Bus to the Stars: Reading sci-fi in the 1970s down the highway

While I don’t read as much science fiction today as I once did, recalling what I did read more than 40 years ago reminded me today how much of it at the time was read on intercity buses.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction, I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi).

Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then. I have become a fan in more recent years of perhaps more post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi, such as New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, centered around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 “Georgia Flu,” a flu pandemic so lethal and named after the former Soviet republic that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed. Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town to town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

There are limits, however, to my fandom for post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction in popular culture, whether it is in a visual or written context. When Black Mirror was first aired on Netflix, I found it dark but cleverly well written. Now, I find virtually everything on Netflix dystopian, and not all of it well written. For that matter, I find much of CNN and even The Guardian real-life dystopian. Thanks for that Donald John Trump and the global COVID-19 pandemic rapidly closing in on the three-year mark.

I read Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven in a paperback edition much like the one shown here is shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on an old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back to Peterborough weekend trip. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot this way:

“When wealthy amateur astronomer Tim Hamner co-discovers a new comet, named Hamner-Brown for its discoverers, documentary producer Harvey Randall persuades Hamner to have his soap company sponsor a television documentary series on the comet. Political lobbying by California Senator Arthur Jellison eventually gets a joint Apollo-Soyuz (docking with Skylab B) mission approved to study the comet, dubbed “The Hammer” by the media, which is expected to pass close to the Earth.

‘The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet’s nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.

‘Immediately after the strike, China, anticipating that the Soviet Union become too cold for its people and must therefore invade its neighbor, launches a preemptive nuclear attack on its neighbor. The Soviets retaliate with their own nuclear missiles, reassuring the United States that it is not the target.”

So, a 1977 plot, not so far from today’s real-life headlines.

After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target less than a month ago on Sept. 26, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.

“As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered,” the agency said.

Pournelle, who died in 2017, was born in Shreveport in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. He was a polymath: a scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. While Pournelle was great at writing or co-writing page-turners like Lucifer’s Hammer, he is also known as the first writer to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher. Jerry was an early adopter.

Sometimes science and science fiction mingle easily enough in my mind.

Looking at images from the James Webb Space Telescope capturing highly detailed snapshots of the iconic Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years from Earth, which show a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars, is remarkable, but the name Pillars of Creation immediately took me back in my mind to a another intercity bus ride; this one a Greyhound bus ride out of Blaine, Washington in the United States’ Pacific Northwest in the Summer of 1979, where I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant 1953 science fiction novel Childhood’s End where Rashaverak, an Overlord, refers to “Sideneus 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn.”

Aside from reading Childhood’s End on that bus trip, I remember having to changes buses in Spokane, Washington and being awoke in the middle of the night, with my body draped rather uncomfortably across several very hard plastic seats on the second floor of the bus terminal, as Washington State troopers made a gunpoint arrest of a man opening a rental locker on the mezzanine below.

While I’m not sure how much of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven was read on a bus (perhaps some of it was on the old Trent Express run from downtown Peterborough to Trent’s Nassau Campus), the book left a big impression on me in the late 1970s.

I still remember reading, “Dr. William Haber’s office did not have a view of Mount Hood. It was an interior Efficiency Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East Tower in Portland, Oregon and didn’t have a view of anything. But on one of the windowless walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood, and at this Dr. Haber gazed while intercommunicating with his receptionist.

“That doesn’t last long. Mount Hood is the very first thing that we see transformed by George’s power: it gets changed into a horse. And that’s just the first of its transformations.

“Later, when he’s become more powerful and famous, Haber gets a beautiful view of Mount Hood through a fancy window instead of just a picture. When the alien invasion begins, Mt. Hood wakes up and spouts fire that burns the surrounding forest. It’s not until George stops Dr. Haber’s dream that the mountain goes to sleep again.”

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Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

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Killer comets, killer asteroids: Make my day, planet-killers

Nudge it, nuke it, tug it with a gravity tractor, or slow it down with some concentrated sunlight. Make my day, planet-killers.

Those are your choices if a planet-killing comet or asteroid is en route to rather imminently collide with Planet Earth. Asteroid PZ39 shot by the Earth from a distance of more than 3.58 million miles (5.77 million kilometres) earlier this month. It flew towards us at speeds of more than 35,500 mph (57,240 km/h), approaching  just after 11 a.m. GMT two weeks ago on Saturday, Feb 15.

A near-miss? “A little over 9x the distance of the earth to the moon,” Ron Graham helpfully explained. “A near miss is, in fact, an impact,” Kevin Hopton added

Both asteroids and comets are bad to have coming toward you, but comets are worse apparently simply because they can be travelling up to three times faster than Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) relative to Earth at the time of impact. The energy released by a cosmic collision increases as the square of the incoming object’s speed, so a comet could pack nine times more destructive power than an asteroid of the same mass. But both are considered to be a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

“It would be a much bigger explosion, a much bigger crater, much more damage,” (https://www.space.com/26264-asteroids-comets-earth-impact-risks.html) impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said in June 2104.

If Boslough says it is so, that’s good enough for me. After all he is the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998, which I wrote approvingly of in a post on Nov. 9, 2014 headlined “‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/edward-baker-thompson-manitoba-s-microwaved-telephone-company-night-watchman-1998-urban-legend-owes-its-fame-to-real-life-american-scientist-and-a-denver-newsman/)

Wrote Boslough back in 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

There are, of course, lot of people besides Boslough whose job it is to think about such things on both a theoretical and practical basis. I’m not one of them.

Rafi Letzter, a staff writer for New York-based Live Science wrote earlier this month:

“If a giant object looks like it’s going to slam into Earth, humanity has a few options: Hammer it with a spacecraft hard enough to knock it off course, blast it with nuclear weapons, tug on it with a gravity tractor, or even slow it down using concentrated sunlight ” (https://www.livescience.com/how-to-stop-asteroid-from-hitting-earth.html)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have come up with an 18-page guide titled “Optimization and decision-making framework for multi-staged asteroid deflection campaigns under epistemic uncertainties” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576519313700?via%3Dihub), also published earlier this month, in the journal Acta Astronautica, to help, in Letzter’s words, “future asteroid deflectors.”

For those taking the longish catastrophic view, rather than the shortish catastrophic view, here’s something to consider:

“If an approaching asteroid were detected early enough,” the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says, “it could be possible to divert its path using the gravity of a spacecraft (https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/mitigate/gravity-tractor). “Instead of sending an impactor to ram into an approaching object, a gravity tractor device would fly alongside the asteroid for a long period of time (years to decades) and slowly pull it out of Earth’s path.

Gravity tractors would be most likely to work on any shape or composition of approaching asteroid, even if it were just a pile of rubble. However, gravity tractors might not be effective for the largest asteroids of over 500 meters in diameter which might be the greatest threat to Earth. Gravity tractors offer the greatest control and could perhaps even divert an approaching asteroid to other locations in space where people could theoretically use them for research or commercial purposes. However, these techniques have never been tried and would require decades for building, launching, and carrying out a mitigation mission.”

On March 26, 1997, police in Rancho Santa Fe, California discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven’s Gate, an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. The 39 cult members who died almost 23 years ago took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

They had participated in the mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

Earth-threatening asteroids might well be movie or book genres of their own. On the movie side, there are such classics as American science fiction disaster film classic Armageddon from 1998, depicting Bruce Willis et al. saving the Earth. The movie has Harry Stamper (Willis) and his oil rig crew (who are mostly losers who have done time in jail) being hired by NASA as astronauts. Their goal is to drill into an asteroid the size of Texas and deploy a bomb to break it into pieces, before the asteroid hits the Earth.

One of my favourite cover versions of the many that have been done over the years of the song Leaving on a Jet Plane is by Winnipeg’s Chantal Kreviazuk from Armageddon, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and featuring a heartfelt, if somewhat off-key, opening rendition to the song by Ben Affleck from the movie, leading to the delightful mission control quip: “So, Truman, this is who you found to save the planet.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbt2G71uT1M&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1KgfVHJxTwyayZ-pLStZ2H0RSeinmKhRqhPPGxR3L2HcIFj6j8vXbdj5s).

On the book side, I’m partial to Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven. I read the novel an early paperback edition shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on and old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back on weekend trip. A great page-tuner for a cold late autumn bus ride.

This is also around the time Pournelle, an American polymath: scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, as well as noted science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers (https://io9.gizmodo.com/rip-jerry-pournelle-a-tireless-ambassador-for-the-futu-1803143871) became perhaps the first writer from any genre to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher.  Jerry Pournelle, early adopter, died in September 2017 at the age of 84.

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Hamilton Tiger-Cats lose, but there may be polyextremophiles in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, if not the Dallol crater itself

Naturally, surrounded as I was by Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans in Thompson, Manitoba yesterday, and my contrarian chosen Hamilton Tiger-Cats already sadly declawed early in the second quarter, before a national television audience no less, the conversation turned to Ethiopian lakes and nearby locales that hold no life. OK, the analogy may not be quite perfect but close enough, and what else is one to do in a roomful of Westerners who think of places like Toronto and Hamilton as “down east”?

Turns out, while the Dallol crater and its so-called Black and Yellow lakes, located in the Ethiopian Danakil Depression, may not support life, other parts of the larger Danakil do. Or not. Take note Ticats fans.

The Danakil Depression is located more than 100 metres below sea level in a volcanic area in northwest Ethiopia, close to the border with Eritrea, aptly named “Afar.” It is part of the East African Rift System, a place where the Earth’s internal forces are currently tearing apart three continental plates, creating new land, and it is arguably the hottest place on the planet, and one of the driest. Researchers in the field contend with sweltering heat, toxic hydrogen sulphide gas, and chlorine vapour that will burn their airways and choke their lungs without gas masks.

Picking up an article from the Madrid-based Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, the London-based Institute of Physics (IOP) on its physics.org website reported Nov. 22 that “Scientists find a place on Earth where there is no life.” The lede notes: “Living beings, especially micro-organisms, have a surprising ability to adapt to the most extreme environments on Earth, but there are still places where they cannot live. European researchers have confirmed the absence of microbial life in hot, saline, hyper-acid ponds in the Dallol geothermal field in Ethiopia.”

The article goes on to explain the “infernal landscape of Dallol, located in the Ethiopian depression of Danakil, extends over a volcanic crater full of salt, where toxic gases emanate and water boils in the midst of intense hydro-thermal activity. It is one of the most torrid environments on Earth. There, daily temperatures in winter can exceed 45 degrees Celsius and there are abundant hyper-saline and hyper-acid pools with pH values that are even negative” (https://phys.org/news/2019-11-scientists-earth-life.html).

“A recent study, published this year, reports that certain micro-organisms can develop in this multi-extreme environment (simultaneously very hot, saline and acid), which has led its authors to present this place as an example of the limits that life can support, and even to propose it as a terrestrial analogue of early Mars.

“However, a French-Spanish team of scientists led by biologist Purificación Lopez Garcia of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has now published an article in Nature Ecology & Evolution that concludes otherwise. According to these researchers, there is no life in Dallol’s multi-extreme ponds.”

Lopez Garcia says, “After analyzing many more samples than in previous works, with adequate controls so as not to contaminate them and a well-calibrated methodology, we have verified that there’s no microbial life in these salty, hot and hyper-acid pools or in the adjacent magnesium-rich brine lakes. What does exist is a great diversity of halophilic archaea (a type of primitive salt-loving micro-organism) in the desert and the saline canyons around the hydro-thermal site, but neither is found in the hyper-acid and hyper-saline pools themselves, nor in the so-called Black and Yellow lakes of Dallol, where magnesium abounds. And all this despite the fact that microbial dispersion in this area, due to the wind and to human visitors, is in Thermaltense.”

Jasmin Fox-Skelly, a freelance science writer based in Cardiff, took a somewhat more upbeat approach a couple of years ago, but one based on older data, in her Aug. 4, 2017 piece “In Earth’s hottest place, life has been found in pure acid,” for BBC Future, which describes it website as “something different” in “a complex, fast-paced world of soundbites, knee-jerk opinions and information overload.” BBC Future says it provides a “home for slowing down, delving deep and shifting perspectives” on “almost every topic that matters.”

“In a surreal landscape of colours, dominated by luminescent ponds of yellows and greens, boiling hot water bubbles up like a cauldron, whilst poisonous chlorine and sulphur gases choke the air,” Fox-Skelly’s story opens. “Known as the ‘gateway to hell’, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is scorchingly hot and one of the most alien places on Earth. Yet a recent expedition to the region has found it is teeming with life” (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid).

Fox-Skelly reported that Barbara Cavalazzi from the University of Bologna in Italy, part of a team conducting scientific expeditions in the area since 2013, found life in the Danakil Depression in March 2017, “after they managed to isolate and extract DNA from bacteria. They found that the bacteria are ‘polyextremophiles,” which means they are adapted to extreme acidity, high temperatures and high salinity all at once. It is the first absolute confirmation of microbial life in the Danakil acidic pools.”

So Spanish research? French research? Or Italian research? Life or no life (or some life) in the Danakil Depression?

You know, the sort of questions Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans were asking in their own ways for their applied football science research in Calgary yesterday, while the results were becoming demonstrably obvious on the field on each series of plays.

Science.

When I observed some of the Hamilton players appeared cold, someone helpfully suggested it was probably because the Ticats offence had been idling on the sidelines for so much of the game, and the Winnipeg defensive squad was likely in a similar predicament, even if not visibly showing it, Prairie stoicism and all.

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Crashing Heaven’s Gate

Twenty-two years ago today I was living in Kingston, Ontario and driving along Peterborough County Road 2, just outside of Hastings, when I learned of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide on the car radio. It was a Wednesday. The suicides took three days, in shifts.

Members of Heaven’s Gate took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols,  best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

Heaven’s Gate was an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. Applewhite also wrote under his cult moniker “Do.” Nettles was known as  “Peep.” Later they became known as “Do” (pronounced Doe) and “Ti” respectively, from the end of the musical scale.

On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, who had participated in the mass suicide in nearby Rancho Santa Fe, California, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.

A tragically surreal moment in the now almost forgotten and often surreal years of the late 1990s, leading to the end of a millennium and the Year 2000.

Applewhite’s theology was based in part on the notion he and Nettles were the “two witnesses” spoken of by John of Patmos, also known as the John the Revelator, in his apocalyptic Book of Revelation (11:3-12); two witnesses who are killed, but stay dead for only 3½ days and then are taken up to heaven in a cloud. While Biblical scholars are not certain of their identity, many believe the two unknown witnesses are either Moses and Elijah or Enoch and Elijah. One of my favourite scenes from the 2002 movie, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, shows the fire-breathing two witnesses at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as rabbinical scholar Tsion Ben-Judah and journalist Buck Williams cross the militarized no-man’s land during the Tribulation to meet them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJipNpSFnQ&feature=share)

At their final celebratory meal at Marie Callender’s Restaurant in Carlsbad, about 15 miles from Rancho Santa Fe. the weekend before they committed suicide, eating 39 identical turkey pot pies, ice tea and cheesecake with blueberries, waiter David Riley asked where they were from,” Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher wrote in the Washington Post a few days later in a story headlined, “The cult that left as it lived,” published on March 30, 1997.

The answer they gave the waiter as to where they came from? “From the car,” one replied.

Applewhite’s journey to the edge of the zeitgeist and beyond began in the early 1970s, first when he was a music professor in Houston, teaching at the University of St. Thomas, a conservative Catholic college.  In 1970, he was fired from his post after administrators there learned that Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student, according to local news accounts. The University of St. Thomas called the reason for the firing “health problems of an emotional nature.” Applewhite would wind up having himself castrated.

Nettles, who died in 1985, was an astrologer and, according to several academic studies of the group, had dabbled in numerous metaphysical theologies, combining Christian ritual with elements of paganism, science fiction and millennialism.  Applewhite, who died in the Rancho Santa Fe mass suicide in 1997, was 66.

Born in Spur, Texas., Applewhite attended Austin College, a Presbyterian-affiliated school in Sherman, Texas., then studied music at the University of Colorado, where he played the lead in both South Pacific and Oklahoma. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he directed choruses at First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, North Carolina, and later St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and at First Unitarian Church of Houston, before joining the faculty of the University of St. Thomas in 1966.

There are believed to be four surviving members of Heaven’s Gate. Two of the surviving members still maintain the group’s website, making sure the hosting bills are paid annually and the domain name continues to be actively registered, although the Heaven’s Gate website has not been altered since the 1997 mass suicide. The two do not identify themselves in interviews, but they are believed to be Mark and Sarah King, a couple in their sixties, from Phoenix, Arizona, who left other cult members in the late 1980s and set up a company called the TELAH Foundation, which stands for The Evolutionary Level Above Human.

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Earth faces sixth extinction-level event, scientists say, while the mass media, as we know it, faces its first, according to the fossil record compiled by today’s advertisers and readers/viewers

A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?

Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth  – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.

As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?

Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.

The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.

Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?

Consider these three exhibits, if you will.

Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.

Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.

I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.

As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.

Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.

Zero. As in zero-sum game.

Exhibit 3:

Mass extinction, niche survival.

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Life in the Circumpolar North: Winter living with a sense of joie de vivre and koselig

Monday, Monday. Winter is set to arrive here in Northern Manitoba on winter solstice, Monday, Dec. 21 at 10:49 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) – which is just eight minutes shy of seven hours after sunset at 3:57 p.m. that day.

The term solstice comes from the Latin word solstitium, meaning “the sun stands still.” This is because on this day, the sun reaches its southern-most position as seen from the Earth. The sun seems to stand still at the Tropic of Capricorn and then reverses its direction. It’s also known as the day the Sun turns around, and in the Northern Hemisphere, astronomers and scientists use the winter solstice Dec. 21 to mark the start of winter season, which ends with the spring equinox Saturday, March 19 at 11:31 p.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT).

Here in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude, no matter what the official dates for the winter solstice and spring equinox may be, we know quite literally in our bones that we have really long, cold winters and on average there are about 140 frost-free days each year. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 (Groundhog Day), the day when those furry prognosticators – Punxsutawney Phil in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia and Wiarton Willie in Ontario – predict either four or six more weeks of winter, depending on whether they see their shadows when they emerge from their burrows, really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking here. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2? Yes, bring it on.

As Thompson oldtimers sometimes tell newcomers: “You might want to consider making friends with winter since it lasts about eight months of the year here.” A slight – but not great – exaggeration. Having spent most of the 21st century living to date in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Thompson in Manitoba, which Macleans magazine, using  Environment Canada, dated, ranked respectively as being number one and number two on their list of “The 10 coldest cities in Canada,” I have some notion of what it means to live in the North.

The North can be defined several ways. Quite often it is quite simply referred to as just that – the North. There is also the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, consisting of 94 major islands and 36,469 minor islands, which aside from Greenland that is almost entirely ice covered, forms the world’s largest High Arctic land area. There is also the Circumpolar North.

The idea of a Circumpolar North was something that caught my imagination in 2001 after I moved from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. While the Arctic Circle, which I’ve crossed en route to places in the Mackenzie Delta, including the historically-Gwich’in founded community of Tetlit’Zheh (Fort McPherson) at 67.4353° N, Inuvik at 68.3617° and Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N, is rather clearly defined as a circle of latitude that runs 66°33′45.9 N north of the equator, marking the southernmost latitude where the sun can stay continuously below or above the horizon for 24 hours – phenomena known as the Midnight Sun in summer and Polar Night in the depths of a deep and dark December, the Circumpolar North is partly a land of the imagination and a state of being, not quite so precisely defined by geographic lines of latitude, although it generally includes in Canada all that is North of 60, including the islands of the High Arctic, and the remainder of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories, plus those parts of northeastern Quebec and central Labrador settled by the Innu.

In the United States, the Circumpolar North is defined to include Alaska, except for the Southeast Alaska Panhandle. The Circumpolar North also is made up of Denmark, including Greenland, and the Faroe Islands; Iceland; Norway, including the archipelago of Svalbard; Sweden; Finland; the European Arctic south to the Arctic Circle; and the Russian Federation south to 63°N in European Russia and to 57° N in Asia, including all of the Kamchatka peninsula and Sakhalin Island.

Copenhagen at 55.6761° N is incredibly close latitudinally to Thompson, Manitoba at 55.7433° N, but neither are quite part of the Circumpolar North geographically. But imaginatively, one might make the argument. In winter, Northern Manitoba is vast land of isolation, ice roads, early sunsets and late sunrises. Copenhagen is not so different with short days during the winter with sunrise coming around 9:30 a.m. and sunset about 4:30 p.m.

One December day in 2001, living within sight of the western shore of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, I got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

And while American poet T.S. Eliot told us that “April is the cruelest month” when he wrote The Waste Land, he seems to have been silent on the issue of November, which the Meteorological Service of Canada at Environment Canada in Winnipeg assures is still usually the snowiest month of the year with one average 35.4 centimetres of snow. At least on average. Usually.

When it comes to permafrost, there was no evidence of the existence of it here in Thompson until work started on the townsite in 1957. Then there was plenty of evidence, as permafrost was encountered at many locations in “scattered islands underlying somewhat less than 50 per cent of the townsite,” as noted by Robert M. Hardy, originally from Winnipeg, and co-founder of R.M. Hardy and Associates Ltd. in Edmonton, the only engineering firm in Alberta to offer geotechnical services at the time, and K.S. Goodman, manager of K.S. Goodman, Materials Testing Laboratories Ltd. in Calgary, in their paper “Permafrost Occurrence and Associated Problems at Thompson, Manitoba.”

Hardy and Goodman’s paper was presented at the National Research Council of Canada’s Associate Committee on Soil and Snow Mechanics Proceedings of the First Canadian Conference on Permafrost in Ottawa on April 17-18, 1962.

We are roughly 240 kilometres south of the line, which approximates the southern limit of continuous permafrost, as shown in the Climatological Atlas of Canada, and about 80 kilometres north of the southern limit of permafrost. But global warming may be causing the southern limit of permafrost to shift further north, meaning less permafrost here in Thompson, making some additional homebuilding on Wekusko Street, Arctic Drive and Char Bay, considered inadvisable 20 years ago, finally feasible within the last six or seven years.

How about the “average weather” for Thompson? Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -29°C to 23°C and is rarely below -39°C or above 28°C. Remember, we’re talking averages now, not temperatures for a specific winter.

The “warm season” (again, a relative term) lasts from May 24 to Sept. 11 with an average daily high temperature above 15°C. The hottest day of the year is on average July 20, with an average high of 23°C and low of 10°C. The coldest day of the year on average is Jan. 15, with an average low of -29°C and high of -19°C

James Diebel, an American, and Jacob Norda, a Swede, who both live in the San Francisco Bay area, can be thanked for these fascinating Thompson weather facts available through their WeatherSpark website at: http://weatherspark.com/averages/28377/Thompson-Manitoba-Canada. Diebel, born and raised in Wisconsin, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics and astronautics, and mathematics from University of Wisconsin, and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, and Norda, born and raised in Sweden, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Linköping Institute of Technology, teamed up and started Vector Magic, now known as Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc., in December 2007. The weather facts are based on historical records from 1988 to 2012.

How best to live in the Circumpolar North or the North, however, one wishes to define it? With a sense of joie de vivre – joy of living, I think.

Oulu in Finland, which at 65.0167° N is about 1,600 kilometres farther north than Thompson and located just 200 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, is the sixth largest city in Finland with 141,000 residents, and played host to the first-ever two-day international Winter Cycling Congress in 2013. The second congress was in Winnipeg in February 2014.

I remember back in February 2011 reading about Bruce Krentz’s bet with Harold Smith, a former City of Thompson councillor and executive director for Manitoba Housing and Community Development’s northern housing operations, who challenged him to use active transportation commensurate with getting to his new job as health promotion co-ordinator with the Burntwood Regional Health Authority (now the Northern Regional Health Authority). “He said, ‘Really, you should walk the walk,’” Krentz said at the time. “I sort of made the commitment that I would bike all year.” Smith said he didn’t expect Krentz to use a bike as his method of transportation. “To be honest, when I threw down that challenge I was really thinking about him walking, not cycling,” said Smith, who noted in 2011 he wasn’t surprised that Krentz had stuck with the plan. “Bruce has a history of sticking with things, especially the crazier ones.”

That’s interesting, I thought. Sounds like Bruce. And Harold. Frankly, it didn’t hold any appeal to me personally, although I had been doing a good deal of fair weather riding from mid-April through early November since my arrival in Thompson in 2007.

Circumstances, however, can change and so last year when my circumstances changed, I changed my mind about winter biking in Thompson. Which is why you might spot me wearing my trademark-like red helmet, white front and rear red MEC lights flashing, courtesy of Jeanette, as I at first carefully nudge my way over the short city-owned public footpath connecting the 200-block of Juniper Drive to the back of Southwood Shopping Plaza on Thompson Drive South, before reaching the paved two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that delivers me to work at the Thompson campus library of the University College of the North (UCN).

The Norwegians, Circumpolar North residents that they are, have something to teach us, too.

Laura Vanderkam, in a Nov. 6 Fast Company online magazine piece headlined “The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter: Residents of Norway view their long dark winters as something to celebrate. How it’s possible to be cheerful for the next four months,” outlined the Norwegian notion of koselig, “that means a sense of coziness. It’s like the best parts of Christmas, without all the stress. People light candles, light fires, drink warm beverages, and sit under fuzzy blankets. There’s a community aspect to it too; it’s not just an excuse to sit on the couch watching Netflix.”  You can link to the article here at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3052970/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-norwegian-secret-to-enjoying-a-long-winter

Lorelou Desjardins, who pens the Norwegian Frog in the Fjord blog, says, in fact, koselig is more even then being cosy. “Most English speakers translate it by ‘cosy’ but that term doesn’t even begin to cover everything that ‘koselig’ can express,” Desjardins writes at: http://afroginthefjord.com/2014/02/02/how-to-make-things-koselig/

“This concept is difficult to translate to those who do not live here, but basically anything can (and should) be koselig: a house, a conversation, a dinner, a person. It defines something/someone /an atmosphere that makes you feel a sense of warmth very deep inside in a way that all things should be: simple and comforting.”

Kari Leibowitz, a PhD student at Stanford University, spent August 2014 to last June on a Fulbright scholarship in Tromsø in northern Norway – a place “so far north that from late November to late January, the sun never climbs above the horizon,” Vanderkam notes in her Fast Company article.

Leibowitz studied the residents’ overall mental health, because rates of seasonal depression were lower than one might expect.

“At first, she was asking ‘Why aren’t people here more depressed?’ and if there were lessons that could be taken elsewhere. But once she was there, ‘I sort of realized that that was the wrong question to be asking,’ she says. When she asked people ‘Why don’t you have seasonal depression?’ the answer was “Why would we?'”

Vanderkam says that Leibowitz found that it “turns out that in northern Norway, ‘people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,’ and that makes all the difference.

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