Helen FieldsScience Writer

Someone bought a facebook ad to sell experts to people like me:

You know what? Thanks, random advertiser, but I can find my own experts. I wonder if there are reporters who use services like this? I find google gets me a long way.

Over the weekend, a friend of mine from college asked, via Facebook, how geologists know where an earthquake was. To quote:

Hey Helen, would you please write a blog explaining how geologists can tell where an earthquake’s epicenter is? Are there things stuck in the ground all over the earth? How did they get there? Are they always watching? It kinda weirds me out to think about it.

I took a stab at explaining it on Facebook, based on my foggy memories of 10th grade earth science, then asked friend and fellow science writer Naomi Lubick, who actually has a degree in geology, if she could handle this one. And she did! Here’s her blog post: How to find an earthquake.

The short version: The earthquake sends out waves in all directions, and seismometers measure the waves. If you know when the waves arrive at each place, you can calculate where they came from. But go read Naomi’s post for more about earthquakes, like pretty maps and links and stuff.

I started the AAAS meeting right Friday morning by going to a session on the science of superheroes. A couple of scientists were joined by two writers from the TV show Heroes and one of the screenwriters on the movie Watchmen. I was really interested in what they had to say about their work, both as a person who likes science and as a writer. They talked about scientific accuracy and how they do what they do. The upshot was: They care about science, but ultimately the character and the narrative are what they care about most.

I wrote about the science of superheroes for ScienceNOW and also did an interview for their podcast with a scientist who has written about physics in comic books.

I’d watched season 1 of Heroes, so I was able to give a little background about the show in my blog post. But then I had a great quote about Watchmen, but no idea what the guy was talking about. So I put out a call on facebook for any friend who knew Watchmen really well. I had five or six offers of help within 10 minutes. Thanks for the help, crowd!

I don’t honestly know anything about the New Oxford American Dictionary or why I should care what they think – they’re not one of *my* 31 dictionaries – but I do like their word of the year, “unfriend.” As in, “Once a former colleague unfriended me because of  a comment I wrote on her Facebook status.” (She sheepishly refriended me a few weeks later – I’d never even noticed.)

When I’m enthusiastic about something, I tend to talk about it a lot. Earlier this year I kept posting links on Facebook to shoes I wanted from this company, whose shoes are cute, comfortable, and – oh yes – wildly expensive. I own a few pairs, because they’re sooo gooood. (Financial responsibility note: They were all on sale.)

This morning my friend Sarah was biking through my neighborhood in her early-morning haze when she saw ahead of her a pair of Fluevogs walking down the street. Wow! Fluevogs! in Berlin! She looked up, and it was me, wearing my new heels to work for the first time. Ha.

Facebook sometimes has problems with gender – if it doesn’t know which a person is, it usually throws around “they,” as in “Bruce Fields took their turn in [game]!” because, yknow, English doesn’t really have a gender-neutral pronoun.

Look how much worse it is when you switch your Facebook language to German:

This is Facebook suggesting a friend who I might know. It doesn’t seem to know if Laura is female or not, so not only does it have the kind-of-neutral “FreundIn” (which means Freund/Freundin), it also has to suggest alternative endings for the article (could be ein or eine) and the adjective (could be gemeinsamer or gemeinsame). It obviously doesn’t know what to do with Carleton, either.

Whew! German is rough. Well, it’s rough in writing, when you can’t just mumble the adjective endings.

While putting together the materials for this website, I’ve been googling myself a lot. Searching for my name and a keyword turns out to be the easiest way to find stuff I’ve written. It also finds lots of other things, like the Facebook page of a Helen Field in Australia. The best thing I’ve turned up today? This book review from the Times of London, which leads with the fact that someone once proposed the “Helen” as a standard unit for beauty. Sounds good to me! (I was kind of hoping he’d go on about how awesome I am, but the rest of the piece is about pain.)