The first weekend of July, I was at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and saw a table for the Smithsonian Community Reef. Someone taught me how to crochet a pseudosphere – it’s like a sphere, kind of, but in hyperbolic space, which is this other kind of geometry that is not the Euclidean geometry of planes and squares and nice normal things that you learned about in ninth grade. Crocheting hyperbolic shapes turns out to be kind of hypnotic. Here’s me learning how:

The reef is being built by hook-wielding volunteers like me; the pieces all have to be turned in by sometime in September and will be on display at the Natural History Museum as part of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef starting October 16. Last week I went to a workshop at a local yarn store to learn more, and I’m now working on my third piece of coral. Here’s the collection so far:

You’ll see that it’s a great way to use up that hideous orange acrylic yarn.

I wrote a blog post about the reef for Smithsonian magazine.

My ploy to get Science to send me to the Seychelles failed, but otherwise I had a good time reporting this story. It was really interesting to talk to someone with such a different perspective on coral reefs. Cinner makes a point that’s obvious when you think about it, but I’d never thought of it before: if you want to manage fish, you actually have to manage people. The fish are going to do their thing. It’s the people you have to worry about.

One of the things Cinner says you have to find out when you’re deciding how to manage reefs is people’s beliefs about what affects the ocean. “Do they understand that human actions are a critical part of shaping the condition of the coral reef or do they think it’s some sort of supernatural power?” he asks. It makes a difference to how you try to manage the reef. If people believe that only the gods control the oceans, then all your talk about overfishing is going to go nowhere. “It’s like telling people in Australia, ‘Go fish the crap out of the reef, bomb it, do whatever you want, just make sure you pray beforehand.’ That’s as much sense as it makes to tell people to preserve reefs if their world view is that the only thing they can do to preserve it is to pray.”

Here’s the profile.

photo: Mila Zinkova

First, a disclosure statement: I got into the museum free. Theoretically, anyone can do this. The museum admission fee ($16 adult, $9 kids) is actually just a suggested donation – you could walk up to the cashier, say, “Hi, I’m not paying!” and get a ticket. But that takes some nerve. I got a voucher from the communications office because I’m a journalist, and my ticket included entry to a couple of things you really do have to pay for.

But I’m pretty sure that even if I hadn’t gotten in for free, I would still think this museum was awesome. ‘Cause it is. Awesome. One blog post can not come close to doing justice. It is a darn big museum. Here are some selected highlights.

First: If I were a kid growing up in New York, I would want to become a mineralogist. The minerals are displayed in this crazy room in the back of the museum, with all different levels and ramps and stairs and carpeted places to sit. I kind of wanted to move in.

I didn’t want to move in anymore after it was invaded by actual children who are growing up in New York. Golly, school groups can make a lot of noise. This leads to one of my useful tips on this museum: Weekdays are good, but weekdays after 2 are better.

One of the biggest dang things is a model of a blue whale. Can you imagine if you were snorkeling or scuba diving and you saw one of these? Wow.

They were setting up some kind of party underneath the whale. I wonder how the whale feels about that.

I couldn’t help, as I went through the museum, comparing it with my hometown natural history museum (the Smithsonian one). Like, we have this one big elephant in the rotunda. He is big, and he is awesome. And New York is like, “Whatever. We have a whole herd of elephants, and they’re not even important enough to be in our entrance hall.”

I like how the sign by the elephants says four of them were “collected” by Carl Akeley in the 1920s. I know, our relationship with nature was different then, and I suppose the dead, mounted carcasses of these elephants have several decades’ experience inspiring young people to scientific greatness, but come on. “Collected”? That sounds like he picked them off the savanna with a butterfly net.

The AMNH particularly excels in that standby of old-school natural history museums: the diorama. There are dioramas of everything. Asian mammals. African mammals. Birds. New York state environments. Neanderthals. There was even an extreme close-up diorama showing the soil surface, with an ant the size of a baby and a disturbingly oversized centipede. Here’s one from the hall of African mammals, featuring a pair of Greater Koodoos:

One of the things I like about the dioramas is that in addition to the sign telling you about the animals, there’s a second sign telling you about the environment they’re in. These guys live in scrub at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. A few years ago my natural history museum scrubbed its dioramas and remounted the mammals on their own, against mostly white backgrounds. It is a beautiful exhibit, but a different approach to talking about animals – more organized around evolution, less reference to environment.

The dinosaurs live on the top floor, where there is [gasp] natural light. Yeah, I know, every picture up to now has been kind of gloomy. That’s the nature of museums, I guess, or at least museums that are trying to preserve things when ultraviolet light is the enemy.

This Tyrannosaurus was remounted in recent years. In 1915, when the museum originally mounted it, scientists didn’t agree on how Tyrannosaurus stood. Some thought it stood like a bird, with head down and tail in the air; others thought it stood upright and dragged its tail. The museum had to pick one, so it went with the upright model. Since then, scientists have decided that would dislocate the neck bones (ow) so they’re leaning in the bird direction. It was remounted in 1992 to 1994 according to that hypothesis:

It’s kind of less threatening when it’s low to the ground, although…now that I think of it, that might just make me even easier to eat. Big, pointy teeth just above head level. Yikes. Good thing they’re extinct.

So like I said earlier, they don’t have a bull elephant in their entrance hall; instead, they have a crazy big dinosaur. Ok, they kind of made this up. The dinosaurs are all real, but they have no idea if a female Barosaurus was indeed capable of rearing up to defend her baby from an attacking Allosaurus. But what the hey, it looks cool and extends about 50 bazillion feet into the sky.

Really, there was so much to see at this museum, I’m saving bits of it for other blog posts. Something to look forward to!

UPDATE: Those other posts: Butterflies; Subway.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

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.

Which brings me to today’s lunch:

I haven’t quite been able to figure out the full environmental implications of this choice. Fish are confusing. If you look up “tuna” on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website, there are six different kinds of tuna, and whether or not you should buy them depends on how they’re caught. If you look up sardines, they give you two options, actual sardines and atlantic herring – but it seems that what I have is actually a little Atlantic fish called a “brisling” or “sprat,” which the Monterey Bay Aquarium doesn’t cover. (Read about sprat here.)

But I do understand food webs, and sardines are way lower down than tuna are. It’s like eating grain-eating chickens instead of man-eating tigers – it’s a more efficient use of resources. Fortunately, they taste pretty good. I polled my Facebook friends, and the consensus was that they should be on toast. A former choir director also suggested a large whisky and soda. I haven’t added that particular flourish yet, but I can’t imagine a large whisky and soda would make anything worse.

You can see a whale surface a mile away, because there is nothing between here and there. I’ve only seen two whales, a pair of humpbacks after lunch, but other people have seen minke whales and a fin whale today. I also saw some Steller’s sea lions swimming in the distance and a whole bunch of far-off harbor porpoises, and I have high hopes for orcas. I mean, what I *want* is humpbacks leaping over the bow, but I’ll take orcas.

I was interviewing a scientist when Chris got the page about the humpbacks and I dragged her up to the bridge with me to see what was going on. It worked out well, that bit of multi-tasking – we saw whales and I learned some basic physical oceanography, all at the same time.

We’re out of the ice for the last time. We’ll be back in port on Tuesday.

On Friday I finally made it down to the National Gallery to see the Pompeii exhibit. I visited Pompeii in the summer of 1998, and it was really cool – lots of halfway-standing houses to run around in – but hardly any of the artifacts are at the site. So I was excited to actually see the stuff, and it’s lovely. Lots of marble portraits, some frescoes, a funny set of frolicking bronze animals.

It turns out the Romans were really into their fish. The exhibit had a little corner on seafood – a couple of frescoes and a reproduction of a mosaic with fish, octopus, and so on. But that stuff wasn’t just for eating. From the text on the wall:

Many proprietors of villas owned fishponds that provided a ready supply of oysters and other delicacies. Private fishponds were a status symbol that was pursued to absurd lengths. Cicero complained of senators who lavished more attention on their mullets than on affairs of state. Anecdotes tell of villa owners treating their fish as pets, adorning their favorites with jewels and gold rings and weeping over their deaths.

You have to love the Romans. They didn’t mess around. They were just straight up decadent. The exhibit closes March 22nd and will be at the L.A. County Museum of Art from May to October.

Photo credit: me, 1998.

You could tell this was kind of a struggle sometimes. I went to part of the scientific session (the blog post was written after the press conference) and Greenpeace guy John Hocevar said, “I’ve been trying to stick to good news but I can’t quite do it.” He hung in there for a while, but then he got to tuna: “Truthfully, the tuna news is mostly bad.” Oh well. He still wrung some good news out of it. And there really are fish success stories.