"Nothing is enough"

This is a short post, and likely a transient one--my children are in Galway, and this is a Galway story.

Last July, Leslie and I found ourselves in Monroe's, a crowded pub on the locals' side of the canal in Galway. We were a bit lost, and a bit more hungry. Ordering in a pub is different than in the States--you order at the bar, and your food finds you.

The place was crowded, and a waitress took us under her wing--that she happened to be stunningly Galway beautiful did not escape me (and, thankfully, Leslie). Her hair was black, her eyes blue, and I suppose I cannot fault her for her western Oirish accent. I fell in love.



The lass found us a quiet spot, and made sure we got fed. We wanted to tip her, though tipping in pubs (at least outside Dublin) is frowned upon--the waitstaff are not servants, and many take pride in what they do, and they do it well.

Still, we felt we had to offer something, and so we asked--what is the custom?

Her reply: "Nothing is enough." I heard it one way, Leslie another, and indeed, nothing is enough.

And with a roof over our heads and Guinness in our bellies, nothing is more than enough.

What does this have to do with science? With biology? With education?

Take a walk outside--nothing is indeed enough. We are animals. We eat, we breathe, we move, we live. The sun, the air, the soil, all gifts. Do our children see them this way? Can you commoditize something that's been given to us for nothing?

I am drinking another bottle of my daughter's mead--yeast, water, and honey now blessed with time. She was born 27 years ago, and her brother followed her 3 years later. Neither took much more than the mead to make, and both, I think (and I pray) know that for happiness, nothing is enough.

And should you find yourself in a pub with the woman you have loved for over three decades, you realize nothing, indeed, is enough.

"Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God's sight."
Luke, of course, and perhaps an odd thing for a science blog.
Take wisdom where you will.

And more wisdom, from a Galway lad no more than 11.
He was fishing in the bay, when a man asked him if he planned to eat any fish he caught.
He looked genuinely surprised. "What else would you do with a fish?"

Ambergris

Leslie and I took a walk along the edge of our world, as we do most Saturdays. The tide was out.

At the edge of our universe, we witness miracles. Today we saw a 1" horseshoe crab the color of sand, not quite a yearling, making the universal horseshoe crab tracking pattern. I rescued an older one, at least a decade old, flipped upside down, a gull nearby eying its gills.

The beach is littered with blue crabs recently dead, their murderers betrayed by the tracks of webbed feet.


The February wind whipped through our coats.
It's still winter here.



And then I stumbled on this:




Its earthy marine aroma seduces me, and repulses Leslie.

I think I've found a good chunk of ambergris, worth something back in the days before chemists played gods. A decade or two ago, a sperm whale wrestled with a giant squid, perhaps a mile deep, and won. The squid's beak took one last stab at the whale's gut, which formed a protective coating of, well, whale excrement around the squid's last charge.

The beak was eventually expelled, either as poop or vomit, neither method particularly charming, and after years in the sea was tossed up on our beach.

If anyone wants to buy it, let me know. In the meantime, I'll keep sniffing it, drawing up images of death and delight in the deepest recesses of my hind brain.

It was 2 years ago February that I tossed a whale's tooth back in the drink.
I wish I held onto that. Far more interesting than a piece of poop.

Horseshoe crab photo by Leslie, of course.

Science on the rocks

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg broke off from Antarctica after being rammed by another giant iceberg.

Reuters News Service

Where to begin?

Who knew icebergs behaved so badly (well, other than the rogue that sank the Titanic)?
How big is a "Luxembourg"? A thousand square miles?
Will the AP report this in "Rhode Islands"?

UPDATE: the AP reported that "a big chunk of ice, slightly smaller than Oahu, broke off from a place it wasn't supposed to." I had no idea Oahu and Luxembourg were close in size.


If I had my physical science classes this year. I'd sic them on this--figure out what happened and why it might matter.

Beats memorizing the Periodic Table....

Five inventions that have doomed humanity

I just read a fun post tweeted by dtitle, "Five amazing inventions that will doom us all!"

Why wait for the future, though? We already have all kinds of technological doo-dads that have doomed humanity (if not humans):

(Runners-up: Automobiles, telephones, and the incandescent lamp. And record players (recommended by John Spencer).)


Number Five: Television (and other forms of e-media)

Very few folks control television, and very few appreciate how this medium has altered our minds. Democracy depends on discourse, and folks who spend hours a day "consuming" visions produced by very wealthy people with very narrow objectives effectively remove themselves as true citizens (though they can, alas, still vote).

Democracy is essentially dead in the States, and hasn't flourished in most parts of the world anyway, so as influential as televison is, I relegated it to fifth place here.




Number Four: The Haber Process

Prometheus gave us fire, Fritz Haber gave us nitrogen fixation. We were now one with the gods.

Before the Haber process, only bacteria and bolts of lightning made nitrogen available for life. Without nitrogen, we have no proteins, no nucleic acids. Haber gave humans control of the nitrogen cycle. We are gods now, able to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.

We no longer had to rely on poop for fertilizer. Our huge human population depends on fertilizer made possible by the Haber process. Ammonia can also be used to make lots of explosives.

Why is this on the list (aside from my innnate hatred of golf courses)? Haber's process created industrialized agriculture. We disconnected ourselves from the mystery (or so we think), and now believe we can continue to grow food relentlessly, without thought.

Haber helped trigger the Green Revolution. In the end, it will only mean that many more carcasses to burn when our fossil fuels are depleted, and artificial fertilizers become too expensive for all but the elite.

Fritz Haber also developed chlorine gas for use in warfare, and personally oversaw its use in France.




Number Three: The written word

Yep, I use them. I read, I write, I even (*gasp*) blog. I'm a hypocrite.

Words are abstract. They freeze moments. Our collective oral memory evolves through generations, tailoring the needs of the clan with the needs of the community. The written word changes all this.

NONE of any of the rest of this list happens with oral tradition alone. The written Bible does not happen, nor the written Koran. Old conflicts dissolve with time in the oral tradition. The written word keeps grudges alive forever.

In my best moments, words disappear.

I'm OK with burning books, as long as we burn all of them.




Number Two: Computers

We can now process thought faster than we can think. Every one of you reading this post can be traced. Databases record your keystrokes. There is no longer privacy for anyone committed to living the 21st century life.

I'd like to pick my nose and maybe even savor the results without anyone knowing. (That was allegorical, folks.)

Computers allow telecommunications, allow nuclear weaponry, allow large hadron colliders, allow genomic typing, allow pretty much every foray into risky high tech hi-jinks without an iota of thought.

OK, they allow Zelda, too, so it's almost a wash.





And number one:
Nuclear weapons

We got 'em, lots of them. So does Russia, and China. The Brits. The cozy buddies India and Pakistan. Did I mention France? France!?

Well that's OK, no rogues states, eh. (Ooops...almost forgot. NORTH KOREA!)

Maybe Israel. And soon, perhaps, Iran.

But it's OK, we all love each other, and would never use them, right?







Yoshihiro, the baby died 11 days later.
Tanaka Kio, the mother, lived until December 9, 2006.

Their story, our story, is here.

Television pic from https://ishcmcwiki.wikispaces.com, via CC 3.0
Fritz is from wikipedia
The open Bible is from wikipedia, too
Univac via Georgia Gwinnett College
Yoshihiro and Tanaka's photo was taken by Yamahata Yosuke.

Am I serious about this list?
Yes.

I'd love to hear your opinions....

Death of a daphnia

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

John Keats, "This Living Hand"

A couple of days ago, I slid a daphnia, a water flea, under a cover slip and peeked at it under the microscope. You could see its antennae sweep the water, its eyes, even its frantic heart beat through its translucent body.

After a bit of time, the heart slowed, maybe hypoxia, maybe exhaustion, time to put it back.

The daphnia came from a jug of water that has sat on the windowsill for over two years now, a jar with elodea and translucent snails and some odd jelly-like organism sticking to the side.

Daphnia reproduce every few weeks--over 20 generations have passed their lives in this bottle, their universe.

While trying to put the daphnia back in the jug, I screwed up--the daphnia stuck to the cover glass, and as I tried to coax it into the water, I squished it.

No one else noticed the death. I'm a loon--I spent hours pondering it.

***

I come from a clan of loons. We travel, we bark, we dance, we live. Mary Beth made friends in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan, and saw a valley of bonfires during an Ismaili Muslim celebration. John tackled a 20/20 cameraman, and got a spot on The Daily Show with John Stewart, and Marnie holds center court no matter where we go, and may be the funniest person on this planet.

I'm the wallflower, and I'm no slouch.

My mom was talented and crazy, but most of all, she was Oirish enough to remind us daily, hourly, that we are mortal. She gave up a shot at the professional stage to raise us, but we were audience enough. She loved us to death.

Death.

We live in a culture that denies it.

If a child learns anything in biology class, she ought to learn that in the end, death is as relentless as life, and life as relentless as death.

***

Our own death remains unknowable, of course, and I fear it in proportion to my love of life. Still, I saw both my parents finally give in to long illnesses, and both laughed, laughed, in their final moments of consciousness.

Not sarcastically, not smirkingly, not even ironically. They both laughed joyously. Neither believed in heaven, and both prayed there was no hell. Their faith was in the herenow.

Faith has no place in science class, but mystery does. Science is about pushing the borders of what we can know.

I know the daphnia I observed under the scope had some sense of awareness. I know the sun provides plant with the energy that keeps me alive. On rare, too rare, occasions I know that I will die.

And on those days I remember this, moments clarify, and joy deepens, not for what I will lose, but for what I have. In a culture that teaches children to fear their own shadows, I hope to show them the ultimate shadow, the inexplicable end that puts things in perspective.

Dozens of daphnia still dance in the windowsill jug, eating, seeing, being.

I want my students to have daphnia moments.

The Daphnia photo is by Paul Hebert at the Public Library of Science, via wikimedia.

Ecstasy in a classrooom

I remember

coming to the farm in March

in sugaring time, as a small boy.

He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart

buckets, dangling from each end

of a wooden yoke

that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them

into a vat in the saphouse

where fire burned day and night

for a week.

Donald Hall, from "Maple Syrup"

I am drinking some fine mead made by my daughter and her beau--they had almost given up on it a few months ago. Honey, water, and yeast, when left alone long enough, make one feel like a part of a universe that matters. We play a part, but just a part.

This week's Perennial Project, my year long observation project, is for the kids to go stare at the tree they picked way back in September. The leaves gave up their nutrients, sugar flowed into the ground, and the trees "died."

And now the sugar returns, last summer's bounty fueling this spring's growth. We don't tap trees in this neck of the woods, but we could. Maybe next year we will.

***

Miracles continue to happen in the classroom. I ate the freshest rattlesnake bean possible in February--Dina brought it up to show me the bean, concerned that her plant was dying. And it was. Somehow her plant had gotten fertilized, and the bean sprout poured its energy into this lovely bean pod.

Without a thought, I ate it, and it was delicious. Another teacher eyed my basil patch this afternoon and offered to "thin" it out. My student teacher has already confessed to gnoshing on some others.

Dina will get extra credit for getting her bean to fruit, but long after the points dissolve to nothing, she will remember her bean, and the ridiculous look of joy on my face as I ate it, the freshest produce in Bloomfield, righ under her nose.

Mead, basil, and rattlesnake beans make the last week of February tolerable. We teach order and restraint, as we must in a public school setting, but wildness creeps through anyway. We share our room with yeast and daphnia, basil and fish. We've raised E. coli that fluoresce with jelly fish protein. We have tomato plants that are threatening to fruit.

And what will a child's heart follow a decade or two from now? Will it be influenced by a battery of tests designed to create super-citizens who will "outcompete" workers from around the world?

Maybe, just maybe, a heart or two will be influenced by the few moments of pure joy experienced by the oldest in the room, eyes rolling up as he savors the explosion of flavor available to anyone who cares to know. Life consumes the living, and all living today will be consumed by life.

That's science.
Just ask Donald Hall.





The photo is of Palestine, the great great grandfather of Willow of Willow Manor, via Creative Cmmons 3.0.
Isn't it a great photo?
It's reason enough for a post....

Crocuses

Less than an hour ago I found my first crocus spears of the season, one even poking through the snow.

I wrote this February 16, 2004. This post is for me. Again, the crocus rises.

I tend to mark the seasons by plants. Some connections are obvious, strawberries and honeysuckle in June, apples and pumpkins in October. After the hard freeze in November, time seems to stop. By January, even kale has given up the ghost. By then, I no longer notice.

Deep winter, rhythms cease. Some of us lose our way. Age teaches me little but patience; sometimes that is enough.

Now in mid-February the ground remains frozen, and will be for another month. In a week or so, however, impossibly green slivers of grass-like leaves will break through the ice, marked with silver stripes down their middle. And in two weeks, egg-shaped cups of purple and yellow and white will flare open with the sun, exposing bright yellow stamens, the first smell of sex since the world died.

Crocuses flower from February to April--the earliest flowers defy logic, brilliant bursts of color calling bees still slumbering in hives.

By this time of year, I have just about given up on prayer. Nothing seems possible. This early bright drop of color reminds me just how little I know.

And here they are, back again.