Christmas On The Good Earth

I stumbled across the Apollo 8 Christmas broadcast on, you guessed correctly, Christmas Eve. I just got back from a trip that included the Air & Space Museum in D.C. I haven't been excited like that in a long time. Which is funny, because the first time I ever went there (8th grade, school trip) I was bored out of my mind.

Here's something I put on Facebook. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite in more "bloggy" language: 

An astronomer friend once asked me why I love space crap so much. Some of it is how small the scale of the galaxies makes me feel, in the good way where I know it's up to me to make meaning in my life, because the universe is expanding / everything is pulling slowly apart and nothing will last long enough for the time I wasted picking my nose to matter. 

& a lot of it is how much the history of space exploration represents some of the highest levels of hope and optimism in humanity. The Voyager I & 2 missions were some of the craziest things we've ever done. Hey, hypothetical intelligent life, here is a GOLDEN record containing some classical music, a baby crying, and scientific diagrams that can be decoded based on the time it takes for hydrogen to transition between its two lowest-energy states. We'll toss it out of the solar system and maybe some day someone will see it. Come find us if we're still around / maybe don't kill us! 

That's beautiful to me. And so friends, happy holidays, happy solstice, merry Christmas, & may your life be full of far more joy than sadness.

Voyager record replica at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

Went to our nation's capital.

A person has a project collecting poems for every year since 1400. I'm submitting one soon for 1601. I was going to aim for something nonWestern, but then I remembered 1601 was the year Tycho Brahe died. And so.

Sue Miller wrote this for 1577 (a comet, also Tycho Brahe):

(excerpt from "Superlunary")

Imagine a race, today, run without
a stopwatch. Imagine a scientific observation
that waits on the day's catch.
Imagine a future unfurling
beyond capacity
at a pace navigated,
stargazing.

1. I hope they still make kids watch Cosmos 50 years from now. It is hands down the best introduction to all manner of science that also works in our responsibility to not destroy the world/ourselves. Sagan is so earnest that no one can laugh when he says the word "cosmic" or makes you feel very small-yet-also-big.
2. I guess they will soon have to update it with what we've learned about the universe since the 1970s.
3. I hope they don't redo it without Carl Sagan just because kids probably laugh at his 1970s clothes and manner of speech.

This is my 500th post, apparently

Via "A Journey 'Round My Skull" today - illustrations for 1970s science textbooks by Phil Kirkland.

The latest

• There's an owl who lives in the tree outside my apartment.
• I have a bruise that looks like dragon smoke, but purple.
• My remaining cat is love-thirsty and cries when I touch her. Then after a while she settles into rumbling peace.
• A much-missed visitor coming.
• My poems are slack, limp little things.
• Minor legal troubles.
  
• My job is interfering with my work.
• I want to learn to play banjo. Thanks, Dark Dark Dark.
  
• I am considering moving again (elsewhere in Madison), this summer. Most of the good things are east of here. This building feels like a shelf lonely people stick themselves on to gather dust. I feel like even my occasional visitor is a disruption of this. We talk and the walls rattle and threaten to fold. I exaggerate.
• Meteor shower tonight. I think I am getting up supremely early instead of staying up late.

This day needs a poem about dinosaurs

They've explained us away a dozen times: some passing
meteorite or another, the rat-like mammals

eating our pitiful young, all kinds
of new weather. Issueless, but far too stupid to be forlorn,

we trundle along the pink quartz shore
to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea.

From "Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the Stegosaurus at

the Natural History Museum in London," by Michael Derrick Hudson.

I listen to this on loop and I feel optimistic.

I haven't figured out how to fix the way this site chops off photos and videos that are too wide for it.

With a big "I am an atheist" disclaimer

So! U.S. Rep John Shimkus, who is vying to lead the House Energy and Commerce Committee next term, is a bible-thumping climate change denier of the first order.

Look! A link to a video! I apologize for the expletives in the subtitles. If you are too lazy, basically he reads a passage or two about the Flood, to the gist of, "After the Flood, God promised there would be no other catastrophes," and says that some religious theorists think the earth is actually carbon-starved, there is no surfeit of carbon.

I don't understand religious people who think that if God has promised them something, it means we as human beings have to do nothing to fulfill that promise.

I realize there is a lot about faith that I was never exposed to. But I also have read enough to know that there are plenty of people who think that even if they've been promised something, they have to WORK for it. And that shall-we-say-God might not say verbatim what will happen, but rather the gist of what will happen. Riddles might be involved. Nothing looks like what it turns out to be. Etc.

And if shall-we-say-God has assured there will be no world-destroying events, perhaps really what shall-we-say-God has said is that human beings are going to pull through with the skin of their teeth because they worked their asses off to keep climate change from getting as terrible as we have heard, over and over again, it has a high likelihood of getting. It seems ridiculous, even if you live in a universe with a conscious, benevolant Creator, to assume that if they have promised you safe passage, you should just go ahead and keep punching holes in your rowboat.

Also, in the passages Shimkus quotes in that video, there's really nothing that says, "Global warming won't seriously screw with the human race." Instead - "Man will not destroy this earth." The big worry about climate change is that we will change the earth so much that it destroys us, and other life. The earth itself will be fine, honeybee.

A sort of nuclear glue

Days like Carl Sagan's birthday make me miss my brother. He can do a pitch-perfect impression. I am sure I have said this before. One Thanksgiving he just erupted with the most beautiful "billions and billions," and we all gawked and laughed.

I called him tonight to demand a performance and he obliged and I laughed and clapped my hands. He is not, however, thrilled about my "Let's bake billions and billions of apple pies and watch Cosmos and call it a party" idea. Oh well.

small hearts

Mosquito heart. Jonas King, Vanderbilt Unviersity: "The green structures are the muscles and the blue dots are cell nuclei. The narrow tube running from left to right is the actual heart of the mosquito and the fan shaped structures are called alary muscles."


Crystallized soy sauce. Yanping Weng, Beijing Planetarium.

Originals, and other very small things via Discover

poems, bones

New (old) poem up in the fall Wisconsin People & Ideas.

As usual, my style has changed since I wrote this and it is odd to look at this thing with my name attached and realize it came from me. I see things the writer-I-am-now would change. Then you ask, does publication mean it's frozen and immutable? Butterfly-pinned? I don't think so, but it does mean I'm likely to put "fixing" this one at the bottom of the stack.

Still unsure, too, about names in general. I hate "Christina," so I don't use it. I do like "Chris" as a formal, public, publishing name, but I don't see myself introducing myself "in real life" as such anytime soon. So it's become, by accident, a kind of pen name.
---

Scientists are getting closer to finding out how the blue whales (and other baleen species) lost their teeth. It sounds like a folk tale.

How nerdy was my workplace

Another new hire: "I was told all the buildings look like guns, and if I just think of your office as being in the handle, it's easy to find."

I: "The buildings on the new campus don't work that well, unfortunately. They're kind of horseshoe-shaped."

My officemate: "I like to think of those ones as being chromosomes."

I: "!!!"

self promotion

What did I do on my vacation beside go to Florida, look at apartments, hang out at art fairs and vaudeville shows, wash my dishes and put my books in boxes and NOT make progress on the Triangle Shirtwaist poems? Write about going to Florida for Dane101. I get paid per page view, so if you're curious about what south Florida is like post-BP, following the link would be totally awesome and maybe in a few weeks I can buy a milkshake to celebrate.

Excerpt to tantalize: "It’s Independence Day and I’m seven miles off the coast of Key West, Florida, right on the cusp of the southernmost point in the contiguous United States. I’m having my first ever look at a shallow water coral reef through the clear glass of a snorkel mask. Two hours earlier my friends and I had stumbled, bleary-eyed, from a 95-degree tent at the KOA campground where we’d spent the night, in order to spend our holiday here, first snorkeling and then, after hours of sweaty wandering, watching fireworks from a beach filled with hundreds of people while rows of boats drifted just offshore, their lights bobbing like stars." Here's the link again.

There was a conversation I had with an Air Force sergeant who was in town with an F-16 demo team for the annual air show, which I was writing about for the paper. We were sitting around waiting for the show to get going, and conversation strayed into fuel consumption/costs/etc. I had no idea that airplanes burned so much. Especially stunt planes (he estimated 50-70 gallons/hour) and highly maneuverable fighter jets (up to 150 gallons/hour). I mentally stagger at the carbon footprint, he stays firmly in financial territory. “It’s all money spent in the defense of freedom.”

“So is the military looking into alternative fuels at all, given worries about supply?”
“Absolutely. There’s this process involving coal…”

Trying to stay neutral as possible, I wandered tentatively into BP territory: “It’s interesting, don’t you think, the extra attention it’s bringing to energy issues?” And he dismisses. “People forget that nearly everything they own is made from petroleum. Focus on fuel is short-sighted. Unless they find a way to make glass more cheaply, we’ll be using oil for a long time.” True, but it ignores the central question of what we CAN do, and the long-term concerns (opposing, in some ways, the short-term concerns of the military) that would make it worth pursuing.

It was an interesting anthropological moment. One of those where you say, Ah, the values here are very different, but they are held together by a certain kind of logic.

I went to that same air show “for fun” the next day. I have other thoughts, maybe for later, about air shows and America, the land where we go to events that boast about “turning fuel into fun,” the land where the deafening roar of a jet engine passing you at 650 mph is “the sound of freedom.”

bright spots in bleak reading

"John Mercer was an English eccentric and, frankly, somewhat disreputable. The list of charges against him is long. He had a penchant for doing his fieldwork in the nude, and was once convicted for jogging naked near his campus at Ohio State University, in Columbus. He ... once abandoned two graduate students, including his acolyte and eventual successor ... high in the Andes after the money ran out on a field trip."

- With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change, Fred Pearce

Space case

Today I've been thinking about

1. Baraboo schools
2. special education
3. oil
4. the Triangle Shirtwaist fire
5. the metaphorical capacity of phospholipids, back-to-back in neat rows to protect each other's hydrophobic tails from water. Though really fear has nothing to do with it, nor hostility. Just a lack of interest in / capacity for bonding with the surrounding water molecules.

Aral Sea, Kazakhstan

actually, Matthew Rohrer has joined my list of future husbands

"Famous raindrops:

Obviously, the first one to fall.
The lucky raindrop who fell down the neck of Helen's dress.
The drop that tried to save the library at Alexandria.
The first raindrop to land on the Ark, on the nose of the figurehead
that was Noah's wife.
Edison's favorite raindrop; the one he kept in a test tube.
The last drop Beethoven ever heard."

Matthew Rohrer, "found in the museum of old science."

Where do poems come from?

I'm working my way towards the Hubble Telescope as a poem series, as of a Science Friday last year when someone got to talking about it. Eventually. It's all a mush of incoherent excitement right now. I am vowing to research.

Prompted by offhand remarks like this from an NPR story today tacked onto the end of an otherwise happy summary of the telescope's accomplishments:

"At some point, the telescope will break down. Eventually, NASA expects to deorbit it and send it crashing down over the Pacific."

THE END