Better to Listen -- Flash Fiction

Image from archive.randi.org

"Look." He nodded toward the girl in the stacks. "She's beautiful. She's in my English Lit class, but she's never talked to me."

"Have you talked to her?" his friend asked.

"Nah. I don't want to bother her."

"Just talk to her. Give her a chance."

Leaving his friend at the head of the aisle, he wandered along looking at book titles as though for a particular book. An older woman entered the aisle and moved past him, shelving books. He waited until she left.

"Hi," he said to the young woman. "Come here often?"

She looked up at him and smiled. "English Lit, right?"

"Right." He read the titles of the books she was holding. "Tyson?"

"Your name is Tyson?" she asked.

"No, no. Neil deGrasse Tyson," he said indicating the books in her arms.

"Oh, yes. He's brilliant."

"He's got a TV show," he said sticking his hands in his pockets.

"I know, but I don't have cable," she said. "Do you watch it?"

"No. He's made some pretty controversial moves."

"Oh, yes?" she asked.

"Like downgrading Pluto to a dwarf planet."

"Yes. He was in on that. His argument seemed very sensible to me."

"Then he stirred the old religion-science pot with that tweet at Christmas time," he continued, crossing his arms and settling into his professorial mode. "You know. 'On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642.'" He was sure he'd quoted it accurately.

"Yeah. I was one of the thousands who re-tweeted it." She held the books closer to her chest.

"Next thing you know, he'll continue his crusade against astrology."

"Yes, he probably will." She arched an eyebrow.

 "My grandmother reads her horoscope every morning." He thought the girl had beautiful eyes.

 "I gotta go." She turned and left the stacks.

He went back to his friend.

"Did you see that?" he asked. "She just blew me off. It's because I'm a geek, isn't it. Girls just don't like intellectual types. I bet if I had a cool car or played guitar . . . ."

His friend shook his head. "She was in the library. In the physics section of the library. You love astronomy. She had two Neil deGrasse Tyson books. Why were you talking bad about deGrasse Tyson? You like him. And your grandmother's horoscope?" His friend crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling. "You're not a geek. You're an idiot."

The Pluto Files -- a review

See all those pink Post-Its? They mark things I wanted to quote in this review; new bits of information I wanted to remember; funny things he said that I wanted to tell somebody -- my husband, my daughter, anybody who'd listen.

Too many, too many.

In The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, Neil deGrasse Tyson tells the history of not just Pluto but of our understanding of our solar system.

He explores America's proprietary attitude toward Pluto. Pluto has always been practically an American planet. It was, after all, discovered by an American and made famous as Mickey Mouse's best friend. How more American could it be? How could it be demoted from its planet status by a bunch of mere scientists?

Tyson recounts his own part in that demotion. The decision to exclude Pluto from the new Rose Center's exhibit of Solar System planets was made in order to save money should discussions, then ongoing in the world of cosmology, redefine 'planet' making Pluto no longer a planet and instantly rendering the exhibit wrong. 

Not because he led the anti-Pluto-as-a-planet movement, but because he was Director of the Hayden Planetarium and he had tacitly accepted the role of astrophysics-interpreter-in-chief, he was the lightning rod. He drew the fury of the American Press and school children from across the country, incensed and offended that their planet was no longer officially considered a planet. 

Third grade teachers throughout the nation recognized a teaching moment. 

And suddenly, Tyson (not the boxer) was a household name. Not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Anything that focuses America on something scientific rather than sports has got to be good -- any publicity is good, right? Even bad publicity. Or detestations from third graders.

And it wasn't just children. Songs were written. Editorial cartoons were published. Comedians had fodder. And other scientists, even astrophysicists, took professional exception.

There were debates. According to Tyson's accounts these debates were every bit as passionate and acrimonious as the current crop of political debates, complete with verbal fireworks. (Though I don't think birther considerations came into any of them.)

The International Astronomical Union did not define 'planet' until 2006. The same year the other Tyson retired from boxing and six years after the Rose Center opened setting off the Pluto-as-a-Planet controversy.  

But more seriously, how can it be that physicists come so late to the method of taxonomy long employed by biologists? Tyson does not explain that, but he does explore the current modes of organizing the celestial bodies by their physical properties.

As the brouhaha subsided, the letters from children changed. This letter Tyson received from 8-year-old Siddiq summed it up. "We just have to get over it. That's Science."

As all good scientist should do, indeed sensible humans of any stripe should do with any of our life questions, Tyson leaves open the possibilities of new information changing our closely held views of reality. Again.

To give Pluto the last word, Tyson shares how political cartoonist Aislin in the Montreal Gazette imagines Pluto's concern with all things human: 

Probably the best news for me is Tyson identifies Ceres as a Dwarf Planet. It was the largest of the asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt when I first started writing Murder on Ceres. A novel my husband describes as science fiction for people who like murder mysteries and a murder mystery for people who like science fiction. 

Educating Americans, the Shocking Failure -- An Essay

image from brainyquotes.com

I woke up this morning feeling fine. We had 47 degrees at 6 a.m. That's a good way to start the day. Then my husband told me about an article in this morning's Washington Post.

A national survey by Oklahoma State University's Food Science Department found that more than 80% of the American public would support mandatory labeling for foods containing DNA. The information included about DNA in the survey question is all completely true, but it is presented in a way that would sound frightening to a reader who does not know what DNA is. Apparently the vast majority of survey respondents do not know what DNA is.

This should be taken as an indictment of our education system. I do not know if biology is required for high school graduation. If it isn’t, it should be. I had high school biology in the 1960s and DNA was not mentioned, but in college it was. Scientists were just beginning to understand DNA. In 1962 Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize for their work with DNA, so I don’t know how many public school biology teachers knew much about it then. Which brings up the question of continuing education for school teachers. Is it required even after they get their Masters? And does that continuing ed have to be in the field they’re teaching?

The responsibility for education does not fall solely on teachers. If we didn’t learn it from them, we have a responsibility to learn it on our own. And the world’s knowledge keeps growing. Even after we leave school. The resources for our own continuing ed are more available to us than they’ve ever been in human history. Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. Why not? Stem cell therapies are being used to treat various forms of cancer. Why?

If we like Dancing with the Stars, that’s fine, but just like eating burgers and fries is just fine, we need fruit and veggies for a healthy body. And we need healthy food for our minds. Watch Nova. Listen to Star Talk. Read a book. Google it.

When we get into the habit of exploring things we were just wondering about, we’re feeding our minds and learning to recognize that hunger for knowledge. We’ll soon discover that that hunger pops up more often than we ever imagined.

Flip a switch and turn on the light. Where did those electrons that are lighting our room actually come from and how did they get here? Read Isaac Asimov’s Atom. (What? You didn’t know he wrote anything but Science Fiction? Which, by the bye, is worth a read, too.) Exploring electricity, we’ll run into the names of Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla. Check them out.

Why don’t you ever see crows dead on the highway? Are they too smart to play in the road? How smart are they? Watch the documentary A Murder of Crows originally shown on PBS’s Nature. Now available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=s472GjbLKQ4. That’s right, youtube has things other than people and cats being dumb and cute, respectively.

Why do some people let their small children run loose in restaurants? Hmmmm. I don’t think Google can answer that satisfactorily. We’d probably have to ask those people and that might get us a few choice words we don’t need to look up.

Ask a question. Learn a new word. Expand your mental horizons.

And keep in mind, if it ain’t got DNA, it ain’t food. It might be a food supplement, but it ain’t food.