home is where the nerdy art is

One of the nicer aspects of moving is getting to make your mark on a new space. Now that I've finally started thinking seriously about in-home design for my new pad, I'm realizing how tough my decor decision-making is going to be. I've got a ways to go yet, but I thought I'd share some fun sciencey/geeky stuff I've come across recently:

Endless Forms Most Strange
Alexander Ross is one of my favorite contemporary artists. His works recall fantastically detailed biological films and cellular structures at once beautiful and weird. I adore the glossy, green Play-Doh-like appearance of his paintings and can only hope that someday I'll be able to place one of his unique pieces in my home. For now I'm happy to know that he's just published a new collection via the David Nolan Gallery in New York.


On the Origin of Species... Down to the Letter
Whether you choose the single finch or the evolving primate set, nothing says "I love science" quite like Darwin's entire manifesto printed out line for line on your living room wall. Posters by Spineless Classics.


See the Solar System
Physics professor and graphic designer Tyler Nordgren created a lovely poster series for the National Parks Service stressing clear skies perfect for stargazing. Last year he also drummed up some fantastic prints depicting travel scenes from around the solar system, including these two gems from Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Io.


Stop and Feed the Robotic Lions
What can I say? This Voltron print by Scott C., titled "Super Hungry," is super cute.


Cheat Sheet
Last, but certainly not least, is this clever Mac shortcuts print by birdAve on Etsy. Who says wall art can't also be useful? ∞

those were the days

This is the very first email I ever received, exactly 17 years ago today [high res]. It was the summer of '94 and I had been interested in finding out about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which was smacking quite visibly into Jupiter at the time. [See how easy that was? This was before links to Wikipedia, kids.]

I was still a high school student, attending classes at Brown for the summer, when I sent the initial email from what was then an awe-inspiring computer lab. Ah, to secure a spot in the sea of black-and-green monitors at the CIT... Anyway, Peter Ford over at MIT kindly sent me some websites to check out (I hardly had any idea what a website even was back then) and pointed me in the direction of Brown's stellar planetary geosciences department. As fate would have it, I ended up taking a super planetary geo course with Pete Schultz, who's mentioned in the email, as an undergrad several years later.

Things to point out in the actual message: It took two pages to print! And gosh the headers were intense back then. This was before we were introduced to Eudora, which Brown used for I don't know how long...through the end of '99 at least. Anyway, I happen to have printed this puppy out and was surprised to find it this week in a stack of stuff I thought I'd long tossed away. Makes me wanna start yammering about trudging five miles to class in the snow, etc. etc.

saying goodbye, times two

“The end of an era.” It's a phrase that's been uttered countless times these past two weeks, as the country and the world waited with anticipation for the last chapter of NASA’s storied space shuttle program to come to a close. Having trekked to Cape Canaveral to witness Atlantis’s final two launches in person—and having known only one American spaceflight program in my lifetime—I certainly joined in the fanfare. Yet those five little words had not one but two melancholy meanings for me this week in particular, as I counted down to an ending of my own: I officially left New York City after a dozen remarkable years and headed off into a whole new cosmos. In many ways, I’m incredibly hopeful for both the future of human spaceflight and for my days ahead in a new city. But I find myself this week stuck in the gloaming, that transition time between day and night, with bittersweet emotions all over, often in places where I'd least expected them. So, here’s where I raise a glass—let's make that two. To the space shuttle, and to Gotham: You will both always be in my heart. &infin



Photo credits: Top - NASA; Bottom - pixbymaia

up up and away

last one by shlomi yoav

And so it is time for me to bid adieu to the space shuttle. The very last mission is set to begin this week with the launch of the Atlantis orbiter from the Kennedy Space Center on the Florida coast. This particular launch is a gift from the American people, whose representatives voted last year to tack on one last go before the entire shuttle fleet is permanently grounded and the orbiters put on their pedestals for future generations to ooh and ahh at. Yet those same politicians are also now looking to drastically defund NASA in what amounts to a serious rethinking of whether or not America has a real future in space. Will the U.S. forever take a back seat to the Russians or Chinese or anyone else in our quest to land humans on Mars? It could very well happen. In the U.S. we certainly like to talk the talk when it comes to being innovators, in space development and otherwise, but so often in the past decades, walking the walk has proven to be another story altogether.

Millions of words will be spoken, penned, blogged, and microblogged about this final countdown, so I won't clog the fiber optic cables with too many thoughts on this bittersweet occasion. But I will say that in the end I choose to believe that the American people will keep outer space in mind when they fill out their ballots of the future. And how, you ask, will we do this in the face of economic uncertainty, declining political will and an ever-straining space budget? By reaching out to each other. In the past couple of years I've met, virtually and in real life, more folks than I'd ever known existed who consider space exploration—both robotic and human-based—one of the most important endeavors humanity can undertake. And these folks have passion. If we can group together, to share our excitement with those unaware of what our space program actually does, to get our representatives to think beyond the next election and out toward the stars, to teach our little ones about what they might one day discover beyond our blue planet, we'll have a force to be reckoned with when it comes to our future in the cosmos.

A friend of mine is still hoping to be an astronaut someday. Despite NASA's uncertain future, he and others like him are keeping the dream alive by continuing to do what astronauts and all scientists do: constantly asking questions. What a stupendous waste it will be if we let this collective bundle of energy and human spirit go for naught.

And with that, I'll leave you with this brilliant 45-minute visual feast of the space shuttle on its way off the pad. I dare you not to marvel as you sit and watch, agog and wide-eyed, at the ingenuity it took to make this peculiar bird fly up, up, and away. &infin

for the love of the game

We live in a post-Title IX age, but it's an unfortunate reality that girls and women in the sporting world still face plenty of uphill battles. You may have heard me grumble about certain inequities that continue to exist for women and girls who attempt to play with the boys...or who want to manage or officiate their games. And I'd be happy to talk your ear off about the paucity of insightful, fair, and unsexist coverage of women's collegiate and professional sports in the media these days.

But these gripes aside, I'm reminded from time to time of how far we've come in the last few decades, and how much we athletes of the modern West take for granted. Today, it was a young woman named Khalida Popal who really drove the point home. Popal is the captain of an all-women's soccer team, which might not sound all that special until you realize that her team is based in Afghanistan, a war-torn nation where females are regularly treated not just as second-class citizens but as subhuman beings.

While the Taliban ruled in Afghanistan, playing sports was strictly forbidden for any female, young or old. More recently, though, officials have allowed limited playing opportunities for Afghan women. For a time, Popal and her teammates had actually procured practice space in the same Kabul stadium in which public executions were once held. And in December, officials allowed a team of Afghan women to play an international game for the first time. Unfortunately, though, the players received numerous threats for following their passion for the game of soccer, and they soon lost their practice space.

Now, NATO has stepped in and offered the athletes a patch of grass near its headquarters, where they can work out and play friendlies against female NATO officers. But playing soccer is still seen by many in Afghanistan as offensive behavior for women and girls, and the athletes continue to be ostracized.

This isn't the first I've heard of females in strict traditional societies butting heads with the law of the land in the name of the sport they love . . . I'm reminded of the the Iranian woman who had to get special permission from a local ayatollah to race Formula-One-style cars; the Palestinian girls who defy their culture to surf along the Gaza Strip; and the Pakistani women who've faced death threats for trying to play cricket. I'm also all too aware that sports are just the tip of the human rights iceberg when it comes to women and girls suffering from all manner of physical and psychological violations each and every day.

But hearing Khalida Popal tell her story truly made me appreciate for a moment the freedoms we have here in America—and not just the freedom to play sports, but the freedom to act when we feel our rights are being infringed upon. I can only hope that Popal and others like her continue to defy the odds and fight for their rights—and that more of the men in traditional societies recognize that female athletes are not a threat, and speak out in favor of letting the games go on. I also encourage you to learn about organizations such as Goals For Girls, cosponsored by UNICEF and FIFA, to find out how you can contribute to the empowerment of girls and women through sport. ∞

the day the earth shook

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, earthquakes with a magnitude of 7 or greater take place about 15 times a year. Often these quakes have little effect on human life, but every now and then, as we've seen so recently in Japan, the world experiences a shake-down for the ages. On a cosmic scale, these events are nothing special; it's all part and parcel of a geologically active planet doing its subducting and fault displacement thing. But when they happen where humans have set up shop, "nothing special" has a tendency to turn into all-out "calamity."

105 years ago today, the world experienced one of those calamitous shakers in the great city of San Francisco, California. My grandfather, age 6 at the time, was right in the middle of it. He was one of the lucky ones.

Every April 18th I get a little nostalgic for what it must have been like in the City by the Bay, back when horse-drawn dreighs were a common mode of transportation and a porterhouse steak would set you back about 75 cents. This morning I watched reels of footage on YouTube from that time. The most compelling was a comparison between a film shot from a trolley making its way down Market Street just four days before the quake with a similar film shot in the dizzying aftermath of the devastation. I was also heartened to discover the reproduction of a magnificent article, first published in 1933, memorializing the city that had fallen: "Shaken to shards in the dawn, gulped in part by a mad sea, swept by flame. Ruin covering agony, crowned by hunger, thirst, fever, pest. Death over all."

After reading that, I decided that I wanted to add to that picture with thoughts from one who was there, in the fire and fury.

My grandfather, Louis Weinstock, Sr., was born in Winnipeg, Canada, to a family of immigrants from what is now Kiev, Ukraine. After the sudden death of his mother from complications of childbirth (as well as of his newborn sister, who only lived about a month), his father—my great grandfather—packed the family up and moved to what was then the 9th most populous city in the union. On the day of the Great Earthquake, my grandfather was just a little kid. Here's what he saw, as recounted some three-quarters of a century later:

It happened on April 18, 1906. I was in bed, and because of the earthquake my bed became jammed against the door. I called for help in moving the bed. My father, [step]mother, and sister came to my rescue. My father moved our beds to the shop, where we all slept cross-wise. We lived very near the Golden Gate Park. The Army set up tents at the park.

I was chosen to go to the Park to fetch food, which was being distributed there. Going to get the food was a big adventure for me. People sat at the curbs and would ask, “Where’s the fire now, how far’s the fire?” The government had requisitioned all the food. The markets were all closed, except the bakeries, which kept working. The papers—Examiner, Tribune—kept publishing, although with reduced editions.

All the trains in the country gave preference to relief effort. There was a lot of destruction, but the worst destruction came with the fires. The water mains broke and the fires could not be put out. They reached all the way to Van Ness Avenue, which became a fire breaker.

Because of the earthquake, we became refugees. One of my uncles got a dreigh, a wagon with big wheels. He then made reservations for the ferry to Oakland/Alameda/Berkeley. We put the whole family’s belongings and took off. As we went by a burning building we whipped the horses to go fast. Right after we went past this building I looked back and the building collapsed.

Why did we go to Alameda? I don’t know. We just got out as soon as possible.

It's astonishing to me to think that a boy of six lived through this catastrophe, which claimed the lives of several thousand and left homeless more than half the population of 400,000; moved across the country to New York; and grew up to have a full, adventurous life, three children of his own, and five grandkids, including little old me. Last fall I returned to San Francisco and thought a lot of my grandpop, who passed away when I was a little girl. I explored the areas and streets he'd talked about from that time, and I even took a ferry over to Oakland/Alameda the same way he did more than a century earlier to flee a burning city. Amazing what time can do, isn't it? ∞

supermoon tunes

For your amusement, I've put a little mix together in honor of the supermoon, which is super spectacular in New York tonight! Enjoy. ∞

Walking on the Moon - The Police
Many Moons - Janelle Monae
Tears From The Moon - Conjure One feat. Sinead O'Connor
I Was on the Moon - Apollo Sunshine
Man On The Moon - R.E.M.
Moonlight - Digitalism
Must Be The Moon (Hot Chip Remix) - Chk Chk Chk
Moonlight Dancing - Bette Midler
Sister Moon - Sting
Moonchild - M83
Blue Moon - Elvis Presley
Full Moon In My Soul - Robyn Hitchcock
Goodnight Moon - Will Kimbrough

oscar doc predictions

It's been three or four years since I started getting obsessive about seeing Oscar-nominated documentaries prior to the big red carpet event. But let's face it: Most Americans don't do docs. It's a damn shame, if you ask me. Documentaries are like college classes, without the tuition and without the prerequisites. True, you have to be prepared to get angry or upset, but docs teach you what the world is really like, without the sugarcoating of shows you might see on cable networks, even the ones that purport to offer "in depth" coverage of real-world events. And before you complain that documentaries do nothing but make people feel helpless, I'd counter that the best docs often reveal how one person, or a small group, can make a big difference, even in the face of powerful, monstrous forces.

Fortunately, it's been getting easier to find the Oscar docs in theaters here in New York over the past few years. The Paley Center in midtown Manhattan now shows all nominated docs, both feature-length and short, every year on the weekend of the Academy Award ceremony, and at least this year, the IFC Center screened all short subject nominees each day for more than a week. But you'd expect docs to show in New York and LA; it's time to get more of them out to places like Wichita and Montgomery and Albuquerque so everyone can watch and learn!

This year's crop of Oscar-nominated docs features a few recurring themes: big business's devastating impact on the environment; the plight of American soldiers during and after war combat; and funky-ass art. But there are some powerful and moving wild card topics, too. So on the eve of the Oscars, here are my picks for who should win and who will win in both of the documentary categories! You can find synopses and trailers for all 10 nominated docs on this page; some are also available for purchase from iTunes. ∞

Documentary Short Subject

Will Win: Strangers No More The most upbeat and heartwarming of the five nominees in this category, Strangers No More tells the story of a unique school in Tel Aviv, Israel in which refugee children from around the world come together to form the ultimate melting pot. There are really no losers in this year's batch of doc shorts, but considering the Academy's choice in the past two years of the similarly hopeful Smile Pinki and Music By Prudence, this seems like a pretty good bet to take home the statuette.

Should Win: The Warriors of Quigang Whether we like it or not, China is going to have to lead the environmental movement of tomorrow. This doc gracefully captures how one small city in Anhui Province is attempting to battle both an unruly local polluter an unrepresentative and unresponsive government. Here's one great example of a film that not only explains where the big problems lie but also makes heroes out of ordinary citizens trying to better the ugly hands they've been dealt.

Documentary Feature

Will Win: Gasland I had never heard of hydraulic fracturing, or "hydrofracking," before I saw this film, and what I learned scared the bejesus out of me. There's been quite a bit of press coverage about this doc since the nominees were announced, mostly due to the unsurprising loud reaction from the natural gas lobby over the film's depiction of their use of what can only be described as a poorly regulated and highly toxic method of extracting gas from the ground. While some have criticized certain methods of director Josh Fox, I think that in seeing this film, Academy voters will have come away with a pretty powerful overall message. What's more, the time seems ripe for a major environmental movie to take home the big doc prize.

Should Win: Inside Job Okay, boys and girls, here's the one movie that everyone in the country needs to see, and pronto. Director Charles Ferguson does an epic job of weaving one-on-one interviews together with easy-to-follow narration and infographics to explain how the recent financial crisis of the late '00s came about. At the end of the day, the lesson is obvious: Our economic policies have been set by the very cronies who masterminded what one interviewee describes as the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. What's more, the film makes it crystal clear that our government is deeply embedded in the pockets of a few powerful corporations, who literally gamble away our security in order to make billions for themselves—with no reprecussions whatsoever when everything collapses. I happened to catch this film in a theater, and the rage of the audience was palpable; people shaking their heads over and over, guffawing and sighing out of frustration at just how blatant the deception was and continues to be. Aside from the surprising production value, which I thought was super considering how dry a subject finance might seem to the average American, this doc needs to win for the sheer power it has in making people see why increased financial regulations—not to mention campaign finance reform—are absolutely essential to the future of our country, and indeed the entire global economy.