According to the online website of the
Smithsonian Magazine, the 2013 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference has taken to publishing a version of
the formal Japanese poetic form haiku to summarize each of their papers. The latest 2013
conference, URL above, had thirty-two such haiku published.
The specific form of
the haiku that they are using is the 5-7-5 form: three lines total, the first line has 5 syllables, the second 7 syllables, and the third line 5 syllables.
Now it turns out that a haiku is actually much more than just these simple rules. But it is probably too much to ask planetary scientists to worry too much about such niceties and we should just applaud their efforts to find a pithy summary of their published work.
Here are the four haiku that the author of the article particularly liked. The article goes into much more detail about what the paper was about. See the complete article about the conference here.
What a haiku is supposed to look like
The haiku for a paper on the orbits of
Phobos and Deimos, moons of Mars, was
Two moons in the sky
wandering by the Sun’s face
their orbits constrained.
For a paper on the fate of benzene observed in a lake on Titan, a moon of Saturn, we have:
wandering by the Sun’s face
their orbits constrained.
For a paper on the fate of benzene observed in a lake on Titan, a moon of Saturn, we have:
Tiny little rings
Drifting in a Titan lake
Fade away slowly.
Drifting in a Titan lake
Fade away slowly.
On the issue of the content of a
meteorite, and whether it contained exotic materials, we have:
Oh, “megachondrule”
We were sadly mistaken
You are impact melt.
Finally, a paper analyzing the data
from an old Viking experiment to see if they could detect atmospheric
conditions on Mars, has
Whispers from the past
Viking mostly felt the wind
Let’s all look closer.
Viking mostly felt the wind
Let’s all look closer.
We have previously discussed haiku on
Global Wahrman here:
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