Helen FieldsScience Writer

Here’s that sea chanty, “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” sung by the great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers:

“We’re homeward bound from the Arctic ground, rolling down to old Maui.” The sailors have been catching whales in the Arctic, which had to be just awful work, and they’re pretty excited to be going to enjoy the tropical pleasures of Maui. Kamchatka is the wayyyy Eastern bit of Russia that dangles down between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. It’s one of the places where humpbacks go in the summer to feed. (I think they would have been catching other kinds of whales, there, too.) A slightly different version of the lyrics is here.

Having blogged before on songs about the elements, and being a Japanese speaker, I believe I am in a position of unique authority to say: Yes, of course Tom Lehrer’s song about the elements needed to be translated into Japanese. Watch it here:

I learned about it from a blog post by Bethany Halford over at Chemical & Engineering News – she also explains how this version happened to come about and to be sung by these 13-year-old Japanese-American twins.

A friend asked if I referenced the CHON movie in my story about the origins of life. I did not. Which is tragic, really – the CHON movie is an absolute classic of science cinema, and for more than a decade now it’s been a required stop on the Helen Fields Tour of the Smithsonian. (It ranks below the Hope Diamond, which everyone wants to see despite the fact that it is just a sparkly rock, and above the artifacts from Troy, which are less exciting than you’d expect.) It plays in a little theater area off the dinosaur hall, although the last couple of times I stopped by, it was not running, which makes me nervous.

Enter…the internet. Now you, too, can watch and learn why we call it the CHON movie, even though its title is “Enter Life.” This version of the video doesn’t have the narration, but I think you’ll be able to follow it anyway. And no narration means you can pay more attention to the catchy tunes.

A story I worked on for nearly a year is finally out in Smithsonian. It’s about the origins of life. We’re talking way, way, way back, billions of years, to the time when Earth was rock and water and a very different atmosphere, because plants didn’t exist and therefore hadn’t started spitting out oxygen yet. It’s about how the very first building blocks of life, in this case amino acids, were formed and found each other on an unfriendly planet.

Read the story.

The story ended up being a profile of Bob Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science here in Washington who also collects trilobites and Hudson River School paintings, writes a lot of books and articles, and plays professional trumpet.

I’ve blogged about this story a number of times, which I can now point out – this visit to the lab became the section in the story where I watched Kateryna Klochko do her work. This and this were for a section of the story that got cut. This…was never in the story. I just thought it was funny. This is a question that came up in my reporting.

And I started going to these concerts because Hazen was playing in one, and I haven’t missed one since. Free Bach at lunchtime – you can’t beat it.

A week or so ago I went to a party that was organized around singing the Pirates of Penzance in someone’s living room. It was a great party, and it reminded me of this excellent song, to the tune of the Major General’s big moment:

I grew up on Tom Lehrer records. Of course, the kids of today, or at least the ones with cool parents, are growing up on the songs of They Might Be Giants. So, here’s a new song about elements – which, I have to admit, is a lot more educational than the Tom Lehrer one.

Fun with science!

Update, 10/14/2010: A new version of the Tom Lehrer song, in Japanese pop style!

Someone I used to work with at National Geographic just drew my attention to this totally cool music video – it tells the story of a woman’s day through infographics:

It’s by the company H5, whose video Logorama just won the Oscar for best animated short. I also love the band, Röyksopp – they’re one of my favorites to listen to when I’m writing. (Is “band” the right word when it’s two guys playing electronica? I suspect not.)

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.

After I found out I was going to Berlin, I found out U2 was touring this year. And I was like, oh, great. I bet they play Berlin when I’m in D.C. and D.C. when I’m in Berlin. But I held out hope, you know? What are the chances they’d be exactly wrong? But indeed, they played Berlin about a week before I got there, and played D.C. about a week before I came home.

This wasn’t all bad, because it meant I went to the Southwest last week to see them on the best vacation ever.

But now Kate points out: They’ve done it again! They’re playing a free concert at the Brandenburg Gate in November! Hello! Guys! I’m IN THE U.S.A. now. Could we please work this out in the future?

Whew. After 2.5 months in Berlin, I came home for a week, then went to Arizona and Nevada for a week to see U2 twice and do some sightseeing. Fellow science writer Kate flew in from Oregon, we rented a car, and we had the best vacation ever. Oh, I’m sure you think you’ve had some good vacations in your time, but sorry – this was the best one ever.

It’s a little embarrassing to be a big U2 fan. They’re so mainstream. And yes, I know it’s ridiculous to fly most of the way across the country to see a band. But they know how to put on a darn good show. And due to a complete failure on their part to check with me before scheduling this tour, they played D.C. in September (while I was in Berlin) and played Berlin in July (while I was in D.C.)

If I may be allowed to brag (gush?) for a moment, this is how close I was in Phoenix last Tuesday:

(That’s Bono. Hi Bono!) The crazy huge set is like a donut with a round central stage (at right in this picture), an “inner circle” where a couple thousand fans can stand, and an outer catwalk thing. We were in the front row, leaning on the railing, right outside the catwalk. For this we got to the stadium at 7:30 a.m., prepared for a really awful, hot day – but the genius Phoenix stadium staff had put the general admission line on the north side, out of the sun. I wore a sweater most of the day. I got a lot of knitting done in the 9.5 hours we were in line.

For the show in Las Vegas on Friday, we were coming in from the Grand Canyon, which meant we would’ve had to get up at, like, 2 in the morning to line up that early. We’re fans, but we’re not crazy. Instead we strolled up at five and stood in the inner circle. Where we were also ridiculously close:

AND we got the full band-immersion experience, because we had stage on both sides of us, plus the inner stage and outer walk are connected by these moving bridges that swung over our heads:

(That’s the Edge. Hi Edge!) It was so! cool! I’m already plotting how I can see them on the next leg of their tour – they’re swinging through the East Coast again, so this time I won’t need to travel quite as far. (Sorry for the cruddy photos. I didn’t want to carry a purse, so I only had the camera on my phone.)

Wednesday afternoon I was reading a book on a bench by the canal, waiting for my neighbor to get back from the playground with his kids so I could get back into my apartment. And this guy came over and asked me if I could take a picture, because the self-timer on their camera was broken. I mean, what else was I doing, right? Sure, I can push a camera button.

So the guy (Andreas) and his friend (Peter) told me they were recreating the cover art from Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits. They’d already taken the picture on the back cover, of Simon and Garfunkel in front of a chain link fence, and they’d been trying and trying to get the front cover one right. They were dressed like them and everything, in jackets from the thrift store with the tags still on. (Before every series of pictures they had to grab the tags and hide them again.)

Why were they doing this? Yes, that was my question, too. It turns out they’re artists, and the photos are for the covers of the catalog for an exhibit they’re doing in Munich later this year. The project: They wrote a song for each of five shopping malls around Berlin, then performed the songs at the malls, while videoing their performances and their interactions with security and whatnot.

I feel like this is the kind of experience you come to Berlin to have: helping random strangers create the exhibition catalog about their run-ins with mall cops. So it’s a good thing they found me, two days before I leave town. They were super nice and we had a half-hour or so photo shoot by the canal.

I really hope they use one of my pictures. They said they’ll send me a copy of the catalog, which is, of course, a songbook. Sing-along party at my house!