Helen FieldsScience Writer

I never got around to writing about a lot of my adventures in Germany, partly because I was having trouble uploading pictures to Wordpress. So, I guess you’re in luck, ’cause I figured that out.

When my parents came and visited at the end of my stay, we took a week and went down to poke around Bavaria. Our first stop was Berchtesgaden, a lovely alpine resort town and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite places. For his 50th birthday, the Nazis built a mountain retreat for him on a crag with 360-degree views. Hitler, according to my guidebook, had vertigo and hated it there.

The building survived – unusual for Nazi sites – and is now a major tourist destination. Buses run up the winding road all day, and there’s a restaurant up top.

The day we went up it was super cloudy and you couldn’t see the views. My dad and I went on a little hike on a trail that climbed up and down the rocks and wound around, with what should have been fantastic views of the alps.

It felt exactly like the beginning of the second Lord of the Rings movie, when Frodo and Sam are trying to find their way through the rocks of Emyn Muil. Spooky.

Well, you don’t see that every day.

This was in front of a teaching hospital. My guess is they’re for people to practice doing intubations. (Anybody know for sure?)

One of my favorite online dictionaries, Leo, is this week’s Dictionary of the Week. Actually, it’s kind of last week’s Dictionary of the Week. Hey. I was busy.

Yep, the online dictionary gets an unattractive picture of my computer screen. Sorry, Leo.

One of the many problems with having a job is that you don’t always have your dictionaries with you. In my last two office jobs, I usually had a red English dictionary, a medical dictionary, and a few usage guides at my desk. So if I had to look something up in a foreign language, I was stuck with the internet. (Yes, I could have visited the library, but this is the internet age, my friend.)

My general verdict on online dictionaries: I don’t like ‘em. Take Norwegian, for example. This one gives the impression that it exists solely as a vehicle for ads and this one doesn’t have the word “funky.” Actually, neither has the word “funky.”

Now look what happens when you type “funky” into Leo. Not only do you get five possible ways to say “funky” in German, you also get “to dance the funky chicken” (den Ententanz tanzen) (literally: to dance the duck dance). Then farther down on the page there’s a list of links to forums, with discussion topics like “Deutsche Übersetzung gesucht ‘Funky cold Medina’” (“looking for a German translation of ‘Funky Cold Medina’”).

One of my classmates told me about Leo when I was taking a brush-up German class at the Goethe-Institut Washington early last year. He worked for a German architecture firm, so he had a somewhat more urgent need to look up German words than I did. It’s only useful when you’re sitting at a computer, and I always did my homework for that class on the metro.

But when I went to Germany this fall to do a journalism fellowship, boy was I happy to have Leo. I always had it open on my computer – to help me read the morning paper, to translate words into German when I was writing, for looking up words I heard people say or whatever. My colleagues all used it, too. They were covering science, which meant they had to read a ton of journal articles and press releases and websites in English.

The main problem with Leo is that there are so many entries, sometimes you can’t figure out which is the most important. Take “finish.” It has several senses – the finish line, the finish on a piece of furniture; finishing a glass of water is different from finishing a project. When you look it up on Leo, they’re split up by part of speech, but other than that, they’re all listed in alphabetical order.

The advantage of a dictionary on paper: it prioritizes. But you can’t beat Leo for speed.

Dictionary Stats: LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch

date: constantly updating
publisher: LEO GmbH
length: 586,592 entries
special feature: Advent calendar. Of German poetry. Enjoy.
other languages: Leo also has Deutsch-Französisch, Deutsch-Spanisch, Deutsch-Italienisch, and Deutsch-Chinesisch editions.
news: Leo has added a new set of economic terms. “We hope that definitions of terms such as Gläubigerausschuss or Steuerausweichung will prove valuable for many of our users – including native German speakers.”
obscenities: Wow. Yes. So many obscenities. In so many combinations and forms.

Fruit flies may all look the same to you. But not to other fruit flies! A new study in the journal PLoS Biology finds that males prefer bigger females. In fact, they harass the big girls so much, those females don’t lay as many eggs as they would if the darn males left them alone.

My story about sexy fruit flies appears today on ScienceNOW. I must warn you that it includes fruit fly porn.

Approximate conversation with editor yesterday afternoon: “I was thinking of taking out the second to last paragraph. I think it’ll flow better.” Me: “I don’t really care, as long as my ‘hitting on the hotties’ joke stays in.” Editor: “Well, at least you’ve got your priorities straight.” Ok, ok, I care how the story flows. I just trust the editor to make the right decisions – he can take out whatever he wants, if he thinks it improves the story. Although he also took out that joke. Ah, well. You win some, you lose some. Important writing lesson: It’s easier for an editor to remove excess personality than to add personality.

I am pleased that a story with the title “I’m Too Sexy For My Species” appeared on my birthday.

photo: Tristan Long

Now for a language I really, really don’t speak: the Dictionary of the Week is a Finnish-English English-Finnish Dictionary from 1967.

In 2005, the Christmas Revels had a Scandinavian theme. Since I speak Norwegian, I could understand most of what I was singing in Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, but Finnish is totally unrelated. It’s not even Indo-European. I thought it might help me memorize the songs in Finnish if I looked up some of the words, so I picked up this dictionary at a used bookstore.

I quickly learned that a dictionary is very little use if you don’t speak any Finnish. It’s often tricky looking up foreign words, because they can be conjugated or whatever, but usually I can figure something out. In this dictionary, I couldn’t find words anywhere near where I expected them. Yesterday morning I called up Sirpa Tuomainen, who teaches Finnish at the University of California – Berkeley, to ask her what the heck is up with her native tongue.

She gave me an example: the word for store is kauppa. But if you want to say something is “in a store,” you have to put an ending on it (sort of like the preposition). So you take the weak form of the noun, kaupa – notice it lost a p – and stick an n on to get kaupan. Ok, now go try to look up kaupan in a Finnish dictionary. No, never mind, I’ll do it for you. Hey – it’s not there. And it doesn’t stop with the letter P. Tyttö (girl) becomes tytö. Helsinki becomes Helsingi. Kylpy (bath) becomes kylyvy. And so forth.

Or take the sentence Minä pidän Sibeliuksesta. Minä is in the dictionary, but if you want to find it, you have to work out that ä does not come after a, as in German, but at the end of the alphabet between y and ö. Minä means “I.” Pidän is the first person singular form of pitää, “to like.” And Sibeliuksesta is the composer Sibelius, who gets a new stem, -kse, and an ending: -sta. Which means we mere mortals can’t even look up the sentence “I like Sibelius.”

I’m not the only one to have noticed this dictionary problem. Sirpa said she worked with a grad student at Stanford who was getting her PhD in Namibian history. Finland has had close ties to Namibia since missionaries started going there in the 19th century, so this student had to be able to read Finnish, which meant sorting out all these noun stem changes. That long connection means there are lots of Namibian children running around with Finnish names – a lot of Marttis, for example, after Martti Ahtisaari, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year in part for helping to get Namibia’s independence from South Africa. “He’s like a folk hero there,” says Sirpa. The very pretty Namibian first name Menette is the second person plural form of the verb “to go.” And there are lots of old-fashioned names that came from the missionaries.

Another limitation of my dictionary: it was published in 1967, so it’s not going to have words like “e-mail” in it. Fortunately, the Finns have invented the verbs mailata, faxata, and chatata. (This is the land of Nokia. They know their technology.)

“We always laugh – at our department, we get these oddballs,” says Sirpa. “The, quote, normal people will take French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.” (Then there’s the people like me.) For more of her thoughts on Finnish and Finland, see the blog she wrote on her sabbatical year there – this post about the ubiquity of English is interesting. And this about -kone, which means “machine” and has been used to make up all kinds of words. And I loved reading about Kaamos, the time in winter when the sun never rises.

I kind of wish I had another Finnish dictionary so I could write more about it. It’s a beautiful language – I loved singing in Finnish, even if it was insanely difficult to memorize.

Dictionary Stats: Finnish-English English-Finnish Dictionary

date: 1967
publisher: P. Shalom Pub. Inc., Brooklyn (See publisher’s credit page, at right, with a chart of Hebrew, Arabic, Nyriac, and Sumerian alphabets.)
by: Aino Wuolle
length: 356 pp
letter quirks: There are no words on the Finnish side starting with C, Q, W, X, or Z. These letters have really short sections, all loan words: B (banaani, biologia), D (demokratia, diftongi - diphthong), F (filmi, flyygeli - grand piano), G (galvanoida, gondoli), and Ö (öljy - oil).
guide words on p. 105: poikapuoli stepson; poro reindeer
introduction: Entirely in Finnish.
obscenities: Ha. No. And I don’t even know any to look up on the Finnish side. I swear I own some dictionaries with bad words. This category won’t be completely wasted.

Last Friday evening, one of Norway’s national broadcast stations showed a documentary called “Bergensbanen minutt for minutt” – “Bergen Line, Minute for Minute.” It was a seven-hour-long documentary showing, in real time, the train trip from Bergen to Oslo. Seven hours. And 16 minutes. Of train. According to NRK, 176,000 people sat in front of the TV for the whole thing and another 1.2 million dropped in for part of it. (That’s about one in four Norwegians.) The train goes through 182 tunnels on the way; during those bits, they edited in historic clips from the railway.

Missing out on the Bergensbane was the great disappointment of my last trip to Norway. I was so excited to take this train. It’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful train rides in the world; it goes from sea level in Bergen to sea level in Oslo, passing over the highlands on the way. The high point is 4,060 feet above sea level. But a couple of days before my ride I saw a picture on the front of the Bergen paper showing a derailed train lying in the snow. Uh-oh, I thought. I read the article and, yep. That was the Bergensbane, and it would be closed until they got those cars out of there.

So instead of a scenic seven-hour train ride over mountains and snow, I had a one-hour train ride – mostly through tunnels – to Voss, then a 5,000,000-hour bus ride to Oslo. The bus was full. The guy next to me wasn’t friendly. It was about the least pleasant transportation experience I’ve ever had in Norway, and I’m including the month in 1998 when the Trondheim city buses went on strike and I had to walk several miles to work.

The train documentary was such a big hit that they’re scrambling to get a DVD out in time for Christmas. I think they could sell that to train buffs all over the world, don’t you? Heck, I would watch it. I’m trying to get part 1 of the documentary to load on the NRK website right now.

Here are the articles from NRK: An Orgy for Train Lovers and A DVD of the Bergen Line is Coming!

photo: SRS scandiline

Chris Linder, the photographer who took me to the Bering Sea, is on another adventure – in Antarctica on an Artists & Writers grant. He’s there to take pictures of south polar skuas, which means several weeks camping at Cape Crozier penguin colony. No blogging from the field this time, but you can follow him on twitter…if they get the internet setup at Cape Crozier fixed.

Yes…yes, I do wish he’d needed a writer this time. Sigh.

Look how cute! And historic! It’s a cardboard model of a house in Cabin John, Maryland, made in 1947 by the mechanical engineer who lived there.

You can get this and so much more local history at A Fine Collection. The collections manager/curator of the Montgomery County Historical Society – who is also a good friend of mine – posts a different object from their collection every week.

This week I happen to have gone on a lot of geology-related reporting trips around town. I’m sorry I never took geology in college. Carleton has a great geology department, and the geology majors always seemed to have fun. All those field trips, you know.

Actually, the field trips are probably why I never took geology. I had a tendency, when I was in my late teens, to get a little whiny when I was out in the field. I have mostly outgrown this. Or, more accurately, I have grown the ability to tell my whiny self to shut up, and also the knowledge that I must pack snacks. Anyway, as a biology major, I already had to take lots of lab classes, so adding another lab to the schedule would’ve been rough. Especially a lab where you got muddy. (I don’t think the mud would bother me now! See? Growth!)

Anyway, this week I’ve gotten a crash course in geology. Seriously, on Monday when I went on the meteorite visit, I didn’t know what a mineral was. The next day, with the help of Wikipedia and a friend who did major in geology at Carleton, I figured it out. Whew.

Oh, so now you want to know what a mineral is, too? Ok. A mineral is, like, a really pure rock, with a chemical structure you can write down. Kind of. I know, I just gave any geologist readers major chest pains. Don’t worry, I’ll refine this description by the time I have to write my story.

The other day I went to the Smithsonian’s natural history museum to look at some meteorites. It was really cool. I held a piece of Mars in my hand. Actually, two pieces. Of MARS. The PLANET. Which is in OUTER SPACE. These rocks weren’t brought back by a spacecraft – they’re pieces of Mars that got knocked off in some kind of impact, flew through space, hit our atmosphere, and made it to the ground without burning up. Whew.

These, however, are not meteorites:

The boxes and envelopes on the corner of that desk are rocks that people have sent in for the museum’s meteorite specialists to check out. (The big white bag on the right is leftover Halloween candy.) Here’s a tip: If you find a funky-looking rock in your backyard, there’s a really, really, really good chance that it’s just a rock. From Earth.

I even got to see a little piece of this meteorite – the one that made the big “Omg Life on Mars!” splash in 1996. It was in its own traveling case.

Gratuitous beautiful meteorite picture:

This is a slice of a pallasite. It’s like a naturally occurring piece of stained glass – gemstones in a matrix of iron and nickel. I totally want one. But they’re rare and expensive, and I’m pretty sure the museum’s crack meteorite team would’ve noticed if I’d taken this one with me.

This is a slice of a big hunk of nickel and iron that broke off from the core of some asteroid. It was collected in Antarctica. Meteorites fall everywhere on Earth, but they’re particularly easy to find on the Antarctic ice sheet, because there aren’t a lot of other black things. Also, the way the ice moves seems to concentrate them in a few places.