Author Archives: Ponderer

About Ponderer

Ponderer also writes science fiction and science-inspired rhyming poetry. Check her out at katerauner.wordpress.com/ She worked at Rocky Flats for 22 years - you may know her as Kathy London.

Mount Stupid

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mount stupid from Science is Awesome on facebook

Thanks to Science is Awesome on Facebook

Real experts must be annoyed by pundits who pontificate on subjects they know little about.  That seems to be the motivation behind two books.

In “Why America is Not a New Rome” Vaclav Smil addresses his pet peeve.  The “grand analogy” “could be dismissed as just a fashionable wave of insufficiently informed commenting… or superficial comparisons.”  Smil quotes authors from Imperial Rome, discusses other states that have been compared to ancient Rome, Continue reading →

How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

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Scatter Adapt and RememberHalf way through her book “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember”, Annalee Newitz states that her goal “is to get us off this crowded planet and into space.”  I don’t think she achieves her goal.  I wasn’t convinced we need to get off our beautiful blue world (at least for the next billion years or so), but it’s a fun romp and worth reading.

Newitz starts with a review of the history of mass extinctions in the last 2.5 billion years, such as the Oxygen Apocalypse (which may be unfamiliar to readers), the Permian Great Dying, and the famous demise of the dinosaurs.  She notes that mass extinctions are usually defined in terms of species going extinct.  Even with such a drop in diversity, the number of individual creatures may (or may not) remain high.  Reasons why some genetic lines survived are often speculative, but if you enjoy natural history, this is an interesting section of the book.

In the second part of the book, Newitz gets closer to home.  She discusses the human genus, Continue reading →

Pwog

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In the current age of political polarization, it is important to have slang terms for your opponents.  (Please read that as humor!)  For example, there are leftie loons and righty wing-nuts.

Here is a term I had never heard, from an unlikely source:

“A moment for language lovers to watch for is the appearance out of nowhere of  “pwogs”… – it’s shorthand for “progressives,” is not entirely flattering in that it often is in reference to knee-jerk old wannabe rads who reflexively support anything that smells of far liberal to even socialist ideas. Its origin is the urban northeast. The yiddish-inflected spelling reflecting what one might hear in a New York coffee house in the middle to latter part of the last century. What a great and ambiguous word is pwog. – See more at: http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker  which is one of my favorite places to go for tips on science in the news.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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The Phrase Finder says the phrase exists in several forms, but this specific form originated in the US.  It appeared in print in 1921 in reference to a financial panic related to mining.  Wiktionary agrees.

Wiki answers says this phrase came from the ancient Greek mythology of “The Odyssey”, when Odysseys had to steer his boat between a rock cliff and a whirlpool.  Word Detective echoes this with a bit more explanation: it is a modern, non-literary variation on the Odyssey phrase “between Scylla and Charybdis”.

These sources mention other phrases with a similar sentiment, such as “on the horns of a dilemma” and (my favorite) “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”  While these phrases may all express a similar sentiment, it seems to me that Phrase Finder has the best answer.

Victorians and Gorillas

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between man and beastMany non-fiction books are interesting or satisfying to read; Monte Reel’s book “Between Man and Beast” is also fun.  Reel tells the story of Paul Du Chaillu, a “forgotten explorer” of Africa who was important to the discovery of the gorilla by Western science.  Paul’s story is set against “Victorian London at its Dickensian peak, New York on the verge of the Civil War, and the African interior at its most lush.”  Reel’s descriptions are as striking as anything in a novel.

Reel describes white missionaries and traders as well as Africans.  I thought it was interesting to read that everyone, whites and Africans, came to trust and like the African coastal tribes they were familiar with, but claimed inland tribes were vicious cannibals.  As Paul traveled inland, he judged the tribes he met as “fellow men worthy of respect”, but they told him the tribes further inland were vicious cannibals.  Some African tribes thought the white traders must be cannibals since they bought and sold people like cattle. Continue reading →

Literally

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The birth of a definition!  If you Google the phrase “define literally,” the dictionary listing now includes this secondary definition: “Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling.”  Whether this is the end of civilization as we know it or proof that English is a vibrant, living language depends on your perspective.