Helen FieldsScience Writer

Yet again, I find reason to be happy that I am happy. Hm. That is an odd sentence. Anyway, a new study from the UK finds that happy people live longer. I wrote it up for ScienceNOW last week.

This doesn’t mean that unhappy people should feel bad about themselves. The authors aren’t saying you should go fix your personality. But it’s an interesting association, isn’t it?

Forget lessons. You can get better at putting just by using a famous person’s golf club. Ok, not even. A golf club that you are *told* belonged to a famous person. I wrote about it for ScienceNOW today.

Confidence is really important in sports, and people with more confidence do better. I mean, confidence isn’t going to make me better at basketball than Michael Jordan. But it’ll make me better at basketball than me without confidence. Crazy, huh? Brains are powerful.

Mission San Juan Capistrano is one of the many missions scattered along California’s coast. They were established by Spanish Franciscans in the late 18th and early 19th century. You know, the Franciscans, as in San Francisco. (Which has a lovely mission.) The missions brought Christianity to the native peoples and were Spain’s military outposts, too.

Mission San Juan Capistrano was founded in 1776. It has the oldest building in California, a little chapel where Father Junipero Serra himself celebrated mass. I know he’s a big deal because he has a road named after him in the Bay Area. (He was born in Spain and died in California, where he founded a bunch of missions.)

I went to the mission a few weeks ago because I was in Orange County for a wedding, and this is pretty much what you do to kill time in that part of Orange County.

Mission San Juan Capistrano is most famous, I am told, for the song “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano.” There’s these swallows that come back to the mission every summer to nest and a guy wrote a song about it, in like the 30s or something. (I’m sorry, my history skills are particularly weak today.) The piano he composed on made it to the mission and is part of the displays now.

The swallows have a festival and everything. I’ve been to the mission twice now (this was not my first Orange County wedding) and have yet to see a swallow. It’s possible it was the wrong time of year, but I also hear that the swallows don’t really hang out there anymore. Maybe with all the development around there, they have other options for places to hang their hats. Nests. Whatever.

I was cynically suspicious that the nests were fake. But at least now you know what a cliff swallow nest looks like.

There’s plenty of real living things on the grounds, though. Check out these pretty flowers:

And I was much obliged to this lizard for posing, unlike all the other jerky lizards I saw around the mission:

There you go. A church museum. (They also have proper museum exhibits but I was more inspired by the outdoors this time.)

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Last Monday I went for a day hike at the Grand Canyon and stopped by the visitor center on the South Rim. And I thought, hey, this is totally a museum! Sweet! Ok, it is quite a thin museum. There is more open space than stuff, and I think people mainly go in there to ask the rangers questions.

But still, there was enough to make a Museum Tourist post, because check this out. It’s a boat.

Nowadays, people go down the Colorado River on inflatable rafts, often motorized. The first people to run the river did it in 1869, led by a one-armed Civil War veteran. This boat is from much later, the 1930s; like Powells’ boats, it was custom-made for the Grand Canyon. (Unlike Powell’s team, the people who built this boat actually knew what they were getting into.) This boat, the WEN, was built in the 1930s to run the Grand Canyon’s rapids. It was part of what made taking people down the Grand Canyon on a boat into a viable commercial enterprise.

Enough about boats. Here’s what you see if you walk about 5 minutes from the visitor center:

And here is what you see if you take a bus about 10 minutes from the visitor center and walk downhill for an hour:

And if you keep going half an hour beyond that, and you look another couple thousand feet down, or if you squint very closely at this picture, you see: the river.

It’s the brown thing right down at the bottom of the canyon. See? I brought it back to boats.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I’ve just arrived in Flagstaff for the NASW/CASW meeting. (Or, more snazzily, ScienceWriters2011.) I flew from Baltimore to Phoenix then Phoenix to Flagstaff.

The Phoenix-to-Flagstaff flight is a 26-minute hop. As the plane headed north, I was watching the lights of Phoenix pass by below us. Then I saw three bright lights flash in a row, traveling in a line in the same direction we were going. It happened again and I realized it was the full moon, reflected in the swimming pools below. The flashes followed us to the edge of town; once I even saw the whole moon in a larger body of water, maybe a lake.

It was cool.

The taxi driver who brought me (and some other conferencegoers) from the airport to Flagstaff said Science News is his favorite magazine.

Fantastic photographer Chris Linder has a new photography book, Science on Ice, about four expeditions to the cold and icy parts of our planet. Including one to the Bering Sea. Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s the expedition I went on.

I wrote a chapter about Chris’s and my Bering Sea expedition. Hugh Powell wrote about Adélie penguins in Antarctica, Lonny Lippsett wrote about exploring the Arctic floor from an icebreaker, and Amy Nevala wrote about Greenland’s glaciers. Of course, Chris’s fantastic photos fill the book.

It’s been fun revisiting my memories of the Bering Sea in the last few days, since my copy arrived. I also answered some questions by e-mail for this nice item about it…and went on much too long. I just kept remembering all these lovely details about the trip. It was a great experience.

You know how I was talking about the Victoria and Albert Museum and how it’s really big? You know what else is really big? The British Museum. I don’t know, the V&A might be bigger. But the British Museum is just out of control. Like, oh, yeah, mummies? We got yer mummies. And stuff from the Parthenon. And, oh right, the freakin’ Rosetta Stone.

This is what it’s like in front of the Rosetta Stone on a rainy day during the August school holidays. Fortunately, it’s not always quite that crowded, plus I managed to worm my way to the front later in the afternoon, so here’s a little corner of the Rosetta Stone from the front:

That’s a bit of the Greek section. As probably everyone knows, the Rosetta Stone was the key that let Egyptologists finally decipher hieroglyphics, because it has the same text written on three times. It’s in hieroglyphics at the top, in the script used day to day by Ancient Egyptians in the middle, and in Ancient Greek at the bottom. It was discovered by a French soldier in 1799 and ended up in British hands a few years later through something to do with the Napoleonic Wars.

The Rosetta Stone is one of many artifacts at the British Museum that other countries (in this case, Egypt) would like to have back, thank you very much. I found it interesting to see how the museum handled the issue in labels. Like this, on the marbles brought back by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon: “Elgin’s removal of the sculptures from the ruins of the building has always been a matter for discussion, but one thing is certain – his actions spared them further damage by vandalism, weathering and pollution.”

So, here’s one of those Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon:

Those Greeks knew how to make something nice out of a chunk of rock, didn’t they? This horse, the website tells me, pulled the chariot of Selene, the moon goddess. It looks so tired because it’s been working all night. The Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 B.C. It’s been rebuilt now – I visited the Acropolis (that’s the name of the hill the Parthenon stands on) in 1998. It was one of the oddest places I’ve been. You’re walking around on marble, but it’s marble that’s been worn into smooth, slippery waves, so you have to watch your feet. Especially with the very hot and strong winds that were blowing across the top of the hill.

Here’s the other thing I remember about the Acropolis:

That’s a real live 1998-era Greek cat, lying in my backpack.

There were no cats at the British Museum, at least none that are still alive. (There were definitely cat mummies.) And it’s so massive, there’s no way to cover it in one blog post. I’ll write more later. Probably. Unless the massiveness just overwhelms me and I give up.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Heh. Nice try, Picasa.

These are all faces from the British Museum. More on that later.

The Victoria & Albert Museum calls itself “The world’s greatest museum of art and design.” I must say, I don’t have the expertise to judge the superlative, but wow, they have a lot of cool stuff there. I got the sense you could wander it for weeks and still miss a lot of the collection. I only had a few hours, and in the last half hour before the museum closed, I was still discovering vast swaths that I hadn’t realized were there. So here’s the tiniest glimpse at their collection.

The V&A’s jewelry collection is amazing, but two things impressed me the most. First, the cast iron jewelry from 19th-century Germany. (Actually Prussia, I think.) Who knew you could make cast-iron jewelry? Well, you can. It’s black, like you’d think, but quite delicate. The other thing I thought was totally cool was the chatelaine.

I knew that chatelaine was a word, but I think I thought it had something to do with chattel. (And I’m not totally sure I knew what chattel meant; the meaning I was thinking of, slave, is archaic.) But it’s actually the feminine version of chatelain, the keeper of a castle. And it has a second meaning: this thing.

Women’s clothes weren’t always made with pockets, but that doesn’t mean women didn’t carry things around. They had one of these, a sort of ornamental chain worn at the waist with useful stuff hanging off of it, like keys and scissors. This one was made of cut steel around 1850 in London.

Seriously, the museum goes on and on and on. Somewhere in the back of a set of galleries is this bed:

But, oh no, it’s not just any bed. It’s The Great Bed of Ware. Haven’t heard of it? Well, that just proves you aren’t living in 16th century Britain. It was so famous, it made an appearance in Twelfth Night:

…and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of
paper, although the sheet were big enough for the
bed of Ware in England, set ‘em down: go, about it.

A traveler first wrote about it in 1596 in an inn in Ware, in Hertfordshire. The real textiles didn’t survive; these hangings and bed coverings are based on other textiles of the time.

The museum is truly mind-blowingly ginormous. Here’s a room of 20th-century design:

Note that the upper reaches of the room hold part of the library’s collection.

And then there’s large quantities of sculpture. And that huge wall thing at the end of this gallery used to be in a church, although I completely failed to collect any information about it.

I mean, I have a little information – it’s a choir screen, which goes between the part of the church where the congregation hangs out and the part where the action happens. They used to be common, and now they’re less common, if I remember correctly from the label. They’ve been taken out of a lot of churches, including whatever church that one used to be in, and some ended up at the V&A.

Including the one in this picture:

What’s that? You say the choir screen isn’t the most noticeable thing in that picture? Yeah. That blue-green thing is a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly that hangs in the big main entranceway thingy. I think “Dale Chihuly” is a good bet whenever you see a swoopy monumental piece of glass sculpture.

I was at the V&A for a couple of hours and really just barely scratched the surface. I suppose I’ll have to go back sometime. One thing that makes that easy: Admission is free. I love free museums. Not only because I am totally cheap, but also because I feel like I can just go in, look at a couple of things, and leave again. There’s no need to stay for hours and get my money’s worth. Well, come to think of it, that’s less true in this case, because I had to get all the way to London – with a plane ticket from the U.S., then a train ticket from Guildford for the day. But anyway, V&A. Yay.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I just realized that New Scientist posted my story about the NASA Art exhibit on their culture blog, so you can read it here for free. Yay free!

If my story inspires you, you aren’t too late to go see the show – it’s open til October 9. It is, of course, also free, because it’s at the National Air & Space Museum.

The last time I mentioned this story, Lila asked for a picture of the gown, which I never provided. So here you go! The gown. It’s made from fabric printed with images taken on Mars by the Sojourner rover. The designer gave out 3-D glasses at the fashion show. It’s hard to see in this photo, but the shoes and tights match the gown.

(Here’s my earlier mention of the story.)

photo: me, incompetently