by Meghan D. Rosen

Last month, I asked you to submit a science-y question that you'd like to have answered in simple terms. You asked about light, and mirrors, and spices and space— I was delighted by the scope of the questions posed.

This month my fellow SciCom classmates tackled three. Steve Tung glides through the mechanics of flight; Beth Mole spouts off about asparagus pee; and Tanya Lewis reflects on mirrors.

Enjoy!

If you have more burning science questions, just post them in the comments. We'll be back next month with more answers.

And if you don't have a science question, but do have a thought or a picture to share, check out www.sharingamomentofscience.tumblr.com

How can an airplane fly upside down?

Daredevil pilots execute stunning aerobatic maneuvers― loops, rolls, spins, and more― sometimes while upside down for a long time. How do they do it? It might seem that the force keeping a right-side-up plane aloft would push a flipped plane down.

The trick is how the plane is angled in the air. Pilots can adjust the tilt to lift the plane, even when it is upside down.

You may have stuck your hand outside of a moving car and felt the rushing air push it up or down. Tilt your hand more, and that force is stronger. Turn your hand upside down and it still happens, though it might not be as powerful.

Plane wings, flipped or not, work the same way― tilt them up more, and air lifts the plane more. There are drawbacks and limitations, however. Higher angles cause more drag, slowing the plane. Tilt too far and the plane loses its aerodynamic properties and falls like a rock.

But not all airplanes can fly upside down. Some depend on gravity to fuel the engines; some would break under the different stresses of flying inverted. Stunt airplanes use specially designed wings, bodies, and engines to be more agile, more durable, and more versatile.

Steve Tung once dreamed of designing airplanes and rockets. He now dreams of pithy, memorable prose. (He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration in fluid mechanics from Cornell University) Twitter: @SteveTungWrites

Read more »

by Alyssa Pelish

There was a time, oddly, when I very much identified with Alan Shore, the charismatic skirt-chaser of an attorney played by James Spader on Boston Legal. Not that I shared Alan Shore’s tastes for bespoke suits or cigars, let alone his highly cultivated predilection for women. My fellow feeling did, however, have everything to do with his absolutely mordant wit. As with the best wit, it had an economy and timing that thrilled me. (And it was, of course, all of a piece with Spader's acting that, in its purest, most enduring form, seems to rely on only the musculature of his eyes.) But Alan Shore’s wit, like his eternal bachelor of a character, was never quite matched. His remarks, cutting through the general babble of conversational convention, would typically hang in the air for a beat — while I would chortle and the characters on the show would either ignore, shake their heads at, or (most typically) take offense at them. Even his best friend, the aging rainmaker Denny Krane, was typically too near the precipice of senility (or his own lascivious preoccupations) to fully match Alan’s witticisms. That was just how the dynamic of the show worked — and it worked pretty well. But of all the staple characters — the bluster and senility of William Shatner’s Denny, Candice Bergen’s no-nonsense senior partner, René Auberjonois’ milquetoast authority figure, the expendable cast of comely junior partners — Alan Shore was really the one who had my empathy.

Alan Shore was (and probably still is) one of my favorite instantiations of what I think of as the solitary wit. This is the sort of person who is always at the ready with an epigram or an ironic aside. There's a detached elegance to their pith that places them above the pedestrian fumbling of ordinary conversation. But if honest-to-goodness repartee consists, at a minimum, of one wit’s thrust followed by another’s riposte, the solitary wit’s rapier is ever brandished but never met by another blade. Alan Shore’s predecessors, Oscar Wilde’s most epigrammatic characters must have pride of place in this. Although the dialogue of Wilde’s prose and plays is, in general, known for its incisive wit, it almost always turns on the solitary wit — for whom the world is his straight man. Think of the caustic bon mots dropped by Dorian Gray’s Lord Henry, which are never quite returned in kind by the more socially reserved Basil or wide-eyed young Dorian.[1] Even in The Importance of Being Earnest, which is adored for its comically mannered exchanges, Algernon is the only true wit. His every other line is a perfect epigram — but it's rarely ever returned in kind by the others.[2]

Read more »

by Colin Eatock

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the principal meaning of “cool” is “Moderately cold; said of a temperature which, in contrast with heat, is cold enough to be agreeable and refreshing, or, in contrast with cold, is not so low as to be positively disagreeable or painful.”

But of course there’s much more to it than that. The OED also tells us that the word, when applied to persons or their actions, can mean, “not heated by passion or emotion; unexcited, dispassionate; deliberate, not hasty; undisturbed, calm.” This is the sense that Shakespeare intended when he wrote, “Such seething braines … that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.”

Now let’s fast-forward to the dawn of the twenty-first century. On television, one trendy young man is angry with another. The other young man, it seems, has recently done something underhanded: he has lied, cheated or stolen (I don’t recall which). But our hero, Brandon, has uncovered the truth – and he bravely confronts his acquaintance about his low-down behaviour. “Trevor,” he seethes, summoning every shred of moral outrage in his soul, “what you did was not cool!”

Brandon could have said unfair, dishonest, hurtful – any number of things. But he was so offended by Trevor’s crimes that he delved more deeply, uttering most damning phrase in his vocabulary: “not cool.”

Trevor and Brandon are (thankfully) fictional characters, the inventions of scriptwriters. Yet they subscribe to the same Weltanschauung that hordes of young and young-ish people do today: cool is pretty much the best thing one can be. For many, coolness has replaced cleanliness as the worldly condition closest to God.

How did this happen? When did this happen?

Read more »

by Tauriq Moosa

Finding a new love is not always a good thing. Having started with writing prose fiction, I drifted away since I found fiction to be too self-indulgent. But, recently, due to events beyond my control, I found myself loving the comics medium. Indeed, I want to create these beautiful things. The problem is, I am on the worst side of the comics medium: an unknown writer who can’t draw. Here, I look at why I think the medium matters, though and why I’m in love.

I have been writing as soon as my wrists could hold up a pen and I (mostly) understood the purpose of words. I wrote stories as soon as those words could formulate into sentences. But I stopped writing stories when reality sucked out the marrow of fiction for me, when I studied something called “Literary Theory” that, instead of making me see The Craft as worthwhile, only showed me to be a self-indulgent buffoon. This was not the intention of the university course I studied; but intentions are irrelevant here. The best thing studying literary theory did for me was to make me realise why I should not be doing it at all. I was one of the top students in my graduating year, without attending a year and a half of lectures; I read none of the articles, studied none of the theorists.

This is not an indication of my intelligence (what little remains) but of the idiocy of (large parts of) literary theory. I won’t go into it here, nor is that central to my point. The only reason I mention it is for autobiographical purpose to indicate why I stopped caring and writing fiction. Indeed, I wrote two novel manuscripts before I was 20 and published several short-stories. Being a horror “aficionado” (which is like being a proud collector of dead kittens’ eyes), I tended to focus on the less accessible sides of reading. I liked that readers would have to adjust to a slightly difficult writing-style, that the stories were sometimes gory, but, more importantly, complex.

Or at least, I thought they were.

In reality, they probably are not. Nor do I think I am a particularly good fiction writer. Anyway, I decided to use my writing ability – which is not “ability” so much as an insatiable need to put words “on paper” – on more important, real-life matters. Here, I found that because I could mostly form coherent sentences, I could write and publish articles that people were interested in. Many were interested in the fact that I was, for example, an ex-Muslim who spoke about non-belief. This went into writing science and philosophy articles, until eventually I decided I should learn more. I then enrolled in a Masters’ course in Applied Ethics.

Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

So let's talk about college. Or to be more specific, let's have a look at how prepared our children are go to college. And I'm not talking about their academic readiness, though clearly many, many words could be devoted to that. I'm talking about their work habits.

My 11-year old daughter, Anya, just entered middle school. If you're even an occasional reader, you'll know that my children go to a small, independent progressive school – the Robert C. Parker school. A conscious, intentional part of both the run-up to middle school in 5th grade and of 6th and 7th grade is to teach the children how to engage in independent study. The purpose of homework, which Anya didn't really get in any meaningful, regular way up until 5th grade, is less about what she learns, and more about how she learns to study. It's about learning to be organized enough that she makes sure she leaves class with all the information she needs to work at home; that she brings the right books and papers with her; that she learns how to prioritize the workload she has – start with the homework due tomorrow, not the work due in three days.

By public school standards, Anya's homework load is still light; if she doesn't procrastinate too much, she can usually easily get it done in an hour a night, and there are still nights when she doesn't have any. Anya, rather like her mother, isn't the most organized or tidy person; there have been some real struggles as she learns to make sure she has her school bag packed with the right materials at the end of the day. And then, she has to remember to take her homework back into school the next morning. But, week by week, she's making progress.

I remember when I was in school in London; it was a private school, but a large rather formal establishment, far removed from the philosophy of my children's school. When we forgot our homework or hadn't done it, we would have to wait outside the teachers' lounge (we weren't allowed to knock on the door) until another teacher walked by. We would then have to catch her eye (it was a girls' school and 99.99% of the teachers were female), and then plead “Mrs Jones, Mrs Jones, can you ask Mrs Smith to come out?) If we were lucky, Mrs Jones would see Mrs Smith and remember to tell her. I sometimes spent entire mid-morning breaks waiting outside of that teachers' lounge.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

Memory is the medium of past experience,
as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
~ Walter Benjamin

Whenever I live in a city for a particular amount of time, I find myself increasingly subject to a peculiar desire. It is perhaps not so much a desire as, in fact, a sense of responsibility. When something disappears, I try to remember what was there. This holds true for the merest mom-and-pop shop as it does for an entire city block. I play the role of casual historian-observer to the ongoing drama – whether tragic or comic – of the development and elaboration of a city. What does the disappearance of a façade tell us about what might have been there before? When an entire block is demolished to make way for a building or set of buildings, who remembers its antecedents, and why should this kind of remembrance be important?

Being the casual sort, I have never felt the need to record these memories in any formal way. Nor do I consider this an exercise in sentimentality – the point, if there truly is one, is to deepen my experience of the ground of a place, and as a result the act is entirely selfish and self-contained. The end result of eleven thus-far years in New York is a private catalogue of jinxed restaurant locations, dearly departed graffiti, and equally unmourned Modernist and corporatist passings. I have always mystified my friends with a need to recall these things, and have little sense of restraint in either quizzing or boring them with said catalogue while walking down the street.

But this assumes a stately pace of destruction and renewal – if we entertain the metaphor of the city as a body, it is old cells dying and being replaced by new ones. What happens when the city becomes truly injured? When vast chunks of it are gouged out of its topography, its very identity, if not threatened, then decisively knocked about and re-shuffled?

A recent conference sponsored by Columbia University, entitled Injured Cities/Urban Afterlives, sought to take up that question. One of the most thought-provoking presentations, by Eyal Weizman, concerned itself with the idea of a forensic architecture. Rubble, like bones, has a story to tell, and the manner in which that narrative is elicited and disseminated tells us much about who we are, and what we might expect of others, and ourselves.

Read more »

by Vivek Menezes

There’s something deeply rotten about the way the international cultural phenomenon known as Modernism is studied, everywhere in the world. And everyone in the know realizes that we are fast approaching a tipping point that will entirely upturn the global narrative.

This has been an international problem for a long time, because the subject has usually been addressed with different parts of the globe kept conceptually distinct from each other for no good reason. And it is also a huge problem for the subcontinent, where a similar problem has persisted – scholars focus on the Bengal Renaissance to the maddening exclusion of everything else. But in all of this, both in India and the West, there is a curious and sustained reluctance to reckon with the very obvious evidence as it exists, a widespread phenomenon I have no hesitation as characterizing as both stubborn and lazy.

This is because the evidence to challenge most prevailing assumptions is extraordinarily copious, and literally wherever you want to look, so that it obviously requires a certain wilfullness to ignore it. This issue has caused me considerable anger and sorrow over the years, as I have become steadily involved without ever intending to do so. This Monday piece for 3QD is an unusually personal account of an art historical conundrum which I stumbled on with no idea of what was coming. It still wound up turning my life upside down.

[E]very Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to do otherwise.” Holland Cotter, New York Times 2008

Around twenty years ago, I spent about 18 months working from Bombay on assignment from Equipe Cousteau in Paris. In my very early 20’s, it was a reckoning with my home city on my own terms after more than a decade studying in the US, UK and France.

It happened that there were many others like me back home at the same time after years studying abroad – the economy was opening widely, multinational firms had started to recognize India’s growth potential, and we could all see a growing entrepreneurial zeal that was going to pay rich dividends in a fairly short while.

That is exactly what happened. The companies set up in that period include many of India’s best and most successful domestic and international brands, creating massive wealth for their owners. And the party boys whose drinks I once always paid for (Parisian salary!) have become billionaires, one crisp dollar bill fact to keep in mind as we proceed in this unlikely narrative.

But I was never destined to be that kind of rich, and have known it from day one. The focus of my passions has always been different.

Riding out by mere bicycle in the late evening cool from my office at Wellington Mews in Colaba, I developed a habit of going to the art galleries of the city for an hour or two before their closing time, and became a constant pestering presence who demanded to see every single item in the deepest recess of their collections. And I bought with some assiduousness too.

Read more »

by Tom Jacobs

(Apologies to Ernest Hemingway)

It was very late and many people had left the establishment (although many more had arrived to drunkenly bowl and play foosball and Duck hunter). An old man sat in the slight shadows cast by the Skee Ball and Hoop Fever Basketball Arcade machine. In the day time the place was mostly quiet and empty (except for the Power Hour Happy Hour at noon, where you can play an entire hour of video games for $10), but at night the place was flooded with tourists and those who were already drunk and looking for a goofy night out. He was deaf and now at night it was actually quieter than his apartment, which looked out over 42^nd Street, which was so bright and loud (he could feel the vibrations through his bed) that he felt as though he was actually sleeping on the sidewalk. Dave and Buster’s was the quietest bar in the neighborhood, and it was cluttered but clean, and incredibly well-lighted.

The two waiters knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, and that they would never convince him to buy the $8 Potato Skins or the $7 Loaded Queso, much less the $9 Mountain O’ Nachos. So they kept watch on him.

“Last night he, like, tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.

“OMG! Why?”

“Ask him, dude. How should I know? I guess he was in, like, despair.”

“Like, what about?”

“Uh, duh! Nothing.”

“How do you know it was nothing?”

“Because, like, he’s totally loaded. He has heaps of money.”

They stood next to each other at the bar at the back of the place and looked out at the main room, which was surprisingly empty for a Wednesday night, since that was the night of the $15.99 Eat and Play Combo. A security guard walked by holding an intoxicated man in a suit and tie by the back of the neck.

Read more »

by Hartosh Singh Bal

Sixty-five years or so after India’s independence, conflicts that question the idea of a constitutional republic do not show any signs of dying down. A few deservedly get some attention, such as the one in Kashmir. The others, for instance the events in the northeast, hardly get noticed in the rest of India, leave alone the rest of the world. What is common to most of these conflicts is that they are localized along India’s borders where ideas of ethnicity, religion and belonging are contested. There is, however, one such conflict that escapes these categories – the armed struggle against the Indian state by Left-wing guerillas interchangeably termed Maoists or Naxalites.

Till recently the outside world had paid little attention to this conflict which stretches through a large part of the forested belt of central India, a belt also occupied by forest-dwelling tribes subsumed under the label `tribals’. As narratives of an emerging, liberalizing India have lost their novelty, correspondents both foreign and Indian have suddenly discovered a counter-narrative in the Maoists. Unfortunately though, the tribals already badly done in by the Indian state and the Maoists are being used again, as props in stories that show them as noble savages rescued from exploitation by gun-wielding Marxists.

The problem with such a description is not what it says about the Indian state. An incompetent and arrogant minister in-charge of internal security P. Chidambaram, who enjoys the confidence of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and more importantly the leader of the Congress party Sonia Gandhi, has over the past year planned and implemented a campaign against the Maoists. While the Army has been kept out, paramilitary troops, ill-trained and ill-equipped for jungle combat, have been thrown against the Maoists. Easy targets for the guerilla fighters, they have vented fury against local tribals who they believe may be helping the Maoists.

Read more »

by Haider Shahbaz

Juicy tomatoes. Crispy lettuce. A succulent chicken breast. Olive oil. Black pepper. Chopped green onions and chopped smelly garlic. Mustard. Rosemary bread, perhaps? Lightly heat the oil. Brown the garlic and the onions as you hear them sizzle. Sprinkle black pepper on one side of the chicken. Sautee the chicken with the pepper side down until a knife cuts it smoothly and exposes the white tender flesh. Smell it. Spread the mustard on slices of rosemary bread. Place the succulent chicken between soft bread with juicy tomatoes and crispy lettuce. Eat.

He imagines tomatoes, chicken, bread. He is hungry. Famished, in fact. Soft, juicy, crispy and succulent: you cannot understand the severity of these adjectives as they orbit his mind. You cannot understand the severity of adjectives. But, let’s stop here. This story is not about food. Not even about poverty or desire. This story is not of love, definitely not bravery. It is not meaningful; it is not meaningless. This story is simply about Muzzamil, who will eat soon. And it is about Dave, who already ate. Still, this story is poor and desirous and brave and loving and meaningful and meaningless in its own peculiar way, like you and I, and our characters and adjectives. And yes, like tomatoes, too.

Read more »

Aftermath

Goaded by hurricane the river raged through
on a tear to the sea taking trucks and trees
Oil tanks bobbed under bridges
on swells of liquid gravity
a wood-framed studio pirouetted from its piers
off downstream, a ship of art, rudderless
until it lodged against the steel
lifts of the dam gates
Cellars filled with silt
and whatever the river’d dredged
from back-yard cesspools
from gardens of summer afternoons
from landfills and barns,
leaving earth and offal recollections
along its banks, in basements,
across fields of flattened corn
that had been high enough for its
cobbed yield to have smiled yellow
from white plates until the hurricane
laid it low, tens-of-thousands of stalks
a quashed mat after the pull
of the river’s winnowing rake,
supine as a man after a swift life
lies still before the sweep of the sea
.

by Jim Culleny
9/22/11

by Mara Jebsen

There was a special skull in Paris in the late 1800s. Like all skulls, it once belonged to a larger structure–a display at the Ecole des Beaux Arts offered to young artists studying anatomy. Amongst these is the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke, though struck by the “manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews” and the “complete agreement of the inner organs with one another”, can’t handle the majesty of an entire corpse. He comes to fix his attention uniquely on the skull. He gets hold of it.

Rilke takes the skull back to his student quarters to spend many nights with it. He contemplates it by candlelight, and keeps it company, until, as we’d expect (for its Rilke, Paris, candlelight, skull) he has a strange thought. . .

But first I want to turn your attention to another skull. This one appears in a poem which appeared to me, appropriately enough, in an anthology of Russian poetry : “In the Grip of Strange Thoughts”. The second skull is a photographic reproduction, an X-Ray, of the one inside the actual poet’s head. Its no good– me trying to describe this skull–as Elena Shvarts does it with such stinging radiance that I can hardly describe her powers of description. She writes:

And my God/growing dark/Slipped me this photograph/In which my glowing skull/Etched from the invisible/Swam, blocking out the dusk/And the stripped naked park

She’ll go on in the poem to be bemused, casual, even crude. But in this moment she’s struck and trembling with the oddness of her own skull. She seems to be naming something intrinsically weird. . .

Read more »

by Tolu Ogunlesi

The first time I met ‘Kissbaby’, 21, he was a security guard at the Silverbird Galleria in Lagos. I was driving out of the parking lot, and as is standard practice in Lagos, tipped him. Then I became curious. I wanted to know what he did with all the tips he got. What I heard was somewhat surprising. He told me he saved up all his money to pay for recording sessions at music studios.

By the time I meet him again, a few months after the first encounter; he has left his security-guard job. “The salary is too poor; not enough to fulfil my needs… mostly my studio stuff.” That is not all. “The work is not encouraging,” he says. “People always underrate you whenever they see you putting on security uniform.”

But his job is about the only thing that’s changed. The passion for music is still as potent as ever. “As you see me, looking at my appearance, you see music in me. Even if I am not there, my shirt is smelling of music!” he declares. Even the job was meant to be a way of furthering his musical ambitions. “The main reason I decided to work was because of my music, so I’d be able to get money and come out with my album.” His decision to get a job at the Galleria, he says, was influenced by his desire to network, to seek a “connection” that’d advance his budding music career.

The Galleria (a popular hangout for celebrities, and home to one of Lagos’ biggest music stores) is part of the Silverbird Group, which is arguably Nigeria’s largest and most prominent entertainment conglomerate, encompassing radio, television, beauty pageants, and music festivals. “Different types of people always come in… I met them,” he says.

Read more »