Science Scribalist

Somebody Always Hates What You Do - Will Shortz

2009-04-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

I'm a puzzle fan, and so I am interested in everything that Will Shortz (cross word puzzle editor at the NYT) does or says.

Ran across this interview with him at the Yale Daily News, and his last comment is so bone-deep true, even for hacks like me, that I simply had to share it.

"I’ve discovered that anytime you do something interesting and fresh and really nice, there will be people who hate it. And conversely, no matter how awful something is, there will be someone who likes it." Will Shortz

Backstage: Will Shortz

Global Warming Nutshell Sheet, and the F/R Ration

2009-03-04T08:26:00.001-08:00

via archaeology.about.com

A hilarious snippet from the Annals of Improbable Research today!

Posted via web from Annabel's posterous

Global Warming Nutshell Sheet, and the F/R Ration

2009-03-04T08:24:00.001-08:00

via archaeology.about.com

A hilarious snippet from the Annals of Improbable Research today!

Posted via web from Annabel's posterous

Mental Epiphanies

2009-03-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

I just listened to this discussion by Jonah Lehrer on Fora.tv about how your brain works to solve problems, that there is a part of your brain that does the problem solving, a few cells in your right hemisphere it turns out, that you can only access if you're not directly focused on the problem.

It sounds really unlikely, I know—but I also know that this is definitely my experience, that when I'm working on writing a piece, a science piece that is, I often need to distract my brain by playing a game before I can complete what I'm doing. Sudoku, or Babble, or Cryptoquote, or JigZone. Just one of them and I can get back to work. In the past I've always felt guilty about this—I only have a certain number of hours to actually crank out a new science piece and the game-playing has seemed like a waste of time. I've always done it, though, especially just before the final read-through. I don't think I'll feel bad about this any more.

Street Fighter 4 Released Today

2009-02-17T10:26:00.000-08:00

Street Fighter 4 was released today, and Mahalo has the goods!

Adrenaline Rush: The Grammys

2009-02-07T05:28:00.000-08:00

I love these days! Coverage of the Grammys at Mahalo.com on Sunday, February 8, 2009, will be just as mindblowingly exciting as the Super Bowl was last weekend. See ya there!

Neil Diamond MusiCares Person of the Year

Smokey Robinson Grammy Performance

Stevie Wonder Grammy Performance

M.I.A. Grammy Performance

Kenny Chesney Grammy Performance

Sugarland Grammy Performance

Jamie Foxx Ne-Yo Grammy Performance

Carrie Underwood Grammy Performance

Jay-Z Grammy Performance

T.I. Grammy Performance

Chris Brown Grammy Performance

Adele Grammy Performance

Kanye West Grammy Performance

Jonas Brothers Grammy Performance

Jennifer Hudson Grammy Performance

Rihanna Grammy Performance

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Grammy Performance

Kid Rock Grammy Performance

U2 Grammy Performance

Radiohead Grammy Performance

Paul McCartney Grammy Performance

Katy Perry Grammy Performance

Coldplay Grammy Performance

Lil Wayne Grammy Performance

Justin Timberlake Grammy Performance

Best Rock Album 2009 Grammy Performance

Best Alternative Music Album 2009 Grammys

Best Country Album 2009 Grammys

Best Pop Vocal Album 2009 Grammys

Best Rap Album 2009 Grammys

Grammy Awards

Grammy Nominations

2009 Grammy Nominations

Album of the Year 2009 Grammys

Song of the Year 2009 Grammys

Record of the Year 2009 Grammys

Best New Artist 2009 Grammys

2009 Grammy Nomination Performances

2009 Grammy Performances

Grammy Winners 2009

2009 Grammy Awards Photos

Grammy 2009 Live Coverage

Best R&B Album 2009 Grammys

Bo Diddley Tribute Grammy Performance

Robin Thicke Grammy Performance

My Grammy Moment

Grammy Red Carpet

Best Short Form Music Video 2009 Grammys

Super Bowl Ads: The Preview

2009-01-30T15:51:00.000-08:00

Is there another reason to watch the Super Bowl?

Amy Borkowsky

Angels and Demons Super Bowl Ad

Budweiser Clydesdale Super Bowl Ad

Career Builder Super Bowl Ad

Cars.com Super Bowl Ad

Cheetos Super Bowl Ad

Chuck Super Bowl Ad

Denny's Super Bowl Ad

Doritos "Free Doritos" Super Bowl Ad

Doritos New Flavor Pitch Super Bowl Ad

Doritos Power of the Crunch Super Bowl Ad

Doritos Super Bowl Ad

Doritos The Chase Super Bowl Ad

Doritos Too Delicious Super Bowl Ad

Fast and the Furious Super Bowl Ad

Frosted Flakes Super Bowl Ad

GI Joe Super Bowl Ad

Go Daddy Danica Patrick Super Bowl Ad

Go Daddy Super Bowl Ad

H and R Block Super Bowl Ad

Heineken Super Bowl Ad

Heroes Super Bowl Ad

Hyundai Genesis Super Bowl Ad

Hyundai Super Bowl Ad

Jay Leno Super Bowl Ad

Kings Super Bowl Ad

LMAO NBC Super Bowl Ad

Land of the Lost Super Bowl Ad

Medium Super Bowl Ad

Miller One Second Super Bowl Ad

Monsters vs. Aliens Super Bowl Ad

NFL Network Super Bowl Ad

Pedigree Super Bowl Ad

Pepsi Super Bowl Ad

Sobe Lizard Lake Super Bowl Ad

Sobe Super Bowl Ad

Star Trek Super Bowl Ad

Super Bowl Ads 2009

Super Bowl Commercials 2009

Super Bowl Commercials Live Coverage

Teleflora Super Bowl Ad

Transformers Super Bowl Ad

Election Results and Exit Polls

2008-11-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

I spent part of the morning today, the BIG DAY, making telephone calls to college kids in my precinct for Obama. Most of the people in my neighborhood have already voted, and it's mostly the kids who are waiting until the last minute. It was good to talk to so many, all of whom said they were going to vote or had just returned from voting.

This afternoon, I'm going to be watching the polls for Mahalo.com. We have a network of people set to track polls this afternoon and evening, folks all over the country, with separate pages for each state and we will be watching and getting the exit polls and results listed.

Here's the main pages:

Election Results
Election Exit Polls
Presidential Polls

And I'll be tracking
Iowa: Exit Polls, Election Results
Minnesota: Exit Polls, Election Results
Oklahoma: Exit Polls, Election Results
Illinois: Exit Polls, Election Results
Nebraska: Exit Polls, Election Results
Oregon: Exit Polls, Election Results

And I'm going to be watching these as they change, because I can't miss a battleground state, not one.
Pennsylvania: Exit Polls, Election Results
Florida: Exit Polls, Election Results
New Hampshire: Exit Polls, Election Results
Virginia: Exit Polls, Election Results
Nevada: Exit Polls, Election Results
Indiana: Exit Polls, Election Results
Georgia: Exit Polls, Election Results
West Virginia: Exit Polls, Election Results
North Dakota: Exit Polls, Election Results
Ohio: Exit Polls, Election Results
New Mexico: Exit Polls, Election Results
Missouri: Exit Polls, Election Results
Montana: Exit Polls, Election Results
North Carolina: Exit Polls, Election Results
Colorado: Exit Polls, Election Results

Please feel free to join me. The champagne is on the ice, which we have planned to use as celebration or solace, but --- dare I say it? we are hoping for the former!

Go Obama!

A Week in the Life of Mahalo

2008-09-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

Working for Mahalo.com is a kick.

One skill I have is synthesis. I can read a bunch of varied resources and synthesize a general public article on archaeology very quickly and, if I do say so, adroitly, pointing it towards an educated adult crowd. But, lately I've wondered if I didn't specialize myself into a corner, by choosing archaeology as the sole topic to write on. Archaeology is really not that marketable---I find it fascinating, and there are several hundred thousand people on the planet that find it fascinating, too. But today there are hundreds of writers and bloggers who write about archaeology, some even more specialized than I am. My archaeology synthetic skills are probably not as useful as they were a decade ago, now that there is Wikipedia in the world: but you do what you do.

Or so I thought. I was a little leery of Mahalo.com, where you must synthesize information on everything from software to celebrity gossip to world news to the financial crisis to the latest bizarro murder case where Mrs. x is stuffed into a suitcase and left in a forest. I've never had to read and synthesize data so fast in my life. Safe to say it's really honing my skills. Here's a list of all the pages I developed in the last week:

http://www.mahalo.com/David_Blaine_Blind
http://www.mahalo.com/Sallie_Krawcheck
http://www.mahalo.com/NYC_Gross_Matchbooks
http://www.mahalo.com/Mikasa_Foods
http://www.mahalo.com/WTC_Center_Pothole
http://www.mahalo.com/Bill_Clinton_On_The_View
http://www.mahalo.com/Latarian_Milton
http://www.mahalo.com/Dave_Hill_Fashion_Week
http://www.mahalo.com/Daniel_Katz
http://www.mahalo.com/Palin_Syrah
http://www.mahalo.com/Dave_Chameides
http://www.mahalo.com/Bill_Perkins_Ad
http://www.mahalo.com/McCain_Press_Conference
http://www.mahalo.com/McCain_Top_Ten_Blowups
http://www.mahalo.com/Presidential_Debate_Drinking_Game
http://www.mahalo.com/Sarah_Palin_Flute
http://www.mahalo.com/Scott_Greenstein
http://www.mahalo.com/Gary_Staton
http://www.mahalo.com/Richard_Millay
http://www.mahalo.com/Emma_Forrest
http://www.mahalo.com/Colin_Farrell_Emma_Forrest
http://www.mahalo.com/Colin_Farrell_Judaism
http://www.mahalo.com/Juan_Antonio_Velez_Gonzalez
http://www.mahalo.com/Brandon_Michael_Soroka
http://www.mahalo.com/Mortgage_Bailout_Plan
http://www.mahalo.com/Stopthehousingbailout.com
http://www.mahalo.com/TPG_Capital
http://www.mahalo.com/Washington_Mutual_JP_Morgan_Sale
http://www.mahalo.com/Taliban_Peace_Plan
http://www.mahalo.com/Sam_Botner
http://www.mahalo.com/Omar_Yoguez_Singu
http://www.mahalo.com/Marcella_Grace_Eiler
http://www.mahalo.com/Global_Electoral_College
http://www.mahalo.com/Drea_Bock
http://www.mahalo.com/Robert_Vezendy
http://www.mahalo.com/Scraper_Bike_Rap
http://www.mahalo.com/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008

And compared to many of my colleagues at Mahalo.com I'm a piker!

Oh, I'm not giving up archaeology. I have too much invested in it to just abandon it, and there are still stories I want to tell. But... how good it is to know I don't have to rely on writing about just archaeology to make a living.

Mahalo, and Thanks to You, Too!

2008-09-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

In August I started working part time for Mahalo.com (in addition to the About.com gig), partly because I needed a new challenge and partly in these tough economic times I needed the dough. So far, it's fabulous: I recommend it as a resource and as a job. Here's why:

Did ya notice how impossible it is to find the important bits of a story? You know, there's a news story going around and hard as you try you can only find bloggers of one slant or another ranting about the issue or the same news report published in a dozen different newspapers with slightly different titles. Drives me nuts.

Well, Mahalo has hired a bunch of us to do that research for you. So that, whether you need to know the latest poop on the mortgage bailout crisis or what David Letterman thinks about John McCain bailing on him or if David Blaine is cheating or what Bill Clinton really said on The View, or even who Clay Aiken is dating, somebody at Mahalo has already done the digging for you.

As a place to work, I'm nuts about it. The work is challenging--you have to stay neutral no matter how much of a wonk or wonkette you are--but it's also exhilarating.

So--that's what I've been up to lately. More later...

Bernard and Doris - Movie of the Week

2008-07-19T05:06:00.000-07:00

Bernard and Doris is a fictionalized version of the last six years of the life of billionaire Doris Duke and her butler Bernard Lafferty, to whom she left control of her fortune. Directed by Bob Balaban and starring Susan Sarandon as Doris and Ralph Fiennes as Bernard, the movie is shot primarily from Bernard's point of view.

The movie is supposedly set in her New Jersey mansion, although Balaban says the building is a stand-in: Duke also had mansions in Newport, Hawaii and Beverly Hills, as well as apartments and estates and a jet to take her around the world. Several scenes are set in a greenhouse; Duke was a collector of orchids and established the Doris Duke Gardens at her New Jersey estate, now closed to the public.

Plot Points

Bernard was a gay Irishman, who previously acted as butler for Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee--with Duke making an interesting trio of powerful famous single women. When we first see him, he is driving down a leafy road on his way to replace the previous butler, fired for the crime of serving too-chilly melon. Bernard is obsequious with Doris but commanding with the rest of the staff of maids, cooks and chauffeurs, which is how he survives through the first few months.

Doris meanwhile consumes quantities of alcohol and quantities of young, talented, buff men with a gray insouciance. At the same time she is shown to have been an intelligent investor and donor, tight-fisted with a nickel and yet generous with her charitable donations. She is emotionally connected to no one, and spends much of the movie as a disembodied voice on the phone barking instructions to support her upcoming itinerary.

Together they make an odd pair, Bernard living for the time when he can serve Doris and be her alter-ego, and drinking his way through the months of loneliness between her visits; Doris, when she's around, is alternately connected to him and distant. Ultimately they are in a chilly conspiracy of two.

Bottom Line

Bernard and Doris makes for a sad, if not totally engrossing story. The movie is dreamy and slow, and although that's probably not to everyone's taste, I think it's an intended slowness, illustrating how Balaban imagines life must have been for Bernard, a few weeks of heady involvement serving Miss Duke followed by months and months of solo drinking, waiting for her return.

Extras on the DVD are limited to choice of language, scene skip-through and Balaban discussing the real Duke and Lafferty.

IMDb: Bernard and Doris
HBO Films: Bernard and Doris
PriceGrabber: Bernard and Doris

The photo is of the Duke Gardens, one of several gorgeous photos taken by Nathan Siemers.

Update for Nobody

2008-04-29T08:06:00.001-07:00

Well, it's been over a year and a half since I posted here. How weird. In the meantime, started a herb garden (presently sitting on our living room floor because of a late spring freeze last night), joined Linked In and started Twittering.

What's new with you?

A Song Not for Now

2007-02-13T10:01:00.000-08:00

When I was a little girl, Walt Kelly's Pogo was a mainstay comic in our house. Pogo was a lefty environmentalist cartoon, and a healthy trade off from the horrors of Al Capp's righty (whitey, tighty) Lil Abner; both were in the comic section of our local newspaper (back when 'fair and balanced' meant something, I suppose). I think the possom and his pals of the Ofekenokee Swamp were avatars for our Dad, but for whatever reason, I ended up with a lot of Walt Kelly's ideas, words, images and tunes implanted in odd corners of my brain.

For example, here is a 'quote of the week' I put together for Archaeology.about.com:
Looking back, the view always improves. Maybe that's why I became an archaeologist.

Anyway, so today I was spending a snowy day catching up on reading my blogroll (there are far too many good writers in the world and a whole bunch are writing blogs about anthropology or archaeology), and in BoingBoing was a link to a review of Songs of the Pogo, a collection of songs written by Walt Kelly and published in 1956. I can't remember that we had this album, but I do know that we had the sheet music, because I can sing you all the lyrics to several of them, including my favorite, a sad little tune called "A Song Not For Now". Be glad, be very glad, I don't have a microphone close to hand...

Songs of the Pogo
This link on emusic will let you listen to real singers singing each of the 25 songs written by Kelly.

Here's Cary Doctorow's post on the subject.

Here's another link to some of the songs sung by Beverly Mills.

"A song not for now, you need not put stay
A note for the was can be sung for today
The notes for the does not will do for the does
Today you can sing for the will be that was. "

Web 2.0 Explained

2007-02-08T14:57:00.000-08:00

I love this video, I ran across it on Lawrence Lessig's blog (where is where the link goes), and he got it from Boing Boing, and originally it came from an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas:

Web 2.0 Explained

This is what geeks like me dreamed of.

Squidoo Lens: MegaSudoku

2007-01-29T11:35:00.000-08:00

One of my main passions is MegaSudoku, which everybody thinks I'm nuts to do because it looks so hard. But, I was looking for a way to perk my brain up in the middle of a long day of backbreaking labor over letters and grammar, and it turns out that if you play with MegaSudoku, you find it includes a number of tiny little logic puzzles that can be worked on a little at a time.

So, when I heard about Squidoo it seemed like a great place to trot out my theory of MegaSudoku. Here's my new lens:

MegaSudoku for Busy People"

Missing Scenes Competition: Oh Susannah!

2007-01-26T11:55:00.000-08:00

This is my first entry in the Missing Scenes Competition, which at present is only in the works, but will eventually be on the Wasteflake Site. The rules are to write a scene based on an existing novel, using the characters and implying the situations in the novel. The scene must not exist in the novel, but must be events that are implied in the book, and may have occurred during the action of the novel, or before or after the action of the novel. The scene must include one or more characters in the novel. Additional characters who did not appear in the novel must be a minority; writing yourself in is frowned upon. As soon as Wasteflake gets our act together again, you too can submit a link to your entry, or if you don't have a blog or website, add your story to the Wasteflake wiki.

So, based on Kate Wilhelm's 1980 book Oh, Susannah!, here's my first entry:

---

On the fourteenth floor of an office building overlooking Central Park, a woman sits at a desk working on the galleys of a manuscript. One pencil is shoved into the untidy knot of her grey hair; with another she taps out a calypso beat on the desktop. She rests her chin in her hand, and peers microscopically at the blue printed words on the shiny fibrous paper in front of her. One expensively decorous shoe dangles off the end of her right toe; the other is lost beneath the desk.

The phone rings, and she snakes out one arm to answer it, dropping the pencil and marking her place with her finger.

"Berryman and Associates, this is Sylvia." she says into the receiver.

"Oh, hi Gavin, yes the galleys came this afternoon. I'm reading them now.... Well, I think he's in the middle of something, but let me check."

She punches a button on the phone, putting the caller on hold, and leans over behind her in what she has come to think of as the Rosemary Woods stretch, blindly finding an intercom button and pressing it down. She listens intently.

In another room, no corresponding buzz is made on the similar intercom, because the receiving button is being held in place with Roget's thesaurus for just such an occasion. Sylvia can hear a soft snore through the connection.

"Sorry Gavin, he's pretty busy right now, I'll have him call you back in about, oh 20 minutes or so. Okay, talk to you then."

As Sylvia hangs up the phone she catches the eye of the other occupant of her office; an orange cat, perched regally in the sunshine on a broad windowsill of the penthouse. The cat's ancient Egyptian demeanor is spoiled, somewhat, by the brown ruff of fur standing out awkwardly from its neck and the ninety degree crook in its tail. The cat stares at Sylvia, then jumps from the window sill and walks toward the door. The cat seats himself about two feet from the doorway and closely examines first the doorknob and then the faint light from the hall which glimmers beneath the door.

The phone rings again as Sylvia slews around in her chair and pushes the intercom open. "Mike, they're here!"

There was this old man who came to see me

2007-01-25T19:23:00.000-08:00

I have a very dear friend who is 94. And today I told her this story, and she wondered why I hadn't written it down. So here is the story, for Gusti.

Last summer I was approached by a young woman whose uncle had written a book. I do manuscript editing on the side now and then, to make ends meet, and the young woman said her uncle's book was a collection of Native American tales and he was interested in getting it published as a historical adventure novel 'some day' and would I meet them for coffee. I said sure, and when I got to the coffee shop, there they were, a young woman in her late 20s with a squirmy three year old and her 75 year old uncle, an old bachelor farmer who lives on his farm in one of the rural corners of my state. Lovingly, he passed over a copy of his manuscript. 450 pages long, it was, but on a CD Rom (not so bulky that way).

When I read this manuscript, or at least began reading this tome, at first I was horrified, because it was so far from what I know to be true about Native American history as to be laughable. On so many levels, this man got it so, so wrong. His book has the glacier retreating and the white men appearing in the space of a single generation (not 10,000 years apart as science tells us). He has Native Americans sitting around a campfire, swapping stories of the mammoth they killed that day and drinking corn whiskey while the women make porcelain tea cups. No. Sorry, no that's very very wrong. But the writing isn't bad, in fact it's quite engaging. And the stories, while not of any Native Americans I've ever known or heard of, and in some respects rather insulting of the true histories of Native Americans, are still stories written based on his life, on his fantastic melding of stories from his own experience and stories he created, whole cloth, out of his imagination.

You see, he'd collected artifacts since he was a little boy, looking for arrowheads and ground stone axes and telling himself stories about them; stories about Indian princesses and tragic love stories and great heroes and noble sacrifices. Except for the time he spent in France during WWII, he'd never left home, never really been far away from the farm on which he now lived, and his stories are deeply ingrained into him, part of the leathery skin and permanent dirty tan of an old farmer. I tried to tell him, gently, that his book was completely wrong in terms of science. But he would have none of it--this is a work of history, he says, and just because I have a fancy degree and work as an archaeologist doesn't make me an expert.

So, I could just say, I'm sorry, I want nothing to do with this error, this set of blunders you want to perpetrate on the public. Except that--the stories are wonderfully flavored elements of his own history, fantasies built of the stories his parents and grandparents told him, stories of his own experiences in France, and the stories that he told himself based on the artifacts he found at home on his farm. It's interesting writing, it's just... not science.

So what is a science-loving archaeo-writer to do? Stall and hope for an inspired solution.

The End of Mr. Y

2007-01-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

This is really a terrific book, written by Scarlett Thomas and published in 2006 by Harcourt Press. I can't remember the last time I read a book that drew me in so securely I didn't want to stop reading. The plot is about a graduate student in Oxbridge named Ariel Mantu (except that's a pseudonym), working on a comparative lit doctoral dissertation, partly on an obscure science writer from the 19th century named Thomas Lumas. Lumas's last book was called The End of Mr. Y, and it disappeared shortly after being published. Lumas himself died the day it was published, and all of the people associated with the publication died shortly thereafter.

Ariel finds the book, of course. The rest of the plot is so unusual, mixing time travel and evolution and deconstructionism, and fantasy and all kinds of good and bad surprises with images from several. Lots of fun for fans of Jacques Derrida and Samuel Butler; and an interesting introduction to the ideas. There is a pun in the title, in fact there are puns and hints about what is going on throughout the book, and The End of Mr. Y is simply a fascinating puzzle that is thoroughly enjoyable.

, Scarlett Thomas, Harcourt Press. 2006.

science fiction, scarlett thomas, books, jacques derrida, samuel butler

An Uncontrollable Urge to Dance

2006-08-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

I have taken on an impossible task. Details don't really matter, but it's an amazing bit of egocentric bravado that I agreed to do it, in fact volunteered to do it.

Not that I can't or won't do it, it's just good for me to write 'this is impossible' so that I can avoid working on it for a few moments.

The Word-A-Day is one of my private passions, and yesterday's word was Tarantism, which Anu Garg defines as "an uncontrollable urge to dance." Oddly enough, this strange word related both to tarantella and tarantula more or less sums up my present state of mind: being bit by the spider of ego and dancing until I drop dead to meet the challenge.

Tarantism

Science Writing and the Scientist

2006-08-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've taken a bit of a respite here, although I've been blogging like mad on my About site. I guess, I've been trying to figure out what kind of science writer I really am. I discovered (if you'll pardon a bit of navel-gazing) that I don't do very well as a standard science writer for a number of reasons.

First, the process is too slow for me. To get an article into Science or any other traditional venue for that matter, one must pitch a story, and then wait for an editor's okay to proceed. My science writer pals (lucky me, I get to say that now) assure me that only a chump starts a story without a paycheck in the offing. So, I wait a couple of days for the okay, then I start reading, making phone calls and mulling it over in my little brain. My oeuvre of choice is 500-800 words, that's where I'm most comfortable, but Science really only wants 250, so I whittle and whittle and whittle and then submit, and the editor says "I don't really understand" so I send them the long version and then they edit it down to 250 words that no longer express the story, so it's back and forth for awhile until everybody hates everybody else.

Now, if I post on my own website, I hear about the story and get right to work, it can be as long as I like and I can go with the comments I can get. Not as much status (I write for Science! makes for good bragging), and working with an editor is a great pleasure and a relief to share the burden I have to admit; but you know what, I've been spoiled by my About gig.

Secondly, I don't think I'm detached enough from archaeology to write well as a standard science writer. Which is definitely counter-intuitive, don't ya think? Science writing is all about putting things in the simplest format, in the shortest, punchiest format, and because I'm an archaeologist, I don't think the majority of archaeology does really well in a sound byte. In fact, that's why I got interested in doing this, because I'm sick of sound-byte archaeology stories.

It's as if you're doing a crossword puzzle, zipping right along, and then there's that one clue that's in your field of expertise, like 'artifact' for me, and there are so many possible answers you have to fill in all the adjacent spots before you get to the one simple five-letter word that the puzzle master had in mind: sherd.

Most archaeology issues are too complicated to express in 250 words. At least I think.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing. Back to work!

Tags:
archaeology, science, writing, science writing

Tornadoes in Iowa City

2006-04-14T07:24:00.000-07:00

As I sit in my basement office this morning I can hear the helicopters overhead, news reporters overlooking the damage to my beloved home city of Iowa City. My husband and I suffered neither loss of roof nor electricity, but about 8:30 last night we heard the freight train pass by about a mile away from us as it tore the roof off the local Menard's. My husband is crushed at the news of damage to his home-away-from-home. Some amount of hail fell in the region; we got about 3/4 inch-sized (safely stowed in the freezer for future generations of... well, what are we supposed to do with it?), although the local news included images of pale hands half-hidden by round white icy soft balls.

Also lost in the storm was old St. Pat's church; I was there last for Grady's funeral (a personal loss of years gone by that I feel compelled to mention, a gentle man and barkeep). And the Alpha Chi Omega sorority house, once an annual source of rush week entertainment when I lived across the street some thirty years ago; and the Dairy Queen on Riverside where we often developed brain freeze.

The valiant local Public Access TV ditched all of their programming to bring phoned-in status reports and video coverage of the damage, despite the fact that announcer Brad Laborman knew his apartment had been damaged. The video coverage was truly amazing, both of the storm itself and the aftermath, when thousands of students wandered downtown gawping at the wreckage.

The town is battered, a little, but we're going to be alright. About twenty people ended up (at least temporarily) in the hospital, a state of emergency has been declared in the city, and some of our landmarks have been damaged or destroyed, but by and large, we are okay.

The Press-Citizen has some photos, and PATV has some of their remarkable video uploaded.

Tornadoes, Iowa City, Public Access Television.

Athlete in the Family

2006-04-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

This is a photograph of my marathon-runner sister, the very first member of our family who can honestly claim to be an athlete. The rest of us are poky fat old bookworms and computer nerds that have to push the cobwebs away from our doors if we want to go outside. Way to go, sis!

Tags: Athletes, Running

Readings: Archaeology at Strangways Springs Sheep Station

2006-04-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

Readings: Archaeology at Strangways Springs Sheep Station

This article is on archaeological investigations at a sheep station (basically a ranch) in the central Australian outback. The original article was written by Alistair Paterson and published in Historical Archaeology, and he was kind enough to let me use the photographs from his excavations. I've never been to the outback, but his report brought the life of sheep herders (black and white) in the late 19th century to life.

Tags: Archaeology, Australia, Farming

Newswise | It's An Exciting Time to be a Journalist - Even With the Challenges

2006-04-04T06:24:00.000-07:00

Newswise | It's An Exciting Time to be a Journalist - Even With the Challenges

Or so says the Dean of Journalism at the University of Maryland in this interview. Journalists must be 'willing to embrace new technology'. For me, it is an exciting time to morph from an archaeologist into a journalist; terrifying even if I'm not in a war or poking into some congressional or presidential wrongdoing. Which stories do you follow? How do you keep your objectivity? And, that perennial favorite--what was wrong with having a full time job?

Science writing, Journalism

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Media: Ralph Bakshi's Phone Doodles

2006-04-01T14:44:00.000-08:00

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Media: Ralph Bakshi's Phone Doodles

Ralph Backshi is one of my heroes; when I was in college his 'Lord of the Rings' was flat-out amazing animation. Blogger A-Haa has a stash of Ralph Bakshi phone doodles. What a hoot!

Oops - forgot to say this is via Boing Boing, fast becoming my favorite blog site.

The Irritable Heart: Increased Risk of Physical and Psychological Effects of Trauma in Civil War Veterans

2006-03-22T07:29:00.000-08:00

The Irritable Heart: Increased Risk of Physical and Psychological Effects of Trauma in Civil War Veterans

The Irritable Heart is based on work that used American Civil War records to track mental and physical problems of veterans. Doctors of the time noticed that there was a problem experienced by veterans resulting from their traumatic experiences, they called it 'irritable heart'. Researchers led by Roxane Cohen Silver at Irvine used the federally-funded database called Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death Project, which is free and available to anybody who wants to poke around in it.

This article came about because I'm trying to become a 'real' science writer. The article is based on a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry, and no I don't normally read that journal, but I do get announcements of papers to be published. That's part of being a 'science writer' (although I have to giggle nervously when I refer to myself as such, which is what I did when I said I was an 'archaeologist' so that's only fittin').

Anyway I got the announcement of this paper and wheedled Science magazine's Random Samples column editor into letting me write a piece for that, which was published last month. I ended up writing a much longer piece than was needed for Science, and wanted to publish it someplace. Of course, it's not really archaeology, so the psychology guide at About was kind enough to let me publish it on her site. And voila!

Sometimes I feel like the luckiest dame in the world.

The photograph is of wounded soldiers being tended in the field after the Battle of Chancellorsville near Fredericksburg, Va., May 2, 1863, negative number 111-B-349, and available with a raft of others at the National Archives website.

Tags: Civil War, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Psychology, History, Archaeology, Writing

Salon.com Books | Remembering Octavia Butler

2006-03-18T06:22:00.000-08:00

Salon.com Books | Remembering Octavia Butler

Science fiction writer Karen Joy Fowler discusses Octavia Butler and her fiction in an article on Salon this week. Fowler describes several of her favorite Butler stories, and discusses what they meant to her. Part of her discussion implies (and the posted comments explicitly consider) how intimately you should know and think about the writer when reading a piece of fiction. I dunno; I'm sort of split on it. One of the reasons I bolted the study of literature as a career was because I felt there was too much emphasis on dissecting pieces of work using bits of the author's biography. In the 1970s when I was in school, we were supposed to use an author's bio to seek out meaningful references in the work--even if (maybe especially if) the author wasn't aware of the meanings. This kind of a one-upmanship of a hard-working writer creeped me out badly. So I bailed.

But on the other hand, one of the reasons I loved Octavia Butler is that she was a female African American science fiction writer (and a lesbian, although I wasn't aware of that until after her death). I thought Butler had some interesting things to say that the largely white male scifi establishment didn't (said with loving respect, however, to Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury and that stinker Harlan Ellison, among many others).

So, maybe there's a happy medium. We can take pleasure in an author's difference without dissecting his or her work. I vote for that; or at least I'm going to be doing that, thank you very much.

Tags: Octavia Butler, Science Fiction, Archaeology, Literature, Gender

ARTNATOMY

2006-03-16T14:43:00.000-08:00

ARTNATOMY

This is just for fun, nothing to do with archaeology whatsover, except in the broader, anthropology-linguistics, evolutionary sense of the word. Basically, it's a Flash-enabled way to play with the human face, and learn about muscle combinations.

Via Boing Boing
Anthropology, Linguistics, Physical Anthropology

The Viridian Design Movement

2006-03-13T14:52:00.000-08:00

The Viridian Design Movement

This is the text of a very-recent speech by Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and thoughtful kind of a guy. He introduced me (not personally, of course) to the concept of "dead media" and he always seems to have some insight into what the future might hold.

Snagged from Boing Boing.

Tags: Science writing,Bruce Sterling, Internet

The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust - a Book Review

2006-03-12T09:48:00.000-08:00

The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust - a Book Review

I never understood the fascination with Adolph Hitler and the Holocaust. Oh sure, I've seen Schindler's List, and I've even been to a Holocaust museum or two in my time, but ... seriously, it seemed almost prurient to me to need to know what when on. But, I've read Heather Pringle's books before (she wrote The Mummy Congress), and I really admire her writing, so when her publisher wrote and asked if I wanted a review copy, I agreed. But my god! It was so hard to read this book. To have to face the fact that a segment of the scientific community in Germany was conducting research and experiments to support Hitler's gaga concept of Aryan supremacy was very hard for me. But I'm glad I did.

Tags: Archaeology, Book Reviews, Hitler, Ahnenerbe, Science writing, Himmler

Death and Commemoration

2006-03-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

This link goes to an article abstract and general yammer on a recent article in the Industrial Archaeology Review by Sarah Tarlow. Here's how my doing this came about. I have a stack of stuff to read; I'm (normally) a voracious reader, and visit my local university library once a quarter, to see what's in the journals, get some ideas for articles on my own website, and feel like I'm in the loop when it comes to archaeology around the world. Then I bring around 25 or 30 of them home, read 'em and file away all these tasty little bits of articles, mostly never to be seen again. This quarter has been rough, though; and three months later the stack is still sitting unread next to my desk. There are interesting things in there, but I get so caught up in other things to be done that I never get back. Well, fie on that! I've decided to combine both blogging and reading. And maybe somebody will benefit.

So, here is the first of the articles I went and retrieved the first of January (ack! it's nearly April), abstracted for your reading pleasure. The author Sarah Tarlow is a pal of mine, who writes some truly interesting archaeology, instilling human life into the field, which is, if you ask me, one of the real tricks in archaeology. Of course, I didn't ask her if publishing her abstract would be a good thing to do until after I'd posted, and I haven't heard from her yet, so I promise to report back here if she shrieks at me from across the big pond that segregates us.

Still. Lots of good stuff to come.

This photo, by the way, is from plumbum, and pretty cool image for a gravestone, if you ask me.

Tags: Archaeology, Cemeteries, History

The Geoglyphic Art of Chile's Atacama Desert

2006-03-06T06:22:00.000-08:00

The Geoglyphic Art of Chile's Atacama Desert

This report with a few pictures of the geoglyphs (including the famous Atacama Giant seen in the picture) comes from an upcoming issue of Antiquity, one of my favorite journals. Antiquity is not afraid to be directed to the general public, even though its articles are primarily reports of investigations: I think that's very cool.

Anyway, Luis Briones' paper in Antiquity is a summary of thirty years of research on the geoglyphs in the Atacama Desert, some 800 kilometers south of the Nasca lines in Peru, and although the Chilean geoglyphs were started about 600 years later than Nasca, they cover a much larger area. Also unlike the Nasca lines, these glyphs are, according to Briones, part of a transportation network, sort of a combination set of sign posts and story telling for travellers in llama caravans between the big civilizations of Tiwanaku and Inca and their outlying colonies and food and commodity sources.

I'll tell ya the truth; this kind of paper is why I got into science reporting at all. It takes a (fairly) well known subject and puts a science spin on it. No need to futz with space aliens here, just a good interesting story that feeds into people's imaginations and reminds us of our humanity.

The photograph is the Atacama Giant, and comes from the article in Antiquity (c) 2006 Luis Briones and is used here with permission.

My report on Briones' paper, called The Geoglyphic Art of Chile's Atacama Desert is on my About Archaeology site.

Tags:

Archaeology, Chile, Geoglyphs, Rock Art, Antiquity

Curious George and Archaeology

2006-03-04T13:18:00.000-08:00

Curious George and Archaeology

I found this opinion piece in the Seattle Statesman complaining about the new Curious George movie, which I haven't seen (and in fact haven't read the book since I was six or so). At first my reaction was ... oh god, here we go again, somebody beating Hollywood up for going about its business and not considering the standpoint of the remarkably few and powerless (archaeologists are such an influential segment of society, don't ya know?). But, I have to admit, that if Nicgorski is right about the plot, it does seem a little off-putting that the friendly father-figure Ted is the modern equivalent of the big white hunter: a big white museum curator, maybe not into poaching animals but still acting as if the world is his playground. Not all museum curators are big white hunters of course, which is Nicgorski's point. But Hollywood takes it for granted, or seems to anyway, that that is the status quo.

Well, it's a point worth mulling anyway, that the West in general takes for granted about our ownership of the world's (cultural and natural) resources: and that such an attitude certainly gets us into a lot of trouble.

Tags:
Archaeology
Curious George
Museums
Cultural heritage

Octavia Butler and Communication

2006-03-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

Octavia Butler on Communication

More on Octavia Butler from MIT, where she "participated in a series of discussions on science fiction, media, and imagination". This site includes her terrific essay on why she writes (oh, dammit, wrote) science fiction, called "Devil Girl from Mars", and a discussion about science fiction among writers including Butler and Samuel R. Delany, the foremost African American male science fiction writer. The discussion is really about language or communication and what happens when language doesn't work the way we all already accept, which is a common theme in her books (and now that I think about it, one of the reasons I'm so crazy about them). What if, asks Butler, everybody could understand each other completely, via telepathy? What would really happen? and what if suddenly no one could read or write anything at all? What changes would those things wreak on society?

This site is wonderful, and just heightens the loss. I'm not sure I'll be able to go buy her latest book for a while, since it will also be her last.

Tags:
Octavia Butler
Science Fiction
Communication

Mount Sandel: The Earliest Human Settlement in Ireland

2006-02-28T06:39:00.000-08:00

Mount Sandel: The Earliest Human Settlement in Ireland

Wrote this paper on the Mesolithic site of Mount Sandel several years ago, and have been meaning to update it for quite some time. Basically, the site is about seven little huts built about 9000 years ago on the river Bann in county Derry. Still is not a lot on the web about this site, however, although I did find some images of the stone tool assemblage and a reconstruction of the huts.

Tags:

Archaeology
Ireland
Mesolithic

The Seattle Times: Local News: Octavia Butler, brilliant master of sci-fi, dies at 58

2006-02-27T09:37:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Times: Local News: Octavia Butler, brilliant master of sci-fi, dies at 58

Octavia Butler was one of my personal heroes. As an African American female science fiction writer, she was one of a kind and faced an uphill battle to be who she was, full stop. I loved her scifi series, one on a walled utopian community under seige (Clay's Ark, etc), and one on the family of a vampire (Patternmaster); both were of the social science genre and both dealt with emotional and physical slavery, although that word isn't quite right.

But mostly, I loved her essays. In one published in Blood Child in 1996, she wrote describing her career choice and the objections of her friends and family who felt she was wasting her talents. "Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you're afraid and full of doubts."

And oh boy did she ever nail it. I'll miss her greatly.

Tags:
Octavia Butler
Science Fiction
Writers

Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History - Book Review

2006-02-25T13:48:00.000-08:00

Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History - Book Review

I reviewed this book on my About site, and even though it is clearly a revised dissertation by Frederick Smith, it's a fascinating study of the history of rum and it fits into the Caribbean social milieu. Smith is an archaeologist, and he was working at a site in Barbados about a decade ago when they stumbled across a burial. The workers wanted to pour a libation to keep away the spirits of the dead (called duppies), and Smith was off and running.

Tags:
Archaeology
Caribbean
Alcohol
History

Sureyya's Journey: A Bump in the Road to an Archaeology Career

2006-02-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

Sureyya's Journey: A Bump in the Road to an Archaeology Career

This is the third installment of a series I'm calling Sureyya's journey. I met Sureyya Kose through my bulletin board. She's an IT engineer in Melbourne, Australia (of Turkish descent), who got sucked into archaeology by the interesting things that we find. She's also an interesting writer, and I like encouraging those kinds of folks.

She's been struggling on her own trying to get into archaeology, but not talking to professionals. This month she got a huge setback when she applied to university and was turned down, because she had no coursework outside of IT. I keep trying to get her to contact the local professionals, but I think she's a little afraid to commit.

But, as I say, her level of enthusiasm is pretty high, and her writing is vivid and interesting. I have my hopes that, if she ever actually gets over the 'shock and awe' of talking to real archaeologists about a 'real' career in archaeology, she may indeed enhance our profession.

Blogging for Archaeology Outreach

2006-02-21T06:39:00.000-08:00

Blogging for Archaeology Outreach: The Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project Blog

I did a quick interview over the weekend with Aren Maeir, director of the Tell es-Safi project (Biblical Gath), and his new venture - a blog describing the progress of excavations and laboratory analysis. It's difficult for me to believe that no one ever thought of doing this before--but blogging seems like a great way for an excavation group that relies so heavily on volunteers can keep themselves visible.

Super-Aerial Archaeology

2006-02-17T13:51:00.000-08:00

Super-Aerial Archaeology

The Super-Aerial Archaeology blog entry is to a news story about using satellite imagery to find archaeological sites in jungle settings, something that is becoming more common these days. But, the San Bartolo site mentioned here is very familiar to me, because it was the basis of the first article I've ever had published in ScienceNow, on January 6th of this year.

San Bartolo contains a pyramid built in at least six stages between about 400 and 100 BC. The murals recovered from the walls of the pyramid are in absolutely beautiful shape, and one of the earliest (if not the earliest) string of Maya characters was found there. I should be able to post something more substantial on San Bartolo within the next few days.

The link to my article at ScienceNow is posted here, but you have to be a subscriber to read it today:

Maya Writing Got Early Start

Tags:
archaeology
maya

Archaeology Books in Progress

2006-02-17T06:57:00.000-08:00

Seriously, the stack of books on my shelf waiting to be reviewed is overwhelming. Right now I'm reading Brian Fagan's book, "Writing Archaeology", Todd Bostwick's biography of Byron Cummings, and Frederick Smith's book on the culture and history of Caribbean rum. All interesting, and only a fraction of the stack.

And why I think blogging this will make me feel better about the slow progress is anybody's guess...

Artful Surgery

2006-02-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

Artful Surgery

Once every couple of months I get an email from Archaeology magazine about their new postings. Almost every one is worth a look, and it makes me wish I could stretch them out, one every few days or something, to make them last.

But of course, Archaeology magazine would prefer that we all be enticed into buying their latest copy. I, like all good public archaeologists, am a long-time subscriber and fan.

This first post is on a cool little project on a burial in ancient Thrace, where evidence of surgery has been identified dating to the 7th century BC.

Baltic Amber Trade

2006-02-15T13:54:00.000-08:00

Baltic Amber Trade

I caught the special on the PBS channel NOVA last night hosted by David Attenborough on amber, something I've always thought was a intensely fascinating substance. It reminded me I had a tiny glossary entry on About Archaeology that doesn't really do justice to the amber trade. Several years ago, I saw a baltic amber necklace on sale in a junk shop, but couldn't come up with the money to buy it. I've regretted it ever since.

Baltic amber was one of the most important trade items for much of prehistory, the reasons for which become very clear in Attenborough's program.

Persepolis Stairway Revealed

2006-02-14T11:57:00.000-08:00

Persepolis Stairway Revealed

I just started listening to CAIS in the last couple of months; it seems as if Iran is stepping up their archaeological reporting, because they report new stuff at least once a day. This photo is from archaeologist Shirley Schermer, who gave me gobs of photographs of Persepolis from a trip she took a couple of years ago. Someday I'll get time to get those photos posted.

Reporters Find Science Journals Harder to Trust, but Not Easy to Verify - New York Times

2006-02-13T10:41:00.000-08:00

Reporters Find Science Journals Harder to Trust, but Not Easy to Verify - New York Times

This story in the NYT is something to consider; a report based on the fallout from the Dr. Hwang Woo Suk cloning scandal. It points out that the newspapers and science journals are being duped, and recommends that science reporters start building in a layer of scepticism; what we called 'crap detecting' when I took mass communications in college.

This is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to exercise. How many science reporters know enough about a topic to write accurately on a subject in the first place? I know as I begin to write on broader and broader subjects outside of my expertise in archaeology, I can only rely on what background and good sense I have to figure out what makes a good story, and then chase down appropriately external reviewers for their comments. But if the journal editors and outside sources are also taken in by studies, how are we, your humble science reporters, to know?

The interesting problem is, as one scientist said to me recently, there are already fewer and fewer scientists who are willing to talk to science reporters because of a lack of trust. This scandal may increase the difficulty in getting good science stories into the public domain.

Ah well. Nobody said science journalism was going to be easy. Maybe this is a signal for the need to increase niche reporting.

Yeti Researcher - Society for Cryptic Hominid Investigation

2006-02-13T09:39:00.000-08:00

Yeti Researcher - Society for Cryptic Hominid Investigation

Thanks to my brother for passing along this issue of McSweeney's. This faux journal about big foot research is a real hoot for archaeologists and paleontologists of all stripes, with articles in it referring to real archaeology studies such as Flores Man (the Hobbit) and Russ Ciochon's Gigantopithecus studies.

The Yeti Researcher is just one of several parts of McSweeney's Issue 17, which is apparently the contents of Sgt Maria Vasquez's mailbox in August 2005.

Kilwa Kisiwani - Medieval Trade Center of Africa

2006-02-10T15:32:00.000-08:00

Kilwa Kisiwani - Medieval Trade Center of Africa

I wrote this article on Kilwa, geeze, years ago, but it continues to get pretty good traffic. So, I thought, in honor of Black History Month, I'd get it out, dust it off and take a look at it again. With a pretty groovy 16th century map from the Historic Cities Project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'd seen their website before, but had forgotten just how useful it is!

New Kingdom Tomb Found

2006-02-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

New Kingdom Tomb Found

Nicole Hansen is doing an incredible job keeping on top of this New Kingdom tomb story, lots of chat on her forum on the news items leaking out of the Arabic press.

The First Africans....

2006-02-09T07:31:00.000-08:00

I just finished editing a report for Archaeology at About on a site in the town of Campeche in the Yucatan peninsula. One problem I have is trying to get feedback from academics who are already too busy, and often times the feedback comes after I've published. I really need to figure out what is a fair amount of time to wait for feedback.

Africans in the New World

The main difference between the article as I published it and the article today, is that instead of calling the article "the first African Americans" it is more properly "Early Africans in America". Fact is, the site is still (as far as I know) the first skeletal remains of African people who can be proved to have been born in the Americas. It's a matter of semantics, of course--but...

I've already heard from folks who want to argue that the Olmec civilization is descended from Africans, which I'm afraid is still not proven archaeologically. It's one of those alternative archaeology theories I'm not entirely comfortable discussing. Am I a scientist or a public archaeologist? Who knew there was (has to be) a difference?

Why in the World Would I Do This?

2006-02-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

Aren't there enough blogs in the world about archaeology? Ah, but here I plan to wage war against my own nature and chat more personally about what writing for the public about science, specifically but not limited to archaeology, means to, uh, me.