This is a MODIS shot of Frances, just off the northern shore of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Frances is in the middle of destroying the Haitian city of Gonaives - relentless denudation of the hillslopes for firewood above the city left no barriers to stop the topsoil from being washed away into torrents of mud.

Skynet:

Just as the sun sets or rises, one can often see the shadow of the Earth rise or set in the opposite direction. The effect lasts only a couple of minutes. In this photo, taken at about 35,000 feet over the Turks & Caicos, the sun is rising to the right, and the shadow is setting to the left. The sharp purple shadow of the curve of the Earth lasted only a minute or so. This is the only "terminator" you will see. 

Trouble ahead, trouble behind...:

Many have probably seen this shot of Cyclone Graham taken by someone on the bridge of a cargo ship, but the skirt is one of the best defined I've seen. When you see this, run. Don't just steer into it, no matter what you are piloting. 

Hurricane Ivan:

Ivan windfield predicted 12 hours out by TSR. 

Well, the moniker "Ivan the Terrible" was fairly predictable. I hope we don't get to "Vlad the Impaler" for two reasons: first, the imagery of something worse than Ivan is hard to imagine, and second, the name Vlad would mean that we would have had twenty-two named storms!

Here's an updated set of my favourite hurricane links:

• TSR, the insurance industry's model
  
• NOAA's National Hurricane Center
  
• General satellite imagery
  
• Hurricane Hunters:
  
  • NOAA Aircraft Ops Center
    
  • USAF 403rd Wing
  
  
• Water Vapour channel loop from NOAA (won't always be Ivan...)
  
• Skeetobite Weather pages
  
• Naval Research Labs Tropical Meteorology
  
• A forlorn webcam loop pointing out to sea in Mobile, Alabama

I also found two really nice movies by NASA Goddard showing how hurricanes feed off warm water. You will need a fairly robust connection to download these quickly, so beware if you are on dial-up... The first example shows hurricanes Fabian and Isabel (1Mb MPEG-1) moving across the Atlantic and Caribbean in 2003. The color represents sea-surface temperature, with blue colder than orange. Note how the passing of the hurricanes leaves a cold wake as the hurricanes feed off the warm waters.

The second example shows an interaction between tracks, as the 1998 hurricanes Bonnie and Danielle (6Mb QuickTime) interfere with one another - if you watch carefully, you can see that Danielle is weakened as she passes over water that has been cooled already by Bonnie (it's harder to see, but if you go back to the first movie, you will see that Isabel is not weakened much by crossing Fabian's track because enough time had passed that the track had mixed and warmed up again).

This is also why hurricanes weaken as they approach land - there is simply not enough water volume to feed them as the shallowing waters begin to starve them even before they make landfall. You can deduce from this that an approach path over a broad shallow shelf will weaken an storm more than an approach over a narrow steep shelf. Even then, if a warm current flows near-shore, it can strengthen a storm - something that is expected to occur for Ivan.

The last frame of the movie showing NASA's Genesis Probe intact, inches above the ground at the Dugway Proving ground, but moving at about 190 mph, carrying fragile cargo. 

Tagging from the female cicadas is quite obvious now - a small tree close by in Arlington. 

Here's a larger tree in the same neighbourhood - heavily tagged trees can be right next to trees of a different species that are relatively untouched. 

A detail of the scars that the female cicada makes on the branch with her ovipositor. The branch grows to the left. 

Hurricane Frances:

Hmm. My blog is getting hit today by searches for hurricane references.

Forecast position and windfield for 36 hours from now.


Here's a quick set of my best places to go:

• TSR, the insurance industry's model
  
• NOAA's National Hurricane Center
  
• 4.7Mb QuickTime NOAA GOES-12 animation
  
• General satellite imagery
  
• Hurricane Hunters:
  
  • NOAA Aircraft Ops Center
    
  • USAF 403rd Wing
  
  
• Beautiful MODIS image of Frances yesterday
  
• Water Vapour channel loop from NOAA (won't always be Frances...)

Hope this helps!

A. Chu:

Scematic of a T4 bacteriophage (Purdue) 

I knew that in the end, the proteins that make up the organelles, walls, and other structures in cells and viruses had to have a physical movement involved when they changed conformations. What I wasn't prepared for was how darned mechanical those motions might appear in some cases.

Recent work by a group from Purdue University and the Shemyachin-Ovchinnikov Institute combined data from many X-ray crytallography and cryo-electron microscopy experiments to get a step-by-step picture of how a T4 phage (virus) infects an E. coli bacteria. This combination of data allowed the group to make a simulated video of the protein conformational changes as the phage attacks a bacterium.

?The video (large 20.7MB Quicktime, small Quicktime, large MP4, small MP4, large DivX) is quite amazing - watch for the unfolding short tail fibers, the simultaneous change in the baseplate (the kernel of the Purdue/Shemyachin-Ovchinnikov group's work), and then the eerie coiling of the tail sheath proteins. It's very gear-like as the tail tube drills through the cell wall. The deposited lysozyme (in green) then digests the peptidoglycan (in blue) and the tube can then inject the viral DNA into the bacterium.

I wonder how much of this is from actual data, how much is from animation texture mapping, and how much is "in-betweening."

The long-term driver behind this research is not only to study how T4 attacks E. coli, but to understand how each of the proteins contributes to the activity, possibly modify some of them so that T4 can attack other pathogens, and in the very long run, learn how to make nano-machines that can carry out particular actions (contract, drill, rotate, etc.)

Hang on - I have a tingle in my nose.... perhaps H7N2 avian flu?

Archie and Jughead:

Hello from Boulder, Colorado.

I'm here attending the annual GLOBE Program Conference.

Bill Hilton is one of the scientists that has funding from me, and he is here talking about his work with the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. I've posted about Bill and these birds before in April 2003, and April 2004, when the little guys first appear at our feeders. Bill has one of the best websites on this bird out there. Bill runs a nature center called the Hilton Pond Center, in York, South Carolina, where he does a lot of banding of birds, ruby-throats among them. After Bill bands a hummingbird, he puts green dye on their throat so that he doesn?t waste time recapturing them, because some of these cheeky rascals will re-enter the trap several dozen times a day! Bill is one of about one hundred people licensed to band hummingbirds in the U.S., and the only person permitted to put dye on them.

There are 338 species of hummingbirds in the world, all of them in the Western Hemisphere. Fifteen to seventeen species have a range in North America, but the only species in the Eastern U.S. is the Ruby-throated hummingbird, or RTHu in ornithological shorthand. Interestingly, the range for RTHus expands waaaay West in Canada, to just short of the B.C.-Alberta border.

In Costa Rica, there are 55 species. By the time you get to the Amazonian basin, there are 125 species. This increase in the number of species as you approach the equator leads us to believe that they originally speciated from the Amazon basin.

The first ever recapture of a migrating RTHu occurred in 1991. A hummingbird with a green throat was sighted in Loganville, Georgia by a lady who had returned the previous day from a birding trip to Costa Rica - she could not identify the bird, and called a friend who is a hummingbird specialist in Alabama. He jumped in his car and drove nine hours, captured the bird, and found that it was one of Bill Hilton's RTHu's, banded just 10 days previously in York, South Carolina. The bird had flown 270 miles in the ten intervening days. Not a new hummingbird species, but an exciting catch nonetheless.

The next recaptures occurred in 1997 and 2000 in Robertsdale, Alabama, 485 miles and 17 days from the banding in York, South Carolina, and then in Cameron, Louisiana, 790 miles from its banding. As you can tell, recaptures are extremely rare. There have been about 100,000 RTHus banded the U.S. since banding was started in the 1930's, but only 10-15 have ever been recaptured away from their original banding site. From the number of chicks hatched during the summer, we can tell that only about 20% of the migrating birds survive to return the next summer ? a staggering loss rate for any species, and one that makes the capture-recapture method extremely difficult to apply to migration.

The interesting thing about these recaptures is that they show a very strange migration pattern. Strange only because previously it was thought that the migration path for RTHus was through Florida and over water to the Yucatan peninsula (because drill rigs and boats in the area had seen RTHu's zooming by on their way, and because there have been sporadic reports of RTHus on Caribbean islands). These three recaptures show the birds moving West, rather than South, hinting that the majority of the RTHu population in North America may move overland around the Texas coast on their way to their wintering grounds on the Pacific coasts of Mexico and Central America.

No RTHu has ever been recaptured South of the Rio Grande, and the intent of the program is to train teachers and students in Mexico and Costa Rica in how to observe the birds so that they can be on the look-out for those green necks!

One interesting point Bill had was that the peak in feeder population that we observe around August is in fact made up of two distinct populations - those bird pairs and their chicks that actually nested in our area, and the early Southward migrators from Southern Canada.

I?m off this afternoon to an area in the Rockies at about 7,800 feet, where there are plenty of Black-chinned Hummingbirds, Rufous Hummingbirds, and Broad-tailed Hummingbirds. Stay tuned.

Jules Verne:

Last Wednesday Taylor Dinerman had an article in the Wall Street Journal (Pg.D14, Col. 4) on the space tourism issue. He brought up the point that several non-Space agency employees had flown before Dennis Tito's flight on Soyuz TM-32/31.

Here's a more complete list than Dinerman's, including people who flew paid by their employers (industry), or because they had political clout:

• Charles Walker, STS-41D 1984, STS-51D and -61B 1985
  
• Jake Garn, STS-51D 1985
  
• Bill Nelson, STS-61C 1986
  
• Christa McAuliffe, STS-51L 1986
  
• Toyohiro Akiyama, Soyuz TM-11/Mir 1990
  
• Helen Sharman, Soyuz TM-12/Mir 1991
  
• John Glenn, STS-95 1998
  
• Dennis Tito, Soyuz TM-32/31 2001
  
• Mark Shuttleworth, Soyuz TM-34 2002
  

The list does not include Russian employees of Energiya. Notable failures in the tourist-cosmonaut program are of course Lance Bass and Greg Olsen, one of whom ran out of money and the other failed the medicals.

The main point here is that this classification is no longer possible - space-faring is becoming quite diverse, and the next step is the diversification in launch vehicles. With last month's launch of Burt Rutan's Space Ship One, this process has already begun.

Location, location, location:

Somehow, I have ended up on some very strange mailing lists. Real estate, liquor dealerships, and travel packages in South America. Not to mention all the junk from shady African bankers looking to transfer millions into my checking account.

The e-mail advertisements I recently read avidly were as follows:

- "Bougainvillea" Farm, 57,600 m2 (14.2 acres), with 1,800 fruit trees (oranges, tangelos, navels, tangerines, lemons, mangos, avocados and 80 banana palms). Main house and caretaker's home. Filtered swimming pool, squash court. Three tanks for the farming of perch and tilapia fish.
$120,000 negotiable.

- House, 450 m2 (4,800 sq. ft), 2 floors
1st floor - garage for 8 cars, swimming pool
2nd floor - 7 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, kitchen; servant's room, bathroom and kitchen
3 cisterns for potable water.
$133,000 negotiable.

At those prices, who wouldn't be interested? Of course, what was drawing me in were memories from my childhood, during which I had visited places like these during my summer vacations. And that was the problem - these idyllic spots are located in one of the most dangerous countries in the world, Colombia. Not only dangerous because of recent political and narco-terrorist troubles, but natural hazards as well - one of the summer spots I remember best was a farm in the town of Armero, which was later buried by a devastating lahar off the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in November of 1985.

This farm had a beautiful pool with a large colony of fruit bats in the pump room. Justin Abel, his sister Louise Abel and I spent almost as much time in the pump room waving paper bags around in a vain attempt to catch the panicking bats as we did in the pool. Sadly of course all that is buried under several meters of mud now.

Today I met with a person who is doing a lot of work on hazards with the National Academy, and they had published a book that dealt with the lahar hazard on Mt. Rainier. The connection here was that the Armero disaster lead directly to the development of the lahar warning system that now protects the cities of Orting, Sumner, Puyallup and East Tacoma that are in 100 to 500 year lahar hazard zones around Mt. Rainier.

---

Now if I can only get organized, get the African bankers to pay for the property in Colombia, fly in all my friends from Argentina, and pay for the Pisco sours, I'll be all set.

The real listings:

- Finca Buganvillia 9 fanegadas, está ubicada en la vereda La Macarena a
5 minutos de Sasaima 1,800 árboles frutales (naranja, tangelo, ombligona
común, mandarina, limón, mango, aguacate, 80 matas de plátano).
Piscina con planta de tratamiento, cancha de squash. Casa principal y para
el Administrador, 3 piscinas para el cultivo de mojarra y tilapia.
Precio $ 320,000,000 negociables

- Casa Melgar 450 mt2 , 2 Pisos
1er piso: local , garaje para 8 carros, piscina
2do Piso: 7 habitaciones, 7 baños, cocina, cuarto y baño de servicio
y cocina para servicio. Tiene una alberca y 3 tanques para agua potable.
Estrato 5
Precio $ 350,000,000 negociables

I used the Sizes website to convert the quaint units still used in Colombian real estate. While I was there I learned that the U.S. has two feet. Two measures of length called the foot, that is.

Hemingway, Faulkner, and Bulwer-Lytton (well, almost):

United Airlines' in-flight magazine Hemispheres runs a Faux Faulkner and Imitation Hemingway contest. I have enjoyed reading these over the years, in between my twenty-minute-readings of Hemingway's books and my interminable attempts at finishing anything of Faulkner's.

United's latest series of television commercials have caught my eye, and during last Friday's flights I saw a short segment on the artist/animator behind them. It turns out that the lead female character in the "Lightbulb" segment is a self-portrait of the artist.

I was pleasantly suprised the other day to hear that a friend, Dave Zobel, had won a similar writing contest, parodying the opening lines of Bulwer-Lytton's writing (of "It was a dark and stormy night..." fame).

Dave's entry:

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.

See the entire set of results here.

Dave and I went to Caltech together, and we lived in apartments that faced each other one year. We often were interviewed by folks from intelligence agencies, gathering background on friends for their security clearances. Dave had a big poster of Lenin on his wall, supposedly gazing optimistically into a Socialist future, but actually looking out a window at a set of sorry Pasadena palm trees full of escaped parrots that left their droppings on the faded Toyotas parked below. I often wonder what those security clearance folks from CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA, and the NIS thought of that poster.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Stan was here at the National Science Foundation (NSF) on June 16th, giving a brown bag lecture (of course he was also here to promote his latest book Forty Signs of Rain, but I´ll give him the benefit of the doubt...).

Several of his latest works have been influenced by his interactions with the NSF. Antarctica, Forty Signs of Rain, and its sequels (still to come) all deal with NSF, the science we fund, and our decision process.

Stan has tried to promote a positive view of science and technology, and the roles they play in society. His interest is in the uses to which S&T are put, within the context of wider social interactions and political contexts. The villains here are not the science and technology themselves, but the system within which they operate. He consciously tries to improve his readers' understanding of science - but I think he knows he is usually preaching to the choir.

Stan sees science as outside the capitalist system. In his view, and in his new book, scientists do all their reviewing of proposals for free, and for the greater good of the system. It's not quite that simple - the Federal Government does pay for the time that people spend reviewing proposals, if they spend that time in a review panel, rather than reviewing proposals from their home base, via the internet. Otherwise, his description of the review process (at least at NSF) is quite accurate. My job is very much like that of the protagonist. Only in Stan´s story, the protagonist tries to explicitly influence the selection process, while in real life all of us spend a great deal of time trying to minimize our own influence on the process until the very end, when we actually make a funding recommendation to the bean-counters that cut the Federal checks, based on a process that is as unbiased as possible.

However, science as supported by NSF is very much within the capitalist system. It might sometimes appear that it exists within its own cocoon, but it has a fairly brutal system for selection that is driven by money. If you can´t bring sufficient money into your university or research lab, you are eventually forced out, or starved. "Publish or perish," goes the saying, and you have to publish to be able to get your proposals through the review system, because the NSF review process looks at the publications record among other things as an indication that you a) are active, b) are productive, and c) are actually competent.

There are other funders of science within the Federal system that are more prone to political pressures or simply idiotic decision processes. I used to work for one of them. I once visited a satellite downlink station in West Virginia, and was stunned to see rack after rack of high-capacity batteries in the basement. Thousands of them. When I asked what was going on, the guide sheepishly explained that when language for the funding of the station had been included in legislation, some Senator's non-technical aide had included a phrase something like "the system shall ensure that 99.999% of the data from the satellite will be captured," without realizing what the engineering implications of 99.999% were. The law is the law. The result was a sextuple-redundancy against power failure, and several thousand batteries in a basement, with a 0.001% probability of ever being used. One guess as to who the Senator was.

At the same Agency, I also once participated in a meeting to decide what to do with some remaining funds. Our choices were as follows: to process the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from a first Shuttle flight, or to fly the SAR experiment again and not process any data. The next report to the Congress had the triumphant statement "Shuttle flies two successful SAR missions." One guess as to what Agency that was.

Sigh. But I digress.

In the Forty Days book, Stan talks about a poster in the hallway promoting a talk at NSF with the title "Antarctica as Utopia" - the inside joke here was that that talk really did happen - it was the title of his previous 'brown bag' here at NSF, when he came to talk about his book Antarctica, which he was able to write after having participated in NSF's Antarctic Artists & Writers Program.

Apparently the idea for the plot of Antarctica came to him as he sat on the Shackleton Glacier. I'm glad we were able to help - I wish I could get sent to Antarctica to sit on my duff and come up with ideas. I might get cold but I bet I´d be productive...

Stan had actually applied to the program the year before, in an attempt to get to the Dry Valleys and what he thought would be the closest approximation to conditions on Mars, since he was in the middle of writing his Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy. But NSF turned him down, stating that the Artists and Writer's Program was for people to produce works about Antarctica, and not about Mars. Always adaptable, Stan decided that his next book would be about Antarctica, and reapplied. And that is exactly how the process works - you take feedback from a review, and resubmit. With success rates for proposals between 10% and 30% depending on the program, most applicants know they may have to submit several times before making it through peer-review.

We did get Stan to comment on Stephen Hunter´s movie The Day After Tomorrow. His dismissal of it was quick: he felt it was silly, and a disservice to science. Apparently he was so distracted by the small details that were inconsistent (if it's supposed to be cold, why does no-one wear gloves?), that he couldn't concentrate on the plot. He also felt the character development was really poor, in that we are all grey - a mix of good and bad, rather than black and white. His phrase was "in the real world, we have all been Gollum," and he has tried to develop that theme in his stories.

NPR's All Things Considered sent Richard Harris, their science correspondent, to see The Day After Tomorrow rather than their usual movie reviewers. Harris' report on the movie was quite amusing with a repeated sound-bite, "...that´s unbelievable..." being played over and over. And although much of what the movie portrays is in fact scientifically un-believable, there are parts of it that are actually true - while the climate could not possibly change in a matter of days, it could well change this drastically in a matter of decades.

Stan also discussed science fiction versus fantasy as genres, and predictably he felt that at least his SF was less escapist. One interesting criticism he had of hard SF was of authors that use Star-Trek like exit strategies for situations, for example using nano-technology to do things that are physically impossible, or introducing them incongruously. These tactics often resulted in stories that were "loose cannons" and did more to raise the level of fear of technology in the general public than to raise understanding.

I tried to get him to expand on his book Years of Rice and Salt which is an alternate history where Christian Europe gets wiped out by the Black Death, and the resulting next several thousand years are dominated by Muslim, Buddhist and Animist cultures - because I knew he was in the middle of writing it when 9/11 occurred. But he demurred, and I had to leave before the session was over to host a conference call.

One other item of note - Stan wanted feedback on the Forty Days story from us so that he could change the story before it went into paperback. He really is interested in accuracy.

99.999% accuracy.

Armstrong, Aldrin & Collins:

It's hard to believe that it has been thirty-five years since the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Wasn't the twenty-fifth anniversary last year?

NPR had an interesting piece on this morning about how close the LM came to running out of fuel on landing - less than 17 seconds of fuel remained, and perhaps as little as six. This is a testament to Aldrin & Armstrong's training, as they knew they could cut it this close and still fire the Ascent Module engine to get away.

An excellent source for material on the mission is the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.

Another little known near-snafu was that both the Lunar Module and the EVA suits were being modified up to the last possible moments. The manufacturers nearly forgot to consult on the changed specifications, and a space suit that wouldn't fit out the LM hatch nearly resulted. Now that would have been a neat finish - "Err, Houston, we have a problem (Buzz! What the blazes is going on? I'm stuck!)" As it was, the astronauts could not wear the cameras on their chests, because they would not fit. They had to pass those out separately.

Regarding the famous Hasselblad 500EL cameras, Apollo 11 carried only two of them, one silver and one black (according to Aldrin and Armstrong, but contrary to the link, which states that there were three cameras onboard). The silver was for use inside and out (silver to keep temperature stable), and the black was for intra-vehicular use only. Black camera bodies became very fashionable after the Apollo flight, since this was the camera that returned - the silver one with the Reseau crosses was left on the surface to save weight for the return trip.

Oh, and Armstrong did not say "Good luck Mr. Gorsky" on re-entering the LM. That is an urban myth.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky would be proud. Verry proud:

Yikes - I know I have not posted much lately, as I have been buried with work and travel.
 
Folks who peruse the Newtons Around the World Gallery will have seen some of my jumping around (although last Friday's trip across North America and back in one day with a three hour stay in San Diego is sadly not included). Phew!
 
Today I simply note the launch yesterday from Kourou of the ANIK 2F satellite, the heaviest communications satellite to date (5,950 kg), with 94 transponders for North American telecommunications.
 
Who owns it? Telesat Canada
 
Who launched it? Arianespace, on flight 163 of an Ariane 5G+ launch vehicle, from Kourou in South America.
 
Who says the NASA is not pre-eminent in space. Oh wait - we have no Shuttle, and no heavy launch vehicle. Humph.

Venus, Venera, Ishtar:

(My apologies, this post never made it out of draft in time for the actual event described...)

On June 8, Venus crossed the face of the Sun ("transited," in astonomy-speak). A mini-eclipse. "Mini" because even though Venus is four times larger than the Moon, it is so far away that it only covered about 0.1% of the Sun's surface. Big deal, you say. Planets pass in front of their suns all the time, don't they? Well yes, they do. But catching them in the act is the trick. Having all the alignments right is a rare thing. Last time Venus was seen pulling this, it was 1882. Cameras were still relatively new, and they were deployed as an aid in making observations. Out of approximately 10,000 photographs taken of the 1882 transit, fewer than ten survive. Old celluloid is fragile.

If you think about it, you can quickly see why only planets that orbit closer to the Sun than Earth (the "inferior" planets, in astronomy-speak) ever make transits. They have to be in-between the Earth and the Sun at some point for a transit to be visible - they have to be "inferior" to the Earth. So, from Mars, you would occasionally get to see an Earth transit, in addition to Venus and Mercury transits. From Pluto, you might get to see all the other planets make transits - but that's not a sure thing, since if you also think about how all the planes of the orbits would have to line up, and since Pluto is such an odd-ball, transits visible from Pluto are probably quite rare (the Sun is also pretty darned small from there, too). There is a really nice website with an applet that gives you a good look at the geometry of the whole thing here.

For this transit of Venus, we had a lot more help to see it happen - the Internet was of course involved, allowing those who happened to be on the wrong side of the Earth to enjoy the sight during the six hours Venus took to cross the Solar disk. The best place to have been happened to be centered on a longitude passing through Europe - and the Penteli Observatory in Greece had a webcast via The Exploratorium starting at 01:00 Eastern, and the European Southern Observatory in Germany also had live images. Images from the Americas and Asia were accessible through this NASA-Goddard site. However, because the Americas are West of Europe, and therefore behind solar time-wise, most of the transit was over before sunrise (an afternote: I managed to see sunrise on the 8th from Nassau, as far East as I could get at that time, but my simple camera lucida could not resolve the tiny dot that had already started its exit contact with the solar limb - I had to be satisfied with the TV broadcasts that day...).

There is a fairly long history of observing transits. Observing a Mercury transit in 1677, Edmund Halley figured out that if we had a good estimate for the speed of light, and timed the four times of contact between the two disks' edges from widely separated spots on the Earth, we could get an estimate of the Earth-Sun distance. Halley laid out the mathematics for this calculation, but did not see a Venus transit, dying 19 years before the next one in 1761. Capt. James Cook took an expedition to Tahiti for the 1769 transit, and George Biddle Airy worked on the maths for the 1874 and 1882 transits. It took about five years to do those maths, resulting in distances of 149.59 million kilometers and 148.672 million km, compared to the value of 150.34 million km accepted today. Even John Philip Sousa got involved.

But what is the deal with watching this again? Haven't we already figured out how far from the Sun we are? Well, yes. But this time there were other things to see, since we have invented a few new instruments since 1882. Fr'instance, Tim Brown, a scientist at NCAR's High Altitude Observatory, looked at the spectrum of Venus' high atmosphere (65 - 85 km) to determine the concentration of particular molecules. Usually this part of the atmosphere can't be detected, since it is so diffuse, but the bright light of the Sun does the job of lighting it up quite nicely. What is amazing is that this technique has already been used to probe the atmospheres of planets circling other stars. This time, we have a sort of inverted technology: something used to observe a planet 150 light years from Earth is being adapted to observe a planet a few light-minutes away. Given the closeness of Venus, the observations will also be used to look at layering and wind velocities. In another twist that would amaze astronomers from 1882, Brown operated a telescope on the Canary Islands from a lab in Freiburg, Germany.

Here is one of the most interesting photos I found. Not because of the visual impact - that is actually small, and there are better-looking photos out there. What is interesting about this one is that it captured not only Venus crossing the solar disk, but also captured the International Space Station. The calculations involved in doing this would be staggering even for Airy, and yet we are quite blithely doing them on our Palms.

(c) Tomas Maruska and VT-2004 Programme, 2004

OK, so how long do you have to wait for the next Venus transit?

Until June 6, 2012. And where do you have to be to see it? East Asia or the Pacific - here's Fred Espenak's map of the transit visibility.

If you miss that one, you are out of luck - December 11, 2117 and December 8, 2125 are the next pair. Do you detect a pattern? You should - it's the harmony of the spheres ringing in your ears - 105.5 years separate the 8-year pairs of Venus transits. They are quite rare, and it is sobering to think that only six Venus transits have occurred since the invention of the telescope!

You would have better luck chasing a transit of Mercury - they occur about 13 - 14 times a century with the next one ocurring on November 8, 2006.

Material taken from articles in EOS 85/21, Science 304/5675, Physics Today 56/12, Fred Espenak's transit webpages, and NSF press releases.

Piazzi-Smythe, Stukeley:

Today is the Summer Solstice. I spent a lot of energy in my youth on reading about Stonehenge, including reading a lot of the baloney that is out there.

I thought the following sites were interesting and reliable enough to be included here:

First, the English Heritage website, which has a LOT more thatn just info about Stonehenge, and is a great site to visit to coordinate dates for a visit to the UK, since it has a calendar for events country-wide.

While a little sparse on graphics and heavy in text, Hengeworld is well worth the time it takes to read it. The webmaster is editor of British Archaeology magazine, and so has field-cred.

Next, for general information of all types, About Stonehenge . Info is a slghtly more commercial spot, with links to an ongoing blog, books (Amazon.com...), and tour operators that go to Wiltshire.

For information on the remodeling and the on-going controversy surrounding the A303/A344 highways that cross the site, the Stonehenge Project pages are a good place.

Lastly, there is Stonehenge Laser Scan which has a digital model of the site, from which I took this frame, looking at the Heel Stone from inside the trilithons and the Sarsen Circle:

Of course, I have to also link to Ian Gillian's tale of woe when the rock band Black Sabbath tried a set based on Stonehenge, that ended up beign the origin for Rob Reiner's movie spoof "This is Spinal Tap" and their take on this episode...

Sandwich Dilettantes:

Most of you are fighting a lot of Spam in your e-mail inboxes. Some of you have filters that help with sorting out the spam. Some of you even have ISPs that are trying to deal with the problem. Watching the spam though, is like seeing a battle unfold inside your inbox between the spammers and the filterers.

One of the obvious filtering strategies is to look for key words: Viagra, mortgage, etc. That's why the spammers have took to coding the words with such disguises as V1agra and m0rtgage. Such tactics serve two purposes: they evade simple filters, and they can still be read by the recipient. The only thing a filter sofware company can do can do is hire someone to add all these variants to its hunt-and-kill list. Or get its users to contribute to these lists (a la Cloudmark). Obviously this is an area where the human brain does a lot better at "error correction" than the automated filters, and the user participation is very effective. As many have pointed out, having all this coded product or service naming does make the advertised products look a lot less professional, and so there is probably a loss of efficiency for the advertiser there - but at fractions of a cent per e-mail, and with millions of targets, these are obviously still useful methods.

Other filter strategies include categorizing senders as spammers, and blocking all mail from particular addresses. But, as a lot of the latest viruses illustrate, sending e-mail with a fake origin address is all too easy. People send e-mail that looks like it's coming from bill.gates@microsoft.com, steve.jobs@apple.com, and even dubya@whitehouse.gov all the time (although I'd be reeeally cautious about that last one).

One particular tactic I have seen lately is to add words from dictionaries to the spam. Often they are hidden simply by using a white typeface so that they don't show against a white background (a tactic that originated in websites trying to increase their ranking in search engines). Lately though, I have noted that many of these actually seem to be using some kind of program to generate random sentences, rather than simple lists of rather odd words. I would assume that this is to try and emulate a real e-mail message with other content, since filtering is now looking at syntax as a detection tool.

These results can often be quite amusing. That's where I got "Sandwich dilettantes" from. It has a certain ring to it, don't you think? There has to be a rock band out there that got its inspiration for its name from this kind of thing. "Any pit viper can make love" is another.

Can you imagine a future where spam is given credit for driving intelligent machine recognition of language? I can. It's happening right now. People are paying a lot of money to keep their in-boxes tidy.

From Bret Harte to Elaine Pagels:

In my latest fortune cookie:
You can depend on the trust of the collective.

What to make of this plain language?

It is peculiarly Eastern in its outlook, urging me to subjugate my will to that of the wider society around me. Should I rebel? No. Should I question? No. But what if their ways are dark? What if they are heathen and peculiar? Ahum - no.

Having read Dan Brown's intriguing book The Da Vinci Code in one gulp several weeks ago, it reminded me that I had several books in the basement I had been wanting to browse through again. Chewing old cud, as it were.

Elaine Pagels' staples: The Gnostic Gospels, and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. An excellent series from the George Braziller house on religions - Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism (sorry no link to be found, out of print). And one to get lost in, The Nag Hammadi Library.

There is some very interesting material in here about how we perceive chance events and our reaction to them. For example, in AE&S Pagels refers to a 1937 study by Evans-Pritchard describing an event where people of the Azande tribe were killed by a collapsing grain silo in Africa. While the Azande culture completely understood how termite rot could cause a structure to collapse (and kill those sitting nearby), the Azande culture automatically took the further step of asking "and why did the collapse occur at that particular moment?" The answer to the question depended on the character of the deceased, and eventually some fault in their past behaviour or their character was blamed for the particular timing of the event. In the West, that kind of question would only be asked by failure analysis engineers, if at all, and the answer would be very different.

We might dismiss the Azande explanation out of hand, but Pagels points out that this in fact goes to satisfying a very deep need in human nature that is often not fulfilled - having a full explanation for events around us that conforms to our world view. This not only applies to assigning guilt to others for these chance events, but is rooted in the almost pathological need to assign guilt to ourselves when these kinds of things occur. She writes: If guilt is the price to be paid for the illusion of control over nature...many people have seemed willing to pay it.

In most of the world, that explanation is supplied by some form of religion. "It is God's will that you be crushed by a ton of millet, because you are a wicked person." "Poseidon was irked at your father's lack of sacrifices to him, and sank your ship." "Toutatis is miffed because he has been forgotten, and caused your airport terminal to collapse." -- In each of these cases, some greater power controls events that impact our lives. (Pagels' thesis is that Augustine fundamentally altered the path of Christianity by putting original sin in this role, and providing a world view where all Christians can assume guilt rather than feeling they have no control).

In the West, we are somewhat disconnected from this, and our need for an explanation is not satisfied with a simple "In'sh Allah". We do not accept helplessness easily, and eagerly apply the toosl at hand (usually technology and analysis), whether or not they are actually capable of improving outcomes. I suspect that the ongoing 9/11 commissions here in DC and in New York City are going to run into this. There are some things, like confusion during a crisis (war included), that are fundamentally NOT FULLY FIXABLE.

In the West, we are more and more willing to point a finger at an individual to fulfil this need to assign guilt, whereas in other cultures it is socially acceptable (and in fact often required) to assign such guilt either to an uncontrollable external entity (an Act of God), or to a particular act by a known or unknown individual (either unconscious, in the case of forgetting to make an offering, or conscious as in the form of a curse).

That's my (somewhat wandering) submission to the collective, and I'm sticking to it.

Bishop Usher:

I am sitting in a review panel that is considering all kinds of proposals in the area of dinosaurs and fossils.

I'm no expert on paleontology, but this is fascinating. Mosasaur tracks (but are they crocodilians, dragging their tails underwater?). Fossil stomata on primitive leaves. Viable 800 Ma bacteria spores trapped in halite. How did the evolution of roots control erosional history?

It occurred to me that basing so much of our sciences of ontogeny and phylogeny on current genetic material is like throwing out 3 billion years of history. It excludes the fossil record entirely. I used to think that gene sequencing was the answer to all the tree of life questions, but I now realize I was way off the mark.

Achilles et al.:

n the middle of my forced high-school reading of the Iliad and the Oddysey, I remember being amazed when I figured out that these were stories relating events from the Bronze Age, collected by an Iron Age poet. I wasn't forced to read the rest - I devoured it. If I remember correctly, we were reading the Fitzgerald translation.

While I have to admit that I did get swept away by the movie version (Troy), I was nagged by several inconsistencies. In the movie, the view of the city from the citadel stretches off into the distance. But I have walked through the mound at Hisarlik, the commonly accepted site for historic Troy, and it's tiny. The building I curently work in has a larger footprint, and it only holds about 500 people. Hisarlik and its surrounding metropolitan area covers, oh, maybe 2 acres -- and that's the remains of Troy including the subsequent 3275 years of settlement/development! I can however accept that for cinematic needs, a tiny hamlet just would not do.

As pointed out in some recent Discovery Channel specials, there are some problems with the size of the Trojan Horse as seen in the movie. The gate that it would have been dragged through is pretty small - only a meter or two wide - limiting the height of any stable structure. The consensus: if it existed at all, the horse would have only held a handful of men. There is no evidence besides Homer's words that this ever happened.

I didn't remember Achilles having a love interest from Troy's royal family either. The movie deftly avoided the idea that Achilles' love interest was probably Patrocles by making him a cousin. In the very beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon does take away Acilles' concubine, Briseis, so at least they did obliquely include that source of Achilles' anger by having Priam's daughter(?) be the contested trophy.

An impressive sight was the zoom-to-wide shot over the fleet sailing to Troy, showing the 1,000 ships. So impressive that I realized there are significant logistical problems with a 1,000 ship fleet that neither Homer nor the film addressed. How do you land them? How do you hide them?

Of course, I should also point out that there is debate about whether Homer existed, and if he did, whether the Iliad and the Oddysey are both his, partially his, or only his compilations.

Time for me to read about Heinrich Schliemann - one of the earliest people to work on this site, but lately of somewhat tarnished reputation. Not only for his methods (standard for the time, but considered extremely destructive by today's standards), but also for his scholarly integrity (there are serious questions about his interpretation of the finds and the data in promoting himself). The "Treasures of Agamemnon" found in a royal burial at the site, are currently believed to have come from a much earlier stage. In fact, it looks like Troy was sacked at least nine times, with the sacking by Agamemnon ocurring a little under half-way through the site's occupied history.

Another item for my "is history truth" theme that I keep promising to post...

Here's a fun romp through one version of Homeric truth.

Zimbardo & Bower:

I was amazed to see a reference to this famous experiment about the behaviour of prisoners and jailers during the early 1970's at Stanford, in of all places, USA Today.

Zimbardo has updated his website on this experiment in the context of the current experience at Abu Ghraib, which makes it more interesting.

As you go through the 'slide show' pay particular attention to the behaviour of the people who should be fully external to the experiment: the parents, the chaplain, and even the lawyer.

It turns out that it's not really just a few bad apples. It is the barrel. We all go bad in this kind of situation. Zimbardo, of course, is saying "I told you so" about the lack of clear directives at Abu Ghraib.

The exposure of these activities has certainly been humiliating for all involved - prisoners and captors. And I not unexpectedly shocked, shocked, to see all the political hay being made by the Congress and by the Arab world.

I always cringe when I hear a high U.S. official crow about how America is the greatest country in the world. It only makes events like this worse - it turns out that Homo Americanus is simply Homo sapiens after all, and is not so sapiens as they thought. The only way to recover (somewhat) is to demonstrate a transparent and effective legal process that can deal with these kinds of behaviors.

Watching the movie "Troy" the other day, as Achilles dishonours Hector's body by dragging it behind his chariot in front of Troy's walls, I could only think about the current situation, and think that we really haven't changed much in the last 10,000 years.

Marlatt sings to Dylan:

I went to a lecture today by four researchers on cicadas. So did NBC, CNN, WTOP-radio, and even Animal Planet. It was quite a frenzy. Two hours of scientific talk followed by questions from reporters. Can I scoop them with this post?

A frenzy much like it is starting to be with the cicadas themselves, because Brood X started their emergence this weekend.

Much of the basic facts you can find elsewhere, or you have probably read in the papers lately, since there have been so many articles. Here are the points I found interesting in their talks that I had not heard elsewhere:

Keith Clay, Indiana University at Bloomington
Clay and his team are investigating what preferences cicadas have for egg-laying sites (tree species, density, etc.), and how the insect density affects tree response, and the interactions between forest succession and cicada populations. Clay looks at patterns of interaction between the microbial, plant, and human worlds. Clay's website.

• Brood X is the largest insect emergence in the world
  
• It occurs largely in deciduous forests
  
• Apart from two very small patches in Canada, it is within the lower 48 only
  
• Different species exist within the same brood (!)
  
• There are documented cases of densities of over 4000 nymphs per hectare
  
• Cicadas are probably still recovering from a population collapse caused by the deforestation of the Eastern U.S. in the 19th century
  
• Given their preference for calling, mating, and laying eggs on forest edges or regrowth areas (and NOT in deep forest), they will probably exceed historical populations given current land cover patterns and forest fragmentation
  
• Studies on Brood XXIII showed the preferred tree for egg-laying to be the Elm, and the least preferred to be the Persimmon
  
• Egg-laying will cause scarring on newly grown twigs
  
• They actually can harm very young saplings, but not older trees
  

James Speer, Indiana State University
Speer and his team are looking at how cicadas affect tree growth during the different stages of their cycle, from the oviposition (egg-laying) by scarring or "tagging" tree branches, to the long underground feeding, to the effect on the trees of the emergence and release from parasite burden. They do this mainly by looking at tree rings, and correlating periods of good and bad growth with known cicada emergences. To date they have looked at Red Maples, but this summer they plan to broaden the study to many other species. ISU Dendro lab page.

• Females lay about 20 eggs per scar on a twig, and lay about 600 total
  
• The visual impact of the emergence and egg-laying on a forest will be large, but the tree-rings tell a different story - most 'damage' is done in the nymphal stages feeding underground, and it increases until emergence, when the trees suddenly surge because they have no cicada nymphs siphoning off their roots
  
• There is a characteristic pattern in the tree rings that they beleive is due to cicadas, and they plan to go back to the dendrochronological record to see if they can see other great emergences far in the past (for example, in a still living 250 year-old Oak, and further back in the dated tree-ring record).
  

John Odland, Indiana University
Odland is an economic geographer, and his interest with cicadas is looking at how human modification of the landscape around us is affecting the cicada population (among other animals). Odland's web site.

• The movement of biomass is significant
  
• 130 nymphs per square meter is a 'moderate' concentration
  
• It has to get up to 35C before the males can sing effectively (therefore their preference for forest edges)
  
• The males congregate, perhaps to louden their collective call (?)
  
• Young trees of long lived species are favored (for repeat generations?)
  
• Humans have created a lot of forest edge, through patchy reforestation, and through penetrative development of forested lands
  
• Because of the extensive clearing in the 1800's there was concern in the 1902 Brood X emergence that cicadas would go extinct
  
• ...but they were still plentiful enough that the 1902 University of Indiana graduation had to be cancelled and moved indoors, since no one would have been able to hear any of the speakers
  
• This will probably be a bad fishing season, since fish will be stuffed to the gills with cicadas, and not interested in your lure
  
• Cherry trees with tagging scars will ooze sap that is laced with cyanide (from the cherry, not the cicadas). Would one call this a "sappurating" wound?
  

Christine Simon, University of Connecticut
Simon's group looks at the evolution of cicadas using tools like mDNA, and looks at questions like Why are there separate broods, and how did they evolve? Why are there 13- and 17-year broods? Why do some 13-year species appear 4 years late (with the 17's), and some 17's appear 4 years early (with the 13's)? Simon has a really nice web site on cicada research.

• There is a genetically separate 17-year group that seems to have successfully shifted to a 13 year periodicity because it coincided with a 13 year hatch, and was protected from being wiped out
  
• There seems to be a cyclic connection between the broods:
  

XIV ---> X ---> VI ---> II

| | | |

XIII IX V I

| |

XII VIII

| |

XI VII

Where there can be either four year differences in emergence year (horizontal), or single year differences (vertical)

• Where the new 13's overlap with the old 13's in the same brood, they sing quite differently - this difference drops off as you go away from the overlap zone
  
• We are probably seeing speciation in action here, as obvious as it will get
  
• When surveying the public about cicada emergence, they ask the question "Have you heard any flying saucers lately?"
  
• They are planning to put micro-transmitters on cicadas to track how far they actually travel before laying their eggs (since they have the reputation as clumsy flyers, it's not clear how effectively they 'spread' into new territory)
  
• Other long-lived insects do exist - Asian beetles have hatched in imported furinture more than 50 years old, and some moths can go into diapause (dormant) for up to 20 years
  
• Bob Dylan was in Princeton, New Jersey during the 1970 Brood X emergence, and was so impressed by the racket that he wrote the song "The Day of the Locusts".
  
• There are cicadas in Fiji and the U.S. Southwest that may also be periodic - but there is so little data on them that we can't be sure
  
• The Fijians make necklaces out of them
  

Other notes I cam across while doing this:

• Brood X will affect the mid-West much more than Virginia
  
• Brood II's 1996 emergence in Virginia was heavier than what is expected out of Brood X
  
• Brood X is heaviest in southern Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio
  
• A USDA entomologist, Charles Marlatt, came up with the Roman numerals for the broods
  
• They simply indicate the different successive years they emerged when he started counting
  
• ...hmm. You could easily figure out when he started counting, methinks. Bonus Mensa question: when will they again emerge in order?
  
• A visiting Swedish minister wrote home about an emergence in 1715. It was Brood X!
  

Where were you in the summer of 1987? 1970? 1953? 1936? 1919? 1902?

And where will you be in 2012?

Cinco de Mayo: The Real Story

I have found returning to this piece each year on this date useful, now that my aging brain cannot easily recall historical facts...

By John Shepler

piece removed under threat of legal action by John Shepler. Have a nice day.

Gutenberg, Richter, Omori, Mallet, Mercalli, Love, Lamb, Rayleigh, Jeffreys, & Benioff:

Argh. NBC's show "10.5" has done a lot of damage! To science, that is. What a bunch of hooey. I put this one firmly in a category with "The Core" and "Armageddon." Just watching the little toy train collapse into an opening crevice made me cringe, and I lost interest.

Here's my (short) list of serious scientific problems and outright inaccuracies in NBC's 10.5:

• First off, the title: 10.5 refers to the magnitude of the supposed earthquake. Earthquake magnitudes are on a logarithmic scale, so a 10.5 is ten times bigger than a magnitude 9.5, which happens to be the largest recorded earthquake. Logically enough, earthquake magnitudes also depend on the size of the fault surface that ruptures - the larger the surface that lets go, the more energy is released. The 9.5 that occurred on May 22 1960 in Chile was from a fault surface over 1,000 km long with about 200,000 km^2 of total fault rupture area. A 10.5 earthquake, releasing ten times the energy, would need between 1,250,000 and 2 million km^2 of fault area. Since most faults in California reach only a few tens of km into the earth, this would mean that the fault would have to be about, oh, say 10,000 to 60,000 km long. Umm, I don't think so. Earthquakes this big are impossible.
  
• Sealing the fault with nuclear bombs? Oh please. Let's just compare energies for a moment. On December 10 I noted that a magnitude 4.5 earthquake releases about 100 kt of energy. A 10.5 earthquake would release about 100 Gt of energy. Yes folks, 100 GIGAtons. You would have to lock the fault against that kind of energy. A totally back of the envelope estimate, I know, but say we tried to equal that energy with our biggest bomb, the B53, which can get up to a 9 Mt yield. We'd need 11,000 bombs. Oh wait, we only have 50 of them. ...let's throw in the next biggest as well, the B83, with yields up to 1.2 Mt. Even counting all the energy from the B53's, we would still need 83,000 B83's, and we only have 650 of those. You see where I am going with this. It wouldn't matter if the Russians, the British, the French, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Israelis, the South Africans and the North Koreans gave us their entire stockpiles. We couldn't bounce enough rubble, even if this kind of technique would work.
  

Of course, that kind of analysis is rubbish, given the first point. But it clearly points out that NBC does not understand logarithms, and also that the earthquake magnitude scale is pretty useless when you get that big.

So what is the biggest earthquake possible? My guess is that a fault area two to three times the size of the 1960 Chile event is possible. In terms of magnitude, that translates to about 9.8 to 9.9.

I don't want to think about what would happen if one of these events were to arrive - NBC didn't get the specifics right about the phenomena. There would be no large gaping (mawing!) crevices, no California dropping off into the ocean, but they did get things right about many structures collapsing (but not the Golden Gate or Space Needle), and about rushing water. Probably the worst part about an event like this would be the tsunami. More about coastal tsunamis in another post.

I toss a concessionary bone to seismologists here: I have ignored the issue that there are different kinds of magnitude, and have simply used body wave magnitude, M(w).

I was happy to notice an article in EOS' GeoFIZZ column (login required) today by Los Alamos' Andrew Newman which also went through this exercise. Newman points out that a 10.5 would be ten thousand times as big as the 1994 Northridge quake. Newman also answered the question "When will California drop off into the ocean?" His answer: "During sweeps week."

Of course, there are plenty of people out there picking on movies and TV series like these. Here are two of those sites: http://www.nitpickers.com/ and http://www.moviemistakes.com/.

I'm amazed people have this much time on their hands.

Brood X Cicadamania:

Click here to enter Cicadamania-space.

I'm getting my earplugs ready. Also, my fork. Yum!

Out of sequence posts:

As you have probably noticed, posting has been a little sparse lately...

I have been jotting down quick thoughts though, that have developed into longer pieces that may appear out of sequence. You may want to scroll down every so often to see if I have inserted a piece somewhere in the sequence that you have not yet read (none earlier than April 9).

Jahiliyyah babble:

I was interested this morning to hear that the media has finally picked up on one of the reasons for the Madrid 3/11 bombings. Spain was once part of the Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, when it was under Moorish rule from the early 700s to 1492 (remember Charlton Heston in El Cid?). The peninsula was known as al-Andalus, a name which lives on today in the name of the province Andalucia.

The radical (and some would claim this is the Wahabbi) Islamic world view behind much of the current terrorism divides the world into two: the Dar al-Islam, where muslim governments exert Sharia law, and the Dar al-Harb, or the House of War - land yet to be conquered by Islam.

A central tenet of Islam holds that land once under the Dar al-Islam must never be ceded back to the Dar al-Harb. All effort is to be put into regaining lost lands, no matter how long it takes: i.e. Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Spain. The most extreme view holds that most of what the West would consider muslim governments are in fact in Dar al-Harb, because these governments do not enforce strict Sharia: Jordan, Syria, Egypt - and even Saudi Arabia itself, home of most Wahabbis. This is partly the reasoning behind the violence in these countries, and unfortunately there is no long-term solution, because compromise is explicitly prohibited.

More moderate muslim philosophers have added other houses: the Dar al-Amn, or House of Safety, describing muslims living under non-muslim (but tolerant) Western governments (also called Dar al-Shahadah, the House of Testimony); and the Dar al-Dawa, or House of Invitation, describing lands where Islam is newly arrived, but not yet the law of the land.

We might not like being labeled as "Crusaders," but we will eventually have that role forced upon us as the Dar al-Islam achieves its long-term objective, the elimination of the Dar al-Harb.

Perhaps we should send missionaries to convert them? Oh no, wait - that's their plan.

Konrad Lorenz:

We are by no means professional "birders," or even amateurs. We simply enjoy watching birds in our backyard, and we have an identification guide. A dangerous combination, producing pseudo-experts. So, given that caveat, here is our report:

Our first female Ruby-throated hummingbird -Archilocus colubris- of the year has arrived at our feeders. We also have two males sorting out their territories. The count will rise monotonically to the absolute fury we get around August, when we have an uncountable cloud of 20 or so psychotic chatterers surrounding the feeders. My target this year is to get one to sit on my finger - I'm confident this can be done, since last year they were tolerant of me sitting a few inches from them...

Other birds we get:

• Blackbirds (Brewer's?) - Euphagus cyanocephalus
  
• Red-winged Blackbirds - Agelaius phoeniceus
  
• Eastern Blue Birds - Sialia sialis
  
• Blue Jays - Cyanocitta cristata
  
• Northern Cardinals - Cardinalis cardinalis
  
• Black-capped Chickadees - Parus atricapillus
  
• Brown-headed Cowbirds - Molothrus ater
  
• American Crows - Corvus brachyrhynchos(?)
  
• Doves (Rock/Mourning?) - Columba livia/Zenaida macroura
  
• Indigo Bunting (?) - Passerina cyanea
  
• Purple Finches - Carpodacus purpureus
  
• American Goldfinches - Carduelis tristis
  
• Canada Geese - Branta canadensis
  
• Grackles (Common?) - Quiscalus quiscula
  
• Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks - Pheucticus ludovicianus
  
• Dark-eyed Juncos - Junco hyemalis
  
• Purple Martins - Progne subis
  
• American Robin - Turdus migratorius (no giggling in the back there...)
  
• Chipping Sparrows - Spizella passerina
  
• House Sparrows - Passer domesticus
  
• European Starlings - Sturnus vulgaris
  
• Tufted Titmice - Parus bicolor
  
• Woodpeckers (Red-headed/-bellied?)
  
• Wrens (Carolina/House/Winter?)
  
• Vireos - Vireo atricapillus?
  

An interesting site to look up arrivals and even enter your own birding data, if you're serious about it: eBird. A less intimidating website, for the casual surfer: Bird Nature.

Operation "San Luis":

I recently read the accident investigation report for the Brazilian rocket explosion that occurred on August 22 last year, killing 21 people. The report was released in February, and is available here (in Portuguese, as a 130-page PDF). I posted a note last year on the intended launch date (Aug 25), but much of that post was dedicated to a similar launchpad accident in the Soviet Union.

I will pick up the story from Brazil here. All the pictures included below are from that report, and most are linked to larger versions so that you can see details. The report itself contains many more pictures and diagrams.

The report is a solid piece of failure analysis, done in 172 days by a group of 23 commissioners, 3 of of which were from the science community, 2 as representatives of the victim's families, along with 6 Russian specialists, and 4 other collaborators. The commission took the basic approach mandated by the Brazilian Aeronautical Accident Investigation and Prevention Center (CENIPA), guided by the triptych: man - machine - environment.

The commission looked at several different factors:

• The Meteorological Factor;
  
• The Materials Factor;
  
• The Operational Factor; and
  
• The Human Factor
  

This is obviously a cursory skip through some very serious material, but I'm not about to translate the whole report, and Babelfish won't do the trick for those of you who are not lusophones. So bear with me.

Brazil is not without experience in rocketry. The country had hosted NASA tracking stations since 1956, and had built its own tracking stations immediately after the launches of Sputnik and Explorer I. By 1964 a national rocket program had been established, and Brazil launched a U.S.-made Nike Apache in December 1965 with Brazilian personnel trained at NASA Wallops and Goddard. By 1967 a completely Brazilian-designed and -built rocket, SONDA I, was capable of taking a 4 kg payload up to 65 km. Two-hundred twenty five SONDA I's had flown when the program ended in 1977.

Building on this experience, and on Canada's Black Brant III, the SONDA II program developed a single-stage 370 kg rocket capable of taking a 20 to 70 kg payload to 100 or 50 km. Sixty-one SONDA II's were launched (no dates are given for the program - the report does note the SONDA II program was "loosely structured" and "poorly documented").

The SONDA III program, begun in 1971 and still operational today, was a large leap. This two-stage 1,590 kg rocket can boost a 150 kg payload to a 500 km apogee, and has been launched 31 times (the latest launch was 12 May 2002). However, as large a technical achievement as this apogee and payload represent, they are still not orbital, and putting a Brazilian satellite into orbit with a Brazilian rocket remained a national goal.

The SONDA IV program provided the intermediate step, with an enormously more complicated system for management of the design, testing, production, assembly and launch. The report, for whatever reasons, does not give any figures for the SONDA IV launch weight, payload, or apogee capabilities.

I gathered the following figures from elsewhere: first launch, April 28, 1989; Height: 11 m (other sources have 9,2 m); Wt. 1656 kg; payload 300 - 500 kg; apogee 1000 - 700 km.

Here's a schematic of the SONDA IV:

With an intermediate program, the VS-40, used to test the proposed 4th stage engines in a vacuum for an orbital rocket system , the Brazillian program reached the point of producing the VLS, or Veiculo Lancador de Satelites ("Satellite Launch Vehicle," proving that Brazil needs to come up with better names).

Here is a schematic of the VLS (Coifa is shroud, Propulsor is engine, others are left to the reader...) :

The VLS is theoretically capable of putting 100 to 300 kg payload into a 250 - 1000 km circular orbit, with equatorial to polar inclinations.

Here is a mission profile, indicating the time for each stage's burn, its altitude on ignition, and the velocity:

Two previous launch failures with the VLS have occurred:

VLS-1 V01 on December 2, 1997 self-destructed 29 seconds into flight when the non-ignition of 1st stage engine D caused an excessive and unrecoverable angle of attack. Faulty pyrotechnic ignition systems were identified as the root cause (Portuguese report available here).

VLS-1 V02 on December 11, 1999 was destroyed by the range safety officer after 189 seconds of flight. An explosion occurred on ignition of the second stage that caused the thrid stage to separate prematurely - this stage ignited after the correct elapsed time, but of course the vehicle was by this time off-course on a ballistic trajectory. When the predicted impact point neared the edge of the secured area in the Atlantic, the RSO sent the self-destruct signal. Unexpected and uneven ignition of the forward section of the solid propellant in the second stage was identified as the cause of the explosion (Portuguese report available here).

By 2003 the VLS program had been restarted and a third launch attempt was scheduled for August 25, 2003. The various stages and components were all airlifted to the launch site, Alcantara, in the State of Maranhao by the Brazilian Air Force:

A view of the Alcantara site, with the long engine storage and conditioning building in the center, and the vehicle assembly building in the rear.

Here is a view of on of the first stage engines in storage inside the engine building:

Here is a schematic of the assembly sequence, indicating that it was expected that an entire capaign could be carried out within 60 days. The accident occurred within the last frame, during vehicle testing, but before the (2) simulated count-downs.

Here is a view of the assembly sequence, with engine C of the first stage being attached. According to the above sequence, this must be between day -43 and -32 in the assembly sequence. Note that the equipment on the top of this stage is visible here (we will return to one of these pieces below...).

Here is a view of the fourth stage being mated to the stack. According to the above sequence, this must be between day -23 and -21 in the assembly sequence.

A view of the completed stack with the vehicle assembly building rolled back from the launch pad during the verticality check. According to the above sequence, this must be between day -15 and -2 in the assembly sequence.

here is a view from the exterior of the vehicle assembly building, showing the VLS enclosed, and the platforms that allow technician access.

Here is a schematic of the vehicle assembly building. Pay particular attention to the location of the monitoring cameras looking down on each of the access platforms.

This is a frame from the security tape at the instant the explosion occurred. Each quadrant is labelled, and represents the image from the respective camera. At the instant of frame capture, quadrant (and camera 2) had just refreshed, so images 3 and 4 are from a few milliseconds earlier. Note the light from the explosion showing through the gap on the access platform in camera 2. Also, on camera 4, note the yellow plastic covering over the shroud that was used to blow refrigerated and dehumidified air over the shroud and enclosed satellite.

This is the next frame. Cameras 1 and 2 have been destroyed. The light from the explosion flames is now visible in camera 3.

This is the view from the monitor camera mounted on the roof of the engine storage building, looking down the access road to the vehicle assembly building, now consumed by the fire. Stages 1,2 and 3 are alight at this point.

This is a view of the aftermath, showing what was left of the assembly building, which collapsed on itself as the flames eroded one complete side. People near enough to hear, but far enough away to survive testified that they heard the sound of several normally functioning engines. This was also supported by the wear patterns on the launch pad and the location of debris. Of course, the locking bolts had not been released so this was in essence an unintended partial static test.

Now to the culprit. This is a schematic of the detonator/initiator/ignitor at the top of the second stage engines.

The most probable cause for the unintended premature ignition of second stage engine D is thought to have been an static electrical charge built up by the cold, dry air blown over the shroud that caused a spark somewhere in the ignition system. All other electrical circuits appear to have been properly grounded, but the problem of static electricity is not common in the humid tropics, and had been overlooked.

A view of the detonator assembly on the top of the second stage engines (this is part of what can be seen in the assembly photo I referred to above). Engine and ingitor pressure sensors are labelled, as are the detonators and the ignitor head.

A paragraph from the preface struck a particular chord for me:

Acidentes, como ensina a longa e frequentemente sofrida experiencia humana, raramente sao obras do acaso. Ao contrario, costumam ser o ultimo elo de uma cadeia de eventos, razao pela qual formouse a consciencia de que as comissoes constituidas para investiga-los nao devem ver a investigacao como um fim em si mesma, mas como um poderoso instrumento de diagnostico, por meio do qual e possivel atingir niveis de desempenho operacional mais seguros.

Accidents, as taught by the lengthy and frequently suffered human experience, are rarely chance events. On the contrary, they tend to be the last link in a chain of events, reason for which that the commissions sonstituted to investigate them should not see the investigation as a goal in itself, but as a powerful diagnostic tool, through which it is possible to attain safer levels of operation.

AMINTAS ROCHA BRITO
ANTONIO SERGIO CEZARINI
CARLOS ALBERTO PEDRINI
CESAR AUGUSTO COSTALONGA VAREJAO
DANIEL FARIA GONCALVES
ELISEU REINALDO MORAES VIEIRA
GIL CESAR BAPTISTA MARQUES
GINES ANANIAS GARCIA
JONAS BARBOSA FILHO
JOSE APARECIDO PINHEIRO
JOSE EDUARDO DE ALMEIDA
JOSE EDUARDO PEREIRA
JOSE PEDRO CLARO PERES DA SILVA
LUIS PRIMON DE ARAUJO
MARIO CESAR DE FREITAS LEVY
MASSANOBU SHIMABUKURO
MAURICIO BIELLA DE SOUZA VALLE
ROBERTO TADASHI SEGUCHI
RODOLFO DONIZETTI DE OLIVEIRA
SIDNEY APARECIDO DE MORAES
WALTER PEREIRA JUNIOR

Brazil: Vampire Bats Kill 14 Locals in Amazon

APRIL 07, 2004 - Fourteen inhabitants of the community of Sao Bento, located along the Acuti-Pereira River, near Marajo, state of Para died of rabies transmitted by vampire bats. Health authorities are working to immunize inhabitants and domestic animals in the region.

Source - Diario do Para

Darn, after reading that headline I was thinking "giant bats" or at least a swarm of them descending on running, screaming inhabitants... but no, it was just rabies contracted through regular, run of the mill night-time vampires feeding off sleeping humans. Sigh. The Amazon is just so ...boring.

Edward R. Murrow:

...would not be proud.

Essay collection.

Do not drink carbonated cola and read these at the same time.

Return of Archilocus Colubris:

We spotted the first returning Ruby Throated Humming Bird at our feeder today. A sporty adult male.

Right on time, too. See last year's post.

Prometheus unbound:

This site is eerily attractive. In a Lara Croft kind of way.

Several colleagues have reacted the same way to an attractive young woman who wears leather, rides a Kawasaki VERY fast, and carries a Geiger counter.

Reading on the meter is 763 micro-Roentgens per hour. In the background, the sarcophagus around the Chernobyl reactor. Run Elena, run!

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán:

At about this time on this day in 1948, the Colombian Chancellor Laureano Gómez was reconvening the Ninth Panamerican Conference in Bogotá, Colombia. There were some interesting characters in Bogotá, including George Marshall and Fidel Castro. Marshall had given the opening speech on March 30th, and Castro was attending a student-organized shadow conference.

As might be imagined, most of the Colombian political elite of the time was attending the conference. A notable exception who had been excluded from the invitees was Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a rising star who was causing a stir with his populist speeches and legal defenses of "the downtrodden." Gaitán was widely seen as the presumptive heir of the Liberal party's mantle, despite some considerable opposition not only from the Conservative party, but also from his own party's elite. There was a palpable feeling that in the upcoming elections, the Liberals under Gaitán would finally be able to wrest power from the Conservative's stranglehold.

As Bob Dix put it in his 1987 book The Politics of Colombia: "Colombia's two major parties, the Liberal and the Conservative, are among the oldest in the world. Many of the other Latin American countries divided politically along similar lines during the 19th century, but in most cases only vestiges at best remain of that original partisan configuration. In Colombia much of political life since about 1848, whether electoral or violent, has been conducted in the name of the country's two 'historic collectivities.' Despite persistent factionalism, periodic 'union' governments, the occasional appearance of third parties, and long periods of one-party hegemony, the two parties have survived and put down exceedingly deep roots. And, in contrast with the great majority of Latin American countries, elections, while not always strictly competitive, have played a meaningful role throughout most of the history of the republic. Although strongly elitist in the manner of their operation, Colombia's traditional parties have historically evoked the profound psychic attachment of most Colombians--even those who have known and cared little about doctrines and programs. By the same token, parties formed in opposition to the country's elitist democracy--and particularly those that have sought to restructure the electorate along class lines--have fared very poorly. Thus Colombia is exceptional among the major countries of Latin America in not having even one signifcant party of a democratic socialist, Marxist, Christian Democratic, or, more vaguely, 'populist' stripe."

Gaitán was at the forefront of a Liberal splinter movement that was close to populist as Colombian politics would get.

As Gaitán stepped out of his office building onto one of the busiest streets in the city, he was shot several times in the head by a lone gunman. Word of the assassination spread like wildfire, unleashing the pent-up feelings of the citizens in an absolute orgy of looting, destruction and wanton violence that the country had never seen before. The center of Bogotá burned for three days in what is now known as the Bogotazo. A long period of turmoil followed, called La Violencia, until in 1957 the parties agreed to a shared government, with the Presidency alternating and higher political posts balanced between them for four successive four-year cycles. Although this did temporarily settle the political landscape, the Colombian psyche has never recovered.

Inter-party violence during La Violencia led to a great number of displaced persons - Liberals ousted from majority-Conservative towns, and vice-versa. Much of the violence afflicting the country today, even the roots of the current guerilla movements and the drug trade, can be partially attributed to the roaming banditry that resulted from these displacements.

Despite these disruptions, the conference did succeed in producing one fundamental result: the Organization of American States, or OAS.

The disturbances also fundamentally altered the lives of many of Bogotá's citizens, including one certain Gabriel García Márquez, who was nearby and was able to witness the scene within minutes of the shooting.

More on Gaitán, García Márquez, the United Fruit Company, and whether history is really fiction in another post.

"I am going to have to disintegrate you..."

For those of you itching to get ahead with Dubya's plans for travel to the Red Planet.
GeoPlayer Mars Demo Download

Fish-eye Sky Cam:

A quick note to mention I spotted this site - concam.net: The Night Sky Live. The animations are quite nice, and give a good feel for the rotation of the sky at different latitudes.

Diefentown:

Hello from Ottawa, where there is still ice on the Rideau Canal. You couldn't exactly skate on it, but the ice still has not completely broken up yet. There is still snow in the low spots. Brrr. I am at a meeting at Carleton University, and I had to laugh when I saw students (slaves to fashion) in capri pants, tube tops and flip-flops. Even walking around in the under-ground tunnels it's cold!

It's good to be back in Canada and see the familiar Mac's Milk and Tim Hortons, to smell the DuMauriers and the Pizza-Pizza, and yes, even to listen to Gord Miller ramble on about the Stanley Cup. While much is still the same over twenty years after I left, there are differences. The Toronto Raptors? The Ottawa Senators? Well, at least the Leafs still suck. I am still disturbed when I hear a line-up without Inge Hammerstrom and Borje Salming.

Ottawa seems to be coming into its own, and growing out of being the sleepy hamlet chosen Solomonically by Queen Victoria to quell the debate about where to locate Canada's Capital city. While I suspect it will always be under the shadow of Toronto and Montreal for urban chic and sophisitication, it does have its charms. One of the bigger charms is the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which I love to visit whenever I can. This time, in a whirlwind 90 minute visit before I was whisked off to the airport, I was able to see a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. I was interested not only because of their historical significance, but because I currently happen to be ploughing my way through several books about the Nag Hammadi Library, a similar (but much younger) set of papyri found hidden in jars. More on the Library and what caused me to dig out these books from my basement after over a decade in another post.

Ah Canada. In the U.S., we have dear Nancy Reagan and her astrologers. In Canada, the mediums are sometimes closer to the seat of power. Sometimes they are the seat of power - Prime Minister Mackenzie King used to consult with the ghosts of his dog Pat and of his mother about policy issues. They lived in his closet. Mercifully, the public didn't find out much about this and several other of his rather odd habits until after he had passed away.

And then there's The Dief. Having a sense of humour about your leaders is always a good thing. Especially when they allow it, and when they give you such good material to work with.