To Make A Mountain - 2: The Science Of Feeling It
Come for the beautiful poetry, stay for the Muppets.
Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a mid-life crisis newsletter about my astonishing ignorance curiosity, science and wonder.
And now it’s - December? Oh dear. I’m not sure how that happened, but here we are. And by “we”, in the readers-of-this-newsletter sense, I mean: 13,000 of us, as of a few days ago. Considering there were 900 of us last December - it’s been quite the year for EiA. Gosh, good lord, and a handful of blimeys.
(If you like the notion of doing this yourself, I dearly hope you’ll steal all my ideas and start a newsletter of your own, as I suggested last time.)
But since it’s December, that also means it’s nearly the Super-Terrible Night Of Desperately Purchasing Last-Minute Gifts, which I gather other people call ‘Christmas’. If you're one of those folk who actually prepares for things in advance (you weirdo), my friend Jodi of Curious About Everything has just published her yearly, always-much-anticipated gift guide on her main website:
(That’s one of a number of food maps that Jodi designed & illustrator Ella Frances Sanders inked up. It’d look fantastic on your wall, it would. Either that one or one of the other countries they’ve mapped. Click here for the full series.)
And staying with welcome gifts, last week the BBC ran a story about the children of low-income families who aren’t eating properly because they don’t qualify for free school meals. This broke me a little when I read it, so I got in contact with the school mentioned in the story to make a small donation. Here’s part of the reply I got from the school’s principal:
“As you saw from the BBC article, it has become increasingly difficult to qualify for free school meal funding, and alongside the rising costs of other household necessities, this results in managing a low income budget impossible. Our families are having to make extremely difficult choices and the financial climate is not looking any better in the longer term…
We are truly humbled by the response to the article. We have always supported our families but we have never seen the demand and need that we are currently seeing. We currently work closely with Fix Our Food, ReThink Food and the Bradford Food Bank who all do amazing work in our community. There have been tears in our office today as we have received calls and I cannot thank you enough – we are truly grateful.”
So, that’s a nice thing - and a good reminder that any time you see something like this in the national news, it’s simultaneously reaching a lot of people who want to help. That’s a very good thing the news can do. So I gave my donation, and will be doing so again, as part of the income from this newsletter. It’s not much, but it certainly feels like something.
(If you want to give a donation directly to the school yourself, hit Reply and let me know, and I’ll email over all the details I was given.)
Meanwhile, far over our heads - oh hey, that’s us! All of us. How about that?
NASA’S Artemis I mission is really delivering on those instantly iconic photos. Whew.
Returning to ground level, today’s edition of this newsletter is for paid subscribers, and continues our season-within-a-season theme of how the land under us shape the way we live, viewed through the lens of geology and the earth sciences. (Here’s the introduction back in August, free for everyone to read.)
And - well, this might be a weird one. It looks at one of the strangest and loveliest books ever written about a mountain, it digs up the most frustrating branch of theoretical Archaeology that I mostly failed to learn as an undergraduate student two decades ago - and it asks the surprisingly scientific question “How does a mountain make you feel?”
(It probably says a lot that part of my argument involves Muppets.)
Okay! Up we go.