Saturdazed

Just another Saturday that seems to have disappeared much too quick. Where does the time go? I think it’s at least partly the shorter days in winter, the early sunsets, of which I’ve never been a particular fan. At least we’re well past the solstice at this point.

I didn’t do a whole lot today besides potter around the house, around the internet, and around the town on a short afternoon walk. I spent the walk listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, one of my favorite podcasts. Their whole “Wonder of Physics” episode was fascinating, but I was especially intrigued by their interview with Mark Oliver Everett. Everett is the frontman of the indie rock band the Eels and, as it happens, the son of physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. (And who was, therefore and sadly, many decades ahead of his time.) The younger Everett recently worked on a documentary about his father for the BBC. “Everybody should be so lucky to get to make a documentary about their father,” he says. It looks like his is online at YouTube, so I may have to check it out in full.

I also listened to a segment of the Leonard Lopate Show, which I’d heard a little of last night as I waited in the car to pick my parents up at the train station. It’s an interview with neuroscientist Douglas Field about glial cells, which apparently makes up the vast bulk of our brains but, until recently, weren’t at all understood. I was especially struck last night by this exchange near the end of their conversation:

Lopate: In a passage of your book where you describe the way that glia interact with oxygen, you describe oxygen as lethal. Well, I thought oxygen was what gives us life.

Field: Yes, it is what gives us life, but for a biologist, we take a long view. I mean, oxygen is relatively new in this planet’s atmosphere and wasn’t there —

Lopate: It killed off a whole previous group of living organisms —

Field: It’s a byproduct of plants. It’s a toxic byproduct, and organisms who could not adjust to that didn’t survive.

I had never looked at it quite like that, and it’s why I went back and listened to the entire interview this afternoon.

All of which is considerably more exciting than the afternoon itself. I think now I’m just going to watch the premiere episode of Caprica and then do some late-night capping.