Stages of Fetal Development
Credit: NHS Pregnancy Desktop

One of the first things Vicky and I established when we first became romantically involved is that we both wanted to have children. We share a deep love of science and the natural world and wanted to share our sense of wonder with children of our own. At the same time, in our sharing we were hoping to experience the world vicariously through fresh eyes, reliving the thrill of learning and discovery.

When the pregnancy test finally came up positive, we were launched into a whole new realm of learning: reading up on diet, lifestyle, and fetal development. We were also put into an unanticipated tour of various types and standards of prenatal care. This post covers what we learned and what we are continuing to learn about pregnancy and childcare.

Researching Pregnancy

Medical Science has doubled of our lifespans over the last 200 years, but it has also made some horrible mistakes when it comes to childbirth. When we asked Vicky’s grandmother about her birthing experiences, she described the days when doctors would administer women in labor the Twilight Sleep drug, which prevented the woman from remembering the act of giving birth, but would also make her lose all self-control, so that she had to be strapped to the hospital bed and wear a helmet so she could wail and thrash. When we asked Vicky’s mother about breast feeding, she told us about how the doctors discouraged the practice, saying it was unsanitary and had less nutritional value than formula. Pre-1950s psychology took the position that showing affection for children was unhealthy and discouraged kissing or otherwise cuddling babies lest they have serious issues later in life. These were unfortunate ideas that manifested lifetimes worth of problems for children born during the times they were popular, but science is a self-correcting algorithm, so I made a point of doing some heavy reading in hopes of learning the latest, most refined understanding of what’s best for pregnancy, labor, and child-rearing.

Pregnancy and Baby Care Books

Anne Marie Paul’s Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives made for a good overview of how life in the womb is affected by the pregnant mother’s environment. It explains, in down to Earth terms, what the mother should eat, what she should avoid, and what lifestyle choices, such as exercise and stress, she should engage and avoid for the health of her developing baby. Humans are a highly-adaptable species, and Paul argues that the fetus is taking in information about the environment into which it will be born so that its brain and body will be customized to best survive in that world.

Meredith Small’s Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent is an important part of the attachment parenting philosophy, which stresses being keenly sensitive to the child’s needs to form a strong emotional bond with them. I appreciated the book’s evolutionary perspective on the subject, advocating co-sleeping and breastfeeding because our ancestors adhered to these practices. The book looks at various cultures and their differing parenting styles to help come to its conclusions. This foundation in anthropology and evolutionary psychology really appealed to me.

Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl’s The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind was a fascinating peek into an infant’s cognitive development. I loved the premise that babies are like scientists, testing hypotheses and adjusting their worldview according to the results. The book has an explanation of the “Terrible Twos” that impressed me: infants at that time are learning that your perspective is different from their perspective and they are having a hard time adjusting their understanding of the world accordingly. The book lays out its ideas exquisitely, bringing all the ideas together into a summary at the end that highly intellectually satisfying.

Lise Eliot’s What’s Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life is an exhaustive overview of every single aspect of the fetus and infant’s development and is also my favorite of all the books I read. The book covers the physiological development all five senses and several other senses that I didn’t even know about. It provides exercises for stimulating these senses so that the child’s brain wires up properly to best take advantage of them. The book can also be a bit scary as it goes over all the things that can go wrong in a child’s development, which set me on edge, but they are important things to be aware of so you can recognize them and get your child the help they need should they manifest.

John Medina’s Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five felt like the Cliff Notes version of Lise Eliot’s book, and that’s a good thing. It’s down to Earth and gets right to what you want to know about turning your child into a supersmart superhuman. I really appreciated some of the worldview adjustments Medina gives, such as to avoid praising your child for being smart, instead, praise them for working hard. Smart is out of our control, but failing a test because you didn’t work hard is something you can overcome.

Depending on your personality, there were a series of “easy reading” books that were less scientific and more about commiseration and practically dealing with parenting and childbirth. For nerds I recommend the Baby Owner’s Manual, found on Think Geek, for its clinically humorous way of covering baby care. For regular guys I suggest the The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-Be, which was pretty in-depth and covered a whole lot of territory focused on the male’s role in things. While men’s men should go with Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads, which actually works on a whole lot of levels, is the funniest of the books I picked up, and has great “circuit training” advice for exercising your baby.

Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: 8th Edition was the “Manual” that everyone took when they kidnapped the baby in the film “Raising Arizona.” It’s criticized for using inductive reasoning rather than evidence-based medicine, and I found some glaring errors in an early edition of the book, like advising parents to put their baby to sleep face down, which we now know puts them at a higher risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrom (SIDS); however, later editions of the book correct these errors and overall the book works as a great big encyclopedia of baby care advice. At the same time, while the book is on my shelf, I’m still more likely to hit a search engine to find out why there’s a white fungus growing on my baby’s tongue (It’s called thrush and it’s perfectly normal).

NHS Pregnancy Desktop

Beyond books, I highly recommend parents check out the UK National Health Services’ (NHS) – Pregnancy Desktop application, especially for expectant dads. One problem I had early on during Vicky’s pregnancy was that she was completely on top of what needed to be done at what week in the process, so that I felt like I was just following along under her guidance. The Pregnancy Desktop application sits on your desktop, opening on startup, and serves as a constant reminder of how many weeks and days you have left until your due date, what’s going on with the baby, and what you should be doing to prepare. Some of the information it provides is UK-specific, but there is also a bounty of good information for mothers in any country. Again, highly recommended.

By far, the most beneficial preparation we made was in attending Bradley Method Classes to learn about Husband-Coached Natural Childbirth based on Richard Bradley’s Husband-Coached Childbirth: The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, where the husband takes a strong supporting role in the wife’s labor, monitoring contractions, tending to her needs and making sure she’s comfortable, and providing emotional support to help her achieve an unmedicated delivery. In addition to practice exercises to prepare for labor, the classes are also fantastic for the way they educate students on the mechanics and physiological aspects of labor. We learned about various medical interventions the doctor’s might use, pregnancy complications we may experience, and lots of information about what’s going on with the baby and mother’s bodies during labor. One factoid I found very interesting had to do with the health effects of cutting the umbilical cord after delivery, which doctors rush to do, but is probably best to hold off on in order to allow the placenta to pump all of its blood into the baby. The classes are important because the books and software are all just theory (in the non-scientific sense of the word) and you need to get active and increase your kinesthetic intelligence to see yourselves through this.

Pregnancy Lifestyle

Vicky had an extremely easy pregnancy, which we attribute to a healthy diet and active lifestyle. Vicky was great at practicing squatting to strengthen her pelvic floor and hit the gym every day, where she found the fetus became very active while she was on the elliptical, but became less active later in the pregnancy to conserve oxygen while Vicky’s consumption went up. She also gave up caffeine, alcohol, and other environmentals that could harm the developing fetus. As a show of support, I gave up caffeine and alcohol too; unfortunately, I couldn’t convince Vicky that this same logic would apply to scooping cat poop.

Here’s the factoids we incorporated into our pregnancy lifestyle:

Diet: As I covered recently, good nutrition is crucial to cognitive development in the developing brain, which is why in our enlightened civilization we have social services like welfare. But what food choices should the pregnant mother make?

Eats lots and lots of fish, which increases infant cognition. Unfortunately, with so much pollution in the environment, this principle has also become a balancing act between good protein and omega 3s and elevated mercury content that gets concentrated in certain species of fish. Vicky and I referred to tilapia and salmon dinners as “IQ points for baby” meals.

Another thing is to make your plate colorful. Our Bradley Method instructor had Vicky turn in a list of all the foods she ate each week, which was first checked to sufficient protein intake, but then turned to variety. One of Vicky’s homework assignment was to eat a yellow or orange vegetable, similar to Michael Pollan’s advice in his excellent book In Defense of Food.

Lifestyle: Avoid the three characteristics of stress: too frequent, too severe, and too much for you. A great way to counter effect stress during pregnancy is exercise, as it reduces stress hormones that can hurt the baby’s development. Exercise also reduces the amount of time spent in the pushing phase of labor compared to women who do not exercise. There is some concern that exercise robs the baby of oxygen and therefore harms cognitive development; however, there is also evidence that exercise improves intelligence and the fetuses show the same benefits of cardiovascular exercise as the mother experiences.

Things to Avoid: Limit caffeine, which appears to have no effect on the child’s IQ but does cause developmental problems in rats when taken in extreme doses. Definitely avoid smoking, which lowers birth weight, increases the child’s chances of neurological impairment, increases the risk of miscarriage, and increases the risk of SIDS after birth. Also avoid alcohol, which is “thought to be responsible for at least 4,000 cases of mental retardation in the United States each year and perhaps ten times that number of children with mild learning or behavioral problems.” Also avoid the chemical Bisphenol A, which is in certain plastics and causes developmental issues in animal embryos. For knowing which plastics are safe a good mnemonic about recycling numbers to use is “Four, five, one, and two/All the rest are bad for you.”

Vicky has a more detailed post about her Nutrition Worksheets and diet during pregnancy as well as her exercise regimen.

Where to Deliver?

My mother has her Doctorate in Obstetrics Nursing with a lifetime of experience working in the field and is a huge advocate for natural childbirth, that is, vaginal childbirth without pain medications. There are numerous health advantages for babies born vaginally as compared to C-section, including their oxygen level rising more rapidly after birth, increased ability to regulate their body temperature, and higher scores on reflex tests. Additionally, pain medications given to the pregnant mother during labor also drug the baby, hindering its ability to adapt to the dramatic environmental changes it experiences going from the womb to the outside world. There is no such thing as a “local” anesthetic.

Northeastern OB-GYN Logo

Vicky started out attending Northeastern OB-GYN in Elizabeth City North Carolina, which was very good at the prenatal care they provided her. In addition to having a very nifty logo (the above is the largest I could find it online), they also gave us our first look at Sagan through ultrasound. The eggsack in the below photo is actually a vestigial trait from when our ancestors developed in an egg with a yolk.

Sagan Ultrasound 14 Weeks into Pregnancy

After moving to Norther Virginia, we first tried attending About Women OBGYN at Potomack Hospital website makes it sound like they have midwives on staff, which they don’t. We learned that it’s a standard practice in prenatal care to rotate the doctors so that every patient gets to meet every doctor so that when it’s time to deliver the patient isn’t stuck with a complete stranger. The only problem with this clinic was that there was no transfer of knowledge. We had to start from scratch with every doctor we met and there was much confusion about where Vicky was in her pregnancy. As a result, appointments for tests were miss-scheduled and prescriptions were mismanaged.

This experience of being on some sort of poorly-managed pregnancy assembly line prompted us to seriously look into midwife-assisted delivery. Usually this means home birthing; however, four dogs, three cats, and four other residents in the house made this option impractical. So we looked into birth centers staffed with midwives.

An question that comes up with delivering outside of a hospital setting is how safe is it? Studies demonstrate home birthing is as safe as hospital birthing, and studies suggesting otherwise tend to be deeply flawed (see also here). I surmise that these equivalent safety numbers have a lot to do with the fact that midwives and birth centers won’t accept high-risk pregnancies and rely on hospitals as a backup option for when labor does not progress.

In our search for certified midwives, we tried out Birth by Design, who was opening a new birth center in Fairfax Virginia. While the midwives there were very nice, there were some things that didn’t grok with me. They were very focused on herbal remedies and said that Vicky would have to agree to drinking an herbal tea every day for a healthy pregnancy. This seemed a little too New Age-y for me and I was further troubled when they said they had herbal solutions to breach pregnancies and other complications.

Sagan Ultrasound 20 Weeks into Pregnancy

Luckily, that same week we got taken off the waiting list for Birth Care in Alexandria Virginia. The midwives at this birthing center were very professional and clinical in their approach to labor and delivery. Their prenatal care was conditional on the patient taking responsibility for their health with prenatal vitamins, filling out their own chart for blood pressure and weight, setting up pediatric visits, proper diet, and, most importantly, taking birth classes to prepare for the experience.

Dr. Bradley believed there were instinctual behaviors animals were engaging to manage the pain and stress of childbirth. Looking to the animal kingdom for how other mammals handle labor we find the mother needs darkness, solitude, quiet, physical comfort and relaxation, controlled breathing, closed eyes, and the appearance of sleep. Our tour of Birth Care revealed an environment catered to providing such an environment, with a homey feel to the place, real beds, baths, and other comforts to allow the laboring mother to relax her body let her uterus do what it needs to do.

The Big Day: Labor and Delivery

(Note: Vicky has posted here birth story here, which is much more detailed than my abbreviated description. I highly recommend it for the detailed version of our birth story and how she prepared for labor.)

The Bradley Method classes were the most important thing we did to prepare for the big day, and that’s taking into consideration the fact that we only got halfway through them since Vicky’s water broke a month early and on July 12, 2011 Sagan Charles Somma was born at 4 pounds 13 ounces. The timing put him two days too early for us to go to the Birth Care Center, and we transferred to Alexandria Inova Hospital, a hospital we had never attended with doctors and nurses we had never met and had never discussed our desires for a natural, unmedicated birth.

We lucked out, however, as the staff was fantastic. Dr. Kenneth Adhoot observed that my wife was progressing through labor well and was admirably willing to step back and allow nature to take its course under the guidance of your nursing staff and midwife. Midwife Donna Greenfield was very professional and attended the actual delivery of our son, taking measures to avoid an episiotomy. Our nurse Heidi was a huge help, offering suggestions and coaching Vicky through her pushing.

We lucked out in another way in that just the night before we had gone shopping for all the supplies we would need for labor; unfortunately, I failed at the “Don’t let the gas tank go below 1/2 mark the last two months” bullet point and had to stop for gas on the way to the Birth Center, which Vicky was much less than thrilled about. Once at the hospital, our Birth Classes were invaluable in understanding all the procedures and anticipating the sequence of events, like when Vicky went into the Transistion Phase of labor and began doubting herself and her ability to go through a natural birth, but this passed within minutes and she focused to get through Active Labor like a champ.

Sagan Newborn

Despite being premature, Sagan was very healthy. He had a perfectly normal problem with his blood sugar dropping, and we got that rising within 24 hours by feeding him colostrum with a teaspoon. He had problems with jaundice for the first few days because Vicky is an A-Negative blood type and I am O Positive, which prompted Vicky’s immune system to attack Sagan’s red blood cells, but this cleared up quickly by putting him in sunlight and Vicky diligently forcing him to eat and flush out the bilirubin from his system. The only minor problem we had at the hospital during our two day stay there was in keeping Sagan’s body temperature up, which the nurses blamed on our inability to keep him properly swaddled; however, I quickly solved the problem by having the hospital turn off the air conditioning to our room, after which the nurses switched to complaining about how hot it was every time they came in. I owe it to the Birth Care midwives and their policy of keeping their center air conditioned during labor, but unairconditioned afterwards to keep the baby warm and healthy for knowing to ask for this.

Our Parenting Choices

Here’s a grab-bag of notes on some of our early parenting choices:

Breast Feeding: There are myriad health advantages to breast feeding over the health problems caused by formula feeding. We intend to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and continue the practice for a full year. This sparked some controversy as a family member argued that breast feeding will prevent our conceiving another child until Sagan is weaned and we are nearing our 40s, where we start to move into high-risk pregnancy territory. Our ancestors breastfed exclusively for two years and continued to breastfeed for up to four years. This not only had the benefit of providing excellent nutrition to the child, but also prevented the mother from conceiving until the current child was sufficiently developed. There is also the monetary savings to consider, and Vicky demonstrates on her blog, the Medela breast pump has given us an exceptional return on our investment over the cost of formula feeding.

Immunizations: We have been and continue to get Sagan any and all immunizations suggested to us. Children who aren’t immunized result in hotspot breakouts of measles, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, and diphtheria. If you are considering postponing or foregoing vaccinations, please think about Benjamin Franklin’s personal lament about not vaccinating his son against smallpox:

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen. [emphasis mine]

At the time of my writing this in 2011, 738 people have died since 2007 that were vaccine preventable.

Circumcision: Decided against it despite being circumcised myself. The idea that a civilization of people who thought the all the animals in the world lived within walking distance of Noah’s home had better medical science than millions of years of penis evolution through natural selection seems pretty silly. The foreskin has a bundle of sensitive nerves, it keeps the head of the penis lubricated for easier vaginal penetration (this is why we substitute spit so much in modern sex) and allows the penis to move within the shaft during intercourse as nature intended, and a very promiscuous friend once told me uncircumcised men make better lovers. Don’t mutilate your child, let them make their own decision when they get older (You can read a good factsheet on this subject here).

Co-Sleeping: We have been cosleeping with Sagan rather than having him sleep in a separate crib. It makes sense to us from an evolutionary perspective. As Mark Vonnegut puts it, “The truth is, almost all mammals (including humans) sleep with their babies. Indeed, most human babies in most cultures sleep with their parents, and always have.” The breathing reflex is stimulated not directly by the absence of oxygen but rather indirectly by the presence of carbon dioxide, so sleeping next to the baby and sharing their breathing space increases the carbon dioxide levels in the air and should reduce apnea (I don’t have research to support this however, so take it as my opinion, not science). There is also a convenience element. Baby cries, one of us rolls over to feed him, baby goes back to sleep. With breastfeeding, the mother can roll over to offer a breast and go back to sleep while the infant feeds.

This is a controversial ideal in Western cultures, and each parent needs to read up on it and make their own choice about it. The American Academy of Pediatrics will eventually release an advisory on the subject, but until then, definitely do not cosleep if you are a smoker, on medication, or have been drinking, and if you do, research how to make your bed as safe as possible.

Baby Sign Language: This will surely be the subject of a future post, but thanks to a friend of ours with a Ph.D. in Anthropology, we will be trying out Baby Sign Language as a means of communicating with Sagan before he is able to express himself verbally. I’m hoping to experience some of the same insights into how the infant understands concepts as this blogger writes about with her daughter.

What We’ve Learned at 12 Weeks

What’s surprised me most about having a baby is what an ongoing learning experience we have gotten ourselves into. Specifically, it feels like we’ve gone on an anthropology expedition, observing the ethology of the human family. We are seeing how life was like for hundreds of thousands of years for our ancestors on the Serengeti.

The first thing we’ve learned is the importance of grandparents. Evolutionists suspect that menopause in human females is actually an evolutionary adaptation because it frees the woman up to contribute care for the children of her own children; in other words, grandmother’s are a human adaptation, contributing to the care of offspring as well as contributing to the transfer of cultural knowledge. Vicky’s mother has been invaluable in caring for Sagan, happy to play with him while we use the time to get some work done. Both Vicky’s mother and my own mother have been fantastic resources on the knowledge-front as well, leading to many phone calls for questions about childcare and issues that come up, and such cultural transmission from grandmothers is why humans needed increasingly larger brains. Vicky has a great blog post up about the importance of Grandmas in helping with childcare.

Something that has taken me by surprise is the complete helplessness of the human infant. Science has demonstrated that infants are not blank slates; however, they certainly appear to be blank slates. I was blown away by how incredibly discombobulated is a newborn. They cannot focus on anything except bright lights and make no social connections with those around them until they are a few month old.

This again is the result of evolution. Humans have big brains, which make us incredibly adaptable to any environment; unfortunately, those big brains can’t fit through the birth canal without the mother’s hips being too wide to allow them to walk upright. So biology found a compromise, the infant is born with its brain only partially developed with the remainder of the development taking place outside of the womb. After a few months of oftentimes patience-straining nights up with Sagan, he started making eye-contact with us and now returns our smiles, building the social bonds that endear him to us as such behaviors endeared infants to our ancestors so that they would raise them the many years it takes to become autonomous members of the clan.

Watching baby level-up appears to have the effect of leveling us up as well.

Sagan Smiling

Further Reading

You can see the Thank You letter I sent Inova Hospital here.

You can see the still-rough draft of our Birth Plan here.

I highly recommend the opening portion of This American Life’s episode Unconditional Love, which covers the history of psychology, the pre-1950s idea that affection and tenderness were bad for children, and the psychologist who proved the importance of love, who was a callous person himself.

Just this week I started reading Geek Dad’s book of suggestions for parenting with things like RPG Parenting and weekend projects with your kids. Looking forward to trying some of them out in a few years.

Update

A complete oversight, I meant to give a huge Hat Tip and Thanks to An American Expat in Deutschland for lending Vicky and I so many of the great books we read!

“I cannot live without books.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

I had the great joy of attending this year’s National Book Festival on the Washington DC Mall. With over 100 authors in attendance, CSPAN’s BookTv.org covering the event, PBS Kids, Scholastic, and the greatest library on Earth providing educational materials, this was a fun activity for kids and adults, all celebrating the most important cultural invention in human history: the written word.

As Carl Sagan explains, books changed everything:

For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the game of ‘Chinese Whispers’, over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost.

Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate – with the best teachers – the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

The Library of Congres

Thomas Jefferson

I’ve written about my love of the Jefferson Room in the Library of Congress and compared it to a modern day Library of Alexandria in my book The Spiraling Web. Just as the British Empire defined itself as the time keeper for the world symbolized through the monumental clock Big Ben, the Library of Congress symbolizes the United States’ status as the world’s cultural hub. The entire world sets its watch by Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and it sets it intellect by America’s eclectic melting pot of diversity and open discussion of ideas.

From the Library’s website:

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 147 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 33 million books and other print materials, 3 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.4 million maps, 6 million pieces of sheet music and 64.5 million manuscripts… in some 470 languages.

Digital Preservation at the Library of Congress

The Library also supports the acquisition of its own collection through the issuance of copyrights, where anyone seeking to obtain copyright protection under the American government is required to submit two copies of their work (electronic copies are preferred now). Additionally, the Library (capital-L) has numerous other projects going on such as Digital Preservation, which includes web archiving and educational outreach efforts to encourage Americans to backup their digital media for long-term preservation. The LoC also has lots of great online educational resources like the World Digital Library, Gateway to Knowledge, Knowledge Quest, and a vast archive of photographs and other media, including photos of the Jefferson Room.

And did you know that the Library of Congress is also a Unit of Measurement in Information Science? 20 Terabytes; although, the LoC has far surpassed that.

Children’s Tents

Electric Company Coloring Poster

Three very large tents hosted a wide variety of games and activities for children. There were lots of folks in cartoon character costumes, presentation, and giveaways. My favorite activity here was the “Klutz Build a Book,” which included all sorts of decorative items to glue into the pages of a spiral bound book. Sort of like scrapbooking, but fictional.

Authors

After the festival, I found out there were tons of authors I would have enjoyed seeing, but, since I didn’t plan my trip out, I only made the effort to see two.

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson, one of the most interesting cyberpunk novelists today and whose book Cryptonomicon I couldn’t finish (gave up at page 300), but did inspire me to buy an autographed copy of IT Security Guru Bruce Schneir’s book Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, was reading from his latest tome. I happily stood in line for 50 minutes to get an autographed copy of the book Reamde for my brother-in-law who is a huge Stephenson fan and is confused as I am as to why I don’t grok this speculative hyper-geek of an author. His writing is kind of dry, but incredibly witty and his science fiction is hardcore and erudite, all wonderful qualities for his subject matter.

Garrison Keillor

A special treat was seeing Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion fame. He was reading from a collection of poems he had assembled titled Good Poems, American Places, which included a nice prayer for the existence of god (YouTube of him reading it), which was a request for god to simply be out there somewhere, and included the amusing line, “for I shall sure be pissed if I should have been an atheist.” Keillor related his experiences in writing, including rewriting scripts on the PHC as the actors were reading them. He also made one of the best observations about the craft I think I’d ever heard, “Writing is never finished; it’s just taken away from you.”

I can’t wait till next year’s festival.

Further Research

You can check out my Creative Commons Flickr Set Here, which includes lots of photos of Neil and Garrison.

Yuri’s Night 2011

50 years ago, on April 12th, 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin piloted the Vostok 1 into space, entering the history books as the first human to achieve space flight. It follows the 50th anniversary of the first artificial satellite in orbit, Sputnik, the first living passenger to make it into space, Laika, and America throwing our hat into the space race. It will be eight long years until we can celebrate the next big semicentennial event, the Apollo Moon landing.

Eastern Standard Time

Yuri’s Night is a world-dance party celebrating human adventures in space and raising consciousnesses concerning space flight with art, music, and costumes. I previously blogged about attending an event in 2008 with the Extropia community in Second Life. This year Vicky and I attended a live event, just outside of Washington DC at the Artisphere in Rosslyn Virginia, and had a blast.

Jedi and Dark Sith Guard the Moon Bounce

The Out of this World Party definitely lived up to its name. Tunes like Muse’s Starlight, Black Hole Sun, and a ska/reggae version of the Dr.Who theme helped set the atmosphere, as did a great performance, in space jumpsuits by the Caribbean-Jazz-Soul-Ska band Eastern Standard Time, who brilliantly got everyone out on the dance floor by handing out Tetris blocks for people to play with. While the band played, projectors ran through scenes from science fiction b-movie cult classics like “War of the Satellites,”Attack of the Crab Monsters,” and “StarCrash.”

Yuri’s Night Costume Party

Lightsaber-weilding jedis and dark sith stood guard over the Moon Bounce, in which Vicky and I had a great time leaping around. Costumes ranged from science fiction classics to beer-dispensing robots and drag queens. The art exhibit on the upper floor was fantastic, covering aliens, robots, space chimps and more, with most of the pieces available for viewing on the event website (Click on “Yuri’s Night” and “C2YN Art Exhibit”). I expect Yuri’s Night to become a yearly todo for my wife and I. We might have to get there early enough for the burlesque shows too. : )

Be sure to check out the documentary “First Orbit,” which will be released for free download on April 12th.

You can also check out my Flickr Set of photos from the party.

“Invention breeds invention.” – Edison

Check out the complete flickr set here.

City living is good for the environment. When populations are concentrated, they are pooling resources. They use less electricity because their apartments are close together, less oil because of mass transportation and less water because they don’t have big lawns to feed. And cities like New York are constantly working to become greener, from the Science Barge, an experiment in bringing local produce to the city, to green roofs, collective grocery stores and hybrid-electric taxi cabs, things are becoming more environmentally friendly in the city all the time.

High Line Park

High Line Park is one-such improvement, suggested by nature, to green the city. The High Line was an old set of railway tracks on stilts, running through the city. It was supposed to be torn down, but local residents had come to love the trees, flowers and shrubs that had overgrown the tracks. So the tracks were converted into a park, running a beautiful river of natural beauty through the city for all to enjoy.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Evolution Store in Soho

When my sister came across the Evolution Store in Soho, New York City, she knew I absolutely had to see it. This store has everything you need to make some high-quality additions to your home Cabinet of Curiosities. From insects, fossils, minerals, taxidermy animals, seashells and corals, skulls and skeletons, this store covers all bases for the Naturalist collector.

What struck me most about the displays, was the way they were presented as fine art. We usually only see these things presented in museums, where they are obviously art, but not always thought of as something we would like to have hanging on the bedroom wall. A skeleton is a beautiful thing, and a fossilized one embedded in stone is one of nature’s paintings perfectly framed. A trilobite or ammonite uncovered from the stone is a natural sculpture, and the minerals like stibnite and obsidian are natural patterns more intricate than any work of modern art, because it’s intricacy goes all the way down to the atomic level.

After some fretting over which dinosaur bone replica was within my price range and was cool enough looking, I went with an Allosaurus finger claw. The store has a very large collection of curiosities for sale on the website, and I could see that the collection was ever-changing as new items rotated in to replace those sold out.

Window Display at the Evolution Store in Soho

I would highly-recommend putting this store on your “must see” list of attractions to check out on your next trip to the Big Apple, after, of course, the American Museum of Natural History.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Walking through this exhibit, we find a love/hate relationship between Americans and science. We love the modern conveniences of plastic, birth control, and cheap energy, but hate the chemical poisons contaminating our environment, radioactivity, cancer, and innovations in warfare that come with them. Displays that are hopeful for the future through science are contrasted with displays of human suffering during the depression… and that’s not even getting into the conflicts of tradition versus progress as we see in the Evolution debates.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

This set is a work in progress, as one must visit botanical gardens at many points in the year to see all the various flowers in bloom.

Check out the incomplete flickr set here.

The azalea is unique among species of rhododendron in that, rather than blooming in clusters or “stripers” as they are known, every terminal branch on the azalea bush produces a flower, resulting in the spectacular displays they bring each April.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Norfolk Botanical Gardens Rose Garden

Shakespeare wrote, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;” however, psychologists have found this is not true, that words impact the way we percieve the world. Understanding the science of roses, how they are made of carbon pulled from the air, that they are often grafted onto the roots of hardier species to survive the outdoors, and how they pull energy directly from the sun, makes them all the more lovely to admire.

It reminds me of this Feynman quote:

The World looks so different after learning science.

For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.

These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

It was merely a happy coincidence that Vicky and I paid a visit to the Norfolk Botanical Gardens at the same time they were having a Bonzai tree show and competition. It fascinates me how artists can spend decades nurturing these trees and guiding their growth to produce such microcosms of beauty.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Jefferson Room (Click for Flickr Set) Credit: Moi

There are names of philosophers, naturalists, and scientists everywhere. Proverbs meditating on Deism and knowledge abound. There are paintings of women representing the different types of literature, from history to erotica. Evidence of America’s love of science is found all throughout the building, as with a collection of cherub sculptures depicting the many noble professions, one of which is entomology, a cherub chasing a butterfly with a net.

Entomology Cherub

There are statues and paintings representing the different nations and cultures of the world, and what each contributes to world culture. Germany is credited with the “Art of Painting,” France is “Empancipation,” England is “Literature,” Spain is “Discovery,” Egypt is “Written Records,” Judea is “Religion,” Greece is “Philosophy,” Islam is “Physics,” the Middle Ages is “Modern Languages,” Italy is the “Fine Arts”…

Dome of the Jefferson Reading Room
Courtesy of Wikimedia

And America:

Detail of America as Science in the Jefferson Reading Room Dome
Courtesy of Wikimedia

The figure, an engineer whose face was modeled from Abraham Lincoln’s, sits in his machine shop pondering a problem of mechanics. In front of him is an electric dynamo, representing the American contribution to the advancement of electricity. Blashfield has signed his work on the base of the dynamo, with the accompanying inscription: “These decorations were designed and executed by EDWIN HOWLAND BLASHFIELD, assisted by ARTHUR REGINALD WILLETT, A.D. MDCCCLXXXXVI.”

There are also eight symbolic statues in the reading room, representing philosophy, art, history, commerce, religion, law, poetry, and science. Accompanying these are sixteen bronze statues of individuals representing accomplishments in these categories of knowledge, with Newton and Henry representing science.

Library of Congress, Jefferson Reading Room

The Jefferson Reading room is off-limits to visitors and photography from the observation deck is prohibited. Even if it wasn’t, the science-related statues cannot be seen from the observation deck. I looked through all the books in the LOC gift shop and could not find photos of these statues either. So if anyone can find photographs of these statues, I and America would be eternally grateful.

My favorite of all these are the mosaics of women representing the arts of the sciences. Each woman is depicted mastering some element of nature through science, be it fire, venom, or the heavens.

It took me four trips to this room to get photos of these murals, which I have not been able to find anywhere else on the Internet. I’m licensing these Creative Commons, so please reuse and redistribute!

Women of Science Top: Chemistry, Zoology, Astronomy, Geology Bottom: Botany, Physics, Mathematics, Archaeology (Click for Flickr Set) Credit: Moi

I’ve taken my photos of these faded murals and have adjusted the brightness, contrast, and color levels to enhance their beauty. The results I’ve posted below.

Archaeology

Archaeology is depicted reading a large book with a magnifying glass. She stands on an artificial structure, with a pottery at her feet. Her clothes are more extravagant than the other women, and she wears a much jewelry and accessories.

Astronomy

Astronomy stands at the apex of a hill or mountain, the crescent moon at her feet. She carries Saturn in her left hand, a celestial object, and what may be a lens in her right. It’s as if the lens makes the immense heavenly body her plaything.

Botany

Botany is clad in green robes, standing on lily pads. In her hands she cradles a lotus bloom. The joy in her face is apparent as she appreciates the intricacies of the bloom’s unfolding petals.

Chemistry

Chemistry toils over a pedestal with a cobra coiled around it. She is using a retort to distill liquid. Is she manufacturing an antidote from the snake’s venom?

Geology

Geology stands on rocky soil, apparent from the mountains in the distance behind her. In her left hand she carries a glass orb and in her right a seashell fossil.

Mathematics

I love the fact that Mathematics is pretty much naked, fitting for her stature as the “pure” science. Her right foot rests upon a block with “MMX” inscribed upon it. I am unable to identify what it is she carries in her hands. Is it a scroll? A geometric shape?

Physics

There is wind or water flashing behind Physics, a demonstration of nature’s physical powers. Her right foot depresses the Earth where she stands. In her left hand, she carries a torch, and with her right hand manipulates the flame.

Zoology

Zoology is clad in animal skins, her stride cast in a dynamic pose, as if she were prowling like the Lion resting at her feet, which she caresses as her pet.

See the complete flickr set here. Very high resolution photos included. The Library of Congress also has a write-up of most of the details you will find as you explore the Jefferson Library. There is also a beautiful book detailing almost everything in the library titled The Library of Congress: the art and architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building, which you may preview with Google Books.

A little after the start of June, the Rhodedendrons are in bloom, and this section of the Appalachian Trail goes ablaze with purple if you get lucky. Wild ponies that inhabit this section of the trail keep the foliage low, so there are wide open spaces with great views all along the way.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Updated this set with some additional photos. Botanical Gardens are great for revisiting, as they are perpetually changing throughout the year.

Check out the complete flickr set here.