Learning

Writing that rocks – Disturbing the Universe

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

You can find the most interesting things in other people’s garages.

We were all at Brother #2’s house, a few months ago (this was the same visit where I learned of the North Sentinel Islands), and the guys and I ended up in the garage, looking through boxes of books that hadn’t been unpacked yet, after my brother’s recent move. We kept exclaiming over novels that we’d all read as children, some of which I hadn’t seen in almost thirty years. Of course, as soon as we’d “Oh-my-goshed” over a book, we immediately tried to identify which of us the book originally belonged to.

Such things are taken seriously, in my family.

After a few minutes of this, my brothers picked up a paperback book and started raving about how great it was. It had a creased cover and yellowish pages and was titled Disturbing the Universe, by Freeman Dyson. I’d never seen it before.

“You’ve got to read this,” both brothers said. “It’s by a scientist, a physicist…it’s his memoir.”

What luck! This dovetailed nicely with my very recent obsession with space and physics.

They handed the book to me, and I added it to a small stack of books that I’d pulled out because they either belonged to me; probably belonged to me; or possibly belonged to me, subject to further investigation. When we left that day, I jammed the books into the back of our van, where they tumbled over and fanned out across the floor. (My patient husband didn’t say a word. We’ve been married for twenty-one years and he knows, by now, that no matter where we are, books tend to attach themselves to me like barnacles.)

A few days later I picked up Disturbing the Universe and started reading. And, oh my stars.

First of all, Freeman Dyson is a great writer, not in a flashy way, but in a steady, sturdy, draws-you-in kind of way. Secondly, the book covers a particularly fascinating period in history, a period which included the creation of the atom bomb and the birth of space exploration. Dyson includes everything from technological details to arguments over the morality of both programs. There is philosophy. There is quoted poetry, quite a lot of it (Dyson is something of a Renaissance man.) There is, of course, physics.


Dyson was born in England in 1923, and became captivated by science as a small boy. During World War II he worked for Bomber Command, using mathematical analysis to try to reduce Allied casualties (all the while wrestling with his personal moral opposition to bombing.)

After the war he came to America for graduate studies, then went to California and worked on the General Atomic program (which eventually foundered.) He was involved in the test-ban negotiations of the 1960’s, and he spends chapters musing over the ethics of everything from defense strategies to DNA research. He worked alongside some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th-century, and he pays tribute to them with a great many personal anecdotes.

The last third of the book is devoted to space exploration, and this section is particularly dazzling (at least, if you’re a space nerd, like me.) The book was published in 1973, and it is evident that Dyson thought that by now (2010), the space program might have been more advanced than it is. He discusses all the possibilities that physicists were then debating, including extraterrestrials and interplanetary colonization. (He also admits that the latter is not likely to happen, and explains why.)

Disturbing the Universe is still in print, a testament to its enduring appeal. After I’d finished it, and was raving about it on Facebook, Brother #1 told me, “You know, I think that copy is actually mine.”

To which I maturely replied, “I don’t see your name in it. Finder’s keepers.”

Because blood may be thicker than water, but when it comes to a good book, it’s every man for himself.

The Curious Case of the Collyer Brothers

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

My hubby and I love the old TV show Frasier. We own every season on DVD (except the first one, which I refused to buy because Kelsey Grammer’s hair was so bad that year.)

We never really watched the show when it originally aired but, after our first baby was born, when we were housebound in the evenings (and stupefied with exhaustion), we started watching Frasier episodes, one after the other, on DVD. Even in our foggy post-baby state, we loved how smart and fearless and funny the show was. The acting was pitch-perfect, the writing was beyond clever – it still makes us laugh today, even after repeated viewings.

Anyway, this post isn’t about Frasier. It’s about a passing reference that was made in one show. In that episode, Frasier and Niles were acting even more neurotic than usual, and Frasier’s dad (an ex-cop) warned them that they could turn out like the Collyer brothers.

Well, that sort of thing is just catnip to me. I headed to the Internet.

Turns out, Homer and Langley Collyer, well-educated brothers born in the 1880’s into a distinguished New York family, were quite famous for being eccentric recluses. Once they reached adulthood, they lived together in a large, beautiful brownstone on Fifth Avenue for two decades, shunning human contact and existing without water, electricity or gas because they wouldn’t pay the bills (although they did have money in the bank.) They never threw anything away; instead, they piled up junk in their home and made small tunnels through the mess so they could move around. They were extreme “hoarders” 50 years before the term was coined.

During the last several years of their lives, they were rarely seen in public. In 1947, working on a tip about a terrible smell coming from the house, police entered their home and after hours of tunneling through junk, they found the body of one brother. An extensive search went up for the other brother, while workmen started removing debris from the home. After more than two weeks of this, the body of the other brother was found – just ten feet from where his sibling had been recovered. Here is a police photo:


Langley Collyer had died while crawling through a tunnel to bring food to his brother; a pile of junk had collapsed and crushed him. Homer, who was blind and depended on his brother for survival, starved to death a few days later.

There are so many degrees on the mental health spectrum, from well-adjusted to eccentric to completely mad. Nature, nurture, a little of both? Evidently the boys’ physician father was quite peculiar, paddling a canoe to his job at the hospital and eventually abandoning the family. We’ll never know exactly what the boys suffered from, since they were never treated (although that may have been a blessing, for them – the 1940’s were the heyday of the horrifying lobotomy craze.)

A final note: 130 tons of garbage were eventually taken from the Collyer’s home, and the building had to be razed. Among the items removed from the house were some 25,000 books.

Which is the one part of this story that sounds perfectly normal, to me.

The L.H.C. (Wait…we can DO that?)

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

Right now, as we speak, something freaky, mind-boggling, unbelievable (insert your own adjective here) is taking place within a circular tunnel buried underneath France and Switzerland. And it’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard a word about it.

The tunnel, which is 17 miles in circumference and lies some 330 feet below the ground, holds the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, for short), the largest machine ever built (as in, since the beginning of time). It is operated by CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research. (The U.S., although we chipped in a cool $542 million to build it, does not have an official seat at the table – but there are more American scientists working on the LHC than those from any other country.)

So what is it? The LHC is a particle accelerator (stick with me, this is fascinating), and with it, scientists are hoping to recreate conditions that were present at the beginning of time.

Here is how it works, to the best of my understanding. (Science was actually my worst subject in school, so I’ll make this quick and easy.)

We all know about atoms, those basic units of matter, and how they are comprised of electrons, neutrons, and protons. (And protons and neutrons are composed of even smaller particles, called quarks.) Within the LHC complex, physicists strip electrons from atoms, creating what are called “free protons.”

Two of these protons at a time are beamed into the huge particle accelerator from opposite sides. They are sent around at faster and faster speeds and then, when they reach their maximum speed (more on that in a moment), they are forced to collide. (The first collision of this type took place on March 29, 2010.)

And that’s pretty much it. That’s what this gargantuan, expensive ($9 billion) machine does.

So why have roughly half (7200) of all the particle physicists in the world devoted themselves to this project? According to them, the only way to fill in gaps in our understanding of the “standard model” of particle physics (the building blocks of the universe) is with experimental data. They hope to examine the matter that is created by these “big bang” collisions and learn more about: dark energy; dark matter (which makes up a stunning 96% of the universe); extra dimensions; and, of course, they are hoping to either prove or disprove the hypothetical “Higgs Boson” (which I am not going to go into here.)

Okay, I’m done. Told you it would be quick.

Here are a few fun facts, though, and you may want to be sitting down when you read these:

  • A single magnet in just one of the stations positioned around the LHC has a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s.
  • The LHC’s magnets must be chilled to a temperature of –271 degrees Celsius – which is one degree colder than deep outer space. Thus, somewhere in the bowels of this machine lies the coldest place in the universe.
  • Each proton goes around the entire 17-mile ring an impossible 11,000 times per second. This is 99.999999% of the speed of light. (It is impossible for matter to reach the speed of light – this is about as close as we can get.)

If you are a total nerd like me, and you need to know more, click here to read the excellent article “The Genesis 2.0 Project” from the January 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, which is where I first learned about this.

Click here to see pictures of this amazing machine.

And here is the very chipper, official website for the LHC, which is surprisingly easy to navigate, surprisingly low-tech (I guess they have better things to do than create flashy graphics), and which is written by endearingly enthusiastic people who use lots of exclamation points. As well they should.

(Lastly, I don’t have room in this post to debate the merits or morality of this endeavor, from a resources standpoint. I am probably sympathetic to both camps, pro and con. But as always, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment…)

Ultramarathon Man (or) Super Freak

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Dean Karnazes is a complete freak of nature, and I don’t think he’d mind me telling you so; I do it with the utmost respect. Before I talk about him, though, let me give you a little personal context.

My siblings and I are very tall and we look like we should be in good physical condition, capable of handling all sorts of rigors. In reality, we bruise like fruit, have no stamina, and get listless and crabby when our blood sugar plunges. Various ones of us have been known to cap off a strenuous afternoon at Disneyland by collapsing onto a bed, pasty-faced and trembling, for the remainder of our vacation. (Sadly, this is not a lie.) Our daintiness is a source of great irritation to our partners, each of whom has a fantastic, ox-like hardiness that calls to mind pioneer stock of the 19th century. My brothers and I, by contrast, would never have survived in an earlier era. We are barely making it in this one.

When we were kids, our coach-Dad tried valiantly to mold us into world-class track athletes, but we were just too puny. Running has remained my exercise of choice, into adulthood, but the most I have ever been able to eke out, with peak conditioning, were a few 10K’s. I have friends who regularly run full marathons, and I find their abilities profoundly confusing. (Also, their tendency to use words like “fun” to describe running long distances. I have been running for 30 years now. I don’t believe I have hit the “fun” part yet.)

Given my own physical frailty, you will understand why I am absolutely befuddled by the humanoid that is Dean Karnazes.

I learned of Karnazes when I bought and read his book Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-night Runner. His writing is solid enough, but you don’t read books like this for the writing. You read books like this to blow your own mind by what some human beings are capable of. Human beings who are not, you know, YOU.

Karnazes grew up in California, where he ran track throughout his school years but quit when he was in high school. Fifteen years later, on the night of his 30th birthday, Karnazes, a businessman who was married to a doctor, had a sort of mid-life-crisis moment. That night, he put on some old yard sneakers and took off, through the streets of San Francisco, and ran, off and on—all night. He loved it, despite the blisters and the shin splints and the strained muscles, and decided he would take up running again. But Dean Karnazes tends not to do things normally.

Did you, like me, think that the pinnacle of athletic endurance was perhaps an Ironman Triathlon? Guess again. Back in 1974, a man named Gordy Ainsleigh entered his horse in the Western States Trail Ride, a 100-mile equestrian race through the Sierra Nevadas. When Gordy’s horse went lame just before the race, ‘ole Gordy decided (as any sane person would) to run the entire course himself. Sans horse. On foot.

Almost twenty-four hours after starting out, Gordy revealed himself to be an extra-terrestrial being from a highly-advanced species finished the race. And a beast called “ultradistance running” was born.

By the time Dean Karnazes had his Come-to-Running birthday experience, Gordy’s little caper had evolved into the annual Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, a race that incorporates a total elevation change of a staggering 38,000 feet. (Lest you breeze on past that figure, let me give you this by comparison: the peak of Mt. Hood, which is the highest point in my mountainous home state, is just over 11,000 feet. Try to imagine running up and down for 3 1/2 times that height, in one race.) In order to even qualify to enter the Western States, you have to have previously run fifty miles straight in less than nine hours.

Look, I would love to dwell on how insane this all is, but I have bigger fish to fry. Because two years after he started running again, Karnazes completed that 100-Mile Run in twenty-one hours – and decided that it wasn’t enough.

A year later, he ran the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race across Death Valley, where the asphalt temperature can reach 200 degrees. An hour into the race, his first pair of shoes melted off. Thirty miles in, he started vomiting. By the 42-mile mark, which he reached at 1:00am, the air temperature was 112 degrees. After 72 miles, Karnazes passed out and was hauled off the course. But the following summer he was back, and that year he successfully completed the Badwater race.

During the next seven years, while holding down a day job, Karnazes did the following:

Scaled Yosemite’s Half Dome.
Swam across the San Francisco Bay.
Did triathlons, adventure races, and 24-hour mountainbike rides.
Surfed, snowboarded, windsurfed, and climbed mountains.
Oh, and continued to run ultramarathons, to the tune of almost one a month.

I know, this is starting to sound ridiculous, ludicrous, and fictional. Just wait, it gets better.

In 2002, Karnazes realized that no one had ever run a marathon at the South Pole. You know, as in Antarctica, the coldest place on the Planet (officially, at -128.6 degrees.) I don’t know about you, but if I learned that no one had ever run a marathon at the South Pole, I don’t think my reaction would be: “Well, this simply will not do.” But then again, I’m not Dean Karnazes.

Yes, our intrepid athlete went to Antarctica, and yes, he ran 26.2 miles in the snow there. He celebrated by stripping naked and doing a quick loop around a barber pole that’s planted at the exact center of the South Pole, so he could say he’d run naked “around the world.”

This might be a good place to talk about Karnazes’ mental state. Clearly, he has some “drive” issues, to say the least. Here’s what he says about it:

The average obsessive-compulsive takes seven years to get help. The average runner covers 10,920 miles in that time. Whether my affliction was clinical is anyone’s guess; I never did submit to testing. Some seek the comfort of their therapist’s office, other head for the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I choose running as my therapy. It was the best source of renewal there was. I couldn’t recall a single time that I felt worse after a run than before. What drug could compete? As Lily Tomlin said, “Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs and alcohol.”

That doesn’t fully satisfy my curiosity about his psyche, but it will have to do.

As for his physical biomechanics, the reasons he can do things that most of us couldn’t do no matter how hard we trained…who knows? Evidently doctors have determined that Karnazes’ body somehow reduces lactic acid as he exercises, which is contrary to normal physiology; but that is all the medical information I could find. Obviously he is made of different stuff than the rest of us. He doesn’t stretch before running. He says he’s never had an overuse injury. His resting pulse is 40. And so on.

Your guess is as good as mine, folks.

Anyway, in the last decade, Karnazes has completed a 199-mile Relay Race (normally run by teams of 12 men), single-handedly, six times. He has run 350 miles, without stopping, in less than 81 hours. He has run on a treadmill for 24 hours straight (the thought of which makes me want to poke my own eyes out with a sharp stick.) And in 2006, he ran 50 marathons, in all 50 states, on 50 consecutive days.

It bears repeating: 50 marathons. 50 states. 50 days.

He is also president of his own company, a motivational speaker, and a media darling. In his spare time, he keeps an active blog.

His book, Ultramarathon Man, is utterly fascinating, especially to a runner (can I still call myself that, after all this?) Karnazes discusses some of his feats in great detail, and he writes in depth about his training and diet. For example: he eats while running, consuming 28,000 calories during a typical endurance run. He actually has a post on his blog where he explains, very sincerely, how to order a pizza and have it delivered to you while you’re running. With a side of cheesecake, if you’re so inclined.

I have always loved learning about people who push themselves to do unbelievable things. It’s beyond inspiring, and it lifts me a little out of my daily drudgery; it lets me know that I’m capable of more than I dream. Reminds me that maybe I can manage another mile or two, metaphorically or literally.

Which is nice and all. But I don’t believe I’ll go running with Dean Karnazes anytime soon.

Snapshot – Architectural Digest

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

It all began with Brad Pitt. As so many things do.

Oh, all right, so there are actually not that many things in my life that begin with Brad Pitt (sadly) – (I kid, I kid!) – but my love affair with Architectural Digest sure did.

I was in Costco a year and a half ago, passing by the magazine rack, when I saw a photo of Brad peering out from under a hat, on the cover of Architectural Digest. This was right in the middle of his having-babies-with-Angelina brouhaha, and what can I say – I was curious enough to pick it up. Unlike all the other publications whose covers he was gracing, this one resembled an art catalogue – pretty and thick, with glossy pages throughout. The Brad article, about his efforts to help re-build New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was not very in-depth or interesting, but the rest of the magazine consisted of page after shiny page full of photographs of enormous homes, professionally decorated. I am a voyeuristic sucker for beautiful homes. I bought the magazine.

Up until that point, architecture was a subject that had escaped my notice. I’m sure I had heard of Architectural Digest before, but the name makes it sound like it is full of blueprints and boring technical-speak. I discovered that nothing could be further from the truth. AD (as it refers to itself) is packed with article after article featuring beautiful custom homes. About half of the content covers architecture; the other half covers interior design and decoration (some of which is hideously over-the-top, which provides a whole other kind of enjoyment.)

For the next couple of months, I bought the magazine off the newsstands, which got a little expensive (remember – I have no income these days.) Then I discovered that my favorite used bookstore periodically gets up to a dozen back-issues of AD in at a time, and sells them for 25 cents each. This made me very happy. I started “dropping by” the store on my way to the park with the boys, a couple of times a week. Whenever I saw a new batch of AD’s on the rack, I grabbed them all and lugged them to the counter. By the second time I did this, the cashier was curious.

“Oh,” she said politely. “Are you an architect?”

“Oh, no, ha ha,” I said. No, I’m just a lunatic who gets obsessed with things. “I…uh…just…I’ve kind of gotten into the magazine. I like looking at the houses.”

I’m not overly eloquent in person.

Anyway, as the months passed and I kept reading the magazine, I started absorbing all sorts of interesting information. Having lived all my life in small, generic spec homes (which certainly have their place in the world), I never realized just how much thought great architects put into the buildings they design. The shapes they create are intended to serve functions but also to inspire emotional reactions. I cannot think of another medium in which art and technology meet in such a potent way.

For example: If architects place a small window at the end of a long hall, they do it to “draw the eye” down the hallway. They think about how the light will fall through each window, at every time of the day. They design entryways to serve as aesthetic “transitions” from the outside to the inside. When a house is built on an open plain, with mountains in the distance, they might create a curving roofline to rise up on one side, to serve as a “counterbalance” to the jagged mountain peaks in the background. Windows are placed to specifically frame views.

Through AD, I learned about brilliant, accomplished artists, people like Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi woman who, in 2004, became the first woman in history to receive the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel. People like Norman Foster, a British architect and fellow Pritzker Prize-winner, who has designed a mind-bogglingly extensive and diverse array of structures: office buildings, domes, train stations, apartment buildings, campuses, Wembley Stadium, and, just for fun, the Millau Viaduct in France, the tallest bridge in the world. You can see photos of just some of his stunning work on his Wiki page.

As my awareness of architecture expanded, however minutely, so did my appreciation. I now “get” stark modernism. You know those boxy structures that seem to be all metal and concrete and glass and sharp angles? I used to think they were ugly. Now, although I still wouldn’t want to live in one, I find great beauty in their clean, even severe, lines.

During this time period, I also happened to read The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, a big, fat, incredibly detailed novel that describes the building of a cathedral in twelfth-century England. I must tell you, I visited several cathedrals in Europe when I was fourteen, and never once did I stop to think about how miraculous it was, that something so huge and heavy and complex could have been built with nothing but bare hands. No cranes to hoist heavy things a hundred feet in the air; no computers to give accurate measurements. Yet these buildings still stand, many hundreds of years later. It is extraordinary.

And so, my fascination grows.

For those who don’t know much about the subject of architecture, Architectural Digest provides a pain-free way to learn things while you’re looking at beautiful pictures – and who doesn’t love looking at gorgeous homes? Plus, you gain all sorts of fun new words that you can work into conversations, words like “clerestory” and “cantilevered” and “curvilinear.”

Okay, so I haven’t been able to use any of those words yet. But when the opportunity arises, and I’m confident that it will, Brad Pitt and I will be ready.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.