Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 73

Math: The Black Diamond Trail of Science Writing (#scio11)

The comment thread for my post about good writing has turned into a fascinatingly well-focused discussion on writing about math. A mathematician arrived, rending his garments in despair, and now others–both writers and readers–are responding. I've always considered math the toughest subject a science writer can tackle, so I find the conversation especially interesting. Check it out.

My fine feathered feature for National Geographic

A few months back I took the train to New Haven to learn about feathers. I sought out an ornithologist at Yale named Richard Prum in his office. As soon as I walked in, he promptly picked up a manila envelope from his desk. Out of it he drew what looked like the black wooden handle of a long paint brush.

"What is that?" I asked.

"It's a quiz," he said. "You tell me."

"A feather?" I guessed.

"This is a cassowary wing feather," Prum said.

Cassowaries are flightless birds that live in Australia and New Guinea. It was hard to imagine how the stick in Prum's hand could belong to a bird, so he led me down a hallway to the Peabody Museum's ornithology collection. We entered a room mostly taken up with white steel cabinets that reached up to the high ceilings. On a wall shelf stood an assortment of exotic stuffed birds. The turkey-sized cassowary was covered mostly in dark downy feathers. But on its wings were black paint brush handles, hanging down like a row of ebony icicles.

Prum had more feathers to show off. He pulled open a cabinet drawer and drew out a tail feather of a superb lyrebird, a pheasant-like bird from Australia. "There's a huge amount going on here," he said. "It's pretty crazy."

After the sleek minimalism of the cassowary feather, the lyrebird feather was a jolt of decadence. It measured two feet long, curving gracefully away from Prum before snapping back at its tip. The feather was striped, although the word striped didn't do the pattern justice. Bars of color streaked across the feather, starting out as a shade of cinnamon on one side and ending in jet black on the other. Between the stripes, the feather was practically transparent.

Prum invited me to look closely at the feather to see how the lyrebird creates the illusion. From its main shaft, called the rachis, thousands of filaments called barbs branched off. In some parts of the feather, the barbs were hollow tubes. In other parts, they took on color and sprouted tiny hooks that merged into a dense network.

Beauty is the sole mission of the lyrebird tail feather. To attract females, male lyrebirds wave tailsin a ritual dance. But feathers that don't serve to seduce also have their own kind of beauty. Rummaging through another drawer, Prum found a paddle-shaped wing feather from a great grey owl. The underside was made up of smooth ridges. But the top was covered in a luxurious mat that felt like velvet.

"That's for silence," Prum said. "The idea is that it reduces turbulence so that owls can sneak up on their prey. For military purposes, people have thought about it. But most of it's classified."

Not all birds use feathers to fly; some use them to swim. Out of another cabinet, Prum hoisted the entire body of a king penguin. He curled one arm around the bird's belly, and moved his free hand over its flipper-shaped wings. They were covered in miniature feathers, each the size of a peppercorn. They had the look and feel of fish scales.

Prum spends a lot of time investigating where feathers get their colors. Some of their colors come from pigments, the same way our hair and skin get theirs. The pigments absorb most wavelengths of light, and reflect only certain colors. But birds also use some sophisticated physics to get extra colors. Prum showed me one of his favorite examples: the opal-crowned manakin from Ecuador. The tiny bird amply earns its name. Its head glitters as if its feathers were cut from stone.

Prum and his colleagues have discovered that the crown feather color is produced by tiny air pockets in the feathers. The pockets, each measuring a few billions of an inch across, are arranged like oranges stacked in a crate. As light travels through them, the photons bounce off their walls. They force photons of certain frequencies to cancel each other out. At other frequencies, the photons boost each other, amplifying their color. The result is the glittering hue of the manakin's head.

The bird's resemblance to opals is no coincidence. An opal stone is made up of tiny balls of silica, which are also packed like oranges in a crate. The stone also boosts and squleches photons in the same way.

"This," Prum said, holding up the bird, "is an inverse opal. It's the same shape, but with air spaces instead of silica balls. And it makes the same effect. This is nanotechnology, basically."

Unlike manmade nanotechnology, however, feathers are not the work of scientists and engineers. They're the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. In the February issue of National Geographic, I take a look at feathers, both in their current splendor and in their bizarre history–a history that may extend a lot further back than you'd think. Check it out, and also check out the marvelous photographs of Robert Clark, who traveled to China, Montana, Europe, and other places to capture their past and present beauty.

[Photo credit: The much more ordinary photo above is by me]

ScienceOnline: The Future Book

At ScienceOnline today, I moderated a spirited session on the future of books. I kicked things off by talking about where we stand at the moment. Ebooks may still constitute a small fraction of book sales, but that fraction is swelling fast. While many ebooks are simply digitized text-dumps of the books you can find in physical bookstores, new kinds of ebooks are emerging. With new services like Smashwords and Creativespace at Amazon, the real possibility has emerged of blogifying books–that is, writers publishing books for themselves without a spot of ink touching a single piece of paper. I described my own experiences with Brain Cuttings, which made clear to me that even in this new world, it still helps to work with people who know how to make books.

But other ebooks point to other possibilities. Neuroscientist David Eagleman recently delivered a lecture about how the Internet could save civilization from collapse. He then transformed it into an ebook–or, to be more precise, an iPad app. Why the Net Matters is organized into a series of chapters, each of which is accompanied by striking illustrations. On one page, Eagleman talks about how viruses could wipe out civilization, and a virus floats nearby. If you want, you can twirl the virus, or change its size with a flick of the fingers. Sometimes this combination of art and text works nicely, especially when Eagleman is talking about an interesting web site to investigate after reading Why the Net Matters. But some of the pictures are more like bells and whistles. Twirling a virus doesn't help you understand Eagleman's argument. What's more, the text overlays the art on a translucent layer, so that the pictures can even make it hard to read. When this happens, I wish for a conventional book or a video of Eagleman's lecture.

Twirling is exactly what feels right when I read The Solar System. Instead of an essay, this ebook is more of an encyclopedia, with entries for the Sun, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Marcus Chown, a veteran science writer, did a very good job with the text, so that it actually holds your attention. Some pages are accompanied by video taken by space probes. You can also navigate from planet to planet through an orrery, an elegant representation of the Solar System that you can navigate with your fingertips.

Tom Levenson, author of Newton and the Counterfeiter and director of MIT's science writing program, took over from me. He put this new turning point in an historical perspective, arguing that each technological advance in books changes the kinds of books that get made. The invention of movable type led to an explosion of books–from 10,000 to 10 million in a matter of decades. In the future, Levenson predicted that lots of different kinds of books would co-exist, from arty bespoke books to "in-between" books–ebooks of intermediate length that would not have had a place in traditional publishing markets. But the role of the author will change, too. Instead of the solitary figure in front of a typewriter, we need to think of a screenwriter at a movie studio, working with directors and special effects masters and other specially trained people.

David Dobbs discussed his own experiences coming to grips with these new books. He is working on a book based on his magazine article on genes and the environment. He's interested in collaborating with designers on an ebook version that could take advantage of iPads–such as designing graphs that readers can manipulate so that they can see how different combinations of genes and environmental experiences can lead to different results. Dobbs isn't going to substitute his traditional book with these apps, however. In fact, he's thinking of offering a stripped-down app for a low price that could lure people to buy the book.

The final panelist to speak with John Dupuis, an academic librarian at York University in Canada. Dupuis is putting a lot of his budget now into electronic books, but not without some reservations. He's in the business of getting books into as many hands as he can; the ebook business seeks to monetize every reading experience. Dupuis can open up a book from the seventeenth century and start reading it immediately. Will people be able to read an app in four hundred years? Maybe we need microfilm…

A lot of the questions from the people who came to the session were of the nuts and bolts sort. How much does Amazon pay you for your own Kindle books? What role do editors have in this kind of publishing? How do you find a good app designer? I took all of these questions as good signs that people are thinking seriously about this new genre–if only to decide it's better just to get back to writing.

The Edge Question 2011

At his website, Edge, John Brockman asks a big question each year and fields responses from scientists and writers (and scientist-writers).

This year's question is "What scientific concept would improve everyone's toolkit?"

My answer is, "Life as a side effect."

As of this writing, Brockman has 155 other answers, too, so peruse and muse to your heart's delight.

Death to Obfuscation!

The latest blizzard socked us pretty hard here in New England. If the streets and runways are clear enough tomorrow, I will be attending a conference called ScienceOnline in North Carolina for the next few days. One of the sessions I'm supposed to moderate is called "Death to Obfuscation." Ed Yong and I concocted it as a workshop in which we would share our thoughts on good science writing. I'm going to lay out some of my thoughts here in advance, partly to clarify what I'm going to say–Ed and I are a bit nervous that what we thought would be a pretty basic session has exploded into a 60+-person crush, infiltrated by seasoned journalists. And if, on Friday, I'm still stranded here, the whole undertaking won't have been a complete waste…

Good science writing is some of the most interesting stuff on Earth to read. Bad science writing is the most painful. There are many things that determine whether a piece of science writing is good or bad, but I can sort them into four rough categories: words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. Good science writing demands lots of care and inventiveness at all these scales.

After a few years of teaching science writing, I've started to ban certain words from my class. I add new words to my list on a regular basis, as they make unwelcome appearances in assignments. I may seem obsessively picky, but I hope through my pickiness, my students learn that every word can make a difference to their story. This lesson is especially crucial for scientists, most of whom are not accustomed to writing for a broad audience. Starting in college, scientists get accustomed to using scientific jargon. It's how they impress their professors. It's how they get taken seriously. Pretty soon, they start thinking that everybody knows what interferometry is.

But you're actually writing for everybody–not everybody in your lab, who have been living and breathing this stuff for their adult life–but everybody who might be possibly enthralled with this research, if only they didn't have to read a monograph on the subject.

This realization can produce a surprising bitterness, I find.

"Isn't this dumbing down?"

"Aren't we trying to teach our readers something?"

"Can't people use a dictionary?"

It's one thing to use a dictionary. It's quite another to actually understand all the concepts lurking behind a word like interferometry. Look it up online and you may find, "the technique of diagnosing the properties of two or more waves by studying the pattern of interference created by their superposition." Rather than doing the writer's work–in this case, elegantly explaining how interferometry actually works–you dispatch your poor reader to the quicksand of a useless definition. Believe it or not, it really is possible to write well about even the most difficult sciences, with a minimum of jargon. Just consider all the pieces of jargon Bill Bryson did not use while writing this lovely piece on particle physics.

Oddly, scientists are so fond of jargon that they even make jargon out of words that are not, in fact, jargon–that is, they do not refer specifically to some piece of equipment, some laboratory method, some chemical process. For instance, many scientist think it makes perfect sense to write, "Recently chemists have discovered an interesting property of molecule X,"–when, in fact, by "recently," they mean nine years ago. By that logic, I could write, "Recently my oldest daughter was born," when, in fact, my daughter now takes ballet lessons and likes making star charts. Sometimes people seem to choose a technical-sounding word as if it was their sole mission to drain as much life as possible out of a piece of writing–"utilize" instead of "use," for example.

Using these sorts of words is lazy. Rather than searching for a surprisingly apt word, a word that delights and informs, beginning writers fall back too often on what they've heard again and again. And while scientists may be particularly prone to fall back on their own mother tongue, everyone can be tempted by all-purpose cliches. Telling me that a piece of research is a "breakthrough" is unforgivable, unless you're writing about the discovery of calculus or something of equal significance. If not, then show me why a discovery is important, rather than telling me with an empty word.

Just as words demand care in selection, sentences demand care in construction. The right length and lilt of a sentence will let your reader take your meaning from it, and take it with pleasure. If your sentence meanders on like a verbal train travelling the Great Plains, made up of as many boxcars as you care to click together, the reader will lose patience, wondering what the point of the sentence is. It probably should be a paragraph instead.

You should also think about whether you're writing sentences in the active or passive voice. Scientists have a fierce passion for the passive voice. I suspect it has to do with the abject humility that they claim as a virtue of their profession. No one has the temerity to actually write, "We discovered X." Instead, "X was discovered."

While the ethics here may be fine, they make for terrible writing. The action of the story diffuses away into wisps of abstraction. Someone has to actually dig up a fossil. Someone has to find a supernova (or at least program the computer that finds it). Scientists use tools to do these things: hammers, telescopes. The passive voice lets you avoid thinking about who is doing what, and how. It is, like jargon, lazy. So I force students to avoid it as much as possible, so they can start to learn how to do the challenging work of building up a story.

Just as sentences are not words casually linked together, paragraphs are not just a random package of sentences. When we start a paragraph, we should know what we're in for, and the paragraph should live up to that promise. It should not meander from subject to subject. And the link from one paragraph to another must be obvious and inescapable. While the connection from one paragraph to the next may be clear in your mind, the rest of us are not gifted with telepathy. Show us the link. In trying to do so, you may well discover that there is none. In fact, you may discover that you can delete a paragraph without disturbing the overall story at all. If that's true, leave it out.

Finally, we come to the story as a whole. As you dive deeper and deeper into the guts of a story, it's remarkably easy to forget the anatomy that a story needs: a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning has to tell us what the story will be about. Here's what the writer of the tome I hold in the photograph above wrote recently about good leads:

They should never promise what does not follow. You read an exciting action lead about a car chase up a narrow street. Then the article turns out to be a financial analysis of debt structures in private universities. You've been had. The lead, like the title, should be a flashlight that shines down into the story.

A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don't use the lead. A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons or whistles like a train, but because it is absolute to what follows.

But in order for a lead to be absolute to what follows, I'd add, what follows must be absolute to the lead. Do not forget what you have promised; do not get seduced midway by another story. The story needs to move forward from your lead to its closing, hewing as closely as possible to chronology. Dance around the timeline, and your reader will get dizzy.

I'd love to know what McPhee has to say about ending a piece. That's the hardest part, I find. It's always tempting to end with a variation on, "Further research is needed." But that's a truism. When isn't it needed, after all? And what scientist would willingly say, in effect, "I'm closing down my lab–my work here is done, folks!"?

An ending has to make us understand why this trip has been worthwhile–perhaps with a surprising implication that we might not have thought of before we read the article. Sometimes, though, the best way to end a story is just to bid your characters farewell as they go on with life, with a gesture or an observation. When I was starting out as a science writer at Discover, I came across an ending that I can still recall. It's the ending of  "Between Home and the Abyss," written by Robert Kunzig, who was a senior editor at the time. Kunzig describes an expedition of a deep-sea research ship called Atlantis II. (It won an award from the American Geophysical Union, by the way.)

The expedition, led by Rich Lutz of Rutgers, was pretty lousy, pocked with glitches and empty hauls. Kunzig did not say further research is needed. Instead, he wrote this:

Lutz's project, this Magical Mystery Tour, had not ended well, despite all its previous successes and all the insights that would yet emerge from the material Lutz already had in his lab. Back in New Jersey the plan for the cruise had seemed straightforward. The plan was to go to known sites and collect animals that were known to be there. It should have been like going to the supermarket, not like stalking the snow leopard. But circumstances had intervened. Something usually does when you're working in the deep sea. Nothing is ever easy.

As Lutz sat in the officers' mess that night, picking quietly at a late dinner, the ship was steaming toward the dock in Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River. There it would exchange Lutz and his colleagues for the next group of researchers. Landfall came just after dawn, at a forested spit of land squeezed between the surf line and a bank of fog. The place was called Cape Disappointment.

______

[Update: Did I forget to say that proofreading is important too? Sorry about the typos. I hope I've fixed them all. Also, Kunzig link fixed]

My Unsmiling Appearance on MSNBC: The Video

Here's my quick visit to TV land this afternoon. I do wonder why my face is in a permanent scowl. On the inside, I can be very cheerful, honest!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/...

Rescheduled: My brain talk in Guilford will be on Monday, 1/24

Another week, another snowpocalypse.

With a foot of snow looking like a sure thing tomorrow, the Guilford Free Library has rescheduled my upcoming talk to Monday, January 24.

As I mentioned yesterday, the talk is called, "Step Inside Your Brain." I'll be discussing some of the cooler nooks and crannies of our skulls, drawing partly on my new ebook, Brain Cuttings.

The talk is free, but you're encouraged to reserve a spot. For more details, check out the library web site.

Uploading Your Brain: Tune in Tuesday at 3:30 pm EST on MSNBC

I'll be on MSNBC at 3:30 pm EST on Tuesday (1/10) to talk about the future of our brains, based on this excerpt from Brain Cuttings. I'll post the web archive once/if they put it online.

Hyperlocal: My talk Wednesday about the brain, here in Guilford

It's always a pleasure to take a short stroll to my local library to talk science. That's what I'll be doing this Wednesday (1/12) at 7 pm, at the Guilford Free Library here in Guilford, CT. The talk is called, "Step Inside Your Brain." I'll be discussing some of the cooler nooks and crannies of our skulls, drawing partly on my new ebook, Brain Cuttings.

The talk is free, but you're encouraged to reserve a spot. If the weather doesn't play nice, the library will reschedule the talk for some time soon. For more details, check out the library web site. Here's a pdf flyer for the talk.

Ashes to Ashes, Soap to Soap (Or Maybe Ashes to Soap)

To make soap, you must mix grease or fat with lye or some other alkaline substance. Sometimes, however, the stuff makes itself. If, for example, alkaline water seeps into a coffin, it can transform a human body into soap. (This cadaver soap is known as grave wax or adipocere.) Here's a picture of a "soapman" in the collection of National Museum of Natural History in Washington, just posted in the Smithsonian's "Snapshot Series." It belongs to a man who was buried in Philadelphia around 1800. His body was discovered in 1875 during an excavation to build a train depot. This particular example of grave wax is kept under lock and key in the museum's "Dry Environment room," so this is the closest you'll get to seeing it. But if you want to see grave wax in person, be sure to get to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which keeps its eerie "Soap Lady" under glass.