Puttin' away poutine:

Yum! Or at least that's what I thought when I saw these in the store at the Montreal train station... Poutine flavoured potato chips! Poutine is a local Quebecois favourite - usually consisting of french fries drenched in gravy and cheese curds. Sounds strange, but is artery-cloggingly delicious. My verdict - stick to the original. The chips were not all that.


They were so-so 

This product also caught my eye because the "poutine" topic was a recurring meme on the NewtonTalk discussion list. Sadly, I did not have my Newton with me to pose properly for the photograph.

GIA Garuda:

This handsome fellow is crouching in the foyer of the ICAO building in Montreal, where I am this week for a conference.


Kashyap x Vinata progeny 

The foyer has gifts from several countries to the ICAO, including a very creepy urn from North Korea, but this beautiful carving of Garuda from Indonesia was my favourite.

Let's hope he protects me from the snakes in this conference.

(For some reason, the photos I have uploaded lately are corrupted. I have to use a PC emulator on a Mac to deal with Blogger's "Hello" mechanism, and obviously that isn't quite working right. For this particular photo, the larger version accessed when you click on the picture here is OK. There are others where the larger version is the corrupted one. ...sigh.)

Consistency:

Yes, I know this silly graphic has been here forever without any text... blogging is not everything, I was out living and working.

What is the point of the graphic? I thought today's forecast showed nicely that you can live only a few hundred kilometers from the equator and still be comfortable. Those of you who know me or pay attention to my postings will be able to easily guess the city this is from. And the time of year does not matter - the temperatures would always be similar, just the cloud cover would change.


Sigh. Life near the Equator is so boring. 

Archie returns:

Spotted the first hummingbird of the season today. Adult male, from his red gorget. Right on schedule, same week as the last two years.

Here's a photo I took during a previous season:


Archilocus colubris 

Note the absence of a red gorget, which means that this is either a female or a subadult male. No way of telling them apart.

Rocket fuel:

On a recent trip to Brazil's Space Research Institute (INPE), I spotted this official car making the rounds, replenishing coffee throughout the campus.


"Executive power"

You can get your coffee sugared, or without sugar, but never, never, ever decaf.

As you can see, it has serious racks of java.

caffeine jackpot

This is one reason why Brazil is capable of building its own satellites, and why they are very close to being able to launch them with their very own launch system. Coffee delivery infrastructure is critical for engineering and science.

Return to Flight:

On this anniversary of the first shuttle flight, and the forty-fifth of Gagarin's flight as first man, I decided to focus on one aspect of the upcoming STS-114 mission to which I have a (tenuous) link.

I have posted previously about another workhorse in the U.S. research aircraft fleet, the WB-57. For some time now, the two NASA birds have been used to photograph shuttle launches. For the upcoming launch they were tasked with acquiring high-quality video from lift-off to just past the solid rocket booster (SRB) separation.


926 and 928...

These are the two NASA WBs - known from their fleet numbers as simply 926 and 928. They are modified B-57 Canberras, made by Martin based on the original English Electric design. Both were originally made in 1963, and their wings were modified in 1967 by General Dynamics for high-altitude reconnaisance missions. 926 was RB-57D 53-3974 while in the USAF, and 928 was RB-57B 52-1536, and they most probably did high altitude sampling over US and Chinese nuclear tests. Lately they have flown through the exhaust plumes left by the shuttle's SRBs and main engines.

HDTV!

To provide high-quality imaging of the shuttle, SRBs and the external tank (ET) during ascent, both 926 and 928 will be carrying specially manufactured imaging systems. NASA contracted the Aerospace Corporation and the Southern Research Institute to put together the equipment and plan the mission for the WBs. This is a shot of the imaging package - a Celestron telescope lens provides an aperture for near infra-red (NIR) and HDTV imaging, and an NTSC system provides the initial sighting for the tracking software.

nose job

In order to track the shuttle's ascent, a turret and gimbal system will be attached to the nose of the aircraft. This is the hangar at JSC where they are doing the first mods to attach the turret.

flankers

During the actual launch, the WBs will fly at 60,000 feet along tracks on either side of the ascent path, giving views of the orbiter, ET and SRBs through SRB separation+10. The technical constraint areas for the position of the WBs during a particular ascent moment are the blue boxes.

RTF!

These are simulations done by the Aerospace Corp. for what the HDTV FOV should be from both aircraft, at different times during the ascent. WAVE stands for WB-57 Ascent Video Experiment.

Of course, since the data will be in HDTV, I am sure that NASA's PR Office is already salivating. But no, it will not be shown live - the data is being recorded on board, and will have to be downloaded at Patrick AFB when the birds return. Time to release, probably about launch + 30 hours. I can't wait. I hope to be in Orlando during the launch window, and will keep my eyes glued to the East.

Non habemus Papam:

Sede vacante 

As I suspected it would, the death of Pope John Paul II hit me hard. I'm not sure why, since I am an errant Catholic, but he seems to have attracted many in that way. I dug out a set of rosaries he blessed while I was at the Vatican in December of 1993, and I have been carrying them around in my pocket. And no, I didn't get an audience with His Holiness - he blessed the rosaries as I held them out above my head among the large crowd in St. Peter's Square (Catholics count such things as legitimate blessings), and then took them back to my mother, who was dying at the time.

In creating the following table, I was trying to figure out how long conclaves have lasted, what the lengths of the interregnums between Popes have been, and what the lengths of papal reigns have been. Well, of course, it wasn't that simple.

First was finding a listing of Popes - since the Papacy extends back nearly 2000 years, there are several different lists, and they differ in agreeing who was and was not a Pope. The two 'best' lists I found were at advent.org and in the wikipedia papal list (I suspect the wiki author(s) used advent.org as a source, which yields the good agreement - I have posted discussions of this dangerous sampling tactic before). The Vatican website, surprisingly, has very little covering this set of basic facts (in any language - I looked, they all go back only to Leo XIII).

The second issue was that the advent.org listing did not have dates, and the article under each of the links for the Popes did not consistently give dates for birth, death, election or the beginning dates of the electing or following conclaves, even for recent Popes. The first of my questions, "what have lengths of conclaves been?" had to be abandoned due to lack of (quickly available) data. There is a good set of articles on the more recent conclaves at wikipedia, and a listing of conclaves at Salvador Miranda's site.

The other questions, the length of interregnums and reigns, quickly ran into problems for several reasons. Although the Wiki site has dates listed by each Pope's name, I was not sure of several things: was the start date the election or the coronation? (the definition of when the elected person becomes Pope has changed with time). There are also some overlapping dates - the death of a Pope post-dates the election/corontaion of the next. Are these abdications and/or resignations? I did not go back to check these cases.

The most fundamental question revolved around the dates themselves: for dates before 1752, I was not sure whether the stated dates were using the Gregorian, proleptic Gregorian, or Julian calendars. Also, since 1752 was the year the U.K. and its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar, and the events were occurring in Rome, which had dropped the Julian calendar during Gregory XIII's reign in 1572, what about the dates between 1572 and 1752? Under which calendar were they stated? And of course, the exact dates get very hazy as one goes further back, and there are cases of second or even third terms after depositions/revolutions. etc. I decided only to take this list back to Popes since the year 1000.

To top it all off, Excel cannot handle dates before 1900 (1903 on a Mac) without special add-in functions, so calculations for these pre-1900 dates were impossible until I hunted down free extended date add-in functions (which, incidentally, do not properly account for the fact that 14 September 1752 was the day after 2 September 1752, in the U.K. at least).

So, with the above caveats, here is the table:

Pope	Length of Reign	Date of Death	Length of FOLLOWING interregnum	Date of Election
John Paul II (the Great)	9,665	2-Apr-2005		16-Oct-1978
John Paul I	33	28-Sep-1978	18	26-Aug-1978
Paul VI	5,525	6-Aug-1978	20	21-Jun-1963
John XXIII	1,679	3-Jun-1963	18	28-Oct-1958
Pius XII	7,161	9-Oct-1958	19	2-Mar-1939
Pius XI	6,213	10-Feb-1939	20	6-Feb-1922
Benedict XV	2,698	22-Jan-1922	15	3-Sep-1914
Pius X	4,034	20-Aug-1914	14	4-Aug-1903
Leo XIII	9,280	20-Jul-1903	15	20-Feb-1878
Pius IX	11,559	7-Feb-1878	13	16-Jun-1846
Gregory XVI	5,606	9-Jun-1846	7	2-Feb-1831
Pius VIII	610	1-Dec-1830	63	31-Mar-1829
Leo XII	1,962	10-Feb-1829	49	28-Sep-1823
Pius VII	8,559	20-Aug-1823	39	14-Mar-1800
Pius VI	8,961	29-Aug-1799	197	15-Feb-1775
Clement XIV	1,953	22-Sep-1774	146	18-May-1769
Clement XIII	3,864	2-Feb-1769	105	6-Jul-1758
Benedict XIV	6,468	3-May-1758	64	17-Aug-1740
Adoption of Gregorian calendar in the U.K. and its colonies
Clement XII	3,496	6-Feb-1740	193	12-Jul-1730
Benedict XIII	2,096	21-Feb-1730	141	27-May-1724
Innocent XIII	1,034	7-Mar-1724	81	8-May-1721
Clement XI	7,421	19-Mar-1721	50	23-Nov-1700
Innocent XII	3,364	27-Sep-1700	57	12-July-1691
Alexander VIII	483	1-Feb-1691	161	6-Oct-1689
Innocent XI	4,707	11-aug-1689	56	21-Sep-1676
Clement X	2,276	22-jul-1676	61	29-Apr-1670
Clement IX	903	9-dec-1669	141	20-Jun-1667
Alexander VII	4,428	22-may-1667	29	7-apr-1655
Innocent X	3,765	7-jan-1655	90	16-sep-1644
Urban VIII	7,663	29-jul-1644	49	6-aug-1623
Gregory XV	874	3-jul-1623	34	9-feb-1621
Paul V	5,736	28-jan-1621	12	16-may-1605
Leo XI	11	12-apr-1605	34	1-apr-1605
Clement VIII	4,781	3-mar-1605	29	30-jan-1592
Innocent IX	62	30-dec-1591	31	29-oct-1591
Gregory XIV	314	15-oct-1591	14	5-dec-1590
Urban VII	12	27-sep-1590	69	15-sep-1590
Sixtus V	1,951	27-aug-1590	19	24-apr-1585
Gregory XIII	4,715	10-apr-1585	14	13-may-1572
Julian calendar dropped by the church
St. Pius V	2,306	1-may-1572	12	7-jan-1566
Pius IV	2,176	9-dec-1565	29	25-dec-1559
Paul IV	1,548	18-aug-1559	129	23-may-1555
Marcellus II	22	1-may-1555	22	9-apr-1555
Julius III	1,870	23-mar-1555	17	7-feb-1550
Paul III	5,507	10-nov-1549	89	13-oct-1534
Clement VII	3,956	25-sep-1534	18	26-nov-1523
Adrian VI	401	14-feb-1523	285	9-jan-1522
Leo X	3,189	1-dec-1521	39	9-mar-1513
Julius II	3,401	21-feb-1513	16	31-oct-1503
Pius III	26	18-oct-1503	13	22-sep-1503
Alexander VI	4,023	18-aug-1503	35	11-aug-1492
Innocent VIII	2,887	25-jul-1492	17	29-aug-1484
Sixtus IV	4,752	12-aug-1484	17	9-aug-1471
Paul II	2,521	26-jul-1471	14	30-aug-1464
Pius II	2,188	15-aug-1464	15	19-aug-1458
Callistus III	1,216	6-aug-1458	13	8-apr-1455
Nicholas V	2,940	24-mar-1455	15	6-mar-1447
Eugene IV	5,836	23-feb-1447	11	3-mar-1431
Martin V	4,849	20-feb-1431	11	11-nov-1417
Gregory XII	3,138	4-jul-1415	861	30-nov-1406
Innocent VII	750	6-nov-1406	24	17-oct-1404
Boniface IX	5,446	1-oct-1404	16	2-nov-1389
Urban VI	4,208	15-oct-1389	18	8-apr-1378
Gregory XI	2,643	26-mar-1378	13	30-dec-1370
Blessed Urban V	3,004	19-dec-1370	11	28-sep-1362
Innocent VI	3,555	12-sep-1362	16	18-dec-1352
Clement VI	3,866	6-dec-1352	12	7-may-1342
Benedict XII	2,683	25-apr-1342	12	20-dec-1334
John XXII	6,693	4-dec-1334	16	7-aug-1316
Clement V	3,211	20-apr-1314	840	5-jul-1305
Blessed Benedict XI	259	7-jul-1304	363	22-oct-1303
Boniface VIII	3,212	11-oct-1303	11	24-dec-1294
St. Celestine V	161	13-dec-1294	11	5-jul-1294
Nicholas IV	1,503	4-apr-1292	822	22-feb-1288
Honorius IV	731	3-apr-1287	325	2-apr-1285
Martin IV	1,495	28-mar-1285	5	22-feb-1281
Nicholas III	1,001	22-aug-1280	184	25-nov-1277
John XXI	254	20-may-1277	189	8-sep-1276
Adrian V	38	18-aug-1276	21	11-jul-1276
Blessed Innocent V	153	22-jun-1276	19	21-jan-1276
Blessed Gregory X	1,592	10-jan-1276	11	1-sep-1271
Clement IV	1,393	29-nov-1268	1,006	5-feb-1265
Urban IV	1,130	2-oct-1264	126	29-aug-1261
Alexander IV	2,356	25-may-1261	96	12-dec-1254
Innocent IV	4,203	27-dec-1254	-15 (?)	25-jun-1243
Celestine IV	16	10-nov-1241	592	25-oct-1241
Gregory IX	5,270	22-aug-1241	64	19-mar-1227
Honorius III	3,895	18-mar-1227	1	18-jul-1216
Innocent III	6,764	16-jul-1216	2	8-jan-1198
Celestine III	2,476	8-jan-1198	0 (?)	30-mar-1191
Clement III	1,194	27-mar-1191	3	19-dec-1187
Gregory VIII	57	17-dec-1187	2	21-oct-1187
Urban III	693	19-oct-1187	2	25-nov-1185
Lucius III	1,485	25-sep-1185	61	1-sep-1181
Alexander III	8,028	30-aug-1181	2	7-sep-1159
Adrian IV	1,732	1-sep-1159	6	4-dec-1154
Anastasius IV	218	15-feb-1154	292	12-jul-1153
Blessed Eugene III	3,065	8-jul-1153	4	15-feb-1145
Lucius II	368	15-mar-1145	-28 (?)	12-mar-1144
Celestine II	164	8-mar-1144	4	26-sep-1143
Innocent II	4,970	24-sep-1143	2	14-feb-1130
Honorius II	1,886	13-feb-1130	1	15-dec-1124
Callistus II	2,141	13-dec-1124	2	2-feb-1119
Gelasius II	369	28-jan-1119	5	24-jan-1118
Paschal II	6,735	21-jan-1118	3	13-aug-1099
Blessed Urban II	4,156	29-jul-1099	15	12-mar-1088
Blessed Victor III	476	16-sep-1087	178	28-may-1086
St. Gregory VII	4,420	29-may-1085	364	22-apr-1073
Alexander II	4,221	21-apr-1073	1	30-sep-1061
Nicholas II	964	27-jul-1061	65	6-dec-1058
Stephen X	239	29-mar-1058	252	2-aug-1057
Victor II	837	28-jul-1057	5	13-apr-1055
St. Leo IX	1,892	19-apr-1054	359	12-feb-1049
Damasus II	23	9-aug-1048	187	17-jul-1048

The average papal reign over the last 1,000 years: 2,973 days.

The average interregnum: 93 days.

Schweitzer, Weiner, Lowenstam, and a T-rex named Sue:

You have probably heard about the recent discovery that scientist Mary Schweitzer made: soft tissue preserved inside a dinosaur bone. It was interesting to see the media frenzy that occurred - just about every major source carried the story. The trigger, of course, being the Jurassic Park aspects of it all: after de-mineralizing a 68 million year old T. rex bone, Dr. Schweitzer found pliable material, some tubular, with dark red to brown spheres enclosed. Both the pliable tube walls and the spheres had smaller, darker central portions. The immediate interpretation by the media was veins and red blood cells with nuclei, and of course from there it was a quick jump to dino-DNA.

There are some parts to the March 25 Science article ("Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex," Mary H. Schweitzer, Jennifer L. Wittmeyer, John R. Horner, and Jan K. Toporski Science 307: 1952-1955; doi 10.1126/science.1108397; abstract) that the media did not choose to follow, but which I found interesting. Perhaps you will too.

My first question was 'what did her team de-mineralize the fossils with?' It turns out they used 0.5 M ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, more commonly known as EDTA. I laughed, since EDTA is used as a food preservative, metal sequestrant and stabilizer in a lot of things we eat - check out the ingredients for many MacDonald's items (and since EDTA is used to chelate metals, it is often used in canning, as well as a poisoning antidote, and there is active debate about EDTA chelation therapy - but that's a whole 'nother subject...). In any case, it's currently thought to be safe to eat, and at the concentrations used in foods, it will not de-mineralize your bones and turn you into a quivering blob of collagen.

The next piece that the media did not pursue was the link to the T. rex nicknamed "Sue," the most complete T. rex ever found (~90% complete). Dr. Schweitzer's team used the same technique on specimens from several dinosaur fossils, including pieces of "Sue," to try and duplicate their results from the T. rex dug up in 2003 (and lo and behold, pliable material was found in the others, too! There were some really nasty lawsuits over the ownership of "Sue," and the fossil ended up on the auction block. The science of paleontology was at risk of losing this valuable find to a private collector, but luckily McDonald's, Disney, the Cal State system and several private individuals put up over 7 million dollars, and "Sue" ended up at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as specimen FMNH-PR-2081).

I thought the pictures that the media chose to use were odd, because they didn't show off the part of the story that they emphasized in their text. Here is the picture I saw used in almost all of the media (used w/ permission of Science):


MOR-1125 endosteal tissue 

Here the arrows indicate the flexible, fibrous, even 'stretchy' material left after de-mineralization - sure, it looks like a piece of meat with gristle, but the media's main focus was the blood cells and the nuclei, and these photos certainly don't show those.

So here is a set of four pictures, also used with permission from Science, that illustrate how startlingly good the preservation is in these samples, and that you probably did not see in the paper or on TV. Schweitzer was particularly careful to avoid calling these things 'capillaries,' 'nuclei,' 'organelles,' or even 'cells.' And I will be too. More on that later.

1) This is a shot of an area about 2 mm across, showing the structure of the interior of the femur on the T. rex MOR-555, from the Museum of the Rockies, also known as the "Wankel rex" after its discoverer. I don't know how often you dine on meat with the bone in it, and if you ever pick at marrow within that, but this texture is absolutely identifiable as bone interior:

Wankel endosteal bone surface 

2) This is a photomicrograph of the Wankel rex again, showing tubular structures about 50 micrometers across, with the enclosed darker spheres. I'd love to have a medical student look at this without knowing what it was, just to hear what they said:

Wankel vessel 

3) This is a shot of a piece from "Sue," showing the same type of micro-structures:

FMNH-PR-2081 

Note that you can see darker centres to some of the red spheres in both of the above photomicrographs.

4) Here is a shot of a microstructure from the 2003 juvenile T. rex, MOR-1125, which shows internal structure, as well as thin extensions protruding from the main body:

MOR-1125 

This looks very much like an osteoblast or osteocyte, or a bone-producing cell, from any modern animal. The extensions are known as filipodia and they fit into thin channels called canaliculi that allow the cells to pass information and nutrients through the dense calcium phosphate (apatite) bone matrix (here is a slide showing osteocytes in place from a fossil theropod's toe!). While osteocytes have been seen before in fossils, we had never seen internal structure. The microstructures inside the 'osteocyte' in the picture above are interpreted as the remnants of cellular organelles. Schweitzer's team also found microstructures in the other two T. rexes and the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus MOR-794 that looked very much like osteocytes. Immunoassay tests done against the materials from the first T. rex, MOR-1125, indicate that proteins from the original bone are highly likely to be present.

We do not know as much about what fossilization does and does not destroy as we thought we did. What Schweitzer's current work shows is that there are certain levels of physical microstructure that are preserved that we did not think were possible. Not much has yet been published about the possible preservation of the biochemical microstructure inside these things, which is where the holy grail of dino-DNA lies (but more on that later). It is slowly becoming clear that fossilization can preserve some very odd things - shapes of things certainly, like bones (even delicate ones in embryos), but also the overall shapes of soft tissues, like feathers, bananas, dinosaur heart, and even jellyfish. There are cases where fossil beetle casings and dinosaur feathers/hair (?) preserve their pigmentation, or colour.

But until now, no one had thought that cellular-level physical structures might be preserved. We knew that some of the original chemicals could be preserved - I worked with Heinz Lowenstam and Joe Kirschvink while I was at Caltech, and collected 63 million year-old Cretaceous ammonites (Baculites inornatus) from Baja California that still had mother of pearl lustre in them, in the unstable aragonite form (here are examples from Japan and from South Dakota). Based on ion exchange chromatography, Weiner, Lowenstam, Taborek and Hood found that the organic matrix in the shells of 80 million year old molluscs from Tennessee (Scabrotrigonia thoracica) probably had the primary, secondary and possibly even tertiary conformations of their proteins preserved. Weiner and Lowenstam also found that the isoleucine in fossil shells was sometimes not racemized - that is, it was still all of the same chirality (handedness), when most materials will naturally devolve into a 50-50 mix of epimers. The lack of epimerization for the shell in the intervening 63 million years, when the characteristic epimerization time is about 10^5 years, is thought to be due to the stabilization of the amino acids by the bioinorganic phase of the shell matrix. Whereas dinsoaur blood had never been found, traces of hemoglobin had been seen, by Schweitzer and others.

It exactly is this 'protection' afforded by the surrounding minerals in the dense bone that contributed to the preservation in the dinosaur soft tissues - as well as the burial under anoxic conditions in sediments that apparently did not allow bacterial action, or later flow of fluids that so often severely alter biological materials. The study of all this, how living materials become fossils, is called 'taphonomy,' and obviously these latest results will have a large impact on this field. One large point in the Schweitzer article is that these types of microstructures have never been found before not because they are rare, but because we had never thought them possible, and so had never even looked.

So the question really comes down to 'exactly what level of detail is preserved in these specimens, and can we expect even better examples?'

We can probably expect to learn a good deal about cellular structure, since the morphology seems to be well preserved, whether with the original biomolecules, or with substituted materials. If original biomolecules are present, or even their degradation products, then a lot can be learned - consider that the presence of certain proteins is in fact a flag for certain DNA sequences and metabolic pathways, so there can be a lot of work done on dino-DNA by inference. And this of course will be very closely watched by folks looking at the phylogeny of the dinosaurs - are modern birds really descendants of the theropods? Were the dinosaurs warm-blooded? Proteins will play a very large part in decyphering those stories.

It turns out I have an inside track on this one, since Mary Schweitzer, the scientist who found the soft tissue in the Tyrannosaurus rex bones, is working with funding from a paleontology program I co-direct. So I picked up the phone and called her - to congratulate her, and also to get an idea of what was ahead, now that the media was paying attention. She was also amazed at the media response, and had been on the telephone pretty much continuously for the whole week.

She is working on another publication, this time looking more closely at bone sub-types and physiological function as well as chemistry - 'nuff said. I had asked her for permission to use a particularly spectacular picture that was not in the Science article for this posting, but it is being used in the new article, so I will leave it for a later date. Although we did not speak about it, I can only assume that future work by Mary and others will explore whether dinosaur fossils have the types of cells associated with bone formation and maintenance (osteoblasts and osteocytes), as well as the cells that break down bone to supply calcium when needed (osteoclasts, for making egg shells, or bones in embryos).

In an interesting aside to all this, I saw that the discovery of well-preserved materials like this is always picked up by short-time creationists (1, 2, 3), as evidence that the Earth cannot be millions of years old. It's an interesting exercise to try and refute this argument, because both sides of Occam's razor are being used: it's a simple explanation (dino bones are only thousands of years old, not millions) and yet you would have to throw away a lot of other work to accept it (all the stratigraphy and geochronology). Here's one refutation. Then again, there are also long-time creationists in the fray...

Of course when I told my nine year old son about the dinosaur marrow, he came right back with: "Did you see the special the other night on Discovery Channel where they had found a real dragon?" After probing a bit, I think he knew the dragon was not real, but the fact that dragons had been mixed with dinosaurs on the TV show made him less apt to believe in the dinosaurs themselves - an interesting effect.

You're hired!

I am in the middle of a selection process from amongst a particularly strong set of job applicants, and have come up with the following law:

The stronger the field of applicants, the more trivial the eventual selection criteria.

It's comforting to think that I might not have been selected for past jobs because of a fat neck. Or was it a big nose? Or was it an errant crumb? Or, or, or...

Or am I fooling myself that the field for my present position was strong? After all, they did take many, many months to reply... aiee, it's enough to drive one batty.

Auwe, another great Temblor:

A large (Mw=8.2) earthquake occurred off the western coast of Northern Sumatra today, and tsunami warnings were issued in nearby Thailand.

The quake struck at about 11:10 PM local (11:10 AM EST), and was about one fiftieth as strong as the December 26 event. The hypocentre was about 30 km (+/- 6.1 km) deep, and was followed by a Mw 6.0 aftershock within about 30 minutes, offset to the South-East. It is not known at present whether these events produced tsunamis, but the rapid Moment Tensor Solution for this event shows an almost vertical motion for the event.


Another Indonesian earthquake today... 

Spongebob's neighbourhood:

Who said science wasn't funny?

Here's Squidward's cousin, Octopeter marginatus, hoofing it (suckering?) across the Indonesian seafloor.

And Octopaul aculaeatus, looking a little frazzled, wanders away from the party...

(videos require the RealPlayer plug-in)

OK, ok, here's the whole story...grab onto it with all your arms & legs.

Why for you bury me in the cold, cold ground?

...a statement which Taz could be asking very soon, but not of Bugs Bunny.

An article in Science (Vol 307, Issue 5712, 1035, 18 February 2005, summary) recently drew my attention to something that has bothered me for years.

For some reason, probably to do with the context in which I learned the word, a disease has always seemed to me to be something that was communicable, or that at least had some kind of vector. So things like leprosy, measles, malaria, influenza were diseases, while things like cancer, diabetes, Krohn's etc. were not. I would have called these latter things 'conditions.'

I now know this is not how they are defined medically, and that there is probably medical or epidemiological terminology to describe exactly the kind of separation I describe above, and that I still feel echoes of today when I hear the word 'disease' used to describe things that cannot be transmitted from one individual to another.

...or am I sure? The Science article describes a facial cancer that has been observed to be increasing in frequency among Tasmanian Devils. The disfiguring facial cancer eventually grows so large that it interferes with the creature's feeding, and they starve to death. The point in the article that stunned me was that this cancer seems to be spreading because the Tasmanian Devils are in fact spreading cancerous cells to each other as a consequence of the vicious fights they normally enage in, including biting each other's mouths. In other words, this is a cancer that is a communicable disease. Evidently these cancer cells can get around the self/non-self signals that are the basis for most immune systems. This is a cell that is not exactly some other form of life, but a mutated version of self.

I think this is more evidence that Nature loves these grey areas, and always holds a surprise, like a sort of fractal.

Farewell to a Trojan:

Earlier last year we said good-bye to a real workhorse of an airplane. This airplane was 55 years old, and had lived a hard life. How hard? Well, consider repeated, deliberate flights into the worst weather possible: thunderstorm supercells full of tennis-ball sized hail (full of super-cooled water, which means icing), repeated lighning strikes, and turbulence unlike any of us has experienced, even on the worst rollercoaster. Sounds like a fun piloting job!

The ariplane was N10WX, a highly modified T-28 Trojan (WX is a common abbreviation for 'weather'). In the early 1960's the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology's Institute of Atmospheric Sciences began operating this bird as a scientific research platform, and until early 2004 flew it hundreds of times into storms that other pilots would take every possible precaution to avoid. Why choose a 1950's trainer in the 1960's, and operate it this long? Several reasons. First, it had a piston-driven prop rather than a turbofan - jet engines don't do so well in heavy hail, stalling and being unable to re-start. Second, it had a airframe strength/engine power combination that could support two heavy items: armor plating and a thick coat of ice. Third, that airframe was designed to withstand a lot of punishment (think keeping student pilots safe...). And fourth, there were a lot of them available for a good price (over 2200 were built - the other choice was the Douglas Dauntless, but purchase cost and maintenance ruled it out).

Here's a picture of the T-28, with some of the features pointed out:


Armored T-28 

Of course, there are many more instruments and hard points for mounting them than shown here. The 700 lbs of armor plating is on all the tops and leading edges of the wings and the rudder and the radial engine cowling, and of course the canopy is also armored - the original plexiglass 'bubble' would never survive!

Here's the kind of damage the hail does - this is a shot of the wing-tip, and you can clearly see the difference that the armor plating makes - the original aluminium wing covering is severely battered, while the armor does not show any damage.

T-28 wingtip 

There are several other areas that are heavily armored - the air intakes for the carburetor and for the oil cooler.

Of course, anything that stuck out was either going to get hammered or struck by lightning. What would usually be somewhat delicate instruments on other aircraft had to be modified (I wonder what the Pitot looks like on this thing?). Here's a shot of a detector with a somewhat crumpled dome...

instrument 

My first thought on seeing these pictures was that it must have been incredibly LOUD in the cockpit. Not only were you riding a 1425 hp Wright Cyclone at several hundred knots, but the noise from the hail must have beed absolutely deafening, mixed in with the occasional lightning strike (which resulted in pieces melting off the trailing edges of the prop and rudder!).

Now that it has been retired, the School of Mines is in contact with the Smithsonian and others to see if anyone is interested in exhibiting N10WX. And of course, the scientific community is looking for another platform that can take this kind of punishment and keep the pilot safe. The candidates so far: an Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt "Warthog" (but chances are not good for an A-10 being released, given the current operations needs for both active ariframes and spares...); or a Coast Guard HU-25 Falcon. Both of these of course are turbofans - it will be interesting to see how the replacement holds up over 50 years of service - if they even make it that long.

The long-time pilot for the T-28, Tom Warner, has a nice homepage for the airplane here (as well as having some great WX photos that deserve a look!).

Ward, Wieland, and Cialdini:

When I visited the petrified forest as a child, it was fairly obvious to me why it was prohibited to pick up pieces of the petrified wood - samples in pockets would wander off, and the whole monument would slowly disappear.

On that same summer road trip, I logically wondered if by taking samples from the Grand Canyon I would be a) degrading the natural wonder by removing some of it, or b) adding to its beauty, since the canyon exists precisely because material has been removed.

A few days ago we had a visitor here from the National Parks Service, and she related a story about the National Cycad Monument in South Dakota that reminded me of all this - the Cycad Monument was decommissioned in 1957 because there were no fossils left to see. The fossils had all walked off in visiting pockets.

The Park Service's best estimate for current losses from the Petrified Forest are about 25,000 pounds (!) a year. People are caught every day (some with hundreds of pounds stuffed under their car seats). The forest is such an attractive site for theft that it has been used as a test site for studying what kinds of warnings are most effective at discouraging theft. The best estimate is that about 3% of the visitors actually steal material.

When I first visited Hawaii in 1985 with Caltech's Bob Sharp as a tour guide, he regaled us with tales of "Pele's curse," whereby if anyone took a piece of the Goddess Pele home (a piece of Hawaiian pumice, basalt, green sand, etc. etc.), she would bring bad luck upon them. In the Bishop Museum and the Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park Museum there are plently of examples of tourists who mailed back their 'souvenirs' (even their sandy shoes, in one case), thinking that their streak of bad luck after their holiday was due to Pele's curse.

In any case, my long-winded point is that this type of "curse myth" seems to be popping up at other parks - the Petrified Forest is getting souvenirs returned as well.

Perhaps there should be a study done about the effectiveness of public announcements saying "if you take anything except pictures, you will have really bad luck."

And yes, I do have a piece of Pele in my house. It's not illegal to take pieces of lava from Hawai'i. It's a really nice chunk of frothy green pumice and some Pele's hair that I collected from the side of Chain of Craters road. And yes, I have had bad luck since then. Only I am quite sure that one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other. And did I take a piece of the Petrified Forest or the Grand Canyon? I'm not sure. It was so long ago that I can't honestly remember - I do remember being very tempted, and if I did, I have since lost the pieces, which is probably the sad truth about a fair bit of the ton-a-month rate for the Petrified Forest.

We shall never forget:

A conversation I had several years ago with the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control:

Science agency drone (me): "Hello. I have a question about financial transactions involving the Cuban government."

OFAC drone: "No financial transactions transferring funds to Cuba are allowed."

Science agency drone:"...yes, I am aware of that. In this case, Cuba is wanting to pay its membership dues to an international organization currently headquartered in the U.S."

OFAC drone: "No financial transactions transferring funds to Cuba are allowed."

Science agency drone:"...umm, I think you misunderstood. Cuba wants to send funds here. This is not a case of U.S. funds going to Cuba, but Cuban funds coming to the United States."

OFAC drone: "...huh. Well, then we would have to seize the funds as war reparations."

Science agency drone:"...war reparations? You mean, like for the Maine?"

OFAC drone: "Yes. For the Maine."

Science agency drone:"Wow. I'll tell them that they should consider being delinquent on their dues."

OFAC drone:"Yeah, I guess so. Have a good day."

Science agency drone: "You too. Bye."

The bells, master, the bells...

The Sumatra Andaman quake that generated the tsunami also made the Earth ring like a gong. Some of the tones last longer than others - the most fundamental frequency is still ringing, expanding and contracting the Earth radially, and should be detectable well into April.

We have to use very special techniques to see this, since the period for this harmonic is quite long - about 20 minutes. So it's really more like a very low groan than a ringing gong...

IRIS has a lot of info on this. Here's an audio file (.au format) of what it sounds like, speeded up about 200,000 times.

Tsunami science & fakery, and a bit of image analysis:

I just met with Jody Bourgeois, who is a sedimentologist at the University of Washington who studies tsunami deposits. We are interested in her work because while the tsunami genesis community has had a lot of attention and funding, the tsunami history community has not. In other words, we know a lot about how tsunamis are generated, but not a lot about how often they occur.

Jody works mostly in the Pacific (where most tsunamis occur, as you will have read in one of my previous posts), looking at the layer of rubble, gravel, sand and silt that tsunamis leave when they run up onto the shore. By digging pits in various spots, and looking at these layers, one can build up an idea of how often these events occur. Once you find a tsunami deposit, you can do a series of pits progressively farther from the shore to see how far the tsunami went inland - in this way she is trying to see where they occurred, how often, and how severe they were. Most of her work has been in the Cascadia region of the US (Washington state), and on the Kamchatka peninsula, in the Russian far East.

Here is a photo taken by one of Jody's grad students, Bretwood Higman, while in Sri Lanka on the tsunami survey team:


Tsunami deposit in Sri Lanka (photo credit: B. Higman) 

In this case, a 30 cm layer of lighter-coloured sandy tsunami deposits overlies the previous darker-coloured soil surface. Jody showed similar sections from the West coast with grey tsunami deposits sandwiched between the pre-existing soils and the later, younger soils on top of them (in the above photo, the younger soils overlying the tsunami deposit have not been deposited yet, since the tsunami occurred so recently).

As you might imagine, Jody is in great demand these days, and is in Washington DC to speak at a Smithsonian press event tomorrow morning at the Willard. She has been dealing a lot with public misconceptions about tsunamis, and she spoke to us about the threat to the Atlantic coast.

One item she mentioned was the threat from the cataclysmic collapse of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canaries, much quoted in the press, and parroted by me here. It turns out that the model producing a 25 meter high wave on the East coast is a model by Steve Ward at UC Santa Cruz (you can see a set of Steve's powerpoints on landslide generated tsunamis here, including diagrams of the Cumbre Vieja predicted wave). Of course, disasters make for good news, so the work by Steve on the tsunami and by Bill McGuire of the Benfield Greig Centre in the UK on the collapse of Cumbre has been played up a fair bit by the press.

This much, at least, is still science. On to the outright fakery portion.

Immediately after the Sumatra event, all sorts of photos emerged purporting to be of the tsunami. Fortunately many of them were real, which can help educate people on what to do in this situation, and to document what happened. Others were outright fakes that only serve to propagate misconceptions. Jody used the following example in her talk that I had seen floating around on the internet, and which I had tried to stamp out as well as I could by telling people it was a fake (the red letters are mine, more below on that...).

Fake tsunami photo 

I hadn't paid much attention to it in the last few weeks until I saw it again, up on the big projection screen, and it screamed out "South America" to me. I don't know exactly why, but something in the architecture, setting, etc. just made me think the city was in Latin America. At first I thought it was Bogota, because one of the buildings looks somewhat like the Tequendama Hotel, and a far off building looks like the Avianca skyscraper, but there were still several things wrong for the skyline to be Bogota.

A quick search on Snopes.com identified this tsunami picture as a known fake - and pointed to a what they claim as the source for the original photo of the Antofagasta skyline at World City Photos:

Lantadilla photo, looking South 

Sure enough, this photo by Christian Lantadilla is of the same scene. However, I do not think this is the photo that was used in the fake.

To confirm this, I did a bit more searching myself. First, are the two photos Antofagasta at all? Sure enough, there is a giveaway photo of the Antofagasta waterfront here, in an artcle in Realidad, a Chilean magazine. Here is the photo:

Realidad photo, looking North 

I have added letters to identify several landmarks. The fake tsunami and Lantadilla photos are taken looking South, with the city to the left. The Realidad photo is taken looking to the North. The letter "A" marks a tall building with yellow and red bricks with a characteristic roof shape. "B" indicates another building with characteristic red and white brickwork, while "C" indicates a park area.

But back to the difference between the tsunami and Lantadilla scenes of Antofagasta. As can be seen in the Realidad picture, it is very probable that the other photos were taken from the dark building at the end of the road just to the left of the "B." My guess is that these two photos were taken from different floors, at different times.

First, look at the mountains and the air and light surrounding them. The lighting and visibility is totally different between the two pictures, and this is not something easily changed with image processing - nor would there be a motive for the person faking the tsunami to put the work into changing the apparent visibility. The Lantadilla photo was taken on a clear, sunny day, while the fake tsunami background was taken on a more overcast, flatter lighted day. On the street next to the park there are tree shadows in the Lantadilla photo that are not present in the other (there is also a vehicle on this street in the tsunami picture that is not in the Lantadilla photo).

Second, the parallax in the photos is different. My guess is that the fake tsunami photo was taken from higher up, and more to the West (seaward), than the Lantadilla photo. It's difficult to tell with the images here, but if you download the originals, you can tell that the red & white brick building shifts ever so slightly against the more distant buildings behind it when you alternate between the two photos. You can see more of the roof (upwards motion) in the fake photo, and the red brick stripe moves leftwards against the building in the background (seaward movement of the observer). In this area there are several other inconsistencies - a possible reflection in the blue-glassed building that is either not there or due to intervening construction between the two photo times, and construction or modifications on the grey building that extends from the red & white to the park area.

I'm convinced that a) the tsunami photo is fake, b) the background is Antofagasta, and c) the fake was not made with Christian Lantadilla's photo.

In the end, what is wrong with the fake photo's water? Why couldn't this be a real tsunami in Chile? First is the scale - look at the height of that wave - it's taller than some of the apartment buildings. Only a major asteroid impact would give that kind of height. A tsunami is a low wall of water that simply keep on coming - sort of like a step function, and not a tall curling wave. Second, the scale of the features in the wave is wrong - look at the ripples and the foam - they just look wrong compared to the size of the cars. Now - there have been tsunamis in Antofagasta, with 1995 being the most recent - but they NEVER looked like this. This is not what a tsunami looks like - at a distance, tsunamis look harmless enough for you to simply stand there and watch. ...and take photos. ...and wait. ...and film. ...and suddenly realize that there is a river of seawater coming for you!

I had to chuckle as I was putting this post together: "Realidad" is Spanish for reality, or truth.

Kahve:

An interesting legend about the beginning of Western use of coffee is that after the siege of Vienna in 1683, the retreating Turkish armies abandoned their coffee supplies and equipment on the field. To celebrate victory over the Turks, bakers made a special pastry in the shape of a crescent - today's croissant.

However pretty a story, this is probably not true. There is good evidence that coffee was present in Vienna and many other Western cities before the 1683 siege. I'm not sure about the croissants - I need to do more research (which of course, includes consumption!).

There is a good paper on the history of coffee here, that includes a debunking of the Vienna myth.

There's a nice page in English on Viennese coffee houses here.

Get a slice of Sachertorte to eat while you sip your Maragogype, sit down, and read.

Dynamite in his drawers:

Leon Lederman keeps his Nobel Prize in a kitchen drawer with all his other junk - rubber bands, twisted paper clips, odd pieces of string, a screw-driver covered in paint, Post-Its gathering dust on their sticky part.

We all know the drawer, because we have one too. We just don't have a Nobel Prize banging around in there.

Y los cuentos, cuentos son:

...after Calderon de la Barca.

As the figures for tsunami casualties climb, it is slowly becoming clear to people that there will never be an accurate count. In fact, thinking that there can ever be accurate counts for events like this is a fantasy.

As rational beings, we know that such a figure exists - the number of casualties, even if changing, is still a "countable set." However, the logistics of providing an absolutely accurate count quickly become unreasonable. Even in highly controlled situations, like voting for political office, an absolute count is extremely difficult. That is why such counts, to be understood and used for decisions, must have statistical qualifiers attached.

When dealing with situations where we are relying on eyewitness accounts, or even historical/oral accounts the unreliability of absolute numbers is well known. When dealing with emotionally or politically charged issues, this effect is even more pronounced. In fact, history itself can be changed.

In 1928, a strike at the United Fruit Company facilities in the city of Cienaga, Colombia, turned violent when Colombian forces tried to disperse the crowd. Shots were fired, and several strikers were killed. Accounts of the incident from the points of view of the strike leader, Alberto Castrillon, and the commander Cortes Vargas varied widely (as might be expected), and differed again from the later accounts of investigative lawyer Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and media reporters.

Casualty estimates ranged from single to double digits. The exact number of casualties became an issue, and the government was accused of trying to hide the real number.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' father spoke of the United Fruit strike and riot before Colombian Congress in 1929, and must have spoken of it at home, because it made enough of an impression on the author for an event based on it to appear in his book "One Hundred Years of Solitude." In that story, the fictional town of Macondo loses over three thousand citizens to bullets and truncheons. Garcia Marquez amplifies the Cienaga incident into the Macondo massacre to make several points - to emphasize the military's brutality, to emphasize the influence the foreign company had on the government, to single out the surviving characters' roles in the town's history, and perhaps, to point out that accounts are unreliable and at some level are all fictional.

The crowning event is that at some point in the 1970's, this subject again came up before the Colombian Congress, and in sworn testimony that entered the public record, the number of casualties in the real Cienaga incident (not fictional Macondo), was stated as "over three thousand."

This was later corrected, but the damage had been done. For many people, this mistake became a government admission that several thousand had died in the Cienaga event.

Fiction had changed history. And only because a combination of emotion, writing talent, and confusion came together at a particular moment.

For this case there is a trail, but for how many other events has this happened without someone noticing? Not simply numbers of casualties, but perhaps the details of the events themselves.