Helen FieldsScience Writer

Every year during the AAAS meeting, there’s an evening reception where some big science journalism awards are presented. This year, the reception was Friday night at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park.

I caught the first shuttle bus to the museum. When they opened the doors and let in the flood of science writers, a guy was standing near the entrance telling us there was food on the second floor. I thought, this guy knows what he’s talking about, and asked him what exhibit I must not miss. He told me to go see the fossils on the second floor. Fossils and food? Clearly that’s where I needed to be.

First: I was impressed that all the signs are in both English and Spanish.

Way to reach out to your population, San Diego. I am delighted to report that the Spanish for “Extinct giant sea cow” is “Vaca marina gigante extinta.”

All the fossils in the museum’s fossil exhibit -are local. So as you go through the exhibit, it goes back in time, telling you what San Diego was like in that era and what kinds of critters walked or swam here. This is a walrus from the Pliocene, when San Diego was under water.

It’s head-down, sucking up clams like it would in real life. (The label says modern Arctic walruses feed this way, too.)

The fossil section continued backward, to a section on San Diego’s Eocene rainforest, with funky-looking mammals in the trees. All along, there were cool interactive things – and physical things to do, not just computer screens to poke at. This one lets you sift sand for tiny fossils:

You tilt the sifter thingy back and forth and back and forth until the sediment all runs through the grate and some fragments of bone appear.

Nerd moment: I saw this and said, “Ohmygod, K-T boundary.” The rock above the pale stripe in the middle is Tertiary (T) and the rock below it is Cretaceous (K – from the German “Kreide” for chalk). That pale stripe is the remnants of the event that killed the dinosaurs.

So, below the line, dinosaurs; above the line, no dinosaurs, and a lot more mammals. There’s also lots of neat stuff in the K-T boundary that point toward an asteroid impact as the thing that killed the dinosaurs, like a high concentration of iridium, an element that is a lot more common in asteroids and comets than it is on Earth.

I sat down to eat some tasty, tasty dinner with two strangers who turned out to be highly entertaining. After a while, someone else came and sat with us – and I realized he was the guy who’d told me to go look at the fossils. He turns out to be the museum’s executive director, a job he’s had for 18 years. One of our first questions was why the pendulum wasn’t going. “It should be,” he said.

(It turns out you actually start it by standing outside with a long stick, but this is more fun.)

He also showed off this totally cool globe-shaped screen thing – you can choose from a bunch of different programs, like a plate tectonics one, and it shows you how the planet changed over time. I think in this picture, it’s showing how glaciers advanced and receded during the last ice age (and, correspondingly, how sea levels changed all over the world).

He was clearly proud of his museum’s cool exhibits.

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!

The Science Channel posted more quizzes!

1. Bones. I put in a Harry Potter question. Oh yes I did.

2. Wind Energy. It’s free, it’s windy, it’s wind energy. Includes a question based on a book I was supposed to read in eighth grade. I was a really good kid, but I don’t think I ever finished this book.

3. Fossil Fuels. Do you know why they’re called that? Eh? Do you? Take the quiz!

To see all my quizzes, click here.

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.

The new Dictionary of the Week is one I’ve had longer than most of my other dictionaries: Lingua Engelsk-norsk norsk-engelsk Ordbok for videregående skole. If you don’t read Norwegian, and hardly anyone does, let me help you: Lingua English-Norwegian Norwegian-English Dictionary for Upper Secondary School.

The stickers say “Allowed to use on the exam!” and “Help with problem words” and “Mini-grammar.” Perhaps you can tell – this Norwegian dictionary is intended for use by Norwegians. I bought it in the university bookstore at the University of Oslo a few weeks after I graduated from college. I believe it was even shrink-wrapped, so I couldn’t look inside, but I needed a Norwegian dictionary, and Norway is a good place to buy them. It was 198 kroner, which is in the $30-$35 range.

I went to college in Minnesota, so when I found out I was going to Norway on a Fulbright, it wasn’t that hard to find a Norwegian class. The other college in town has a Scandinavian languages department, and a professor agreed to let me audit her intro class. It was pretty easy – I’d heard that Norwegian was what you took there if you needed to get the language requirement but couldn’t hack Spanish, and that seemed to be true.

My language education continued that summer at the University of Oslo’s lovely International Summer School. Many of the classes are international relations-y type topics and are taught in English, but you can also take Norwegian language and literature classes. By the end of my six-week intensive course, I could hold my own in a very, very simple conversation with a patient person, like the author of our textbook, who did the oral portion of our exam. (It’s a small country.)

Of course, then I went to Trondheim, where people speak nothing that resembles the standard Norwegian I’d learned in classes. And just to make it harderI was working in an academic environment with people who’d come from all over the country and brought their dialects with them. I mostly spoke English at work.

But I continued taking language classes, and with the help of my choir friends, I got pretty good at it by the end of the year. Choir friend Ann-Kristin, who I often saw at the bus stop on the way to work, refused on principle to speak English with foreigners. She was right, of course, and I appreciated her patience and her relatively easy dialect. (When I wasn’t around, she secretly spoke English with a visiting researcher from Spain; short-time visitors got a pass.) Another choir friend, Veronica, spent her summers guiding busloads of British tourists around her home islands, but eventually decided my Norwegian was good enough and switched. I never switched with another friend, Anna Bergitte – she’d lived in the U.S. in high school and spoke perfect idiomatic American.

The vast majority of Norwegians still speak much better English than I will ever speak Norwegian, but I’m still glad I learned it. I mean, obviously. I know how to pronounce æ, ø, å, and kj. I was able to read the Norwegian subtitles when I watched Scottish movies. And I’ve found it’s very useful with the older folks I’ve met through Norwegian folk dancing. (A hobby that came along much later.)

Fascinating fact I’ve just discovered while poking through the dictionary’s introduction: It was based on an English – Danish Danish – English dictionary that came out in 1991.  Norwegian and Danish are really, really close, particularly in written form. I can read Danish, but I have no hope of understanding it when it’s spoken.

Dictionary Stats: Lingua Engelsk-norsk norsk-engelsk Ordbok for videregående skole

date: 1996
publisher: Universitetsforlaget AS
length: 831 pages
guide words on p. 714: skjold et shield; (våpen~) coat of arms; (flekk) blotch; skredder en tailor; (dame~) dressmaker.
introduction: Includes a history of English-Danish dictionaries. The first one came out in 1678 and had a title along the lines of “English Dictionary of which can be learned the English Speech, containing the Words which do not have a known affinity with Latin or Danish.” The first Danish-English dictionary appeared in 1779. These were both actually written by Norwegians, the introduction proudly points out.
useful extras: As with so many foreign language dictionaries, the extras – a guide to English grammar, tips on writing letters in English, a box listing the ways to translate fabrikk into English – would be much more useful if I were coming at the dictionary from the other side of the English/Foreign Language divide.
obscenities: Yup! I guess upper secondary students in Norway can handle rude words.

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?

I’m cleaning off the bulletin board by my desk and came across a couple of blog ideas I’d meant to write a while ago, so here’s one of them. I’ve now been back from Berlin for almost four months, but I don’t think it’s too late to tell you the things I most appreciated when I got home in October 2009.

1. The walk lights in D.C. count down how much time you have left to get across the street. This is handy.

2. Water fountains! I saw one water fountain the whole time I was in Germany. It was in Hamburg, by the harbor, and it was on this giant pedestal that said “water” in big letters and multiple languages. I guess they were worried people wouldn’t recognize it. In German, they even pointed out that it was drinking water.

3. Joking with strangers. My language skills weren’t up to it. I mean, not that I go around making wisecracks all day here, but every now and then, you just want to be able to say something funny and have someone appreciate it.

4. Walls without graffiti. It seemed like everything that stood still for more than a few minutes in Berlin got tagged. I’m sure this is not actually true – ok, I occasionally stood still for a few minutes and no one approached me with spray paint – but really, there is graffiti everywhere. Some of it is cool murals and artsy stuff and whatnot, but a lot of it is just ugly old tagging.

5. Tap water!! In restaurants!!! I’m sorry, that wasn’t enough exclamation points to express how awesome this is!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!! !

(Previously: Good things from Berlin that stuck with me – and, I can report a few months later, have continued to do so.)