Why every family should include at least one marine biologist

My nephew Adam is getting his PhD in Marine Biology. A few years ago he took me way out into the Everglades to catch and tag a few alligators. It was a blast.


Adam is a very handy resource when it comes to important marine biology topics. Note this recent email exchange:

Hey, Marine Biologist -

CSI Miami's latest episode opens with a guy on his cellphone stepping into his swimming pool, not noticing that there's an alligator in the pool. Which, of course, proceeds to attack him, making for a nice bloody dramatic beginning. Questions for you:

1. Would the alligator survive the chlorine?

2. Would an alligator in a pool automatically go after a human? If not, what would make an alligator attack someone in a swimming pool? (Not a super-big alligator, either.)

Just wondering. I know everything on TV is true (especially on CSI: Miami)...

- Your favorite auntie

* * * * *

Hey Auntie E,

Yes, an alligator could survive in a chlorine treated pool, but not for a really long time (like months). Gators can survive being exposed to almost anything for short periods of time (days - weeks) as long as they keep their mouth closed because their oral cavity is pretty much the only part of their body that contains highly permeable surfaces and therefore is the site for most ion exchange with their environment (i.e. chlorine, salt, etc.). If they don't open their mouths, they don't get exposed and it's all good in gator land.

An alligator would not automatically attack a human in a pool. Depends on the size of the gator and the size of the human. Alligators generally don't go after prey that are bigger than they are, though there are exceptions to the rule (e.g., deer). What would happen in the pool, I think, is that the gator would sense a human entering the pool through the vibrations on the water surface caused by their entry (they sense these vibrations with their "dome pressure receptors" located on their mouth), and also by the noise of course. The alligator would come over the the human to check it out and inspect the situation, and then it would decide to attack or not attack based on the human's size relative to it and its own hunger level. Gators also like the element of surprise, so if the human saw the gator and started trying to hit it or punch it in the mouth or something like that then the gator might decide that attacking wouldn't be worth it. If the gator on the show was small (less than 6 ft. or so) and the human was a big adult then I think most likely the gator would not attack, at least not immediately.

glad my PhD learnin' is proving to be useful in many contexts

love

adam

Stepping Out on the Ledge

A close friend here in Gloucester lost her younger brother yesterday morning. He was shot outside his Detroit townhouse by one of his neighbors, who then went home and shot and killed his father before killing himself.

* * * * *

On my way to her house yesterday afternoon, I listened to “Judgment of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig’s Tune),” a song about Beethoven, by Joni Mitchell:

You've got to shake
your fists at
lightning now
You've got to roar
like a forest fire
You've got to spread your
light like blazes
All across the sky
They're going to aim
the hoses on you
Show them you won't expire
Not till you burn up every passion
Not even when you die

* * * * *

Late last night I watched a documentary about Bruce Springsteen and the making of the album Darkness on the Edge of Town. After a long legal battle with his manager following the success of Born to Run, Bruce and the band finally got back into the studio and spent a year working to make Bruce’s vision for the new album a reality.

They worked at it month after month, recording multiple versions of over 70 songs, trying different approaches, mixing the tracks in various ways, pushing the limits of the technologies, the musicians, and, no doubt, everyone’s patience. They spent three months just trying to get what Bruce felt were authentic drum sounds – instead of the polished and pristine sound of drumming in the studio, Bruce was looking for the raw essence of drumming, a sound he just had to find.

Some people would see this as obsession; others would call it genius. What I see is his clarity of vision and an unwavering belief in himself and what he was trying to do. The film shows his burning intensity, compelling and hard to watch in equal measure. As the exhausting and seemingly endless process of iteration continued, it’s remarkable that he didn’t get so tangled up in the doing that he lost sight of the getting there. But he recognized the endpoint when he reached it, and the album was done.

Talking about that period in his life, Bruce said, ““More than rich, more than famous, more than happy – I wanted to be great.” Watching his dogged insistence on realizing his creative vision--believing in it, absolutely convinced that it was great--I thought about how infrequently I have pursued my own dreams and vision with anything even vaguely resembling that level of clarity, commitment, and conviction. I haven’t walked that far out on the ledge. These past few days have made me think about what it would take for me to take the first step, and the second.

* * * * *

Our time here may be long or short or somewhere in between. What shall we make of the time we have left?

Big Money, Bad Money

Seems to me that a whole lot more good could have been done with the billions of dollars that have been spent on negative political ads and campaigns for the upcoming midterm elections.

There are 310,554,258 people in the United States; the combined total of all of the money spent for these elections is far more than that. The money could have gone to more productive things, like helping people pay their mortgages, donating it to cancer research, or repairing roads and bridges. Or they could have given everyone in the U.S. $5 apiece and saved us all from the constant barrage of campaign crap.

Grey

I spent this past weekend preparing myself for letting Grey go. He spent the weekend sleeping, eating a little here and there, and occasionally sitting in my lap, purring. It’s clear that he is uncomfortable and feels unwell; his beautiful sea-green eyes are distant and he sits facing the wall, as if he is waiting for something. Today I will take him to the vet for the last time.

It’s sad to lose him, but sadder still to watch him suffer. So, I will be there with him at the end, with many tears but also with love and gratitude for all that he brought to my life.

Grey is, above all, a persistent cuss. He has always been a good communicator, and generally got his way, demanding food and attention, insisting on sitting in my lap while I was working, and deciding when it was time for me to stop working and come to bed. When he thought it was time for breakfast, he’d walk back and forth on me as I slept, and then would stick his face right into mine, tickling me with his whiskers until I got up.

Since he’s been ill, there have been a few flashes of his old spirit, but mostly he’s been quiet and sleeping a lot. He has tolerated a certain amount of medical treatment, but I can tell that he’s done with that, it’s not making him feel any better, and he’d just as soon let this body go. And so I will help him with that.

I am quite sad, but also immensely grateful for the time we had together. May we meet again someday.

Marketing Tips for the Administration

Time to do some marketing, Mr. President. (And you Congressional Democrats.)

Run a series of ads spotlighting the individual Americans who are benefiting from the stimulus package. Let the people speak for themselves about their jobs and how their lives have changed as a result.

Run a series of ads spotlighting the various projects across the country that have been funded by the stimulus package. Let the project/site manager and/or the people working on the project speak.

Include a counter in the corner that ticks away, rolling up the numbers of how many jobs have been created -- just keep it ticking away, still going as each ad ends (to show it's an ongoing process).

Stop ceding this ground to the Republicans and TeaBaggers. You can win the battle for people's hearts and minds.

Stop telling everyone what you're doing and the impact it's had on people's lives -- show us. Over and over and over again. On TV. On the radio. Online.

Time Zones

I grew up in southwestern Ohio. It’s in the western end of the Eastern Standard Time zone, along with most of Indiana. On early summer nights, it would stay light out quite late and we’d be out in the back yard in our pajamas, catching fireflies before bedtime. I remember thinking how wonderful it was to be running around in the soft evening air, looking for the intermittent flashes of light in the darkest corners of the lawn.

Now I live on the north shore of Boston, which lies at the eastern end of the time zone. And although I have lived in this area for over 25 years, the morning light still surprises me. On these early summer days, it starts to get light over the marsh at around 4:30AM. The cats begin to stir around 5:30; the birds are already fussing and twittering. The cats want their breakfast. I fend them off as long as I can, but invariably I end up getting up before I really want to; their persistence defeats my desire to catch another hour of delicious morning sleep.

. . .

Many summers ago I went back to Dayton for the wedding of one of my childhood friends. The evening reception was held outdoors on their family farm, with a big tent with tables and a dance floor set up next to the hay fields.

It was a beautiful evening. The music was sweet, the air was as soft as I remembered it, and there were thousands of fireflies over the fields, signaling to each other as darkness slowly fell.

Art in West Texas

Spent last week driving through West Texas with one of my oldest and dearest friends. We flew into Austin, then drove 7 hours due west to Marfa, a small town that boasts both the “Marfa Lights” (UFOs) and a huge installation of artwork by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and John Chamberlain, among others.

Judd’s and Flavin’s pieces are minimal and meticulous. Flavin’s spare but vivid fluorescent light environments are housed in a series of six former military barracks. Donald Judd designed and installed a large number of antiseptically clean, rectangular aluminum boxes into two huge artillery sheds. All of the boxes have the same outer dimensions, with variations of inserted planes and open sides.


With most sculpture, the setting is the frame within which one perceives the work. In this case, not so much. There was a nearly complete lack of interaction between the art installations inside the buildings and the landscape surrounding them. The buildings that housed the art could have been anywhere—say, in upstate New York or urban Seattle or southwestern Ohio. The grand and glorious desert landscape did not matter, for the most part. Judd did have some concrete boxes out in a field, but the scale was wrong (too small) and they seemed plonked down somewhat randomly, without any clear rationale or apparent sensitivity to how they were placed in that space.

* * *

The Texas desert is spectacular. Huge sky, clouds moving constantly, and a landscape of muted color: sage, sand, dark browns and greens. Small deer. Coyotes. Cows. Sheep. Goats. Horses. Llamas. Vultures. Turkeys. Sun. Rain. Stars. And lots of open space. It's a landscape on a gigantic scale which made me feel small and rather inconsequential. Not so for Donald Judd, or so it seems.

* * *

One of the aluminum boxes in the artillery shed created a frame for the desert, but the others did little but reflect each other. It seemed very odd to me that the artist chose largely not to interact with and respond to the beautiful land and sky.

I came away thinking that Donald Judd’s ego was significantly larger than his vision.