Waaaay back in March, neurologist Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings) wrote a tribute to Francis Crick, of double helix fame, in The New York Review of Books (article available online only to subscribers).
In his article, which related a twenty-year correspondence between the men about topics largely related to visual perception, Sacks briefly mentioned working with a group of genetically colorblind natives from the isolated South Pacific island of Pingelap.
Things being what they are, I didn’t get around to reading the article until this past weekend, some four months after it was published. Always a sucker for stories of collaboration and cameraderie, I sucked it up. The name Pingelap and the mention of the colorblind Pingelapese twitched my mind, however, since I’d never run across it before.
So imagine my surprise when — in the very next day’s edition of the Oregonian (which I almost didn’t see because it was one of the extremely rare occasions when our paper didn’t show up) — there was a 700-word article by reporter Melissa Sanchez on a Pingelapese reunion here in Portland. Apparently, Portland has one of the largest populations of Pingelapese outside of Pingelap (about 100), and an equal number of US residents came for the event as well.
Odd coincidences.