Helen FieldsScience Writer

The Washington Bach Consort is in the process of performing every one of Bach’s 215 cantatas at a series of free noon concerts at a church downtown. Actually, this is their second time through; they finished the first round in 2006, said, hey, that was fun, and started over on period instruments. That means trumpets with no valves, baroque violins, the whole crazy nine yards.

Yesterday they performed “Komm, du süße Todesstunde” – it’s about longing for death and is really quite lovely. Since the concert is 50 minutes and the cantata is only about 25 minutes, there was plenty of time for the group’s conductor to chat before the singing started. He asked one of the recorder players to talk about pitch.

You might think a pitch is a pitch is a pitch, but it’s not. Orchestras all tune to the A above middle C, but it’s not always the same A. The standard A is 440 Hz (cycles per second), but some orchestras tune higher, and baroque music is usually played about a half-step lower, at 415 Hz. Some instruments, like violins, can tune to more or less whatever, while others, like clarinets and organs, have to be constructed to the right pitch.

In Bach’s time, the recorder player told us, the pitch of A varied from country to country and even from town to town. Sometime in there, woodwind instruments like recorders were refined in France and imported to Germany – but they generally had a lower pitch than German instruments, so when they came back in, one side or the other was always transposing. The last time this group played this cantata, he said, he and the other recorder player kept having to switch between alto and tenor recorders because neither one could quite cover the range required; this time, the group was playing it lower, so everyone else would have to transpose while the recorder players played happily along on their tenor instruments.

Since I don’t have perfect pitch, I had no darn idea what pitch they were tuned to, but I can tell you it was a lovely concert. I’ve been to the last two cantatas and hope to make it to many more.

Here’s a blog post about A from the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

On Thursday, I met up with Brandi Murphy, one of the technicians on my icebreaker trip in the Bering Sea last year. Brandi works for the University of California – San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She’s at their Nimitz Marine Facility, or, as I would call it, “the place where they keep the boats.” Since I was in town for a conference, she offered to give me a tour.

It turns out Brandi doesn’t normally do the kind of stuff she was doing last spring on the Healy. On that cruise, she was collecting water; normally, she does marine seismic stuff. Basically, she knows how to tow an air gun behind a boat, make it go boom, and record the sounds that bounce back on a bunch of hydrophones. Here’s the 800-meter cable o’ hydrophones:

“Cable” is really not a good enough word for this. It’s a flexible tube filled with silicon oil. The orange bits are hydrophones – there are 48 spaced along the cable – and the blue bits are floats that keep it hanging at the right level in the water. Wires carry the data from the hydrophones, and computers along the cable process it before sending it back to the ship.

So this high-tech tube trails behind a research vessel and records the sounds from the air guns bouncing off the bottom of the sea. They actually go about 1,000 meters below the bottom, so scientists can use this to map the rocks below the surface.

Next, we poked around the New Horizon, one of Scripp’s research vessels. It’s a whole lot smaller than the Healy, which is my point of reference for all ships. For example, the Healy has two gyms with lots of exercise equipment. The New Horizon has a stairmaster in a workroom and this:

And now, something Brandi thinks you should know if you’re ever on a ship. The lifeboat is supposed to be released by a little pressure-sensitive mechanism. But if that happens, the boat is already underwater and things are pretty bad. So if you should ever find yourself needing a lifeboat, release the latch she’s pointing at or cut the rope below it.

Then find the black thing coming out of the end and pull it to make the raft inflate.

Finally, Brandi took me to look at FLIP. That’s for “Floating Instrument Platform.” It isn’t a boat; it has to get towed out to sea. See the big long thing sticking out front, kinda looks like submarine? That’s part of FLIP. It’s filled with air right now. When it gets out to sea, they fill it with water and the whole thing turns – it takes half an hour – until it’s floating upright in the water.

Everything turns 90 degrees. The walls become floors. And people live aboard, so everything has to either be capable of moving 90 degrees or be duplicated at 90 degrees.

Walking around on the platform is like being in an Escher print. Look up while standing on the deck and you’ll see an unclimbable ladder:

Inside, we saw a bunk on wheels and this sink, in a bathroom:

And here’s a door outside:

The whole thing was both disorienting and totally cool. This video shows what it looks like when it’s flipped.

Brandi is also a knitter – she was working on beautiful burgundy-colored cardigan on the cruise last year. Here’s her knitting blog, which is mostly about spinning these days, but let’s not hold that against her.

It’s kind of lame being in a conference center all day, but I can’t really complain when the way to the press room has views like this:

For something I’m writing, I needed to double-check that you can buy meteorites (or pieces of meteorites) on eBay. Of course, I turned to Google. Look at the shopping results:

–> Note that they’re all used meteorites. What do you think the listing says? “Condition: Lightly melted on entry”?

Ok, I checked, and the actual eBay listings don’t seem to describe them as used. But still, it made me laugh.

I think it’s the first sign of spring:

The Peeps have arrived at the local fabric store. Why does the fabric store have Peeps? This I do not know. But I do know it’s time to think about your diorama entry.

Today I went on a reporting trip to chat with a scientist who likes to collect fossils. (I’ll tell you more when the story comes out.) I saw tons of shark teeth, bits of seals and whales, some coral and barnacles, and also…other stuff from the beach.

Spiderman. Heh.

We’ve been getting truly fantastic quantities of snow around here lately. Since Friday, the Baltimore airport has gotten 44 inches of snow. Come on. That’s almost four feet. That’s insane. It’s a little less at National Airport, so I think the snowy truth is somewhere in the middle for me. In any case, it’s a lot of darn snow.

We’d been hearing about this storm for days. Apparently the meteorological models were unusually confident that this was going to be one heck of a storm. And the models did not lie.

Things kicked off Friday afternoon, Feb. 5:

The metro was still running at this point, but that didn’t last. Snow gets up around the electrified third rail, so in deep snow they only run the trains through the underground stations. Here’s a press release from WMATA that includes information about how they remove snow, a process I got to watch over the next few days.

Snow kept falling hard, all Friday  night…

…and Saturday:

It finally stopped snowing Saturday afternoon, after about 30 straight hours.

The sky cleared just in time for a lovely sunset.

Sunday was pretty much wall-to-wall snow. So was Monday. Fortunately, my neighborhood has a bar and a co-op grocery store within walking distance, and by Monday afternoon it was possible to get to both.

Tuesday there was talk of another storm coming, with less snow but nastier weather, and my guilt about leaving my mother alone with her snow shovel caught up with me. A friend with four-wheel drive gave me a ride to my parents’ house by way of Trader Joe’s.

It snowed a bunch more.

That bird feeder had a giant hat of snow on it before I shoved it off to put seed in for the birds.

Tuesday night and Wednesday, I shoveled snow, I worked from my parents’ house, and the birds were happy. (I assume. They don’t speak English.)

Moment of science: apparently it’s good to feed birds in winter.

I love snow, so this winter is suiting me just fine, even after all the shoveling I’ve done in the last two days. It’s so exciting to have a legitimate winter in the D.C. area. I got snow without having to travel to Norway or the Bering Sea!

This is fun – an article from the New York Times about “crash blossoms.” Those are headlines that don’t make sense because they’ve dropped too many of the little words that help make English understandable. Most of them hinge on the fact that a lot of English words can be both nouns and verbs, and the third person singular of the verb is the same as the plural of the noun. Thus: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Heh-heh. Waffles.

This afternoon I was getting ready to walk to Whole Foods and IMing with science writer and friend Naomi, who relocated from D.C. to Zurich last year. Well, actually, I was deciding what grocery store to go to, and she said, “Whole Foods! because I miss it. take photos.” So, here you go, Naomi.

I realized that I didn’t know what one would miss about Whole Foods. I mean, they have grocery stores in Switzerland. And since it’s Europe, organic and otherwise left-leaning fruits and vegetables are probably pretty common. So, maybe…the Whole Foods font?

With its handwriting-y flair?

Your fellow customers?

Think very, very carefully about your banana purchase, buddy.

The store-brand products?

(Or just the fact that the labels are in English?)

The prepared foods?

Check out that guy, he’s totally eating something.

The very expensive and delicious juice?

Mmmm, Odwalla.

So, I don’t really know what an expat would miss about the grocery store and want to see pictures of. I should probably get specific requests next time. Did this work, Naomi?

The Economist had a story last month about which languages are the most difficult. It’s kind of a silly quest. For one thing, it depends what language you’re starting in. If you’re a native speaker of Korean, Japanese is probably going to be easier for you than Spanish. But, for English speakers, the Economist settles on Tuyuca, a language of the eastern Amazon. Japanese was hard enough for me – I have no plans to start on the Amazonian languages. Although I suppose if someone wanted to pay me to go there, I would give the language a try.

One of the interesting things the writer points out is that English isn’t as hard as people like to say it is. The spelling makes absolutely no sense, but other than that, we don’t conjugate verbs much, our nouns don’t have gender, and making plurals is pretty easy for most words. This makes me feel a little less guilty about being a native speaker of the language everyone else in the world has to learn.