Julius, meet Gregory:

Here it is, that extra day we get every four years. The one where you wonder what it would be like to be born on February 29th ("Do you celebrate on the 28th or on March 1st during regular years?" ... "What happens when you have to fill out a form?" etc. etc. etc.)

Well, not quite every four years.

The rule is a little more complicated than that. Since 1582 we have been using the following:

According to the Gregorian calendar, which is the civil calendar in use today, years evenly divisible by 4 are leap years, with the exception of centurial years that are not evenly divisible by 400. Therefore, the years 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2100 are not leap years, but 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years.

Why not simply every four years?

Think of it this way: we can measure a year as 365.2422 days long (the number of days it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun, which is what controls the seasons).

If we had no leap years, the calendar would slip behind the seasons by 0.2422 days each year. In an average lifetime, this error accumulates to about two weeks. It would take just under 750 years for the calendar to be out by six months from the seasons.

If we have a leap year every four years, we have the following:

(3*365+1*366) or 1,461 days/4 years = 365.25 days/year

Now we are closer to the correct value, but a little high. This calendar would gain on the seasons by 0.0078 days each year, accumulating to about half a day in a lifetime.

Since we are too high, we need to have fewer leap years. Since the above error is 0.0078 days/year, every hundred years this will be almost one day, 0.78 days/100 years. Let's try having one less leap year every hundred:

(76*365+24*366) or 36,524 days/100 years = 365.24 days/year

Now we are even closer to the correct value, but a still a little low. This calendar would lose on the seasons by 0.0022 days each year, accumulating to about three hours in a lifetime.

It looks like we need to have a couple more leap years than this to get to 365.2422. Since the above error is 0.0022 days/year, every four hundred years this will be almost one day, 0.88 days/400 years. Let's try having one more leap year every four hundred years:

(303*365+97*366) or 146,097 days/400 years = 365.2425 days/year

Now we are at the level of accuracy used today. Note that this is still a tiny bit high. The calendar we use today, the Gregorian calendar, gains on the seasons by 0.0003 days each year, accumulating to about one-half hour in a lifetime. At this rate, it will take 600,000 years to be out a half-year. This level of accuracy is good to slightly better than one part in one million.

Note that this approximation could go on - if we took it to the next level, we might add the following:

We need a tad fewer leap years to get even closer. Since the error is now 0.0003 days/year, every three thousand two hundred years this will be close to one day, 0.96 days/3200 years. Let's try having one less leap year every three thousand two hundred years:

(2425*365+775*366) or 1,168,775 days/3200 years = 365.2421875 days/year

This is an extremely accurate value. This calendar would lose on the seasons by 0.0000125 days each year, or about one second. This error would accumulate to about two minutes in a lifetime.

So why didn't Pope Gregory XIII recommend more approximations in 1582 when the current leap year system was adopted? It was clearly within their mathematical abilities (although their knowledge of the length of the year to this level might not have been). After I had figured the above rationale I also asked: "why don't we simply have one less leap year every 128 years, instead of every hundred? (getting rid of as much of the accumulated error at each step as possible)"

The answer was probably convenience. The above rule is easier to use. Once you start worrying about years divisible by 3200 (or 128), things get complicated. The rule as adopted is easy to remember. Especially in the several hundred years following 1582 when there were no logarithms, slide rules or much less calculators or computers.

And, no, of course that's not the end of the story - there are levels below this as well. I have written before about the infamous leap second, but it's also known that the Earth's day is slowly getting longer as the lunar and solar tides slow our rotation.

The rate is pretty small, losing a second every 36 million years. It is far below needing a correction to the above rule, but enough for today's timekeeping to worry about.

Whoa Nelly!

Now some (like my wife) might find the humour a little bit off, but since my registration was about to expire, I tried the other day to get the following vanity licence plate:

I did hesitate, thinking that this kind of provocation would not be wise, and might lead to a strange episode of road rage directed against me by a vegetarian.

Trouble was, somebody out there has already claimed it. I can only hope they didn't use Virginia's Horse Lover plate:

...unless they were French, Italian, Swiss, Japanese or Belgian, of course.

---

The recent mad cow scare led to a small increase in the consumption of exotic meats in Europe and North America (alligator, hippo, horse, kangaroo, ostrich, etc.), but in fact most of these meats have their associated risks as well. A large risk is systemic, in that the inspection procedures for these meats are much less well-defined than those for the standard meats: beef, pork, mutton, fish, and fowl.

Given the extreme rarity of vCJD incidences (119 known cases worldwide as of January 2002) and the laxer inspections of these other meats (except horse and kangaroo, see below), it is very likely that consumers who chose exotics over beef due to the vCJD cases in fact increased their risk of contracting other food-borne diseases at the cost if an infinitesimal decrease in vCJD risk.

For alligator meat, the main risk besides improper handling is due to the mercury burden, especially in the Florida Everglades (ref.). However there is also some parasitic risk from trichinella, trematodes (flukes), ascarids (roundworms) and pentastomes (ref. [PDF]).

In the case of kangaroo, although many of the above parasites can be present in wild animals, a well-established inspection system has been in place since 1993 in Australia for meat raised or culled for use in human consumption. The only parasite of note is a nematode Pelicitus roemeri with a 1988 detected appearance rate of about 1.4% (ref.).

Since horsemeat is often consumed raw or extremely rare, there can be a (small) trichinosis risk. There was an outbreak in France in 1985, and more recently in 1998 from horses brought in from Eastern Europe (ref.).

I noticed that the U.S. had decided to stop all importation of French meat products last Tuesday, so I decided to look at the issue of French horsemeat consumption (although the flow of horsemeat is decidedly from the US to France, rather than the other way around). The data below is all from the most official source I could find, Office National Interprofessionel des Viandes, de l'Elevage et de l'Aviculture, OFIVAL, the French National Office of Meats, Breeding, and Poultry Farming (the Ministry of Agriculture didn't seem to have much). I have to say that the OFIVAL synthesis notes on horsemeat are already five years old, and getting a little ripe. There is also a monthly bulletin from which I pulled some 2002 data.

The most obvious fact is that the consumption of horsemeat declined in France during the 1988-1998 period, and according to later notes, continues to do so (imports dropped 10% from 2001 to 2002). Most meat is supplied from imports - in 2002, 30% came from other EC countries, 23% from Argentina, 21% from Canada, and 11% from the USA.

The French market is highly polarized. While 24% of the population consume horsemeat more than once a year, 43% of French refuse to consume it, and the remaining 33% either consume it once a year or less, have stopped because of unavailability, or have never tried it at all and are neutral. The industry itself is extremely sensitive to the public opinion, and has decided not to try and promote consumption using the media given the outcry that this might provoke.

This is a table from OFIVAL that compares the changes in consumption for various meats in France over the 1988-1998 period:

Consumption of meats in France 1988-1998
Species	1988	1993	1998	percent change 88-98	98 Consumption per capita	Average price (1998)
Large Bovines	1369	1336	1304	-4.7%	21.7	60.0 F/kg
Veal	326	308	292	-10.4%	4.8	72.4 F/Kg
Lamb/Mutton	287	317	295	+2.8%	4.9	56.9 F/Kg
Pork	2013	2076	2185	+8.5%	36.2	33.9 F/Kg
Horse	60	42	34	-43.3%	0.6	73.1 F/Kg
TOTAL	4055	4079	4110	+1%	68.2	51.9 F/Kg
Fowl	1087	1235	1430	+31.6%	24.2	33.9 F/Kg
TOTAL (incl. Fowl)	5142	5314	5540	+7.7%	92.4	47.4 F/Kg (est.)

Numbers are in the exquisite units: "equivalent carcass tonnes," and I have added the last row with its calculations.

What I thought was interesting here was the over 43% decrease in horsemeat consumption in the decade in question. Most of the difference has been made up by increases in poultry and pork. From the average price column, an abvious conclusion might be that this is price driven, since poultry and pork are the cheapest meats, and the two largest decreases, in horse and veal, are the most expensive meats.

Probably most fundamental is the actual level of consumption: only about 0.66% of all meat consumed in France is horsemeat.

I would love to find a similar table for US consumption to be able to look at the proportions of alligator, armadillo, elk, rabbit, moose, snake, and venison.

...and no, I have not tried horsemeat. I would not elect to, but I think I could. I have had plenty of venison, buffalo, rabbit, and wildfowl, and even had several alligator steaks. My lightning visit to Cairns never afforded me the chance at kangaroo. Oh yes - I have had ants.

And the licence plate? I ended up getting COI-O3 on a National Air and Space Museum plate. A hug and a kiss to whoever figures it out.

Athens, Rome, Los Angeles:

No, not the Olympics, but the seat of cultures that have given us the mythology and deities we choose to immortalize in the skies. Athens gave us the Greeks, Rome gave us the Romans, and Los Angeles gave us the Tongva.

"Los Angeles? Tongva?"

Yes, it is so. Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown, of Caltech's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS), have named their discovery, the largest "minor planet" beyond Pluto, Quaoar, after a god of creation in the legends of the Tongva, Native Americans indigenous to the Los Angeles Basin.

You might comment that this choice is somewhat parochial. After all, the Greeks and Romans had a very large impact on subsequent civilizations, many of them far removed in time and in geography. You might say it would be telling if we asked 100 randomly selected citizens (even from the L.A. basin) if they had heard of a) the Greeks, b) the Romans, and c) the Tongva.

Well, there is a website about c), of course. It turns out that the Tongva are an as-yet Federally unrecognized tribe of about 300 people.

I would suggest a few minutes perusal of the full list of Minor Planet Names. A few guffaws are guaranteed ("Arthurdent" "Tweedledee/Tweedledum" "Zappafrank"). "What about the deities of the Chibcha? I cry out... I want a planet called Tequendama!"

However, all this is old news, including the debate about the name. After all, the discovery dates from June of 2002, and the name 'Quaoar' has since been accepted by the International Astronomical Union. You can see information on the IAU naming proces and guidelines here and here (N.B.: despite many huckster's ongoing attempts to convince you and your wallet otherwise, naming a star for your sweetheart ain't official).

The name Quaoar does meet the IAU criteria (although I'm not sure about 'easily pronounceable'), and I bet having the largest body discovered since Pluto went a long way towards meeting the political goal of having the Tongva tribe Federally recognized. I can imagine that the Tongva elders' consideration of this idea was an extremely interesting discussion.

What got my attention was an article in the GPS Alumni Newsletter by Trujillo that talked about the ongoing search for other bodies like Quaoar.

By using the IRAM telescope in Spain and the Hubble, Trujillo and Brown have determined that Quaoar is 1,250 km in diameter, which makes it about as large as all the known asteroids put together. They are in the middle of a robotic search of the entire sky using the Oschin telescope on Palomar, which by the end of 2004 will indicate if there are any additional bodies like Quaoar.

Trujillo's surprising comment was the following:

"Since beginning this project, we have only had time to examine about 7 percent of the sky for the presence of very large bodies like Quaoar, so we think that there should be about ten more of similar size that are still undiscovered, a few of which may be even larger than Pluto." (Pluto is about 2,300 km in diameter)


(NASA and A. Feild/STSci)

If there are bodies discovered larger than Pluto, this will certainly add fuel to an ongoing debate about how many planets there are in the Solar System. Surprisingly, the debate is not whether Quaoar should be an additional planet, but about whether Pluto should be demoted, or thrown out. There has been sufficient debate and confusion to have the IAU reconfirm that Pluto is indeed a "planet."

It's not as simple as one would think. Simply saying that planets are round and orbit the Sun, would give us many more: Ceres, about 914 km in diameter; Pallas (522 km); and Vesta (~500km). In the outer solar system, among the Kuiper Belt, consider this crop:

(Gerhard Hahn/DLR, Astrovirtel, ESO, ESA, Institute for Astronomy)

When we add 2001 KX76 (also referred to as "Ixion"), Varuna, and all these other 1,000 km class objects to the list of 'planets,' and remember that they are being added to on a yearly basis, we can see that the list of planets will get out of hand quite quickly.

We've been there before, when Ceres' discovery in 1801 was quickly followed by the avalanche of Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, and the post-1845 deluge of Astraea, Hebe, Iris, Flora, Metis, and Hygeia.

(There are a lot of bodies out there, most of them much smaller, but in impressive numbers, as in this 100-year animation of the outer solar system made by the folks at Harvard's Minor Planet Center)

The historical list of eight plus Pluto was soon re-established, and it will likely live on for historical reasons rather than a truly consistent ontological naming system.

Despite Quaoar, Ixion, Varuna and their ilk.

Polyblog II:

Hmm. I recently got a hit from Mexico, looking for "pleibol," that led me to rediscover the Google translator, so I decided to see what my page looked like in languages Google handles that I can actually understand.

Here's my ranking of the machine translated versions, from the best translation to the worst:

1. French;
2. Spanish;
3. Portuguese;
4. Italian; and
5. German.

This ranking has several problems. First, it's done by me, and therefore also reflects my decreasing understanding of these languages (except French and Spanish - I'm quite confident that Google is having more trouble translating my page into Spanish than French). Second, it's a translation of pieces written by me. They tend to be difficult: odd sentence structure, odd diction, etc. etc. I'm not an easy read, so I'm sure I'm an even harder translation.

Google is getting ready to provide translators into more languages - I tried changing the hl flag to sv for Swedish and ru for Russian, and although the page is not translated, there is an upper frame from the Google return that is in Swedish or Russian.

I also tried translating my page from these languages into English by simply switching the hl and sl flags. The results are odd, to say the least. I'm asking the machine to translate English into English, but to listen with a French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or German ear.

This has actually occurred to me once - I heard English as non-speakers must hear it. For several minutes, as an in-flight announcement was being made on an Avianca flight into Bogotá, I could not tell what language was being spoken. For some reason, I could not parse the sounds and place the spaces between words correctly, and I heard a stream of gibberish. Right at the end, something clicked, and suddenly I could understand that it was English. Try as I might, I could not hear gibberish again.

It's much like when one sees an interesting pattern, only to realize after a while that it is actually a highly stylized font. Once you can read the words, it is extremely difficult to recapture the pure pattern - the 'wordness' interferes too much.

Polyblog:

Something fun I found by backtracking visitors to my site...

My blog, in other words... (you might need a Japanese character set installed to load this on a Windows system... don't bother clicking on the link if you don't think you have one -- trust me, it's not worth the hassle).

Since I don't know any Japanese, I can't tell whether this even comes close to an accurate translation. Plus, my accent is probably atrocious anyway.

Brunhes, Matuyama:

The Earth's magnetic field is dying. As it has before. And no, it is not a human-caused disaster. But it should have some interesting effects on humans.

The Earth's magnetic field goes through periods of instability every so often. Sometimes the field comes back reversed (so that magnetic North reappears where the magnetic South used to be, and North where South was), but more often than not, the field goes through a weak period and then strengthens back to the way it was before. We do not completely understand the process, but we are close. It's one of those non-linear magneto-hydro-dynamic problems even your best professors had nightmares about. Even using our most powerful supercomputers, we have problems modeling this process accurately.

We are pretty sure this occurs on Earth, because when lava cools, the magnetic minerals preserve the direction of the magnetic field at the time. We can see that the direction preserved in progressively older rocks changes in the way described above: sometimes the field reverses completely, and sometimes the signal dimishes only to reappear again in the same direction.

This "magnetic pole reversal" pattern can be mapped out by looking at successively older and older rocks from different locations to get an idea of how often this change occurs. Here is what it looks like for the last 5 million years, with black being 'normal,' and white 'reversed':

(the above is from Lisa Tauxe's notes for her courses at UCSD)

There is actually more detail here than shown: very short-lasting reversals are omitted, so what we are looking at above is the 'dominant' polarity over 10- to 20,000 year periods. These dominant polarity periods, then, last 250,000 years on average, with a fair amount of variation. But what actually happens during a magnetic field reversal?

It takes about one thousand years or so for the field to reverse. At first, the field weakens, as is happening presently. The next part is interesting: the field can pass through a multi-pole phase. In other words, there is a crazy period where there are many, many North magnetic poles, and many, many South magnetic poles. Out of this chaos, the field slowly organizes again, and can emerge either 'normal' or 'reversed.'

What I have wondered about is the effects that these collapses/multi-pole phases might have had in the past, and what they will have in the future. Consider the timescales involved: one thousand years is quite fast compared to evolutionary (speciation) time scales, and fast even compared to things like migration or species expansion into biomes. For species that rely on the magnetic field for navigation (bees, tuna, some turtles, some birds, perhaps some whales) this kind of thing could be catastrophic if the field is their only cue. Are magnetic reversals associated with any particular die-offs? I have never seen any attempts to answer this question, but given the timescale precision required to date die-offs against magnetic reversals, as well as proving that the species in question had a magnetoreceptor, I am not surprised.

The other end of the question is that since there is no longer a strong magnetic field, much more of the Earth's surface is exposed to hard radiation. Think aurora borealis/australis scattered all over the place. Would this affect the speciation rate from radiation induced mutations? Again, a question that would be exceedingly difficult to approach, given the quality of the geologic record.

What about the present? What would happen to us today if we lost the magnetic field? There would be a higher radiation risk generally - but even especially so for airplane flight and for manned space flight. We could expect many satellite outages, and the accompanying data/communications problems. On the ground, electric grid disturbances would be stronger, and might cause more the failures similar to those we saw last year. There might be ozone holes all over the place, since the high energy rays that break apart ozone can only get in around the magnetic poles. We would probably all be able to see the aurora - even in equatorial areas. We might even see an increase in public interest in science.

Learn more.

#35 & #43:

Besides dooming the U.S. hatmaking industry with his bareheaded 'viggah,' John F Kennedy set NASA on its course to the Moon with his Message to Congress in May of 1961 and his more famous 1962 Moon speech at Rice University.

At NASA Headquarters, on January 14, President Bush made a speech about new directions for the U.S. space program, including a return to the Moon with the ultimate goal of putting a man on Mars. Perhaps significantly, this initiative was missing from his January 20th State of the Union Address.

First, it is interesting to compare these speeches. Now, I don't want to get into a Texas vs. Massachusetts debate, Yale vs. Harvard, or even 'jocks and geeks,' but my end conclusion was that unfortunately Dubya's speech writers have not been putting out their best.

The next few days after the Moon/Mars announcement we of course saw inevitable sniping about how could the nation afford this given the present budget climate, etc. etc. I have had to endure some pretty fierce ribbing from European counterparts at recent meetings about this issue.

My questions have been: What did the NASA budget look like in 1962? What has the NASA budget done since? What about science in general? What about other major pieces of the budget pie?

So, given my penchant for posting horribly long tables, here is the Federal budget history, from 1962 onwards.

Federal Finances, 1962-present

| Year |	NASA Budget |	Total Gov't Outlays |	NASA % |	National Defense % |	General science % |
1962	$1,257	$106,821	1.18	49.00	1.61
1963	$2,552	$111,316	2.29	47.97	2.74
1964	$4,171	$118,528	3.52	46.20	4.13
1965	$5,092	$118,228	4.31	42.82	4.93
1966	$5,933	$134,532	4.41	43.19	4.99
1967	$5,425	$157,464	3.45	45.35	3.96
1968	$4,722	$178,134	2.65	45.99	3.10
1969	$4,251	$183,640	2.31	44.92	2.73
1970	$3,752	$195,649	1.92	41.75	2.31
1971	$3,382	$210,172	1.61	37.53	1.99
1972	$3,423	$230,681	1.48	34.32	1.81
1973	$3,312	$245,707	1.35	31.21	1.64
1974	$3,255	$269,359	1.21	29.46	1.48
1975	$3,269	$332,332	0.98	26.03	1.20
1976	$3,671	$371,792	0.99	24.10	1.18
TQ*	$953	$95,975	0.99	23.20	1.21
1977	$4,002	$409,218	0.98	23.76	1.16
1978	$4,164	$458,746	0.91	22.78	1.07
1979	$4,380	$504,032	0.87	23.08	1.04
1980	$4,959	$590,947	0.84	22.67	0.99
1981	$5,537	$678,249	0.82	23.22	0.95
1982	$6,155	$745,755	0.83	24.85	0.97
1983	$6,853	$808,385	0.85	25.97	0.98
1984	$7,055	$851,874	0.83	26.70	0.98
1985	$7,251	$946,423	0.77	26.71	0.91
1986	$7,403	$990,460	0.75	27.60	0.91
1987	$7,591	$1,004,122	0.76	28.09	0.92
1988	$9,092	$1,064,489	0.85	27.28	1.02
1989	$11,036	$1,143,683	0.96	26.54	1.12
1990	$12,429	$1,253,198	0.99	23.89	1.15
1991	$13,878	$1,324,403	1.05	20.64	1.22
1992	$13,961	$1,381,684	1.01	21.59	1.19
1993	$14,305	$1,409,512	1.01	20.65	1.21
1994	$13,695	$1,461,902	0.94	19.27	1.11
1995	$13,378	$1,515,837	0.88	17.95	1.10
1996	$13,881	$1,560,572	0.89	17.03	1.07
1997	$14,360	$1,601,282	0.90	16.89	1.07
1998	$14,206	$1,652,619	0.86	16.24	1.10
1999	$13,664	$1,701,932	0.80	16.15	1.06
2000	$13,442	$1,788,826	0.75	16.46	1.04
2001	$14,199	$1,863,926	0.76	16.39	1.06
2002	$14,484	$2,010,975	0.72	17.33	1.03
2003	$14,885	$2,140,377	0.70	17.58	1.01
2004	$15,305	$2,229,425	0.69	17.51	1.02
2005	$15,854	$2,343,399	0.68	17.50	1.02
2006	$16,511	$2,463,663	0.67	17.18	1.00
2007	$16,954	$2,576,203	0.66	16.94	0.99
2008	$17,531	$2,710,517	0.65	16.99	0.97

Some points to note about the table:
(*) 1. TQ stands for the 'transition quarter' of July through September of 1976, which bridged the change from July-June Federal fiscal years to October-September.
2. Figures are not in constant dollars (a MAJOR fault with the above table).
3. All data are from historical tables of the US Federal Budget

Some additional data that I stripped from the table to avoid clutter:
- the interest on the debt in 1962 took up 8.54% of the total outlays. By 2003, the interest took up 16.59% of the budget, down from a high of 22.22% in 1997 during the Clinton administration. Basically, we have twice the amount of proportional debt, in non-constant dollars. Note also that the Federal spending on science as a whole has declined in proportional terms.

Here is the diagram on the projected budget for the new NASA objectives presented by the President during his January 14 NASA HQ speech (click on it for a larger, readable, version).

Of note is the definite horizon/end of the Shuttle and ISS programs. This also means the end of non-"human spaceflight" experiments aboard the ISS. For years NASA has trumpeted space as a place for new manufacturing technology and as a source of new materials, and justifications for the Shuttle and ISS were written in those terms. Unfortunately, even routine scientific research is extremely difficult to do in a test vehicle, and that is what these platforms are - the risk of catastrophic failure on launch or re-entry was always very real.

The budget presented shows that there really is little new money to be devoted to this re-ignited mission of exploration. Of special note is that after 2009, there is no projected increase in the budget - it simply keeps pace with inflation. What is clear is that this mission will eat away at most every other aspect of NASA science - aeronautics, remote sensing, astronomy, etc. - very much as the ISS and Shuttle budgets did.

One remaining point. When the U.S. went from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo to Shuttle, we built each successive generation of booster/capsule systems from scratch. Based on previous experience, of course, but any engineer knows that systems as complex as these need extensive testing before using them for human flight. Why does the U.S. do this? Because we put the prime contracts out to bid. Sometimes Boeing would win, sometimes Lockheed, sometimes others. Each of these had submitted a proposal that had to be different enough to catch the selector's eye. The Russians, in contrast, have stuck with the basic RK-7 Soyuz rocket configuration for over 40 years. They have of course modified the boosters and capsules over the years, but the stability in the core program gave them one tremendous advantage: low cost. It is very probable that Russia could launch a manned mission to Mars for about one quarter of what it will cost the U.S. -- however, they currently lack the political will and financial power to do it. And that is, in the end analysis, what counts.

Having people in space is always much more expensive than simply launching metal. It's certainly much more exciting too, but we always have to be ready to face a catastrophe. And there will almost certainly be another disaster somewhere in this Moon/Mars series. I am not sure the U.S. has the political courage to face another space catastrophe so soon.

Rudolf Flesch:

Sheesh. After that last post, I think I need a dose of this. It is a great piece of freeware that I recommend to anyone writing or preparing presentations. It gives out free slices of humble pie.

The "Bull Composite Index" for the sustainability posting was 4. Average sentence length 24.8 words. Average syllables per word, 1.9. Flesch score: 19/100. I suspect what sunk me was my propensity for run-on sentences I love them a lot because I am a steamroller of thought.

The comment on the posting from the Bullfighter software was great: Diagnosis: You like to hear yourself write. Despairing the thought of bringing a sentence to a close with something as demeaningly ordinary as a simple period, you shower readers with gratuitous, interminable and often weighty if not impossibly labyrinthine prose. Meaning lingers, albeit awash in a thick tide of metaphor and exposition that threatens to drown the writer's message. Seek help.

My very own Simon Cowell, and I have him right here on my desk.

Quine, redux? (who doesn't?):

Over the past two decades, our understanding of the many and various facets of global environmental change has grown enormously. We have gained knowledge ranging from fundamental discoveries concerning the mechanisms that underlie chemical cycles to new observations of how societies adapt to environmental changes.

This new knowledge has been accompanied by a growing appreciation for the scale and complexity of the interconnected systems we are attempting to understand and manage. At the recent World Academies of Science Conference on 'Transition to Sustainability in the 21st Century,' Robert Kates, a scholar from the United States, succinctly stated, ...if almost everything is connected to almost everything else, then how is one to avoid the practical impossibility of having to study everything in order to know anything? Over the last several hundred years, the answer for science has been reductionism: the procedure by which a thorough understanding of the parts of a problem and their interactions will lead to an understanding of the whole.

Unfortunately, two factors complicate the application of this procedure to environmental issues. First, interactions between ecological, climatological, and social systems are highly nonlinear and in fact may be chaotic, settling in meta-stable states that might not be predictable from any level of knowledge of the individual parts.

Second, reductionism tends to operate on a long time scale. Traditional academic activities operate on time scales much longer than the decision processes of the political and private sectors. In fact, the time scales associated with scientific study may be longer than that of evolution between meta-stable socio-environmental states, so even if we reached understanding of one state of the system, it might already have jumped to another. This kind of reasoning has led to the ?precautionary approach? behind Principle 15 of the UNCED Rio Declaration (1) which urges preventive political action to prevent possible harm before full scientific certainty is reached.

In combination with political reality, reductionism has left us with a fractured system within which international environmental conventions are developed and implemented separately, even though they are actually interdependent in a physical sense. We believe that rising carbon dioxide levels may be mitigated by planting forests, but we have little understanding of how this practice would affect biodiversity. National systems for environmental research, monitoring, assessment, management, and policy are loosely coordinated at best, both within countries and internationally. For the present, the political and financial capital required to produce a globally coordinated response is perceived to be too large for most countries. However, the problem is more complex than a lack of political and financial capital.

We are only beginning to understand the primary socio-economic drivers behind global environmental change. When the development path followed by countries has a far greater impact on emissions than actions taken under environmental agreements, as is now the case, large amounts of capital are expended on trying to resolve problems that are likely to be secondary. The precautionary principle is well-intentioned and may claim some preventive successes, but in periods of high uncertainty it will inevitably also result in expensive efforts that lead to naught.

How then is society to tackle the multiple scales of organization inherent in these socio-economic drivers, which span everything from understanding molecular-scale phenomena to managing biomes, and in another dimension, from understanding the social attitudes of individual consumers to formulating macroeconomic policy? How can science maintain a credible role within social processes that require action based on imperfect information? Specifically, how can global environmental change science contribute to trajectories of development that reduce vulnerability and increase resilience?

For science the answer is an uncomfortable one. The answer will also require scientists to undertake a process of inquiry that is more adaptive, integrative, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing than at present (2,3) Such a process challenges a central tenet of the scientific method because it requires that the scientific community be a social actor, and not simply an independent observer. It requires a change in scientific culture.

To a certain extent, this change is already under way. Early concepts, like those set forth in James Lovelock's Gaia (4), Barbara Ward's Spaceship Earth (5) and the sometimes impenetrable ramblings of Buckminster Fuller (6), provided a contextual seed that probably contributed to various physical sciences' interacting to produce "climate change science." Further combinations produced "Earth systems science," and later, in combination with biology and ecology, the health and socio-economic sciences produced "global environmental change science." Today the discussion is moving towards what is being called "sustainability science" (7,8,9) -- an adaptive, integrative, interdisciplinary, and synthesizing interaction of the kind described above. What is perhaps more important, sustainability science is beginning to lay the foundations of hard data and sound science that have been lacking in previous attempts at defining 'sustainability.'

It is vital that discussions about sustainability science involve substantive participation and contribution by developing nations. Environmental change is of the highest priority to the developing world because these regions are the most vulnerable to the effects of change, but their societies are the least resilient, with little ability to mitigate and adapt to those effects. The developing nations must be encouraged to contribute their local knowledge and experience to sustainability science. Furthermore, they should be encouraged to take actions that will reduce their overall vulnerability, such as strengthening infrastructure and capacity in order to help mitigation efforts, and formulating adaptation strategies that make sense locally. As far as possible, sustainability science research should be done in the developing world, by scientists from the developing world, and for the benefit of the developing world. In what context can discussion, development, and practice of sustainability science be carried out? What new structures must come into existence to allow it to succeed?

First of all, the discussion must take place among peers, and the development must be fully cooperative. If a sense of local ownership is to emerge, researchers in the physical and social sciences disciplines must interact with one another, with private sector interests, and with policy-makers in the context of a single problem. Second, the practice must be consistent over a long enough period, and over a large enough geographic area, to appreciably contribute to a solution of the problem that will result in a 'livable community.'

I suggest that some of the required social structures and some of the tools and requirements for the integrative process already exist, or are about to emerge. For example, the convergence that is about to take place among geographic information systems, decision support systems, information technology, and communications will undoubtedly produce some very useful techniques for analysis of the complex problems involved in sustainability science. This convergence will also make possible the collaboration of interdisciplinary teams from widely dispersed geographic areas at a much reduced cost. A cautionary note?these converging systems and technologies are still relatively young. Standards for their interoperability are being established, and they are undergoing needed experimentation. The explosion of data on the Internet has also created what may perhaps be called 'data chaos,' rather than easy access to larger quantities of well-managed data and information. There will certainly turn out to be many false starts in the process of realizing these opportunities.

The beginnings of the necessary scientific structures already exist in the form of regional global change research networks: the Asia-Pacific Network (APN), the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI), and the System for Analysis, Research, and Training (START). These networks have already forged highly competitive, interdisciplinary teams of scientists that are working to make information available for decision-makers. The networks are contributing to the strengthening of local scientific infrastructure and encouraging local young scientists to become involved in integrative science. These regional networks are poised to make a strong contribution to sustainability science. There is also the question of equal access, both to the data and to specialized analysis tools--and in this respect a 'digital divide' (10) separates the developed world from the developing. While many developing countries have a robust research, communications, and computing infrastructure, many others have extremely poor systems. The regional networks provide a framework for attacking some of these problems, through their visiting scholars programs, infrastructure grants, and team-building activities. Many grants provide computer hardware and, in some cases, the necessary telecommunications infrastructure. Each of these regional networks places a great emphasis on training young people to use new concepts within an integrative, multidisciplinary context. International global change research networks are emerging as a plausible response to the challenge of carrying out sustainability science research. They operate on a scale that provides a good fit to most of the problems to be tackled: they are fundamentally regional. Significant advances in sustainability science must take place on regional scales.

The local scale is too small to include many of the important systemic interrelationships (and is also too small to provide significant relief), and the global scale is simply unmanageable?in addition to being politically problematic and often irrelevant in a scientifically comparative sense. The regional scale provides a context within which the full complexity of these problems is both evident and tractable. Reductionism certainly still has a place within science, but it cannot remain a central paradigm for science's approach to society's critical problems.

---

1. United Nations, 1992. Annex I, Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 3?14 June, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

2. Kates, R. W., W. C. Clark, R. Corell, J. M. Hall, C. C. Jaeger, I. Lowe, J. J. McCarthy, H. J. Schellnhuber, B. Bolin, N. M. Dickson, S. Faucheux, G. C. Gallopin, A. Gruebler, B. Huntley, J. Jaeger, N. S. Jodha, R. E. Kasperson, A. Mabogunje, P. Matson, H. Mooney, B. Moore III, T. O?Riordan, and U. Svedin, 2001. ?Sustainability science,? Science, vol. 292, pp.641?642.

3. Friibergh Workshop on Sustainability Science, 2000. Sustainability science: Statement of the Friibergh Workshop on Sustainability Science, 11?14 October, Friibergh Manor, Örsundsbro, Sweden.

4. For a good discussion of the Gaia hypothesis, see Schneider, S. H. and P. J. Boston, eds., 1991. Scientists on Gaia, American Geophysical Union:3-10. MIT Press, Cambridge, in particular the article of James Lovelock, ?Geophysiology?The Science of Gaia,? p. 4.

5. Ward, B., 1966. Spaceship Earth, Columbia University Press, New York.

6. See for example, Fuller, R.B., 1971. Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth. E.P. Dutton & Co., New York.

7. NRC (National Research Council), 1999. Our Common Journey. Board on Sustainable Development, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

8. NRC (National Research Council), 1999. Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade. Committee on Global Change Research, Board on Sustainable Development, National Academy Press, Washington D.C.

9. NRC (National Research Council), 1992. Global Environmental Change: Understanding the Human Dimensions. Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Commission on the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Academy Press, Washington D.C.

10. Although the original study was strictly within the United States and for domestic purposes, the origin of the term lies in the correlation between income disparities and access to communications technologies found by a study published in July 1999 by the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide (PDF link).

Rover, now go find Beagle:

NASA's commands to Spirit's rover this morning included not only "turn right and go down the ramp," but also "and when you're done, look up."

The Mars Express orbiter (of Beagle 2 fame) will pass overhead, and will be looking down at the landing area. By design, the two craft have similar sensors onboard, and they will hopefully look through some of the same portions of the tenuous martian atmosphere.

When you look down, it's very hard to tell what part of the signal comes from the ground, and what part comes from the atmosphere in-between. For example, if you are interested in how much dust there is in the air, but you are looking down at a dusty surface, you can't tell how much of the "dust signal" is in the air, and how much is coming from the ground:

Express Signal = Ground Signal + Atmosphere Signal

If you look up, you can measure what's in the air, but you can only do it in one place at a time:

Spirit Up-look Signal = Atmosphere Signal

The best thing to do is to combine these techniques, and get an idea of what the correct value is for at least one spot, use that to validate the measurement, and then calibrate your space-borne sensors so they can be used over wide areas. When Spirit looks down, it will also be able to determine what is actually on the ground, rather than the combination Express sees:

Spirit Down-look Signal = Ground Signal

You can use your high school algebra to see that this system of equations overdetermines the individual signals - this is what gives us some bounds on errors.

And that is what Spirit will help Express to do today.

You might think this kind of thing is done all the time on Earth, but you'd be wrong. This type of ground truthing calibration/validation exercise is very expensive. The ground truth that is used to calibrate sensors here on Earth is actually quite sparse. Most of the remotely sensed data of the Earth is not fully understood, and very few of the tens of thousands of maps produced from satellite data even have rigorous error estimates for the signal interpretation.

I'm still chewing on President Bush's "Infinity and Beyond" speech from yesterday, and trying to find U.S. budget figures for 1962. Stay tuned.

Henry v. Vucetich:

The oft-told story of re-inventing wheels, competing standards, and generally un- or at best ill-informed decisions.

At lunch today I met Julia Rodriguez, a researcher from the University of New Hampshire who is looking at criminology in late 19th century Argentina. She is looking at the implementation of a fingerprinting program to document and uniquely identify all immigrants, and how science played into the adoption of this particular policy. Answer: not very well. And by now you can probably guess where she went with this, given the recent news about fingerprinting at U.S. points-of-entry and possible changes in immigration policy. Follow the parallels where they exist. There are bright spots, I promise.

In the 1870's the British invested a great deal of capital in Argentine railroads, allowing a large boom in the agricultural export industry. A period of enormous immigration flux followed, and the population grew more than ten-fold within 20 years. As might be imagined, the social and physical infrastructure could not manage this, and a great deal of social unrest occurred. Within the flood of immigrants, there were all sorts of bad seeds (to be read as 'anarchists, communists, and other criminals'), and the Argentine government wanted to winnow them out.

Social criminology theories of the day based on the work of Cesare Lombroso (nature) and Enrico Ferri (nurture) in Italy were popular, as was the evolving work of physiological measurements ("anthropometry") under Alphonse Bertillon in France. Although much maligned by later mis-use and outright quackery, the fundamental motivation was simple enough: can measurements of human physiognomy be used as identifiers, are they inherited, and can they also be used as predictors of behaviour? Many thought they could, and Argentina (among most other advanced nations of the day) set up an official system to collect measurements from criminals and immigrants. The data was to be used to help with resolving identity in criminal cases, and perhaps to identify potential troublemakers before they were allowed entry.

Among the beaurocracy was Juan Vucetich, a statistician given the task of seeing if there was anything useful in fingerprints, since recent work by Francis Galton (a cousin of Darwin's) in England pointed heavily towards fingerprints as unique identifiers. Galton had initially tried to tie fingerprints to race and to behaviour, but was not able to establish a scientifically rigorous correlation (however, Galton never renounced the belief that the correlation was there). Vucetich took Galton's fingerprint uniqueness theory, and devised a rigorous classification system for fingerprints that allowed for the searching of the growing set of records. Argentina had the first set of indexed fingerprint records, and the first criminal conviction in 1892 based on fingerprint identification (incidentally, an Argentine (Gori) also published the first professional criminological journal). The Vucetich system is still in use today by many police, judicial and correctional systems throughout the world. Vucetich's method is still taught at an institute bearing his name in Mendoza, Argentina.

However, the system as set up in the late 1800's and early 1900's in Argentina had a lot of holes. Only seaports took immigrant fingerprints. First-class passengers and Argentine citizens were exempt. Plenty of bad seeds came overland. Plenty were already in the country (...many of them home-grown), and plenty of bad seeds were in the moneyed classes. It was a classic case of implementing a policy based on a presupposed, and long-term untenable position that any unrest was caused by poor outsiders, and that border control was the answer. There were of course two fatal flaws: a porous border, and the presupposition that the threat came from an easily classified set of people. It was a short-term political fix designed to quell public fear. Given that Argentina was composed of more than 50% immigrants, riots soon ensued, and the fingerprinting program was eventually dropped.

To continue the fingerprint history, about ten years after the Vucetich system was set up in Argentina, Edward Henry devised a similar system in India. He was later transferred to London, and began using his system in Scotland Yard, from where it migrated to most of the rest of the English speaking world. In the U.S. there were several false starts, based on variants of Henry, and many incompatible systems were set up based on decisions by local police superintendents. By the 1940's most of this had been ironed out, and a massive card file began to grow in Washington.

The growth of computers and pattern recognition theory was a great incubator. The digitization of the U.S. card database and the eventual merging of international databases was contemplated under a common system. The competing Henry and Vucetich systems had come to a head, under the need for the FBI's International Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).

They both lost, and Vucetich and Henry systems were discarded. IAFIS actually went back to Galton to look at even finer levels of detail to provide necessary levels of evidentiary confidence.

So, what is to be made of this in the present?

One. Massive as it is, the IAFIS database is generally only composed of the convicted criminal population, all federal civil servants (yours truly included), and military personnel. Most civil, unconvicted criminal, and foreign fingerprints are still on cardboard, and are not in the system. The system therefore is re-active rather than pro-active.

Two. Current immigration fingerprinting is only required for certain countries, and so would miss U.S., Canadian and British citizens, as well as current holders of green cards. And there are certainly plenty of bad seeds among those groups.

Three. Fingerprinting is only implemented at certain ports of entry, not all. ...and there is additionally always immigration that avoids ports-of-entry, anyway.

Four. Terrorists supposedly come from a classifiable set of people. Not by measuring their skulls, but by looking at their electronic habits.

Five. We are a nation of immigrants, and depend on immigration for labour and population growth.

The 1800's Argentine ingredients are there, but of course the context is very different.

The level of effort required to make this system work is daunting, and it will require giving up freedoms. At the moment, those freedoms are those belonging to the outsiders, and so there is political short-term capital to be gained from the policy. When the freedoms impinged upon belong to regular U.S. citizens, watch out. Those stories will start to emerge, as dual citizens get caught, U.S. citizens in other countries' databases get caught, and just plain errors are introduced. Godel's omega incompleteness will have its way.

Good books I found on this issue are:

Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; 369 pp.)

and the bible for fingerprinting technology:

Maltoni D., D. Maio, A.K. Jain, and S. Prabhakar, Handboook of Fingerprint Recognition (New York, NY: Springer Verlag, June 2003; 360 pp., 180 illus., DVD included, ISBN: 0-387-95431-7) Amazon.com

I will post another amusing story about Argentine science later. The Huemul incident is not a proud moment for a country that has a strong intellectual history.

Japi birdei:

This blog made it to the one-year mark. A good summary of the phases a blogger goes through is here. Perhaps I'm in Stage III?

...some comments might help from you lot. I know you're there. I'm tracking you.

'Nuff said.

Beagle! Here Beagle, Beagle...

Sadly, as we recede from its planned landing day on December 25, it looks more and more like we have lost contact with ESA's Mars lander, Beagle 2.

As the IKEA man would say, in the Cannes-prize-winning advert Spike Jonz produced about a lamp left out in the rain on a garbage pile: "Many of you feel bad for this spacecraft. That is because you are crazy. It has no feelings."

But Mars is a particularly harsh destination, because we have sent thirty-three probes to the planet, and eighteen have failed completely. By my reckoning, we have had ten successes, four partial successes, eighteen failures, with two missions pending (Japan's Nozomi, and the US's Opportunity). Here are the dirty details:

• 10 October 1960: USSR launched Mars 1M (1). Launch failure.
  
• 14 October 1960: USSR launched Mars 1M (2). Launch failure.
  
• 24 October 1962: USSR launched Mars 2MV-4 on Sputnik 22. Launch failure (debris was thought to be initial Soviet missile attack during Cuban missile crisis).
  
• 1 November 1962: USSR launched Mars 1. Failed 3 months before fly-by. Now in heliocentric orbit.
  
• 4 November 1962: USSR launched Mars 2MV-3 (1). Failed to leave Earth orbit.
  
• 11 November 1963: USSR launched Venera 3MV-1/A (1) (listed as a Mars probe, but name belongs to Venus series?). Failed to separate from LV.
  
• 19 February 1964: USSR launched Venera 3MV-1/A (2). Launch failure.
  
• 5 November 1964: USA launched Mariner 3. Launch fairing failure same day.
  
• 28 November 1964: USA launched Mariner 4. First successful Mars flyby. 5.2Mb of data returned, photographing about 1% of the surface ("Craters! Mars is like the Moon!"), giving first estimates of atmospheric pressure, 4-7 mb, from radio occultation ), mass and shape constraints, and non-detection of a magnetic field. Mariner went into heliocentric orbit, and was finally terminated21 December 1967.
  
• 30 November 1964: USSR launched Zond 2. Communications failure in April 1965.
  
• 25 February 1969: USA launched Mariner 6 (Mariner 5 went to Venus). 20% of surface photographed ("Whoa! Mars is not like the Moon!"), surface pressure 6-7 mb, determination that southern polar cap was composed of CO2.
  
• 27 March 1969: USA launched Mariner 7. Successful fly-by. Mariner 6 & 7 returned 800 Mb of data.
  
• 27 March 1969: USSR launched Mars M-69 (521). Launch failure.
  
• 2 April 1969: USSR launched Mars M-69 (522). Failure at +41 sec left the launch site unusable due to fuel contamination for several months.
  
• 9 May 1971: USA launched Mariner 8. Launch failure.
  
• 10 May 1971: USSR launched Mars M-71 (1) on Cosmos 419. Failed to leave Earth orbit (another unit conversion failure: the timer to ignite the stage was set to 1.5 years instead of 1.5 seconds).
  
• 19 May 1971: USSR launched Mars 2 (M-71 (2)). Reached Mars on 27 November. Lander failed on descent.
  
• 28 May 1971: USSR launched Mars 3. Reached Mars on 2 December, lander descended to soft landing same day, but operated only 20 seconds before failing.
  
• 30 May 1971: USA launched Mariner 9. First successful orbit insertion around another planet. Mapped planet after global dust storm lasting from September to December. Valles Marineris canyon details. 54 Gb of data returned. Turned off 27 October 1972. Still in martian orbit.
  
• 21 July 1973: USSR launched Mars 4. Martian orbit not achieved, fly-by only on 10 February 1974. Faulty computer chip. In heliocentric orbit.
  
• 25 July 1973: USSR launched Mars 5. Martian orbit insertion on 12 February 1974, operated a few days before failure. Faulty computer chip.
  
• 5 August 1973: USSR launched Mars 6. Martian orbit and landing achieved 12 March 1974, but data was corrupt. Faulty computer chip. Contact lost on landing.
  
• 9 August 1974: USSR launched Mars 7. Premature landing probe separation - missed Mars. Faulty computer chip. In heliocentric orbit.
  
• 20 August 1975: USA launched Viking 1. Martian orbit insertion 19 June 1976. Soft landing 20 July 1976. Orbiter powered down 17 August 1980. Lander functioned until 13 November 1982.
  
• 9 September 1975: USA launched Viking 2. Martian orbit insertion 7 August 1976. Soft landing 3 September 1976. Orbiter powered down 25 July 1978. Lander functioned until 11 April 1980. Viking 1 & 2 orbiters mapped the entire surface.
  
• 7 July 1988: USSR launched Phobos 1. Failed 27 March 1989 while in orbit before launch of probes to martian moon Phobos. Software error led to loss of lock on Sun, depleting the batteries.
  
• 12 July 1988: USSR launched Phobos 2. Reached Mars 29 January 1989, failed 27 March 1989 before lander was released.
  
• 25 September 1972: USA launched Mars Observer. Communications and propulsion failure 22 August 1993 on orbit insertion attempt. In heliocentric orbit.
  
• 16 November 1996: Russia launched Mars 8 (M-96). Failed to leave Earth orbit and re-entered over the Pacific, Chile and Bolivia. Last Russian mission to Mars.
  
• 7 November 1996: USA launches Mars Global Surveyor. Martian orbit insertion 12 September 1997. Began mapping in March 1999. Still operational (a nice shot looking back at Earth from MGS' camera).
  
• 4 December 1996: USA launched Mars Pathfinder. Landed 4 July 1997. The Sojourner rover is operated. Mission terminated 10 March 1998 when communications failed. Great public attachment to little rover.
  
• 3 July 1998: Japan launched Nozomi or Hope. Original plan was to arrive at Mars 11 October 1999, but swing-by orbit acceleration problems left the craft with insufficient delta-V. Additional Earth swingbys were used to get a Mars encounter January 2004. Stay tuned.
  
• 11 December 1998: USA launched Mars Climate Orbiter as part of the Mars Surveyor program. Failed 23 September 1999 when an incorrect value in a look-up table caused incorrect orbit insertion (unit error, using pounds instead of Newtons).
  
• 3 January 1999: USA launched Mars Polar Explorer. Reached Mars 3 December, and was to have landed between 73 and 78 degrees South, but communications were lost on lander separation. The death knell for Dan Goldin's faster, better, cheaper mantra.
  
• 7 April 2001: USA launched 2001 Mars Odyssey. Achieved martian orbit October 24, 2001. Today it serves as the communications relay for the landers (this is one of the craft that have IP addresses that I mentioned in my Feb 20 post).
  
• 2 June 2003: the EU launched Mars Express. Mars orbit insertion 20 December 2003. The lander, Beagle 2, was to have landed 25 December, but contact has not been made. The orbiter remains operational, with a 1 year operations plan.
  
• 10 June 2003: USA launched Mars Exploration Rover A (MER-2, Spirit). Rover weighs 185 kg, over ten times what Sojourner weighs. Landed 4 January. Rover roll-off planned for 12 January. 90 day operations planned - dust covering the solar panels and a lowering sun angle will eventually kill the batteries.
  
• 8 July 2003: USA launched Mars Exploration Rover B (MER-1, Opportunity). Martian arrival scheduled for 25 January 2004.
  

(Data from astronautix.com, ESA, JAXA, and NASA)

Here is a great QTVR panorama of the view from Spirit's landing site.

Here's the nifty desktop clock, Mars24, so that you too can get successively more jet-lagged like the mission control folks at JPL, operating on Mars time. Mars24 doesn't label all the landing sites for all the missions listed above, but you can center the map on whatever coordinates you want, and so see where the forlorn and freezing are. Poor things. But they have no feelings.

Donner party, revisited:

Driving along I-5 in San Diego today, I heard about the closure of the I-5 several hundred miles to the North, between California and Oregon because of a strong snowstorm. Several hundred cars and trucks were caught, and gasoline and food had to be snow-mobiled in after the storm had abated, and until the big ploughs could get in to clear the road. The story mentioned that many of the vehicles had people in them that were completely unprepared. Clothing for 70 degree weather. No food or water. There were children in several cars.

It struck me that we are so focused on staring at our feet as we trudge through this life that we have become completely disconnected from the natural forces around us. As the city of Bam knows, nature can suddenly decide that it wants to shake you up. And we are usually quite unprepared for it. A compounding set of problems can prove deadly for even the wisest of survivors.

Sounds of good old Saint Nick:

When something moves really, really fast through the air, we can hear it. Faster than a speeding train. Faster than a speeding bullet. I'm talking hyper-sonic.

Lightning drills a 1 to 2 cm hole in the sky several kilometers long. Thunder is what we hear when the atmosphere is snapped open and then refills the hole. Imagine the sound when a hole about 1 meter in size gets drilled through tens of kilometers in a second or less.

That's what happens when a significant meteor comes down to within 50 km of the surface. The sound produced by this shockwave (particularly the infrasound below 20 Hz) can be detected from several thousand kilometers away. These events are of interest not only because of the spectacular display and their effect on unwary populations (on September 27 an event over the state of Orissa in eastern India caused several people to collapse in shock, and one person died from a possibly connected heart attack), but also because they are detonations in the atmosphere, and could be mistaken for nuclear tests. In fact, the energy of these bolides is often quoted in kilotons of TNT, the standard energy equivalent for nuclear shots. A bolide with total energies over 1 kt is needed for infrasound detection with the current comprehensive test ban treaty infrasound international monitoring system, and estimates of the bolide flux in this range are about 10 events worldwide per year. About 6 to 7% of a nuclear blast's energy goes into sound, and the estimates for bolides range from 0.2 to about 7%.

Here's a great summary of the collision flux with Earth, ranging over 14 orders of magnitude, from an often quoted letter to Nature by Brown, Spalding, ReVelle, Tagliaferri and Worden (10.1038/nature01238 - PDF file):

Other methods that are used to detect these events are satellite optical and IR observations of the fireball, radio reflections, seismic signals (again, just a form of sound), and ground-based video. The proliferation of security cameras has in fact been a good source for fireball data, but often what is seen is a reflection off a car or a window, since the cameras are looking down to catch crime, and not up to catch celestial phenomena.

Things to remember: shooting stars and fireballs are neither stars, fire, nor comets; groundfall (pieces reaching the ground) from an event is extremely rare and very difficult to find, but are often mistakenly reported; eyewitness accounts are almost without exception useless for research (we are poor observers of exciting events).

There is a great article by Alan Hildebrand of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada here that gives a nice mathematical summary of the chances of seeing a meteorite fall. Summary: of the approximately 7,000 groundfalls in a year, about 5 have a chance of being seen. His comment about a herd of dairy cattle extending a person's awareness cross-section made me laugh...

There is a nice page about the 1947 Sikhote-Alin fireball (and groundfall!) here.

A Colorado website tracks fireballs, here, and seems to have a scientific approach.

Then again, if you are listening on Christmas Eve, and hear a rumble under clear skies, it could be the crack of a reindeer whip you hear.

Jaenicke-Després, Buckler, Smith, Gilbert, Cooper, Doebley & Pääbo:

On trying to reduce my backlog of reading, I noticed an article in the November 14 Science about teosinte corn (maize, for my cross-Atlantlete readers).

The kernel of the story is that several traits of modern corn had already been established by human interference at least 4,400 years before the present. Selective breeding is genetic modification.

So genetically modified foods have a deeper history than we thought, and I perhaps need to revise my table of agricultural stages.

Nothing is ever as simple as we would like. Prehistoric popcorn anyone?

Ridge:Esker::Bin Laden:Erratic

The upcoming holiday season, all the air travel involved, and the change of U.S. threat advisory from elevated to high will be an interesting combination to watch.

It occurred to me that al-Qaeda has forgotten about China. Not in the sense that China has a large muslim population that they would love to radicalize, since I am sure they are at work on that, despite Beijing's obvious preoccupation with just such a scenario. It's the Made in China factor.

Both decorating for the season and making my purchases has made me aware that most everything is now "Made in China." If we continue in this direction, everything will be made in China. Everything. Even the continental substrate. The atmosphere. China will make it all. As foretold.

What I mean behind that hyperbole is that China has an enormous stake in the survival of the current economic system. As goes the U.S., so goes the Middle Kingdom - and if China perceives a real threat to the U.S. buying power for its own exports, it will act. A sleeping dragon will have been awakened that would be much more than al-Qaeda bargained for.

Merry Christmas! Buy Chinese!

Oneirology:

I used to sleep six nights a week as an undergraduate. Now, if I skip a night, I seem to pay a much higher price. And I thought I was supposed to need less sleep as I aged?

I had a great night with Isabel. Hurricane Isabel, that is. We lost power for about 16 hours starting at about 7 a.m., and my wife and I spent that time bailing out the sump every 30 to 45 minutes to stop water from flooding the basement and ruining hundreds of our books... there is a sort of zombie rythm one gets into when the alarm goes off that frequently.

The next morning the alarm went off and I jumped out of bed, feeling well rested. I showered and got dressed for work, only to look at the clock as I was about to depart, and realize that it was 12:30. I had slept for about one-and-a-half hours. The clock time was correct, but the alarms had all been reset to midnight. By that point I was fully awake, so I knew going back to bed was going to be difficult.

That was a rare taste of needing less sleep, because lately our circadian rhythms have been dominated by cats. And that means nocturnal activity. Theirs, not ours. It's those odd digging noises that come from the study that worry me...

The sleep deprivation study comes to mind where they placed cats on 3-inch-wide islands in the middle of a pond for several days. Cruel indeed - they ended up with psychotic cats. More psychotic that normal, that is. Our cats are occasionally psychotic with 23 hours of sleep a day. I'm psychotic with an average of six to seven hours.

Patrick O'Brian and the Prinz Eugen:

I saw Master and Commander this weekend, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Parts of the sound track were recorded by Richard King using cannons supplied by Michigan cannoneers, with live shot of all sorts. What you hear in the movie are actual ball, bar, grape and chain shot flying overhead, so the whistling and humming sounds are probably quite authentic (NPR/All Things Considered story).

There's a good website about men-of-war here, although it seems related to another movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. The Royal Navy also has a nice history section to its website.

The lines in the Master and Commander about the phasmid disguising itself reminded me of a story my father told of flying a sortie over the English Channel during WWII and coming across a very large ship with what appeared to be cargo boxes on its deck. When they peeled off to attack the convoy, the boxes unfolded to reveal very large guns - it was in fact the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, against which the squadron had no chance, and so they quickly broke off, scattered, and returned to base.

I'm farily sure this was not any part of the famous Channel Dash by the Bismarck & Prinz Eugen described in this MOD article, since he never mentioned the Bismarck. It must have been some other movement - his flight logbooks are still around, so I will have to ask and have a look to try and find the dates.

I had an old Revell model of the Bismarck which I think I eventually destroyed with a pellet gun. I probably even made airplane noises and rat-a-tat-tatted at it as I made pass after pass, immune from its silent, plastic guns and frozen turrets. I'm sure my sound effects were just as effective as those depicting exchange of fire between the Surprise and the Acheron.

ME, not FL:

An interesting project I came across in one of my programs - Lobster Tales. You can find out where your particular lobster was caught, and find out a bit about the lobsterman who caught it. Purchased live lobsters often come with rubber bands around their claws. The bands from this program have a serial number on them that consumers can enter in the Lobster Tales website also printed on the band. It makes for an interesting connection between a consumer and a provider that has been severed in modern culture.

The idea to extend this tracking into the consumer side of things came from a scientific tracking system gone awry: a lobster with a scientific tag that was supposed to be removed by the fisherman accidentally made it all the way to a Wal-Mart in Wisconsin. A dutiful consumer called the telephone number on the tag, and the science program was left with a lobster catch indicator in the middle of the continent!

Lobsters are an interesting case in the world of aging research - I'm not sure if an upper limit to lobster age is known. They have a very great advantage over us mammals in that their telomeres do not shorten when their cells divide, which is what appears to be the limiting factor for our cell divisions. (FEBS Letters Vol. 439 (1-2) pp. 143-146). When large lobsters are caught, there is no way to tell their age - because they molt, they do not have annual growth marks. The largest lobster on record, weighing 44 lbs 6 oz was probably between 50 and 100 years old (I remember seeing a photo of this monster hanging beside a fisherman many years ago, about 3-4 feet long, but I can't find it on the net).

Here's a Lobster Cam inside a lobster trap in Maine - pity the poor fellow who wanders in (cam is often black - either night-time, or simply disconnected).

The The Lobster Conservancy site has a lot of good information on lobster issues, and you can even "adopt a lobster" here (although I'm not sure I'd want to get that telegram "...regret to inform that your adopted lobster, Elvis, was boiled and eaten on Sept. 12."...)

Hungry yet? Can't get to the The Maine Lobster Festival this year? Jess' Market participates in the Lobster Tales Program, and ships FedEx (unfortunately, their website appears to be somewhat hostile to Mac browsers (Safari and IE...), just be patient, and their page will load eventually).