Discovery

A couple of days into fall—even though it feels like summer here in Pullman—and I’m craving some fruit. So I jump at the chance to head out past the bears and the golf course to Tukey Orchard and grab some fresh apples.

Apple samples at WSU's Tukey Orchard

About ten varieties await me when I arrive at the warehouse on the edge of the orchard. I’m not an apple connoisseur, so I chop off samples and do a taste test. Some are sweet and crispy, others frankly a little soft for me. I end up with a bag of Berry and a bag of Tydeman’s, two toothsome varieties I’d probably never find in the grocery store, especially at 85 cents a pound.

Of course, Tukey is not all about my enjoyment of sweet fresh apples. Tree fruit research and education has long been part of Washington State University. Those efforts will be advanced even further by the largest gift in the University’s history. Apple and pear growers throughout the state agreed to make a historic investment of $27 million over the next eight years to support tree fruit research and extension.

While not all tasty Tukey produce is organic, they have several organic acres as part of WSU’s organic farm. That makes it even more appropriate to indulge, because last week was Washington Organic Week. The Tilth Producers of Washington organized the celebration with events ranging from organic chocolate tastings in Seattle to “Forks Up For Farmers” meals supporting local farms.

Apples on sale at Tukey Orchard

According to the state Department of Agriculture, Washington is second only to California in the U.S. for production of organic food and leads the country in producing organic apples, pears, cherries, sweet corn, green peas, snap beans, and onions.

More fruit sales are on the way at Tukey this fall. Next up for me: pears. The orchard has 83 varieties of apples, 11 varieties of pears, cherries and more, so I’ll be trying them out for a while. And Tukey will continue to help develop our state’s signature fruits.

As Vancouver newspaper The Columbian pointed out in an editorial praising the new tree fruit grant, “If you enjoy eating apples and pears—and as a Washingtonian, you’re obligated to—then you can rest assured about the future of those crops in the state.”

WSU's Tukey Orchard, late September 2011.

Lloyd Smith spends a lot of time pondering the performance of bats and balls—aluminum, wood, baseballs, softballs. It’s his job, and he does it well enough that his Sports Science Laboratory is the official bat testing facility for the NCAA.

But while the WSU associate professor of engineering might use his ball cannons and high speed cameras to facilitate an arms race of ever bouncier balls and more powerful bats, the lab focuses more on uniformity, or to mix a metaphor, a level playing field among the tools of the trade.

Flickr photo courtesty of MelvinSchlubman, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauldineen/

In fact, if you ask him what bat is best, he can’t tell you. That would be a conflict of interest, an implicit endorsement of the people he is supposed to help regulate. Moreover, he says, it just doesn’t matter that much.

It’s a common misconception that there is an enormous difference between bats, he says. By design, the highest-performing softball bat is 10 percent more powerful than a wood bat. The best college bat is 5 percent better.

“The big difference is in player ability,” he says, referring to an on-the-field study showing as much as a 20 percent variation between players.

“When parents come to me and say, ‘Hey, which bat should I buy for my kid,’ I tell them, ‘Go to the weight room and work out. Go play the game. Go work on your skills.’ That’s going to make a lot more difference than spending $300 on the latest and greatest bat.”

Then there are the intangibles that lie outside the realm of measurable physics, like bat comfort. Smith can measure 100 bats and determine the best performer, “but if a player is convinced that this other bat is better, what does that psychology do? What factor does that have?”

That may even have been a factor in the use of illegally corked bats. A study co-authored by Smith in the recent American Journal of Physics found a ball bounced better off a solid wood bat than one hollowed out and filled with a material like cork.

It could be that the lighter corked bat improves a player’s ability to turn on the ball, and a player like Sammy Sosa—caught with a corked bat in 2003—was aiming to improve his batting average, not power. Or it could go back to that intangible psychological factor: He thought the bat worked better, and thinking made it so.

“Suddenly superstition does have a reality,” says Smith, “but we can’t really measure that here, so we stick with the science part.”

To learn more, see “The Physics of Cheating in Baseball” at Smithsonianmag.com.

Spring Visiting Writers’ Series: HOA NGUYEN

Hoa Nguyen

On a chilly Wednesday evening in the middle of April, Hoa Nguyen begins reading from her various books and collections of poetry in a room on the top floor of the CUE building on the WSU campus. The audience is mostly a mix of students and faculty members who eagerly wait to hear the work that this poet will bring alive in her reading.

Hoa’s writing is daring and blunt—she’s not afraid to use words that others might shy away from, or discuss politically charged current events. Her slightly sarcastic, yet intelligent delivery is compelling and leaves the audience grounded in reality; her verse is rooted in gritty images that leave listeners thinking about world issues that many would rather avoid.

After Hoa concludes this powerful reading, I pull her aside for a quick interview about the inspiration and experiences that influence her work so powerfully.

Angela: Out of all your experiences, what would you say inspires your writing the most? Is there one specific experience or time in your life that’s the most inspiring?

Hoa: No, I don’t think of writing that way. I think just life, loving, and being curious [informs it]. And that includes reading poetry, figuring out the name of that little purple star flower that’s blooming right now [and] what the name of the creek is, and where does it flow. I think it’s more about being an active participant in being-ness.

Angela:  So you would probably say that where you grew up (Washington D.C.) didn’t really influence your writing that much, or did it?

Hoa: Oh, sure, I think your life is all of those things. When I grew up in D.C. certainly influenced how I received that experience of being. Growing up in a place that’s really political [and] very international definitely influenced my worldview. Growing up with The Washington Post as my daily newspaper [and] having conversations, regardless of where I was [that] would often gravitate towards international politics. I think that [these things] probably did politicize me at an early age. The access to pretty good public schools and libraries certainly didn’t hurt at all. If I’d grown up in a place that was impoverished or [in] a different class of neighborhood, it would’ve completely had an effect on my poetry too.

Angela: Do you think that if you had grown up somewhere that wasn’t quite [as] diverse as a big city, you wouldn’t have been a poet at all, or do you think you still had that in you?

Hoa: It’s hard to say. We can only speculate. I really always did feel like a poet. I know poets that grew up in small towns that also had the same sort of pull towards poetry, towards a kind of compression, a kind of song, a kind of concern towards verse. I’d like to think maybe I would just be the same and it would just be informed by different things.

Angela: You talked about how you were the co-editor of the poetry journal. How has that influenced your own writing?

Hoa: Hugely. In a lot of different ways. First, when you’re an editor of a magazine, you get tons of submissions and you become really quite adept at identifying what poems you are interested in. We got lots of submissions especially towards the end when we were at the pinnacle of our popularity.  At one point we were getting 30 submissions a week, which is a lot for just a little mom ’n’ pop kind of place. It was because we had been recognized in this yearly called The Best American Poetry and everybody that saw that issue wanted to be in our magazine because they thought [they could] get in The Best American Poetry. It kind of crushed us, actually. It ended up being the demise of the magazine. But earlier, when I was able to really absorb the work, what I found was that I could read a stanza and immediately make a decision [about] whether I wanted to continue to read the stanza. [This] made me interrogate my own poetics. What is the [energy] of this stanza that makes it something that I want to keep reading? I just naturally applied that eye to my own work, so it definitely informed it.

Engaging in the process of being an editor [also] put me in contact with editors across the United States who were doing similar projects. Suddenly you have these nexus of connection [where] you can see what other people are doing in their magazines, what that editor’s aesthetic is like. It really just kind of expands your worldview of what’s happening on the ground right in that moment. An amazing benefit is that editors would understand that you’re a poet and [say]: “Hey, we’d love to see what you’re up to, send me some poems.” It became this way that you could actually take part in your own creativity and be part of those journals and presses.

Angela: Your poems talk about the environment and world issues that are really negative. Do you think that poetry is a more effective means of communication than a news article online? Do you think poetry reaches people in a different way?

Hoa: My hope is that the poetry impacts people’s imaginations and the possibilities of engagement. There’s no poem of mine that’s going to really make a difference in the oil spill in the gulf, but my hope is that it creates an opportunity for an imaginative possibility that can then extend beyond me, beyond the page, beyond that poem, and live and carry out in other imaginings and other possibilities. The multi-facetedness of a poem can actually reach other interiors that just reading a fact might not.

Tectonic plates. Courtesy US Geological Survey

Is our vital blue planet the last of its kind?  Or has it always been one of a kind?  From the perspective of post-modern geologists, planet Earth is like no other solar body yet discovered.

“I think when you live on the Earth, you take it for granted,” says Katie Cooper, who thoughtfully considers such esoteric questions for a living. As one of a relatively new group of geologists who use computer simulations to study the thermal and tectonic evolution of our planet, her viewpoint is decidedly celestial.

Cooper, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, studies the broad area of geodynamics—particularly the evolution of Earth as a planetary system. Specifically, she models how the three main layers of our planet—core, mantle, and crust (lithosphere)—interact and change over time.

“I look at the Earth as a giant heat engine which drives all of the geologic activity we see at the surface,” she says. “In the past, the core was hotter than it is today. The planet is slowly cooling and that affects everything on the lithosphere.”

That cooling takes place in large part through thermal convection. Like boiling water or the slow movement of oil blobs in a lava lamp, hot plastic rock from the Earth’s mantle is constantly rising toward the surface, where heat and energy are released in hot springs, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions. At the same time, cooler rock is sinking toward the interior core.

This steady interplay leads to the phenomenon of plate tectonics where vast puzzle-like sections of Earth’s crust “float” on top of hot rock in the mantle—and imperceptibly migrate across the globe.

Earth stands alone

Although plate tectonics is often taken for granted as standard planetary modus operandi, it turns out that Earth is a world apart from other planets.

“Plate tectonics is unique to Earth as far as we know right now,” says Cooper. “The big question is if this is unique to our solar system? Our galaxy?  The universe?”

Not only unique, but possibly essential to life itself. Through its part in cooling the planet’s interior, plate tectonics allows Earth to maintain a magnetic field that shields our world from dangerous solar radiation and, in effect, creates a safe haven for life to flourish. Which presents Cooper with another question—did plate tectonics create optimal conditions for the initial occurrence of life?  No one knows for sure.

Plate tectonics—the next generation

For the first half of the twentieth century, geologists suspected that Earth’s continents had once formed a single land mass before breaking up and drifting aimlessly apart. The continental drift hypothesis was backed up by fossil evidence but no one could explain the actual physical processes driving it.

That changed in 1963, however, when Princeton professor, Harry Hess, used WWII submarine-hunting technology to discover unusual magnetic polarity in the ocean floor. It was concluded that hot rock from the mantle was rising up through the lithosphere and pushing the sea floor—and the continents on either side—apart.

This finding provided the mechanism to explain the purposeful movement of Earth’s plates and led to the development of the first theory of plate tectonics.

Today Cooper is among a new generation of geologists who study what could be called “post” plate tectonics. Taking the field up a notch, she investigates similar processes on other planets and asks why Earth has plate tectonics in the first place.

“Is it the preferred mode of operation?” she asks. “Does it help the planet lose heat most efficiently? Is it a coincidence?”

Using a computer cluster of 600 processors working together as a single unit, Cooper attempts to unlock these mysteries by crunching enormous calculations that often run days or weeks to generate results.

Doing these “paper and pencil calculations” as she refers to them, Cooper builds computer models of planets and applies basic laws of physics to see if the theories are applicable.

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