How Mushroom Time-Lapses Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pioneering Time-Lapse Cinematography Behind the Netflix Documentary Fantastic Fungi

in Biology, Film, K-12, Nature, Photography, Science | September 3rd, 2021

Mush­rooms are hav­ing a moment, thanks in part to pio­neer­ing time-lapse cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Louie Schwartzberg’s doc­u­men­tary Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi.

Now stream­ing on Net­flix, the film has giv­en rise to a bumper crop of funghi fantat­ics, who sprang up like, well, mush­rooms, to join the exist­ing ranks of cit­i­zen sci­en­tists, culi­nary fans, week­end for­agers, ama­teur grow­ers, and spir­i­tu­al seek­ers.

Schwartzberg, who ear­li­er visu­al­ized pol­li­na­tion from the flower’s point of view in the Meryl Streep-nar­rat­ed Wings of Life, is a true believ­er in the pow­er of mush­rooms, cit­ing funghi’s role in soil cre­ation and health, and their poten­tial for rem­e­dy­ing a num­ber of press­ing glob­al prob­lems, as well as a host of human ail­ments.

Fan­tas­tic Funghi focus­es on sev­en pil­lars of ben­e­fits brought to the table by the fun­gal king­dom and its Inter­net-like under­ground net­work of myceli­um:

  1. Bio­di­ver­si­ty

A num­ber of projects are explor­ing the ways in which the myceli­um world can pull us back from the bring of  deser­ti­za­tion, water short­age, food short­age, bee colony col­lapse, tox­ic con­t­a­m­i­nants, nuclear dis­as­ters, oil spills, plas­tic pol­lu­tion, and glob­al warm­ing.

  1. Inno­va­tion

Mush­room-relat­ed indus­tries are eager to press funghi into ser­vice as envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able faux leather, build­ing mate­ri­als, pack­ag­ing, and meat alter­na­tives.

  1. Food

From fine din­ing to for­ag­ing off-the-grid, mush­rooms are prized for their culi­nary and nutri­tion­al ben­e­fits.

  1. Phys­i­cal Health and Well­ness

Will the hum­ble mush­room prove mighty enough to do an end run around pow­er­ful drug com­pa­nies as a source of inte­gra­tive med­i­cine to help com­bat dia­betes, liv­er dis­ease, inflam­ma­tion, insom­nia and cog­ni­tive decline?

  1. Men­tal Health

Researchers at Johns Hop­kins, UCLA, and NYU are run­ning clin­i­cal tri­als on the ben­e­fits of psy­che­del­ic psilo­cy­bin mush­rooms as a tool for treat­ing addic­tion, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, PTSD and sui­ci­dal ideation.

  1. Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty

Of course, there’s also a rich tra­di­tion of reli­gions and indi­vid­ual seek­ers deploy­ing mind alter­ing psy­choac­tive mush­rooms as a form of sacra­ment or a tool for plumb­ing the mys­ter­ies of life.

  1. The Arts

Direc­tor Schwartzberg under­stand­ably views mush­rooms as muse, a fit­ting sub­ject for pho­tog­ra­phy, music, film, poet­ry, art and oth­er cre­ative endeav­ors.

 

With regard to this final pil­lar, many view­ers may be sur­prised to learn how much of the 15 years Schwartzberg ded­i­cat­ed to cap­tur­ing the exquis­ite cycle of fun­gal regen­er­a­tion and decom­po­si­tion took place indoors.

As he explains in the Wired video above, his pre­ci­sion equip­ment excels at cap­tur­ing devel­op­ment that’s invis­i­ble to the human eye, but is no match for such nat­ur­al world dis­rup­tions as insects and wind.

Instead, he and his team built con­trolled grow­ing envi­ron­ments, where high­ly sen­si­tive time lapse cam­eras, dol­lies, timed grow lights, and more cin­e­mat­ic light­ing instru­ments could be left in place.

Set dress­ings of moss and logs, cou­pled with a very short depth of field helped to bring the Great Out­doors onscreen, with occa­sion­al chro­makeyed panora­mas of the nat­ur­al world fill­ing in the gaps.

Even in such lab-like con­di­tions, cer­tain ele­ments were nec­es­sar­i­ly left to chance. Mush­rooms grow noto­ri­ous­ly quick­ly, and even with con­stant mon­i­tor­ing and cal­cu­la­tions, there was plen­ty of poten­tial for one of his stars to miss their mark, shoot­ing out of frame.

Just one of the ways that mush­rooms and humans oper­ate on rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent time­lines. The direc­tor bowed to the shrooms, return­ing to square one on the fre­quent occa­sions when a sequence got away from him.

Pro­vid­ing view­ers an immer­sive expe­ri­ence of the under­ground myceli­um net­work required high pow­ered micro­scopes, a sol­id cement floor, and a bit of movie mag­ic to finesse. What you see in the final cut is the work of CGI ani­ma­tors, who used Schwartzberg’s footage as their blue­print.

Net­flix sub­scribers can stream Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi for free.

From Octo­ber 15 — 17, film­mak­er Louie Schwartzberg is host­ing a free, vir­tu­al Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi Glob­al Sum­mit. Reg­is­ter here.

You can also browse his col­lec­tion of com­mu­ni­ty mush­room recipes and sub­mit your own, down­load Fan­tas­tic Fungi’s Stoned Ape poster, or have a ram­ble through a trove of relat­ed videos and arti­cles in the Mush Room.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Cage Had a Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Dis­cov­er the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Brood X Cicadas are her mush­rooms. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Brilliant 19th-Century Astronomical Drawings of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot

in Astronomy, Science | September 2nd, 2021


The first pho­to of the moon was tak­en in 1850 by Louis Daguerre, from whom the daguer­rotype gets its name. We have no idea what that first image looked like as it was lost in a stu­dio fire. But the need to cat­a­log the heav­ens with mod­ern tools had start­ed, and was both fas­ci­nat­ing as it was lack­ing. Into this evo­lu­tion of sci­ence and art stepped Éti­enne Léopold Trou­velot, the French immi­grant, liv­ing in the States, an ama­teur sci­en­tist and an illus­tra­tor. He would dis­miss pho­tog­ra­phy of the heav­ens as “so blurred and indis­tinct that no details of any great val­ue can be secured.” And by illus­trat­ing instead by he saw through tele­scopes, he secured a place in art *and* sci­ence his­to­ry.

Trou­velot might have thought his sci­en­tif­ic papers would be his lega­cy. He wrote fifty in his life­time. Instead it is his rough­ly 7,000 illus­tra­tions of plan­ets, comets, and oth­er phe­nom­e­na that still please us to this day. The New York Pub­lic Library has put 15 of his best up on their site, and over at this page, you can com­pare what Trou­velot saw—-the great astronomer Emma Con­verse called Trou­velot the “prince of observers”—-to pho­tos from NASA’s archive.

Even if his Mars is a bit fan­ci­ful, look­ing translu­cent like a fish egg, his under­stand­ing of the plan­et echoes in the fol­low­ing cen­tu­ry of sci-fi para­noia. Some­thing strange must be there, he sug­gests.

Har­vard hired him to sketch at their college’s obser­va­to­ry, and he used pas­tels to bring the plan­ets to life. Engrav­ing or ink would not have worked as well as these soft shapes and deter­mined lines. His ren­der­ing of the moon sur­face is accu­rate but also fan­ci­ful, like whipped cream. And his sun spots might not be accu­rate, but they repli­cat­ed the god-like forces at work on its tumul­tuous sur­face. His Sat­urn is the most real­is­tic of them all. Even the NASA image doesn’t look too dif­fer­ent to Trouvelot’s art.

These images also help reha­bil­i­tate Trouvelot’s oth­er legacy—-the dread­ed Gyp­sy Moth. Before his stint as ama­teur sci­en­tist, he was also an ama­teur ento­mol­o­gist, and while research­ing silk­worms and silk pro­duc­tion, acci­den­tal­ly let Euro­pean gyp­sy moths into North Amer­i­ca, where they wreaked hav­oc on the forests of North Amer­i­ca. Saturn’s rings may look the same back then as they do now, but so does the dam­age of the gyp­sy moth, which accord­ing to Wikipedia is up to $868 mil­lion in dam­ages per year.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 9th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­script Teach­es Astron­o­my by Mak­ing Sub­lime Pic­tures Out of Words

Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell Changed Astron­o­my For­ev­er; Her Ph.D. Advi­sor Won the Nobel Prize for It

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Vintage Public Health Posters That Helped People Take Smart Precautions During Past Crises

in Design, Health, Life, Museums, Science | August 27th, 2021


We sub­scribe to the the­o­ry that art saves lives even in the best of times.

In the midst of a major pub­lic health cri­sis, art takes a front line posi­tion, com­mu­ni­cat­ing best prac­tices to cit­i­zens with eye catch­ing, easy to under­stand graph­ics and a few well cho­sen words.

In March of 2020, less than 2 weeks after COVID-19 brought New York to its knees, Angeli­na Lip­pert, the Chief Cura­tor of Poster House, one of the city’s new­er muse­ums shared a blog post, con­sid­er­ing the ways in which the CDC’s basic hygiene rec­om­men­da­tions for help­ing stop the spread had been tout­ed to pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions.

As she not­ed in a lec­ture on the his­to­ry of the poster as Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ment the fol­low­ing month, “mass pub­lic health action… is how we stopped tuber­cu­lo­sis, polio, and oth­er major dis­eases that we don’t even think of today:”

And a major part of erad­i­cat­ing them was edu­cat­ing the pub­lic. That’s real­ly what PSAs are—a means of inform­ing and teach­ing the pub­lic en masse. It goes back to that idea … of not hav­ing to seek out infor­ma­tion, but just being pre­sent­ed with it. Keep­ing the bar­ri­er for entry low means more peo­ple will see and absorb the infor­ma­tion.

The Office of War Infor­ma­tion and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia Soci­ety for the Pre­ven­tion of Blind­ness used an approach­able look­ing rac­coon to con­vince the pub­lic to wash hands in WWII.

Artist Sey­mour Nydorf swapped the rac­coon for a blonde wait­ress with glam­orous red nails in a series of six posters for the U.S. Pub­lic Health Ser­vice of the Fed­er­al Secu­ri­ty Agency

Cough­ing and sneez­ing took posters into some­what gross­er ter­rain.

The New Zealand Depart­ment of Health’s 50s era poster shamed care­less sneez­ers into using a han­kie, and might well have giv­en those in their vicin­i­ty a per­sua­sive rea­son to bypass the buf­fet table.

Great Britain’s Cen­tral Coun­cil for Health Edu­ca­tion and Min­istry of Health col­lab­o­rat­ed with

Her Majesty’s Sta­tionery Office to teach the pub­lic some basic infec­tion math in WWII.

Children’s well­be­ing can be a very per­sua­sive tool. The WPA Fed­er­al Art Project was not play­ing in 1941 when it paired an image of a cheru­bic tot with stern warn­ings to par­ents and oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers to curb their affec­tion­ate impuls­es, as well as the trans­mis­sion of tuber­cu­lo­sis.

The arrest­ing image packs more of a wal­lop than this earnest and far wordier, ear­ly 20s poster by the Nation­al Child Wel­fare Asso­ci­a­tion and the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion for the Study and Pre­ven­tion of Tuber­cu­lo­sis.

Read Poster House Chief Cura­tor Angeli­na Lippert’s Brief His­to­ry of PSA Posters here.

Down­load the free anti-xeno­pho­bia PSAs Poster House com­mis­sioned from design­er Rachel Gin­grich ear­ly in the pan­dem­ic here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Down­load Beau­ti­ful Free Posters Cel­e­brat­ing the Achieve­ments of Liv­ing Female STEM Lead­ers

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed Exclu­sive­ly to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

Sal­vador Dalí Cre­ates a Chill­ing Anti-Vene­re­al Dis­ease Poster Dur­ing World War II

Down­load 2,000 Mag­nif­i­cent Turn-of-the-Cen­tu­ry Art Posters, Cour­tesy of the New York Pub­lic Library

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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17th Century Scientist Gives First Description of Alien Life: Hear Passages from Christiaan Huygens’ Cosmotheoros (1698)

in Astronomy, Sci Fi, Science | August 27th, 2021

Astro­bi­ol­o­gists can now extrap­o­late the evo­lu­tion­ary char­ac­ter­is­tics of pos­si­ble alien life, should it exist, giv­en the wealth of data avail­able on inter­plan­e­tary con­di­tions. But our ideas about aliens have drawn not from sci­ence but from what Adri­an Hor­ton at The Guardian calls “an engross­ing feed­back loop” of Hol­ly­wood films, comics books, and sci-fi nov­els. A lit­tle over three-hun­dred years ago — hav­ing nev­er heard of H.G. Wells or the X‑Files — Dutch sci­en­tist Chris­ti­aan Huy­gens answered the ques­tion of what alien life might look like in his work Cos­moth­e­o­ros, pub­lished after his death in 1698.

Every­one knows the names Galileo and Isaac New­ton, and near­ly every­one knows their major accom­plish­ments, but we find much less famil­iar­i­ty with Huy­gens, even though his achieve­ments “make him the great­est sci­en­tist in the peri­od between Galileo and New­ton,” notes the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Those achieve­ments include the dis­cov­ery of Saturn’s rings and its moon, Titan, the inven­tion of the first refract­ing tele­scope, a detailed map­ping of the Ori­on Neb­u­la, and some high­ly notable advance­ments in math­e­mat­ics. (Maybe we — Eng­lish speak­ers, that is — find his last name hard to pro­nounce?)

Huy­gens was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary thinker. After Coper­ni­cus, it became clear to him that “our plan­et is just one of many,” as schol­ar Hugo A. van den Berg writes, “and not set apart by any spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion oth­er than the acci­den­tal fact that we hap­pen to be its inhab­i­tants.” Using the pow­ers of obser­va­tion avail­able to him, he the­o­rized that the inhab­i­tants of Jupiter and Sat­urn (he used the term “Plan­e­tar­i­ans”) must pos­sess “the Art of Nav­i­ga­tion,” espe­cial­ly “in hav­ing so many Moons to direct their Course…. And what a troop of oth­er things fol­low from this allowance? If they have Ships, they must have Sails and Anchors, Ropes, Pil­lies, and Rud­ders…”

“We may well laugh at Huy­gens,” van den Berg writes, “But sure­ly in our own cen­tu­ry, we are equal­ly parochial in our own way. We invari­ably fail to imag­ine what we fail to imag­ine.” Our ideas of aliens fly­ing space­craft already seem quaint giv­en mul­ti­ver­sal and inter­di­men­sion­al modes of trav­el in sci­ence fic­tion. Huy­gens had no cul­tur­al “feed­back loop.” He was mak­ing it up as he went. “In con­trast to Huy­gens’ astro­nom­i­cal works, Cos­moth­e­o­ros is almost entire­ly spec­u­la­tive,” notes van den Berg — though his spec­u­la­tions are through­out informed and guid­ed by sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing.

To under­mine the idea of Earth as spe­cial, cen­tral, and unique, “a thing that no Rea­son will per­mit,” Huy­gens wrote — meant pos­ing a poten­tial threat to “those whose Igno­rance or Zeal is too great.” There­fore, he willed his broth­er to pub­lish Cos­moth­e­o­ros after his death so that he might avoid the fate of Galileo. Already out of favor with Louis XIV, whom Huy­gens had served as a gov­ern­ment sci­en­tist, he wrote the book while back at home in The Hague, “fre­quent­ly ill with depres­sions and fevers,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review. What did Huy­gens see in his cos­mic imag­i­na­tion of the sail­ing inhab­i­tants of Jupiter and Sat­urn? Hear for your­self above in a read­ing of Huy­gens’ Cos­moth­e­o­ros from Voic­es of the Past.

Huy­gens’ descrip­tions of intel­li­gent alien life derive from his lim­it­ed obser­va­tions about human and ani­mal life, and so he pro­pos­es the neces­si­ty of human-like hands and oth­er appendages, and rules out such things as an “elephant’s pro­boscis.” (He is par­tic­u­lar­ly fix­at­ed on hands, though some alien humanoids might also devel­op wings, he the­o­rizes.) Like all alien sto­ries to come, Huy­gens’ spec­u­la­tions, how­ev­er log­i­cal­ly he presents them, say “more about our­selves,” as Hor­ton writes, “our fears, our anx­i­eties, our hope, our adapt­abil­i­ty — than any poten­tial out­side vis­i­tor.” His descrip­tions show that while he did not need to place Earth at the cen­ter of the cos­mos, he mea­sured the cos­mos accord­ing to a very human scale.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Do Aliens Look Like? Oxford Astro­bi­ol­o­gists Draw a Pic­ture, Based on Dar­win­ian The­o­ries of Evo­lu­tion

Carl Sagan Sent Music & Pho­tos Into Space So That Aliens Could Under­stand Human Civ­i­liza­tion (Even After We’re Gone)

Richard Feyn­man: The Like­li­hood of Fly­ing Saucers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Mattel’s Barbie Turns Women of Medicine, Including COVID Vaccine Developer, Into Dolls

in Biology, Gender, Science | August 20th, 2021

The multi­na­tion­al toy man­u­fac­tur­er Mat­tel is encour­ag­ing young­sters to play doc­tor — not a euphemism — and hon­or­ing first respon­ders with the recent release of three health­care-themed “Career Bar­bi­es.”

The com­pa­ny is putting its mon­ey where its mouth is by donat­ing $5 to the First Respon­ders Children’s Foun­da­tion for every doc­tor, para­medic, or nurse Bar­bie pur­chased at Tar­get through August 28.

Mat­tel has also iden­ti­fied six female health­care pio­neers whose efforts dur­ing the pan­dem­ic mer­it a one-of-a-kind Bar­bie who shares their like­ness.

Vac­ci­nol­o­gist Sarah Gilbert, who led the team that devel­oped the Oxford/AstraZeneca vac­cine, describes this unex­pect­ed hon­or as “a very strange con­cept” (pre­sum­ably as com­pared to being award­ed a dame­hood or receiv­ing a stand­ing ova­tion at Wim­ble­don.)

The 59-year-old Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor added that she hoped the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly smooth plas­tic doll would be “part of mak­ing it more nor­mal for girls to think about careers in sci­ence, although, to be hon­est, when I was a young girl I nev­er believed that I would­n’t have a career in sci­ence.”

If the doll falls short of inspir­ing girls to con­sid­er a career in STEM, Women in Sci­ence & Engi­neer­ing (WISE), the non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion Pro­fes­sor Gilbert chose to receive a dona­tion from Mat­tel on her behalf, can take up the slack.

One of the most com­pelling of the six cus­tom-made Front Line Respon­der Bar­bi­es is based on vet­er­an nurse Amy O’Sullivan, a heav­i­ly tat­tooed, queer moth­er of three, who cared for the first COVID-19 patient (soon to become New York City’s first offi­cial COVID death) in Brooklyn’s Wycoff Hos­pi­tal.

Soon there­after, she sur­vived being put on a ven­ti­la­tor with COVID her­self, even­tu­al­ly wind­ing up on the cov­er of Time Mag­a­zine, in the same neck­er­chief, flo­ral socks, eye catch­ing sur­gi­cal cap and woven bracelets her tiny scrub-suit­ed dop­pel­ganger wears.

Sure­ly Amy O’Sullivan is a bet­ter all around role mod­el than the sim­i­lar­ly inked Toki­do­ki Bar­bie or Total­ly Tat­too Bar­bie, or for that mat­ter, the non-cus­tom made First Respon­der Nurse, whose descrip­tion on Target’s web­site seems a bit ret­ro­grade, giv­en the events of the last year and a half:

Wear­ing cute scrubs fea­tur­ing a med­ical-tool print top, pink pants and white shoes, Bar­bie nurse doll (12-in/30.40-cm) is ready make her rounds and check on patients!

The real life O’Sullivan, who was very involved in the cre­ation of her cus­tom doll, seems tick­led by Mattel’s faith­ful recre­ation, telling The New York Post:

When I was younger I always felt like an out­sider — nobody ever looked like me, talked like me, walked like me. I had no role mod­el at all when I was grow­ing up. So if I can be some lit­tle girl’s role mod­el that feels like this, I would love that. 

Nurse O’Sullivan had stronger words for those who have aged out of the demo­graph­ic, in a recent inter­view with Time:

I see these young peo­ple not wear­ing masks. And, you know, those are the peo­ple that COVID is affect­ing now, the younger gen­er­a­tion. They’re becom­ing very sick. And it’s nev­er going to go away until we get vac­ci­nat­ed and wear masks.

That might be a bit heavy for those on the younger end of Career Bar­bi­e’s rec­om­mend­ed 3 and up age group (“espe­cial­ly those inter­est­ed in care­tak­ing and help­ing oth­ers!”), but hope­ful­ly her words will car­ry some weight with those respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing those chil­dren.

The oth­er cus­tom-made Bar­bi­es hon­or:

Dr. Audrey Cruz, who col­lab­o­rat­ed with oth­er Asian-Amer­i­can physi­cians to bat­tle anti-Asian-relat­ed bias spring­ing from the pan­dem­ic

Cana­di­an psy­chi­a­try res­i­dent at who bat­tled sys­temic racism in health­care a doc­tor in Las Vegas who is cam­paign­ing against racial bias against Asian-Amer­i­can physi­cians

Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to psy­chi­a­try res­i­dent, Chi­ka Sta­cy Ori­uwa, whose activism includes cre­at­ing ini­tia­tives to boost the num­ber of Black stu­dents apply­ing to med­ical school and cre­ate net­works of sup­port for schol­ar­ly and pro­fes­sion­al advance­ment with­in the Black com­mu­ni­ty.

Bio­med­ical researcher Dr Jaque­line Goes de Jesus whose team sequenced the SARS-CoV­‑2 genome with­in 48 hours of receiv­ing sam­ples from the first infect­ed Brazil­ian patient, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing the vari­ant from the one that caused infec­tions ear­li­er in the pan­dem­ic.

Dr Kir­by White, founder of Gowns for Doc­tors,  an Aus­tralian ini­tia­tive that addressed a nation­wide short­age of per­son­al PPE by deliv­er­ing free, wash­able, vol­un­teer-made reusable gowns to front­line staff.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

How Zora Neale Hurston & Eleanor Roo­sevelt Helped Cre­ate the First Real­is­tic African Amer­i­can Baby Doll (1951)

The New David Bowie Bar­bie Doll Released to Com­mem­o­rate the 50th Anniver­sary of “Space Odd­i­ty”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.Follow her@AyunHalliday

 

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Carl Sagan Answers the Ultimate Question: Is There a God? (1994)

in Religion, Science | August 13th, 2021

Some pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als asso­ci­at­ed with sci­ence court dis­agree­ment with reli­gious believ­ers; oth­ers cul­ti­vate suites of rhetor­i­cal tech­niques express­ly in order to avoid it. While Carl Sagan did­n’t shrink from, say, debat­ing a cre­ation­ist on talk radio, he always engaged with char­ac­ter­is­tic aplomb. But deal­ing with bel­liger­ent callers-in is eas­i­er, in a way, than respond­ing to an earnest, straight­for­ward­ly expressed curios­i­ty about one’s own reli­gious beliefs. In the Q&A clip above, tak­en from his 1994 “lost lec­ture,” Sagan receives just such a ques­tion: “What is your per­son­al reli­gion? Is there any type of God to you? Like, is there a pur­pose, giv­en that we’re just sit­ting on this speck in the mid­dle of this sea of stars?”

“Now, I don’t want to duck any ques­tions,” Sagan replies, “and I’m not going to duck this one.” Nev­er­the­less, he requests a tri­fling clar­i­fi­ca­tion: “What do you mean when you use the word God?”  Pressed by none oth­er than Carl Sagan to define God, few of us would pre­sum­ably hold up well.

Here the ques­tion­er changes his angle, draw­ing on Sagan’s own def­i­n­i­tion in Pale Blue Dot of the “Great Demo­tions,” those “down-lift­ing expe­ri­ences, demon­stra­tions of our appar­ent insignif­i­cance, wounds that sci­ence has, in its search for Galileo’s facts, deliv­ered to human pride.” And so, “giv­en all these demo­tions,” the man asks, “why don’t we just blow our­selves up?”

“If we do blow our­selves up,” Sagan asks, “does that dis­prove the exis­tence of God?” This is an intrigu­ing rever­sal, but Sagan does­n’t sim­ply reply to ques­tions with ques­tions. Sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge increas­ing­ly leaves us “on our own,” he says, which is a state “much more respon­si­ble than hop­ing some­one will save us from our­selves.” What if we’re wrong, and a deity does indeed step in to save us? “Okay, that’s all right, I’m for that; we, you know, hedged our bets. It Pas­cal’s bar­gain run back­wards.” The prob­lem lies with God itself, “a word so ambigu­ous, that means so many dif­fer­ent things,” and one used “to seem to agree with some­one else with whom you do not agree.” Despite its impor­tance, not least for “social lubri­ca­tion,” no term can be use­ful to truth that encom­pass­es so many dif­fer­ent per­son­al con­cep­tions — bil­lions and bil­lions of them, one might say.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

Hear Carl Sagan Art­ful­ly Refute a Cre­ation­ist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Dar­win­ian Con­cept of Evo­lu­tion is Pro­found­ly Ver­i­fied”

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Ted Turn­er Asks Carl Sagan “Are You a Social­ist?;” Sagan Responds Thought­ful­ly (1989)

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Carl Sagan Tells John­ny Car­son What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chau­vin­ism in It” (1978)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch an Exquisite 19th Century Coffee Maker in Action

in Food & Drink, Physics, Science | August 13th, 2021

Pourover…

Cold brew…

Sin­gle ori­gin…

Cof­fee snob­bery may seem like a recent phe­nom­e­non, but the quest for the per­fect­ly brewed cup has been going on for a very long time.

Behold the Con­ti­nen­tal Bal­anc­ing Siphon, above — a com­plete­ly auto­mat­ic, 19th-cen­tu­ry table top vac­u­um brew­er.

There’s an unmis­tak­able ele­ment of cof­fee mak­ing as the­ater here… but also, a fas­ci­nat­ing demon­stra­tion of phys­i­cal prin­ci­ples in action.

Vin­tage vac­u­um pot col­lec­tor Bri­an Har­ris breaks down how the bal­anc­ing siphon works:

Two ves­sels are arranged side-by-side, with a siphon tube con­nect­ing the two.

Cof­fee is placed in one side (usu­al­ly glass), and water in the oth­er (usu­al­ly ceram­ic). 

A spir­it lamp heats the water, forc­ing it through the tube and into the oth­er ves­sel, where it mix­es with the cof­fee. 

As the water is trans­ferred from one ves­sel to the oth­er, a bal­anc­ing sys­tem based on a coun­ter­weight or spring mech­a­nism is acti­vat­ed by the change in weight. This in turn trig­gers the extin­guish­ing of the lamp. A par­tial vac­u­um is formed, which siphons the brewed cof­fee through a fil­ter and back into the first ves­sel, from which is dis­pensed by means of a spig­ot.

(Still curi­ous? We direct you to Har­ris’ web­site for a length­i­er, more egghead­ed expla­na­tion, com­plete with equa­tions, graphs, and cal­cu­la­tions for sat­u­rat­ed vapor pres­sure and the approx­i­mate tem­per­a­ture at which down­ward flow begins.)

The bal­anc­ing siphon was to 1850’s Paris and Vien­na what Blue Bottle’s three-foot tall Japan­ese slow-drip iced cof­fee-mak­ing devices are to ear­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry Brook­lyn and Oak­land.

Does the fla­vor of cof­fee brewed in a bal­ance siphon mer­it the time and, if pur­chased in a cafe, expense?

Yes, accord­ing to Maria Tin­de­mans, the CEO of Roy­al Paris, whose 24-carat gold and Bacar­rat glass bal­anc­ing siphon retails for between $17,500 and $24,000:

The cof­fee from a syphon can best be described as “crys­tal clear,” with great puri­ty of fla­vor and aro­ma and no bit­ter­ness added by the brew­ing process.

More afford­able bal­anc­ing siphons can be found online, though be fore­warned, all siphons are a bitch to clean, accord­ing to Red­dit.

If you do invest, be sure to up the cof­fee snob­bery by telling your cap­tive audi­ence that you’ve named your new device “Gabet,” in hon­or of Parisian Louis Gabet, whose 1844 patent for a coun­ter­weight mech­a­nism kicked off the bal­anc­ing siphon craze.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Make the World’s Small­est Cup of Cof­fee, from Just One Cof­fee Bean

The Life Cycle of a Cup of Cof­fee: The Jour­ney from Cof­fee Bean, to Cof­fee Cup

Wake Up & Smell the Cof­fee: The New All-in-One Cof­fee-Mak­er/Alarm Clock is Final­ly Here!

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Jocelyn Bell Burnell Changed Astronomy Forever; Her Ph.D. Advisor Won the Nobel Prize for It

in Astronomy, Gender, History, Science | August 5th, 2021

A few years back, we high­light­ed a series of arti­cles called The Matil­da Effect — named for the fem­i­nist Matil­da Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay “Woman as an Inven­tor” inspired his­to­ri­ans like Cor­nell University’s Mar­garet Rossiter to recov­er the lost his­to­ries of women in sci­ence. Those his­to­ries are impor­tant not only for our under­stand­ing of women’s con­tri­bu­tions to sci­en­tif­ic advance­ment, but also because they tell us some­thing impor­tant about our­selves, who­ev­er we are, as film­mak­er Ben Proud­foot sug­gests in his “Almost Famous” series of short New York Times doc­u­men­taries.

Proud­foot casts a wide net in the telling, gath­er­ing sto­ries of an unknown woman N.B.A. draftee, a would-be first Black astro­naut who nev­er got to fly, a man who could have been the “next Colonel Sanders,” and a for­mer mem­ber of the Black Eyed Peas who quit before the band hit it big. Not all sto­ries of loss in “Almost Famous” are equal­ly trag­ic. Joce­lyn Bell Burnell’s sto­ry, which she her­self tells above, con­tains more than enough strug­gle, tri­umph, and crush­ing dis­ap­point­ment for a com­pelling tale.

An astronomer, Bell Bur­nell was instru­men­tal in the dis­cov­ery of pul­sars — a dis­cov­ery that changed the field for­ev­er. While her Ph.D. advi­sor Antony Hewish would be award­ed the Nobel Prize for the dis­cov­ery in 1974, Bell Burnell’s involve­ment was vir­tu­al­ly ignored, or treat­ed as a nov­el­ty. “When the press found out I was a woman,” she said in 2015, “we were bom­bard­ed with inquiries. My male super­vi­sor was asked the astro­phys­i­cal ques­tions while I was the human inter­est. Pho­tog­ra­phers asked me to unbut­ton my blouse low­er, whilst jour­nal­ists want­ed to know my vital sta­tis­tics and whether I was taller than Princess Mar­garet.”

In the film, Bur­nell describes a life­long strug­gle against a male-dom­i­nat­ed estab­lish­ment that mar­gin­al­ized her. She also tells a sto­ry of sup­port­ive Quak­er par­ents who nur­tured her will to fol­low her intel­lec­tu­al pas­sions despite the obsta­cles. Grow­ing up in Ire­land, she says, “I knew I want­ed to be an astronomer. But at that stage, there weren’t any women role mod­els that I knew of.” She com­ments, with under­stand­able anger, how many peo­ple con­grat­u­lat­ed her on her mar­riage and said “noth­ing about mak­ing a major astro­phys­i­cal dis­cov­ery.”

Many of us have sto­ries to tell about being denied achieve­ments or oppor­tu­ni­ties through cir­cum­stances not of our own mak­ing. We often hold those sto­ries close, feel­ing a sense of fail­ure and frus­tra­tion, mea­sur­ing our­selves against those who “made it” and believ­ing we have come up short. We are not alone. There are many who made the effort, and a few who got there first but didn’t get the prize for one unjust rea­son or anoth­er. The lack of offi­cial recog­ni­tion doesn’t inval­i­date their sto­ries, or ours. Hear­ing those sto­ries can inspire us to keep doing what we love and to keep push­ing through the oppo­si­tion. See more short “Almost Famous” doc­u­men­taries in The New York Times series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

How the Female Sci­en­tist Who Dis­cov­ered the Green­house Gas Effect Was For­got­ten by His­to­ry

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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