question, which sought to classify the circumstances that lodge little tunes in our brains — Involuntary Musical Imagery, INMI, or just “earworms” — found that the set of contributing factors are more varied and complex than you might think. Earworms are ubiquitous, and the circumstances associated with them run the gamut from banal to mathematic to profound.

For some older immigrants, 'the Internet is everything'

May 21, 2012 in Science & Environment, Writing

There’s a growing body of evidence that the Internet can be an empowering tool for marginalized populations, and a recent study tells some striking stories of how it’s been used by one uniquely isolated community.

In the early 1990s, when Gorbachev reopened the borders of the declining Soviet Union, many thousands of Russian Jews fled to Israel, where there were no restrictions against Jewish immigration.

Scott, Amundsen and the persistent thrill of the "Race to the End"

May 17, 2012 in Arts & Culture, Science & Environment, Writing

The story of Scott and Amundsen racing to the South Pole at the dawn of the 20th century only gains dimension as time passes. The mythical (you could say tabloid) aspects are as captivating as ever, but it’s the humanity that bleeds out from the details over time that has us returning to the story 100 years later. I recently read “Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole,” an illustrated account of the competing expeditions, and the one that didn’t make it back. It was a compelling and emotional retelling of the events that left Robert Falcon Scott and four of his fellow British explorers dead in their tent, not long after being beaten to the Pole by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team.

LSD helped treat alcoholism, according to analysis of 1960s trials

March 10, 2012 in Portfolio, Science & Environment, Writing

The patients, almost all of them men, were checked in for alcohol abuse sometime in the late 1960s. One day, instead of the usual therapy for addiction at the time, they were each taken into a quiet room, given varying levels of explanation of what was about to happen (for many of them, none at all), and given a single hit of LSD. The results included euphoria, powerful emotions, and psychological insights that often felt like a new lease on life. A few freaked out, but a little music helped.

Online daters lie on their profiles, but their hearts are in the right place

March 05, 2012 in Science & Environment, Writing

When singles sit down to create their profiles on Match.com or OkCupid, they have but a mouse and keyboard to answer a philosophically weighty question — Who am I? Not only that, but why would someone else love me? They have to capture who they really are in a way that is most attractive, but won't disappoint upon flesh-and-blood scrutiny.

Rare, enormous insect was hiding out on this remote island

February 29, 2012 in Science & Environment, Writing

A monstrous insect thought long-extinct has been clinging to survival on a tiny spike of volcanic rock that juts out of the Tasman Sea off the coast of Australia. Considered extinct since 1930 at its original home of Lord Howe Island, the six-inch-long, nocturnal bug nicknamed "tree lobster" has survived in a colony of only 30 or so insects on a nearby sliver of an island called Ball's Pyramid. Robert Krulwich chronicles the Lord Howe stick insect's rise from the dead at his NPR blog.

Like so many colonial mishaps, the rare stick insect was thought entirely wiped out when a British ship carrying black rats crashed near Lord Howe Island in 1918. The rats made it to shore and devoured the entire species in two years — or so we thought.