Joshuah Bearman

Charismatic Megafauna = Less Charismatic Megapoops = Ultra-Charismatic Megascarabs

Such as once existed in Pleistocene-era South America.

Yeti Researcher Reconsidered, By A Smarty Pants English Student

 

I guess I finally rode McSweeney's coattails into a graduate English department: McSweeney's 17 forms a key part of the honors thesis of one Flora Feltham, at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Some time ago, she emailed me the following:

The section I'm currently working on is about the blurry distinction between fiction and non-fiction in the issue and how the dynamic between the fictive and the non-fictive informs our relationship with a potentially literary text. What I would love to know, then, is what degree of authenticity your fantastic Yeti Researcher has?

Of course, I love over-intellectualizing my own work — I mean, who doesn't, really? — so I will admit that I was thrilled that someone else decided to pile on. I answered Flora's questions, and a little while ago, she sent me the relevant chapter of her thesis. Incredibly, Yeti Researcher is mentioned in the same breath as Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden, part of which is a scientific work in the form of a poem:

This combination of “metaphor and scientific material” (Emery, 1) – a tangle of fictional rhetoric and factual content – is, obviously, uncommon to both literature and scientific writing. About 200 years later, “Yeti Researcher” jumbles up the conventions of fiction and non-fiction in an equally atypical style. The difference is that Darwin was writing demonstrable scientific information using the medium of poetry, whereas the editorial-board at “Yeti Researcher” uses the conventions of scientific prose to write about a fictional creature in the context of a literary magazine.

Flattered!

Fletham later goes on to offer an analysis about how stylistic prose choices helped define Yeti Researcher as a distinct form of "non-narrative fiction," which itself is situated in turn in the grand sweep of literature and fiction in our fragmented (super-post-)modern culture. Whew! And by way of my answers, Feltham addresses the question most often put to me back when Yeti Researcher first came out:

“[T]he idea was to make something that McSweeney's readers would think is amusingly, fascinatingly compelling and that bigfoot researchers would be able to read with satisfaction” (Bearman, e-mail). Thus, though their intention was fictional, every step of the research and writing process was subject to rigorous fact-checking in accordance with the pseudo-scientific field they were working within: the information in “Flores Man and Sumatra’s Orang pendek” could “have survived the fact-checking process at a real magazine." They did not make-up any of the information, insofar as, according to common-sense it was not already made up. “[T]he information in the articles is real. By which I mean we didn't make up any bigfoot sightings, records, theories, etc. It was all researched and cited.”

OK, so the ads were fake. And the Classifieds. And Jim Shepard's contribution, which was clearly a piece of fiction masquerading as a real document inside a magazine of fiction masquerading as a real document! And there may have been a few other fudged things. But otherwise, YR (as we at the Society for Cryptic Hominid Investigation like to call it) stands by its work. Which, I'm now reminded, was really fun to put together. Does etiquette say that four years is too late to publically acknowledge Mark Sundeen, Jim Ruland, John Silver, Jim Shepard, Erik Bluhm, Eli Horowitz, and Brian McMullen? Hope not!

All this nostalgia made me go back and take a look at the fine writing and designing and editing that went into YR, which, if you don't own that pile of ingeniously disguised fake junk mail that was issue 17, is hard to come by. Which is why, if anyone is interested, I'm going to make the whole thing available right here!

With The Fire Threat Waning, Let Us Reconsider The Legacy of the Mt. Wilson Observatory

Praise be to the slightly moist, changing winds — they helped spare Mt. Wilson. Or so it seems for now. Deep breath taken. And now please allow me to pull from the files a feature I wrote for the LA Weekly about the Mt. Wilson observatory. It is one of the first things I wrote, and it remains a favorite, partly out of a multi-layered nostalgia: for the old LA Weekly; for the early, exciting days of a newly found writing career; and for the sheer awe of visiting the Hooker dome, which, unless you're pretending to be a science journalist from, say, the LA Weekly, is difficult to do.

In case you haven't heard on the news yet, the Hooker dome was the biggest telescope in the world for 50 years, and it's where Edwin Hubble first discovered that there are galaxies. Many many many other galaxies in the universe. Then, he discovered from the light of those galaxies that the universe is expanding. From that came the Big Bang theory, and modern cosmology. All from right there, above Altadena. Even Einstein had to rethink things and came up for a visit. Intrigued? Then you will enjoy:

THE GREAT DOME

Before the early film impresarios set up shop here for the constant sunshine — a full decade, in fact, before Carl Laemmle’s 230-acre chicken ranch became Universal City — someone had already noticed the light in Los Angeles. That someone was George Ellery Hale, an astronomer from back East who had developed a way to photograph the sun. Hale studied the sun daily, so he needed good light. And in 1904 he built a big version of his spectroheliograph atop Mount Wilson, about 10 miles northeast of Los Angeles, to take advantage of the calm air and the 300 cloudless days the area gets each year. The site grew, with four more telescopes added over the next decade and a half, the last of which was the Hooker 100-inch — then the largest in the world, and the instrument with which Edwin Hubble discovered (or proved, depending on whom you talk to) that the universe was expanding.

I moved to Pasadena in 1981 when my father took a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Mount Wilson has been with me ever since. It’s the tallest summit in our little stretch of Sierra Madres, and you can see it from the entire city. Since I was 14, it’s been framed right in the center of my bedroom window (I’m looking at it right now). My father is a physicist — to the aging crack about smarts that went, “What are you, some kind of rocket scientist?” he always responded, “Yes indeed!” — and he gave my brother and me an early start with the sciences. Next to our charts of the solar system, we had mural-sized posters of eclipses, Io’s angry volcanoes and Europa’s mottled tundra, with its zigzagging furrows. I was up on quasars, brown dwarves, pulsars, the date of Voyager II’s expected Saturn flyby. And I knew that Hubble made one of the most important cosmological discoveries, one that fundamentally changed our idea of the universe — even Einstein’s idea of the universe — right up there on Mount Wilson. There’s a canyon below the mountain, and right at the edge, hidden by a barricade of oleander, is a little platform where I liked to take girls in high school, not only because it was secluded but also because we could talk about the string of lights up on the mountain and how they gave us the universe that we know. Those lights blinked slowly over my first kiss.

Despite all this, I had never been to Mount Wilson until recently. Like most people, I assumed that the observatory no longer operated — that light pollution had rendered the telescopes ineffective decades ago. I am admonished about this on my first visit by Don Nicholson, the associate director of the Mount Wilson Institute, who explains that the Hooker and the other telescopes have been in daily use since they were built (except for an eight-year stretch when the Hooker was offline for lack of funding). A full staff continues to use the daylight to watch the sun; and the night sky, which filters through some of the world’s calmest air, affords what astronomers call good “seeing” — down to half an arc-second on some nights, a resolution that, as the convivial octogenarian Nicholson says, “makes other astronomers drool.” And lately, Mount Wilson has been home to some pioneering technologies that make the observatory as relevant as ever. Despite the smog and the encroaching city, Los Angeles still gives us a great sky.

The Mount Wilson grounds occupy about 40 forested acres atop a 5,700-foot peak that overlooks much of Southern California, from Mount San Jacinto to the Malibu hills. Its spot on the ridge is tight, almost precarious. From some points the crest becomes so narrow you’ll look south and find Catalina floating in the mist and then turn around to see the Angeles National Forest stretching off toward the Mojave Desert. From these places, the view due east is divided equally between a solid urban grid and empty wilderness.

The solar observatories on Mount Wilson are imposing towers, although the giant structures we see from the city are the nearby broadcast facilities. Together, the various spires and domes feel sci-fi: They give the impression, especially at night, of some kind of far-off research colony. People do live there, and for them there is a cluster of buildings that provides housing, a galley for cooking, and a library.

Dwarfing them all is the dome of the Hooker 100-inch telescope, which is settled on a north-facing, downward-sloping promontory that puts it out of sight of city lights. It looks like what we imagine observatories to be because it set the standard: a massive white metal cap, raised on a pedestal, with a wide arc of a door that opens to reveal the cage and optics that make the heavens visible.

The Hooker was finished in 1917, after three years of construction, and it’s built like a dreadnought — solid steel top to bottom, a massive complex of structure, supports and bulkhead doors. “They didn’t have finite element analysis back then,” Nicholson says as we enter the open floor of the observatory. “So they overengineered. They just worked it out on the back of an envelope and doubled the numbers.” The telescope weighs 50 tons and the dome twice that, and both are moving parts: While the scope swivels, the full range of the sky is reached by turning the entire dome. The reflecting element at the bottom of the scope is 9,000 pounds of wine-bottle glass from the Saint Gobain bottle works in France. It remains the largest solid plate mirror ever cast. All of this was hauled up the tortuous Mount Wilson Toll Road by burro and a few specially designed Mack trucks, which, as you’d expect of trucks built in 1917, often got stuck and required assistance from the donkeys and their drivers.

To the dismay of many visitors (including me), the Hooker, like all professional observatories since, doesn’t have an eyepiece. You can’t bend over, squint, and see Jupiter. The whole apparatus is guided electronically and mostly records data. But photographic images taken by Edwin Hubble more than 70 years ago were the basis for Mount Wilson’s most important scientific discovery. Hubble, with the help of his historically neglected partner, Milton Humason, used a spectrograph mounted at the top of the telescope to expose spectral images onto photographic plates. Over eight years, Hubble took thousands of exposures, which together revealed something extraordinary.

Hubble was measuring the distances and velocities of galaxies outside our own, and he found that all of them, in every direction, were receding from us. And the farther away they were, the faster they were moving. This relationship could be quantified, and the resulting number became Hubble’s constant. Until then, many assumed the universe was fairly static; that the firmament was fixed; that it was, had been, and always would be the same general size and shape. But Hubble proved that the universe was, in fact, expanding, and he could say how fast. One of the conventional ways to visualize the phenomenon is to imagine a balloon with dots all over it. When the balloon fills with air, the space between all the dots expands. No two dots are getting closer together. From the perspective of any one dot — or galaxies, in the case of the universe — all the others are moving away. The expanding-universe idea quickly led to the Big Bang theory: If the universe is getting bigger all the time, it must have been smaller before. In the beginning, then, it all started in one place, as one point, a singularity.

Today, technology has made Hubble’s photographic plates obsolete, but it is also giving the observatory a new lease on life. From the catwalk outside Hooker’s dome, you can see a few small silver domes poking out over the trees below. These are the components of a nearly finished stellar interferometer, which is an instrument that receives the light from multiple observatories and combines it into an image with the resolution of a hypothetical telescope that would be far too big to build. Interferometry is not new; there are many such instruments already, including an older one on Mount Wilson. But this new one, which should be fully functional this spring, will be among the world’s most powerful.

The aging Hooker, too, has been upgraded. Five years ago, it was outfitted with an adaptive optics system, which uses a deformable mirror and computers to monitor and correct in real-time blurring caused by light in the atmosphere. It undoes the stars’ twinkle to get a much sharper image. When this system is in operation, the Hooker lens will be able to get the same quality images as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Anyone with a research project can rent the Hooker at $1,800 a night and make use of its improved capabilities. But when no one else is in, the telescope carries on the age-old task of mapping the night sky. That ongoing project, called “HK” for the spectrum in which the observations are made, is in its 21st year, and is less than half finished. One night, Jim Strogan is the telescope operator on hand, taking data on the calcium flux of about 60 stars. “Depending on the time of year, you can do more or less stars,” he says as he steps onto the telescope mounts to check something out. “You take data on each one for a few minutes, and then move on.”

Astronomers live differently from the rest of us. They are true night owls, sometimes sleeping through daylight entirely. Their world goes by sidereal time, with days that are 23 hours and 56 minutes and clocks that match ours only twice a year. They think about position in terms of declination and right ascension instead of longitude and latitude. They brave the elements and, in the case of Mount Wilson, the cougars that sometimes come out of the forest to forage.

And they don’t mind isolation. The act of astronomy is a lonely activity. The people who live on Mount Wilson call the dormitory building the Monastery. Nowhere does it feel more monastic than at the desk of the scope itself, where one or sometimes a few dedicated astronomers stay up through the night to study the sky. The place is cold, cavernous and — since the lights go out when the telescope is active — very, very dark. Only the scope operator’s desk is lit, the sole beacon in the enormity of the dome, except those dim lights coming in from the sky.

There is also no noise, or any sound at all, but for the Geiger counter-like crackle of a detector on the telescope that gives audio cues to the operator. (Each pop is one photon, so the more light, the louder the crackle; when you’re right on a star, the detector’s speaker really sputters.) When the operator is working, the place is an empty, dark metal cavity, alternately silent and filled with electronic hiss, and it can be downright spooky.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to see why people want to be there. Although astronomy is not very glamorous — there are few “Eureka!”s and even Hubble’s discovery was built on others’ ideas — the appeal is in just being there. Strogan, for example, is a former auto mechanic and astronomy hobbyist who made it to the controls of the field’s Holy Grail, and for him there’s nothing like sitting for a night at the desk. “It’s tough living up here,” he says. “But the hard part is the downtime, when we’re not working. The fun is when we’re in here.” If you like the night sky, what better place to be? After all, when the dome opens, it really is just you and the heavens.

Which is an unavoidably impressive feeling. When I first see the door slide out to reveal the stars and an invading sliver of moonlight, I can’t help wondering if the mere sense of place influenced Hubble’s discovery: Looking out into that expanse, how could you not find an expanding universe? From Mount Wilson, it’s easy to see why the early narratives and rituals of civilization were rooted in the stars — they tell us a lot, especially now that we can add scientific understanding to superstition. The night sky, as those of us who seldom see it forget, invites both awe and interpretation. The first marvel is that the stars are really there, drifting around a universe indescribably far beyond our scale. More startling is that we actually know a lot about these things and can derive scientific, if not metaphysical, meaning from them.

This, for me, has always been the essence of Hubble’s discovery — that science constantly navigates the edge of fathoming the unfathomable. From lines exposed onto glass plates, we can deduce the nature of a cosmos that will always be outside our experience. Like relativity, or other great discoveries, that kind of intuition is sort of the cosmological equivalent of Hitchcock’s zoom-dolly shot: It puts us, uneasily, at the center of a center-less universe. Human intellect keeps revealing, in very certain detail, a universe that is indifferent to it. And that’s the rub: We learn ever more about a physical world that can be described but not fully understood. Every time science answers How? at a place like Mount Wilson, the Why? question only looms larger. As a friend rejoined after I tried to explain Hubble’s discovery: “OK, so, the universe must be expanding, because the dots on the balloon are moving away from each other. But,” — he turned, leaned in, and added with a pointed finger — “then who’s blowing up the balloon?”

Just What We Need

Twitter functionality inside your actual brain.

Wouldn't You Know, As Soon As You Name A Robot Adam

It starts thinking. Not only is Adam a robot, he is a robot scientist, a geneticist with a minor in evolutionary biology who is looking for genes that code for a certain type of protein. Moreover, once they turned the thing on it made a discovery. If that sounds like the machine that some day in the future the last rag tag and of humans will dust off to discover the prototype of the mechanized killers that roam the earth, then you have not seen Terminator Salvation, which spent two hours trying to prove that the real worry about the post-Skynet future is that the human dialogue will be more robotically deadly than any machine.

The Recto Rotor

 

This was a real product. Patented and everything. Because you wouldn't want anyone stealing your idea for dilator that can cure your “piles, constipation, and prostrate problems” and lubricate the rectum through secreting holes in the tip. The motto: “large enough to be efficient, small enough for anyone over 15 years old.”

This, from a list of ill-advised "men's products," which also includes a chest hair toupee, a radioactive jockstrap, and a "spermatic truss," a metal apparatus designed to forcibly prevent erections.

Quit Giving Me Those Puppy Dog Eyes

Because I know you're trying to fool me -- or rather, you're trying to fool my pituitary gland:

A dog’s gaze trig­gers re­lease of the so-called “trust hor­mone” ox­y­to­cin in own­ers, ac­cord­ing to Jap­a­nese re­search­ers. Ox­y­to­cin, pro­duced by the pi­tu­i­tary gland at the base of the brain, has been im­pli­cat­ed in bond­ing be­hav­iors in an­i­mals in­clud­ing hu­mans. Ex­pe­ri­ments have even found that sniff­ing ox­y­to­cin in­creases a per­son’s trust­ful­ness of others.

Climate Change Is Here. And Will Get Worse. But At Least, We'll Be Drunk!

An interesting photo essay in Scientific American, starting with Darfur, whose war has been fueled by sustained drought. Normally, the pastoralists and farmers lived side by side. But a decades-long rain failure mean the land couldn't sustain both, and farmers started fencing off fields. As always, what seems to be an ethnopolitical battle is really one of resources, as the nomadic arabs sided with Khartoum against the farming tribes.

Along with that are the usual threats to the Great Barrier Reef and American Gulf Coast (the point is made that although scientists are reluctant to lay blame for Katrina directly on global warming, insurers are not, and have hired climatologists to assess the likely future costs to them). Most surprising was the epidemic last year of chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever, in Castiglione di Cervia, a small village in northern Italy. Why, more mosquitoes, and earlier, because of mild winters and hotter summers. Yes: the first outbreak of a tropical disease in European in modern times. 

But hey -- if things are looking bad, at least there will be more wine to drown the sorrows! Turns out the warming latitudes are making more land available for more wine. England has more land in wine production than at any time since the 12th Century, when there was a brief global warming. Not only is there more wine, it's stronger. And better. A 1.8-degree F (1-degree C) rise in temperature yielded a boost of 13 rating points!

A Star Is Born, At Livermore Labs

Or will be, next year, when the world's largest laser turns on. After that spooky hexagon at Saturn's North Pole --



-- turned out not to be an infant second sun, Livermore Labs got fed up. Hey -- we're not waiting for 2010 for our odyssey; we're going to create our own sun, right here, on earth, in cozy Northern California. How do you create your own star? Just fire up the National Ignition Facility:

What does the ominously named/looking scientific instrument/doomsday machine do exactly (besides either saving the world -- or destroying it)? Here's the director, Ed Moses:

"We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."

There doesn't seem to be the same loopy luddite jeremiad broadside against the NIF as there was with RHIC at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider last year. I guess if you're inclined to be worried about the big lights out, it's better to go inside a new star than an accidental black hole. Flip the switch!

Girls DO HAVE THE COOTIES!

Using "powerful gene-sequencing techniques," a research Team at UC Boulder found that "not only do human hands harbor far higher numbers of bacteria species than previously believed, women have a significantly greater diversity of microbes on their palms than men."

Diversity is one way of putting it; the team "detected and identified more than 4,700 different bacteria species across 102 human hand.s" And don't let them fool you by "washing their hands": 

"The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise, and so was the greater diversity of bacteria we found on the hands of women," said Fierer. The study also showed that the diversity of bacteria on individual hands was not significantly affected by regular hand washing, he said.

New York Times Xinjiang Cover Up!

Oh sure, put Xinjiang on A1 but stay silent on what everyone really wants to know -- what happened to the  gerbils? Mummies are pretty nifty, yes, but there is a bigger story in Xinjiang, one that the mainstream news organizations wouldn't touch back in 2003 and which I, Joshuah Bearman, investigative reporter extraordinaire, blew the lid off for McSweeney's 14: the horde of giant gerbils eating china. This story is 100% true, beginning with the Reuters news item that described "the worst rodent disaster since 1993." The told us the gerbils were coming. They told us they couldn't be stopped. They told us the Chinese government was breeding eagles to fight them. And then they told us nothing. A news blackout. What happened? That is what I sought to find out:

And so began a fact-finding mission that describes:

1. Rodent drumming
2. Too many koala bears
3. Psychedelic toads
4. Desert horticulture
5. the Great Plague
6. Quizno’s ads
7. The biogeography of the mountain beaver, which apparently is neither a beaver nor lives in the mountains.
8. How quietly gerbils make poops.
9. And  let me remind you once again that it is all 100% true.

Here it is in full, for those who dare:

One word: Plastics

Before DDT was banned, enough of it was used that every single living organism absorbed trace amounts of the pesticide. Apparently Bisphenol A, a component of ordinary plastic, is almost as ubiquitous:

scientists analyzed urine from some 2,500 people who had been recruited between 2003 and 2004 for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Roughly 92 percent of the individuals hosted measurable amounts of BPA, according to a report in the January Environmental Health Perspectives. It's the first study to measure the pollutant in a representative cross-section of the U.S. population.

Global Cooling

Just when we get our Prius, they come out with the quick fix:

 Giving Earth an Umbrella

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
22 February 2008

Spraying millions of metric tons of sulfate particles into the atmosphere could reverse some human-caused global warming, a new study shows. But the simulations also reveal that the technique, which mimics the short-term cooling effects of volcanic eruptions, could chill the planet if overdone.

Alarmed by the lack of progress by governments in finding ways to slow emissions of CO₂, climate researchers have begun to examine so-called geoengineering schemes (ScienceNOW, 9 November 2007). One method involves injecting large amounts of sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere. Like the particles emitted during volcanic eruptions, sulfate aerosols cool the Earth by blocking a portion of the sun's rays. Previous studies of how such a scheme would lower Earth's temperature used back-of-the-envelope calculations. Instead of simulating the behavior of aerosols, researchers have turned down the intensity of the sun manually in their models.

  In the new work, published in Geophysical Research Letters late last month, researchers modified an established climate model to gauge the effects of varying aerosol amount and size. The findings confirmed the previous rough estimates that releasing large amounts of sulfates can reverse some impacts of higher carbon emissions. For example, in a simulated world where the atmospheric CO₂ levels were double today's values--a scenario many scientists believe likely--models predict that Earth will warm by more than 2°C. Adding a million metric tons a year of smaller sulfate aerosols to the stratosphere reduced that increase to 1°C and forestalled some predicted effects on precipitation, including more rain in the Southern Ocean and along the equator. "Geoengineering pushes the climate more towards a climate that looks like today's," says atmospheric scientist Philip Rasch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which conducted the study.

But the models also suggest that the scheme could go too far: Adding excess sulfur could increase ice in Antarctica, "overcompensating" for warming, says Rasch, which could affect ecosystems and the global ocean-atmosphere system in a myriad of ways that scientists haven't studied.

Climate modeler Christopher Bretherton of the University of Washington, Seattle, called the study "good, solid, important work … [suggesting] stratospheric aerosol injection is an approach to compensate greenhouse warming that is worthy of further study." However, other researchers see limitations. If nations begin to geoengineer using aerosols, says climate researcher Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington D.C., the aerosols would likely be emitted in certain spots across the globe, not spread equally through the atmosphere, as occurred in models the scientists used. Uneven distribution of the aerosols could lead to more cooling in some places than in others, which could cause unknown environmental consequences.

In addition, the study doesn't address larger concerns about geoengineering, says climate modeler Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago in Illinois. He says that global temperatures could soar if scientists stopped geoengineering. He also worries that the use of the technique might encourage nations to continue emitting carbon dioxide "essentially into perpetuity."

The stars make music

And of course it sounds really spooky. Also, what's a starquake soundlike? F sharp.