Friday, September 20, 2013

Let Me Clarify

There seems to be some confusion.

We are not a club purely for scientists, nor are we a club solely for poets. We are a club that seeks to balance on the intersection of diverse and seemingly disconnected disciplines, in order to better understand the world, what we ourselves hope to study someday, and each other. You don’t have to write poetry. You don’t have to know science. If you’re out there, we want your perspective. If you’re out there, you have a valuable lens through which to interpret and share. Our goal is to make what is technical accessible to the layman in a way that enriches both the knowledgeable person’s understanding of their topic, and the layman’s understanding of the world. The most important thing to remember is that we’re all simultaneously playing the role of the knowledgeable and the layman, just in different disciplines. So learn from us, let us learn from you, and as a whole we’ll all know more.
 
Source
Mills College, Vera Long 140, Wednesday nights from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.
No technical knowledge or writing experience required, just come learn something, write your associations and thoughts down on it for 15 minutes in whatever form you like (haikus, poetry, prose, technical writing, free verse, anything you want), and discuss. 
We have only two requirements: (1) Respect  and  (2) No disclaimers. 

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Rough with Ribosomes

After a lovely talk by Abra Schlotz on photosynthesis, the color green, and the sly cunning of plant cells, we each explored the topic in various ways via our freewrites.

Source.
Then, I decided to get hip and make a tumblr, and if you haven't yet found out, there is also the Facebook page. Check them out, follow, reblog, like, and all that jazz if you like what we're up to around here.

Join us anytime. One person told me that they think you have to be a scientist to come here. Another said that you have to be a poet. In reality, you just have to be a person who likes to learn a little. Anyone can join, anytime. Try it out sometime!

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Free Write on, The Ghost in The Machine - by, Alexandra M.



“Let’s suppose that there really is a ghost in the machine—a little man who “looks out” through our eyes, and “listens in” through our ears. Or if you prefer, a soul”

The notion of whether or not the “little man” inside has a consciousness, and then the possibility of that “little man” having another “little man” inside his head, and so on… Reminds me of a sequence in mathematics. A sequence is an infinite list of numbers, listed in order, and it just keeps going. It can converge or diverge, but it has to go somewhere by definition. This sequence of consciences could converge somewhere in the depths of one’s soul, but that place seems like it would be somewhere we cannot comprehend or prove things about. If this sequence diverges, I also would not know what it would look like, maybe that looks like these “little men” being in other beings and it could be the “thing” that connects us all. And if this little man inside one’s head is a soul-less being, this whole construction has no meaning.

But why wouldn’t it? We as humans only seem to use a small amount of our brain power to complete our daily tasks, so what is the rest of it full of? We aren’t just empty, but we know that out of a place of not-knowing. A not-knowing what life inside these bodies is not like. What the not-space consists of…

I just can’t picture what it would be like to be empty—to picture that would be similar to the thought of what it feels like to be dead. The trying to feel what is not, brings me to a wall that I cannot climb over. To conjecture, but not to be able to prove…

It really reminds me though that my body really is just a physical vehicle that drives me around this world. Who is this “me” that I refer to? And if I can say that without referring to my physical body, the “I” must be part of that “little man” inside, right? Is this sequence of “little men” just converging to “me”? Like I said, if it converges, I know not what to. 

The Ghost in the Machine

lt started with a book and it started over the summer, when technically speaking I wasn't thinking of Poetry for Scientists, though I'm always thinking of PfS, like how everything Kermit the frog thinks of is actually in relation to Ms. Piggy, though you'd never expect Kermit to know it let alone acknowledge it, really.

Anyways, the book is titled, The Reenactments by Nick Flynn (it's a very good book).  In it I was introduced to the concept of The Ghost in the Machine - and it really had an impact on me - I couldn't help but to wonder, what are the metaphorical possibilities of this concept?  How does it enable us to understand ourselves better, I mean, that's what metaphors are about, no?

The concept is grounded in Descartes, dualism - and I'm going to be honest - Descartes' outdated in a very serious way - his ideas were, well, his ideas - and I'm surprised as a philosophy major the extent to which his work is still such a integral part of the curriculum - he was just wrong about a lot of stuff, though I suppose his process enabled a closer approximation to, I don't know, reality?  I'm not going there - not tonight -

Dualism - let's stick with that.  Descartes thought that because the physical self is endlessly divisible and the mind is completely indivisible (his idea, not mine), that the mind and the body were two completely separate entities.  Furthermore, the mind isn't distinguishable from the soul, and the soul is eternal, it doesn't decay with the rest of our cells - it is, a completely separate entity.  The concept of The Ghost in The Machine is rooted here.  It is the way we refer to ourselves as if there is an "I" that can refer to the self - it is sometimes referred to as, the homunculus - a "little man" living inside of our heads, who sees with our eyes and listens with our ears - check this link out for a very articulate portrayal of the concept http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=2514.  And to really blow your mind, consider that if there really is a "little man" living in our heads, consciousness, a soul, whatever you want to call it (him?), what of the "little man" in his head, huh?  what about that?  They have a term for it - the principle of infinite regression - and personally, just as a side note, I found that The Principle of Infinite Regression, makes for an excellent form in a poem (read my free write if you want to know what I mean).  

The point is this - on Wednesday 9/11/13, Poetry for Scientists met for our first official meeting of the semester - we talked about this concept, The Ghost in The Machine - I wrote a definition on the whiteboard - a few people chimed in with their thoughts, and then we sat in silence for 15 minutes and wrote about whatever associations arose while we learned something about this concept, rooted in 17th century philosophy, and since evolved into an interest of neuroscientists and (apparently) poets alike.

This is what we do.  We meet, one of us leads a brief discussion on a topic of personal interest, we write about what this topic brings up for us - we share what we write, and we go home - it's really a meaningful experience and whether we like it or not, I'm pretty sure this exercise is making us all care about each other a little bit, and then a little bit more.              

Monday, September 2, 2013

Next Meeting

The summer stretched, hot and endless, and I can only hope we each allowed ourselves a little rest. Now it's time to get our minds back into motion, and what better to lubricate the gears of your brain than a supportive group of curious listeners, suggesters, and sharers?
Source


Poetry for Scientists will be having its first meeting this Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. in our usual room, Vera Long 140.
Source
We have some big ideas for the semester, and a shiny new event to plan, in collaboration with the Octopus Literary Salon. From their website:

"The Octopus is a literary salon, re-interpreted in the 21st Century to engage and entertain readers and writers of all ages in Uptown Oakland, California. The Octopus Literary Salon includes a café, a small-scale specialty bookstore and publisher, and a space for public readings and discussions as well as other literary spontaneity."

We are very excited for the opportunity to work with the Octopus Literary Salon and to put together our event for September 27, 2013! 

We hope to see you Wednesday! 

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Space and Art at Chabot

Now playing at Oakland's Chabot Space and Science Center is a program called "Inspired by Space." This breathtaking planetarium show explores the relationship between art and space exploration, focusing on how they inform and expand one another.
The show discusses constellations and their relationship to discovery, how imagination fuels scientific discovery, and how real space imagery serves dual roles as information and inspiration.  Part of the COSMOS 360 series, the shows occur Friday and Saturday evenings at 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm. Visit this link for showtimes, and go here for more information on the COSMOS 360 series and future speakers. Chabot also features multiple exhibits on space travel, the sun, and other interesting space-related topics.


The best part about Chabot Space and Science Center, however, is their telescopes. The telescopes themselves are open to the public for free on Friday and Saturday evenings, and provide amazing, breathtaking views otherwise unavailable to the layman. The most surreal experience is looking through a telescope lens and seeing Saturn and its rings, which are clearly visible this time of year. The view is amazing.

Be sure to arrive right at sundown or just a little after, however. Later in the evening there is a risk of humidity closing the larger telescopes.

Check it out if you're in the area!

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Oakland Local & the Campanil!

Poetry for Scientists has been featured in an article in the Oakland Social section of the online paper Oakland Local, entitled "Revenge of the Nerds." The article begins with a discussion of the modern nerd who, as article author Bonnie Chan states, "pursues literature alongside neuroscience, or the nerd who has a deep interest in social phenomena and a vast understanding of systems, thus producing a potential to draw connections and metaphors between scientific theory and human behavior."  Her description of the modern nerd, a moniker which had never occurred to me to apply to any of my fellow Poetry for Scientists members or myself, is incredibly in line with our vision of ourselves: delivering the complicated, technical jargon of research and theory in a metaphorical, creative form.


To read the article, please click here.

Poetry for Scientists was also featured in an article in the Mills College newspaper The Campanil by Annie O'Hare. You can read this article on page five of the paperless edition of Spring 2013 Issue 22 here.


Monday, May 6, 2013

Convergence

On April 26th, 2013, members of Poetry for Scientists faced arguably the most difficult facet of our club: that particular vulnerability in poetry which springs up from reading one's work aloud, in a quiet yet crowded room where most faces may or may not be the faces of strangers. A Tendency to Oscillate, Poetry for Scientists' first event, was by all accounts a success. We had a fantastic turnout (thank you so much everyone who attended and supported our event), and while many among us were intimidated by the prospect of exposing our passions and carefully chosen words, everyone's pieces were fantastic. They truly embodied the spirit we've aimed for in their educational, scientific value and the juxtaposition of this factual aspect with the very real, and very poignant human voice that is so often lost in traditional textbooks and research papers.


Poetry for Scientists has grown quickly from an idea to a fully functioning, supportive, creative, and intellectual space that is safe for both creation and education. We are so proud of one another, and so grateful to every person who has taken the time to hear our work, read our zine, or check out this blog. It has been an incredible semester, our very first semester, and we look excitedly forward to the next, where we hope to expand our work, our membership, and our passions.

Thank you,

Erika Refsland

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Free Write on Atrophy by Emily Searle-White


Ever since I was little, I’ve had pictures come to mind when I close my eyes, some that would come very often.  It was a fight between me and my brain – it was me trying and probing, cautiously enjoying a part of my mind I couldn’t control.

One such image was that of a small polar bear on an ice floe. As I watched, eyes either closed or drifting lazily out and up, the floe would tilt to the side and the bear would slide into the water. I shook my head: the floe righted itself. And it would happen again. It was work to keep the floe balanced, but who was I working against? My thoughts said to this image of my own creation, “No – stay!” – and I would see it tilt before me again.

This is the experience, the thought-maze, that is easiest to explain. The other one that recurred has less movement. The other one was just an image of a person – deformed. It didn’t start deformed, though. As I watched, a figure would appear in my mind and then gradually, it’s head would shrink, or swell, like a cartoon until it was a cruel caricature of humanness. I felt so uncomfortable seeing it happen. It might have been funny if I hadn’t wanted it to stop, and if I hadn’t simultaneously been the one making it happen, though I didn’t know how.

Bodies can’t be right or wrong, but it seems they can be malformed, disfigured, atrophied. Atrophy – makes me think of the desert – devoid of moisture, softness. Deserts are very like atrophy in a way that dogs and waterfalls are not. A desert makes you think of what it is not – of green, of wet, of safety. A dog doesn’t make you think of a cat, but a limb, partially or completely wasted away – makes you think of what it could have, might have been.

-

I would recognize that handwriting anywhere. If you do not nourish a body, it wastes away, it shrivels, tightens, folds and fades. It is nothing without support. Do memories atrophy? I have no idea when or why you wrote that sentence on this page, but there’s no doubt in my mind that you were the one who wrote it. And when the door opens and the mix of apple cider and old sheets of music crashes into my nose, I’ll know the memory of my grandparents’ house has not faded, folded, nor collapsed. What has a memory that flesh has not?

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Free Write on hypertrophy and atrophy, dedicated to Nietzsche, by Kate M.

Not enough of everything but too much of one thing...-- Nietzsche said nearly those exact words.

I remember you once said
happiness needs to be regulated too
not just pain, or fear, or anger
To ease the dis-comfort of these emotions seems natural
but to ease the discomfort of happiness
that hadn't occurred to me before

Do you want to know how I cross the divide?
despite...

I'm convinced that-
or maybe convinced isn't the right word
maybe I actually just know that
I can tolerate so much a certain breed of suffering, and
so little of another
especially
how do I say it

I wouldn't know that I am full of bones if I didn't keep breaking them
or blood, or guts
or thoughts if I didn't figure out a way to tell you them
that's the thing

--I want to learn how to tolerate happiness--

I've certainly got too much of something
something superfluous
maybe it's like a stray cat
I feed it, though I don't actually want it around

Or like in Beloved
the baby gets so fat
while the mother atrophies
this
the most frightening metaphor of all





 



Tuesday, April 9, 2013

On April 26

Clear your calendar. 


Mark your planner. 


Find a date.


On April 26th at 7:00 p.m. in the Student Union, Poetry for Scientists will be hosting an event. There will be food. There will be music. There will be poetic science


Sunday, April 7, 2013


Light Pollution

A starry night sky

Our Vanishing Night

Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.

By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Photograph by Jim Richardson
If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun's light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don't think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it's the only way to explain what we've done to the night: We've engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it's not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays from overlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet—squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.
In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze that mirrors our fear of the dark and resembles the urban glow of dystopian science fiction. We've grown so used to this pervasive orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth—is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost. And yet above the city's pale ceiling lies the rest of the universe, utterly undiminished by the light we waste—a bright shoal of stars and planets and galaxies, shining in seemingly infinite darkness.
We've lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
Insects, of course, cluster around streetlights, and feeding at those insect clusters is now ingrained in the lives of many bat species. In some Swiss valleys the European lesser horseshoe bat began to vanish after streetlights were installed, perhaps because those valleys were suddenly filled with light-feeding pipistrelle bats. Other nocturnal mammals—including desert rodents, fruit bats, opossums, and badgers—forage more cautiously under the permanent full moon of light pollution because they've become easier targets for predators.
Some birds—blackbirds and nightingales, among others—sing at unnatural hours in the presence of artificial light. Scientists have determined that long artificial days—and artificially short nights—induce early breeding in a wide range of birds. And because a longer day allows for longer feeding, it can also affect migration schedules. One population of Bewick's swans wintering in England put on fat more rapidly than usual, priming them to begin their Siberian migration early. The problem, of course, is that migration, like most other aspects of bird behavior, is a precisely timed biological behavior. Leaving early may mean arriving too soon for nesting conditions to be right.
Nesting sea turtles, which show a natural predisposition for dark beaches, find fewer and fewer of them to nest on. Their hatchlings, which gravitate toward the brighter, more reflective sea horizon, find themselves confused by artificial lighting behind the beach. In Florida alone, hatchling losses number in the hundreds of thousands every year. Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
Of all the pollutions we face, light pollution is perhaps the most easily remedied. Simple changes in lighting design and installation yield immediate changes in the amount of light spilled into the atmosphere and, often, immediate energy savings.
It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. And, in fact, some of the earliest civic efforts to control light pollution—in Flagstaff, Arizona, half a century ago—were made to protect the view from Lowell Observatory, which sits high above that city. Flagstaff has tightened its regulations since then, and in 2001 it was declared the first International Dark Sky City. By now the effort to control light pollution has spread around the globe. More and more cities and even entire countries, such as the Czech Republic, have committed themselves to reducing unwanted glare.
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Toxic Flora by Kimiko Hahn

There is something vital
about the Passiflora auriculata,
which over a million years varied its cyanogens
to discourage feasting insects...

In "Toxic Flora", a collection of poems by Kimiko Hahn published in 2009, Hahn explores topics such as family and adolescence, but through the lens of clippings from the New York Times' science section. Her poetry, while emotionally powerful, utilizes scientific phenomena and terminology as a lens for understanding the world. 

What does this demonstrate about toxins
or residence?

Or carrying around a portion of the childhood home
where the father instructs the daughter on the uses of poison
then accuses her of being so potent?




To read more, check out her book for sale on Amazon, or read this article about her in the New York Times. 

Freewrite on the words Resonance and Dissonance by Serena Tsang

Dissonance and resonance--complementary opposites. Neither one can exist without the other; the concept of disharmonious clashing cannot exist without harmonious reverberation. Though these terms most commonly regard inanimate objects, that is not to suggest that humans cannot prolong or reinforce the sounds from another human being, or that two humans cannot be unsuitable and disharmonious toward each other.

But perhaps dissonance and resonance are not merely complementary opposites. Doesn't some dissonance resonate through us? And we all have experienced the sensation of two bodies moving around a single primary, a single object, a single goal, a single experience. Their revolutions simply proportional, their revolutions simple--easy--and perfectly proportional to each other. Only to find that something has happened to push them out of synchronicity and make them disharmonious. Isn't that the cause and definition of dissonance?

So resonance and dissonance are not merely complementary opposites; rather, they are the cause and effect of each other. 

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Freewrite on the word resonance by Brenna Judith Baker


If we were instruments, you and I would be two peaks on a sound wave born from the same string.
Since that night when we sat of the floor, knees cracking, laughs breathing, pencils scratching, I’ve known our hearts were synchronized to the same rhythm.
We are two hollow bodies in space singing together, matching one another pitch for pitch through every movement of the symphony:
A chorus of gestures filling the space, bending the silence, and twisting the air into reverberating rings of emotion.
I feel sunbursts and gravity when I think of you.
I see myself in you.
We resonate.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Freewrite on the word Displacement by Alia Ghafur

Who is rowing this boat and why?
I was displaced from my
mothers womb and will be displaced
when i die

Freewrite on the words Resonance and Dissonance by Alexandra Michel

Resonance and dissonance,

Balance between the two.
Yin and yang,
light and dark,
the harmony created by two opposing forces.
The beauty of synchronous sound interrupted by the surprise of a
clash.
Waves crashing,
periods of time where the water is still. Silent.
Dormant falls the air at sunrise, when the sun begins to calm the winds of a rough night at sea.
Yet that rough sea triggers something laying asleep during the day.
--It is not during the calm, but on a stormy night in the shadows that this power begins to form within. A stirring inside begins to awaken a new day in the darkest hour.
It releases in the dissonance of the waves crashing and splashes up on the clean sand--
But, without the peace after the storm, I would not make meaning of the splash; it would just be a mess.
As the waves settle again, that eruption stays active in mind, giving strength to move forward.
Enjoying the day of sun, darkness will soon come again welcoming the inevitable clash that is yet to come.
This cycle of tighten and release is ever present in every living thing.
It is both what fuels us and uses us up.
It is a continuum. A force that never sleeps.
Though the waves lie dormant in the bright sunlight, the winds will stir and dissonance will come of resonance.
Still, the dissonance must run its course; posing questions and challenging every silence.
Stirring. Awakening. Living. Breathing. Fighting. and letting go...
The cycle has no mind.
These opposites exist within each other.
They keep us moving on.

Saturday, March 16, 2013


"Right after the big bang, particles of matter and particles of antimatter annihilated each other. But for every billion pairs of particles, there is one extra particle of matter. That tiny imbalance accounts for the existence of poetry, that is, the existence of the observed universe.

A poem is a neutrino—mainly nothing—it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected." ...From Mary Ruelfe's Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lecture

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Freewrite on the word Displacement by Erika Refsland

Displacement: the amount by which an object is moved from its original position

Source
On my desk there is an orange. It's a bit bulgy, not particularly round, ashamed of its expulsion from spherehood. Despite its misshapen quality, it is bright and smooth and I would really like to eat it, but I am waiting for a friend to pick me up for lunch.

I can smell it, though. Those little pouches of orange juice are calling me, so I pick it up. It's ripe in my hands. I roll it around in my palms, and only start to peel it when I hear the hum-pop of my friend's beat up old Pinto in the driveway.

I set the orange back down on my desk, but not exactly where it was before.

Now displacement cares not for how long I held the orange, nor how hard I contemplated eating it. It's a much more direct concept than that. Displacement only wants to know the distance between where the orange sat while I lusted after it, and where I reluctantly set it when I replaced it to the desk.

Now suppose there is a family. Misshapen, over-ripe, and maybe a bit bitter, it sits. Whether huddled tight or fractured, it is nonetheless a single object, a unit of relational complexity.

It's sitting there, and then a hand comes and grabs it, a hungry hand. The family is inarguably no longer where it once stood. Suppose the hand rolls the family around, tears into its skin. For some time the family is out of control, misused.

Now the hand places it back, this time exactly where it had been sitting before. What is the displacement?


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Freewrite on the word Displacment by Emily Searle-White

                                                    
Displacement.
Dis-pla-cement.
Dis means un, means de, means not – means no longer. Displacement.
Pla – means fish in Thai – fish and water. Water is displaced – by hands, spoons, boats and bodies. Water is displaced.
Cement. Not something that is often displaced. If it is displaced, it is broken.

Source
People are displaced. Their displacement can be measured by miles, but it also can’t. Can concepts be displaced, or are they removed or changed? Evolving ideas shift the meaning of words gradually with every utterance – after a time, concepts may be displaced, but not the way people are.
A displaced person is still who they are. But as soon as they are where they are and know why, they are changed.

A stone drops into water, the water opens up. It actually cannot resist, gravity pulls the stone down and the water yields and for a second, there’s a valley on the surface. Then the rush out is replaced by the pull in and from all sides, ripples come together. They crash. They move apart again. Then back together. Each time smaller. Has the surface of the water risen infinitesimally by the volume of water displaced by the stone? Intuition nods but my eyes can’t see it. In a bowl, perhaps, but not in the Atlantic. My eyes would not notice if a plane sunk in the Atlantic if they did not see it falling.

What is the name for that which takes the place of something that was displaced?

Monday, March 11, 2013

Goldfish, Tidy Households, and Math

The question is posed all the time:

What, exactly, do mathematicians do all day?

Different people give different answers, the most common being simply, "research," as though that term were enough to explicitly indicate math work. But what is research?

In his hilarious (and a little tragic) answer to this question, Yasha Berchenko-Kogen provides an accessible description of life as a graduate mathematics student and, eventually, as a mathematician.

Source


To discover answer and learn more about a "Tool that Does Suck Dust," check out his response here. 


Sunday, March 10, 2013


If you've ever been in love

and perhaps it's felt like

a synchronous gravitational relationship of two celestial bodies (moons) that orbit a third (as a planet) which can be expressed as a simple ratio of their orbital periods

And if you've ever had your heart broken

and perhaps it felt like

a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements

In any case we're meeting Monday nights 6 -8pm in 140 Vera Long.  New members are always welcome

Even if falling in and out of love isn't really your thing

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Member Bios

Member bios, topic description, and some prose are up in the "Member bios" section!

Definitely provide feedback and comments are welcome!


Monday, February 11, 2013

History Lesson


In her article, "Epic Science," Anna Lena Phillips provides a brief history of poetry and science's intersection. 
Source

She notes, "In 1791, in his verses about plants, Erasmus Darwin imputed emotions and desires to them. It’s perhaps an understatement to say that, however charming, something like this would not fly today. But in the early 1800s, such fancy was not so far-fetched. According to Hugues Marchal, a professor of literature at UniversitĂ© Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, scientific poetry was seen as a way of promoting the science it described."
She also provides links to papers on the topic.
Source

For example, the author of ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science, Barri J. Gold, states that “I think that we have certain socially engrained beliefs, held by scientists and nonscientists alike, that science can’t be explained in ordinary language to an intelligent nonexpert,” she says. “I don’t agree with that."
See Phillips' history and the related papers here.

Success

The second Poetry for Scientists meeting went well--each member shared their ideas and interests, themes they wish to explore, and received feedback from everyone else.

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 Perhaps the most striking, beautiful aspect of this was that, no matter the subject matter, each idea exemplified an intersection of different sciences, creative mediums, and personal experience. Furthermore, every member made valuable contributions to the exploration of each topic.
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Every member discussed some idea or subject that interests them, and that they would like to explore through creative writing. Topics included simulation theory; adaptive plants as metaphor for attachment theory; the complex relationship between society and mathematics; the tension between fishers, the environmental impact of fishing, and culture; mathematical convergence as metaphor; the mind-body theory in poetic form;  IVF and its ethical and social implications; climate and society; the separation of implication and cause in psychology (feelings versus numbers); different types of infinity, as well as some fiction work.
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This extremely diverse and intriguing range of topics demonstrates perfectly what PFS strives to be: a place where seemingly distinct fields of study intersect, expand, and impact one another in a way that fosters deeper understanding, broader worldview, and a greater appreciation for other fields.

Creative writers and members who have focused in literary studies also provide expansive insight into how to explore these topics in a way that is accessible, clear, and engaging.

Conclusions:

  • There will be NO MEETING Monday, February 18 because of President's Day
  • All members are encouraged to email their bios and a description of their theme/project/interests to kmccobb@mills.edu. These will be posted on a page here.
  • This club was an EXCELLENT idea. 
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Sunday, February 10, 2013

Next Meeting 2/11/13


Our next meeting will be this Monday night, from 6-8 PM in Vera Long 140!

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Whether you want to be a more creative scientist or a more scientific writer or artist, we welcome you.

Please join us as we discuss ideas for member work, with the goal of developing each person's themes and direction. We will also be sharing more poetic science material and doing a quickwrite via prompts.

Newcomers and members from all majors and interests welcome!

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[Please bring writing materials, any interesting/creative/eloquent or otherwise successful pieces of scientific non-fiction or related fiction, and a respectful ear.]

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

A Fine Example


From looking at its face we had inferred that the Moon's heart is small and dead; but this is not to say that its face has no properties; not even the most stuporous face has no properties. The moonscape is pleated and rumpled, with rilles and ridges and craters and crevices and darknesses and brightnesses. Except for some meteor-made bruises, though, its features have not changed for three billion years; they are memorials of an ancient vim. Once the Moon was welling up from inside, jutting into volcanoes from the force of its own melting, cracking at the rind from its deep inner shifts. Now it wears the same glassy expression eon after eon, like a taxidermied antelope. The Moon is a never-brimming eye, a never-whistling teakettle; and it shadows the very flower of planets. 
     To see what we mean when we say, "Our purpose is meant to appeal to our natural propensity to use metaphor and simile as we do daily in colloquial speech, to describe concepts, theories and philosophies that've been previously rendered inaccessible to the non-expert (layman) and to do so in an artistic, dramatic manner..." please read the beautiful, tragic, and scientifically correct description of the moon and its relationship to Earth and the sun written by Amy Leach, presented in full at the following URL:


    This piece is moving, eloquent, and extremely informative, thus presenting a fine example of what we strive to achieve. 

What Are We?


Our purpose is to integrate art & science, and to employ the various techniques utilized in poetry and creative writing to create compelling works of nonfiction that the reader can both relate to and learn from.  It is to discover the multitude points of intersection between various, seemingly unrelated, subject matters and to show where they overlap and also at what point they diverge.   Our purpose is meant to appeal to our natural propensity to use metaphor and simile as we do daily in colloquial speech, to describe concepts, theories and philosophies that've been previously rendered inaccessible to the non-expert (layman) and to do so in an artistic, dramatic manner, such that the possibilities to learn something new and to integrate it into our knowledge and worldview grow exponentially.

Mostly though our purpose is to move you and to move each other so that if we gain enough momentum by doing this, then maybe none of will get stuck, or stay stuck for so long that we stagnate and forget what it's like to be impassioned and alive and changing all the time.