Angular Unconformities

Friday photo

2011-10-21T12:20:00.003-04:00

Au Sable River, Huron National Forest, Michigan. October 2011.

Here's another photo from my Au Sable trip. I thought I should offer up a nice colorful-trees image, while we're still in autumn.

The raft is a replica wanigan, a floating kitchen and supply store for lumbermen who worked in the deep woods, far from the main camp. Up the hill from this spot is the Lumberman's Monument, a celebration of those 19th Century men who supplied the nation with timber and stripped the Michigan landscape of its native cover. As you can see from this older image, they were effective at their jobs. The statue today is surrounded by second-growth trees.

Friday photo

2011-10-14T11:28:00.001-04:00

Grass stalks reflected in the Au Sable River. Huron National Forest, Michigan, October 2011.

I just loved the feeling of geometry here.

Who's Who

2011-10-06T18:36:00.001-04:00

[via Daily Dish]

My country descends

2011-09-18T11:27:00.001-04:00

Friday photo

2011-09-09T21:09:00.002-04:00

Sugar Creek. Turkey Run State Park, Parke County, Indiana, July 2007.

Morning along the river. The early bird gets the gnats.

Friday photo

2011-09-02T18:56:00.007-04:00

Washington Monument. Washington, DC, February 2007.

Today's image features our National Phallus, the venerable Washington Monument. Begun in 1848, but not completed until 1884.¹ It's the usual project, overly ambitious and poorly-administered, soon running over budget and sitting half-completed for a generation before someone decided to just finish the damned thing. Which they finally did, after they gave up the plan for the Greek temple surround the base. And it wasn't even a government project.²

The Monument has been in the news lately, of course, because of cracks discovered after the recent East Coast earthquake; more have been discovered in the wake of Hurricane Irene. Reportedly, the Monument is sound and not about to fall over, but that hasn't stopped our modern-day Jeremiahs from discerning God's wrath in natural phenomena. Pat Robertson begins with "I don’t want to get weird on this, but," and realizing it's already too late for that, continues, "it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power. It has been the symbol of our great nation. We look at the monument and we say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it. Is that a sign from the Lord?” Not to be outdone, a certain Professor of Practical Theology³ at Southeastern University speculates on what message God might be sending, asking, "If the crack in the monument is, in fact, a God-sent ‘sign’ for the moment, then what might God be saying? And to whom is He speaking?"

I sometimes think God is just some great, vaporous infant. He cries every time He's unhappy, which is most of the time, but He can't tell you exactly what the problem is.

Perhaps He's just gotten around to noticing that the founder of His Own Country was honored by constructing a pagan edifice. The Washington Monument is an obelisk, a style of monument that first adorned Egyptian temples and has no Christian connotations whatsoever -- although the things are so cool that even the Vatican still keeps one that was erected by the beloved Emperor Caligula.

We needn't be surprised at this. Who can't admire the architecture of the Classical Age? If you look around Washington, DC, you'll see a lot more references to classical Rome and Greece than you do to Christian sources, and the buildings all resemble Greek temples more than Christian cathedrals. Both Rome and Greece also copied the Egyptians' obelisks. The Romans not only built their own, but they plundered them from Egypt, too, long before Napoleon began the modern tradition of collection development, so that today only half of all surviving Egyptian obelisks are still found in Egypt.

Frankly, I don't mind a bit that, in honoring our primary Founding Father, Americans also honored one of the most accomplished cultures of the ancient world.

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1. Which makes me think of Orwell's 1984, which was published in 1948 and gained its title by reversing that last two digits. But I can't quite make any other connections, so I guess I'll have to drop the whole thing.

2. If you look closely at the photo, even though it's backlit, you can see the difference in color between the marble in the original base and that used to complete the monument.

3. It's hard to even type that without giggling, isn't it?

Book review: AD 381

2011-08-27T18:54:00.000-04:00

A couple years ago I wrote a post about Charles Freeman's book The Closing of the Western Mind, which argues, in a nutshell, that the triumph of Christianity in late Antiquity truly did usher in an intellectual Dark Age, wherein philosophical and scientific questions (and there was not yet a distinction between the two) were settled by theological arguments from authority and free inquiry was discouraged. In A.D. 381, Freeman continues his argument, exploring in more detail how the late Roman emperors injected themselves and the state into theological disputes.

Several reviewer of the book have complained that Freeman in simply updating Edward Gibbon and blaming Christianity for the fall of Rome. This is not how I read Freeman. He blames Christianity – or, to be more precise, certain later Christians and Roman emperors, and the precedent they established – for killing off a great and ancient Greek tradition of free inquiry. But he does not blame Christianity for bringing down the Empire itself.

By the end of the 4^th century, while Christianity was growing but did not yet dominate, the Empire was barely maintaining itself. Grown too large for its own governance, it had split into two coeval sections, with capitals at both Rome and Constantinople governing the West and East. The powerful Persian Empire threatened the East, numerous Germanic tribes were invading from the North, and Roman armies were spread across borders that had grown too long and too distant to be efficiently defended. With the military removed so far from the core of the empire, the interior trade routes were less well-guarded and commerce became more difficult and expensive.

Although the East retained a cohesive state for another thousand years, the West disintegrated both politically and economically. After 400, trade all but disappeared in Western Europe. Cities became small towns; the money economy disappeared; well-manufactured goods, once common in even a peasant household, disappear from the archaeological record. Rome's famous aqueducts went dry for a millennium, and even the lead and copper pollution levels recorded in ice cores testify today to the demise of manufacturing during the Medieval Period.

***

None of this does Freeman blame on Christianity. Given the entirely worldly difficulties that Rome faced, it should be no surprise if the Empire failed to overcome them all. As I read Freeman, he would instead blame the fall of Rome for the intellectually authoritarian turn that Christianity took following the 4^th Century. Throughout the Roman world, the scholarly decline was almost comparable to the economic and political collapse. According to Freeman's account, even the renowned Medieval scholars are recognized to have written poorly and less grammatically than their predecessors; where a rich Roman citizen could possess a library with thousands of works, medieval monasteries would be considered impressive if they contained a few hundred. Theology replaced naturalistic inquiry. A Christian mob probably destroyed the remnants of the Great Library at Alexandria¹ in 391, and in AD 529, Plato's Academy was shut down after 900 years of free inquiry. Had the Christian authorities not been so hostile to non-Christian literature, more would likely have survived to the present day.

What happened? By Freeman's reckoning, the emperors meddled in theology and set a precedent of resolving scholarly disputes through authority instead of inquiry. As the Empire's organization became ever less adequate to meet external threats, the later emperors were prone to blaming their ineffectiveness on a lack of internal unity. And as Christianity absorbed more and more of the Empire's inhabitants, the emperors began to see the divisiveness of the Church as a principle weakness of the empire. In the centuries after Jesus's death, Christian clergy had taken the Greek practice of philosophical disputation, applied it to theology, and then – disastrously – made it a matter of eternal life or death to declare and defend a single position. “I don't know” was not an acceptable answer, even though it would have been the best answer to questions which were essentially unknowable.

One of the major, unknowable, questions concerned the exact nature of Christ – was he fully human, or fully divine? Maybe he was a human who was temporarily occupied by God? Or was he entirely God all along and only appeared human? However you answer the question, some unpleasant consequences seem to follow. If he was human, then why should we be worshiping him? Or if he wasn't human, then he could hardly have suffered through his crucifixion, in which case his great sacrifice would seem to be greatly overtouted. According to the disputants, immortal souls were at stake, although a cynic might notice that the emperors' habit of extending patronage to certain churches meant there was a lot of money and status at stake in elevating one's own views and disparaging a rival's.

The emperors began to take sides in these disputes, something that had never happened with philosophy or pagan religion. In AD 381, the emperor Theodosius issued an edict declaring the Nicene faith – an incoherent declaration that Jesus was simultaneously fully God and fully human, and you could conveniently flip from one to another whenever you needed to dodge a contradiction² – was orthodox and that all other views were heretical. Clergy with contrary views were disfranchised and their churches closed. A decade later, Theodosius banned pagan rituals and sacrifices altogether.

Theodosius's efforts did not succeed in solving theological questions; all he managed to do was thoroughly politicize these disputes and cement the role of the state in establishing religious orthodoxy. Through the following century, Christians continued to gain strength and began to suppress pagan practices even more thoroughly than had been Christianity in earlier eras.³ Curiously, the disputatious eastern empire survived as the Byzantine Empire until 1453; it was the western empire, where theological questions seemed less urgent and there was no such thing yet as “papal authority,” that thoroughly fell apart.

As for the promises of orthodoxy … Freeman tells this story. In AD 428 the bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, put the case as baldly and boldly as could be: “Give me, king, the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you heaven in return. Aid me in destroying heretics and I will assist you in vanquishing the Persians.” A few years later, Nestorius himelf was condemned for portraying Jesus as too human. Not that he had adopted any known heresy; he just wasn't orthodox enough. Thus the promise of fundamentalism; thus the all-too-often-delivered reality.

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1. The case is ambiguous and disputed. It seems likely that the Library suffered several episodes of destruction after its zenith in the last couple centuries BC. It's not clear how much was left to be destroyed by the mob in 391, but they did destroy what they found.

2. Yes, that's my own definition.

3. It comes as a surprise today to be told that the Romans were religiously tolerant, but it's fairly true to say they were. In conquered territories, they did their best to amalgamate local religion with their own, while polytheism would naturally tolerate anyone's decision to choose a certain god as his particular patron. An upstanding citizen would be expected to make a show of honoring a city's gods, just to keep them happy, but this didn't require him to reject any other gods. Jews refused to adopt polytheism, but they were never upstanding citizens (generally not legal citizens at all). I'm not well-studied enough to say this with confidence, but I suspect Christians would never have suffered persecution if the religion had remained confined to the lower classes; their religious views wouldn't have mattered to anyone.

Friday photo

2011-08-26T13:08:00.001-04:00

Golden Spike National Historic Site, Promontory, Utah. June 2005.

Did you know it could have been "Golden Rail National Historic Site"? Alas, a certain San Francisco booster discovered there wasn't enough enthusiasm for donating that much gold, so he settled for a golden spike instead. Nevada also offered a silver spike (from the Silver State, of course), while Arizona produced a silver spike with a golden head and a San Francisco newspaper gave a second golden spike. At the famous completion ceremony, these were (gently) tapped into place with a special silver-plated maul and then immediately pulled out again so that real spikes could be put in their place. Railroad magnates Leland Stanford and Thomas Durant tried to drive the iron Last Spike into place, but made a hash of the job; a real rail worker had to finish. The precious spikes were dispersed to various repositories and none resides at Promontory today*.

As a matter of fact, neither does the transcontinental railroad. The site was forced as a huge and inconvenient detour around the Great Salt Lake and, even today, it's almost 150 miles of vacant desert and single-lane road from Brigham City. Fortunately, the Salt Lake is quite shallow and crossing it with a trestle was well within 19th Century engineering capabilities. The Southern Pacific Railroad** completed such a cutoff in 1904 and, except for tourists visiting the National Historic Site, no one has seen much need to travel around the north side of the lake ever since.

A previous post on the financing of the transcontinental railroad

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* The second golden spike has since been lost, perhaps in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire

**Not part of the original transcontinental railroad, which was built by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads.

Action-adventure games

2011-08-25T21:32:00.002-04:00

I want this game.

Forever and ever, amen

2011-08-24T17:29:00.003-04:00

It's always amusing to hear people intone that God is the same today as he was yesterday, and will be the same tomorrow. It clearly contradicts all historical experience -- just pick any period in history, examine the teachings and behaviors of any Church, and ask yourself if there have been no changes from then until now. It also contradicts Scripture itself, at least as God was portrayed in some of the early books of the Bible.*

So it's hard to resist poking fun as someone who says, "God wants me to do X," and when he changes his mind, breezily announces that "God wants me to do Y." Matt Hinton pokes a little fun at Oregon football player Lache Seastrunk, a highly-recruited player who has just transferred to Baylor in search of playing time. When he first went to Oregon, Seastrunk told reporters, ""I just really leaned on God and asked Him where I really need to be."

Now that he's going elsewhere, it's "When I first intentionally went there, I felt like God wanted to be there. But God also does things — God also pulls you out of the storm before it happens. So I felt like something was about to go down and God just wanted me to get up out of there." So nice of God to pull you out of a storm you wouldn't be in if you hadn't listened to Him in the first place. He can be just swell that way.

In the Mr. Deity world, I imagine the following conversation:

Larry: "We totally punked him! Oh, I know! Now tell him you want him to go to Alaska-Fairbanks!"
Mr. Deity: "That'd be awesome! He's from Texas; Alaska would just kill him!"
Larry: "Plus, they don't even have a football team!"

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* My favorite example: when the Israelites worshiped the golden calf at Sinai, God told Moses that he was going to destroy them all and offered to make Moses's own descendents become the great nation of sycophants that He longed for. Apparently six or seven centuries is plenty of time for even God to forget that He had made the same solemn promise to Abraham. Fortunately, Moses was a far more forgiving and compassionate person than Yahweh and talked Him into changing His mind back again.

Fun with Photoshop

2011-08-16T10:57:00.009-04:00

I missed the Indycar race Sunday. Hate to do that, but my sister-in-law was appearing in an excellent performance of "Singing in the Rain" and, if I skipped that, there wouldn't be any YouTube highlights to tell me what I missed.

What I did miss was a major executive-decision screwup: with 5 laps left and the cars running under caution due to rain, the race was restarted even though it was clearly still too wet to race safely. Unnecessary mayhem ensued and Will Power, never the shrinking violet, let Race Control know what he thought of their decision:

(And no, that wasn't ABC that put Power's fingers on a loop)

At iRacing, someone suggested that this was a great topic for Photoshop and I agree. Here are my submissions.

Will Power, the movie actor:

Will Power at the center of historic events:

Will Power vacations in Scotland:

More here

More. This is fun!

Friday photo

2011-08-12T11:08:00.004-04:00

Wet cat. Monroeville, Indiana, August 2011.

This may be the most bizarre thing I've ever seen: a cat sitting in a puddle of water. Surely it's a sign of the apocalypse; can Republicans embracing tax hikes, or Richard Dawkins joining the Southern Baptist Convention, be far behind?

(Bear) death in Yellowstone

2011-08-03T14:31:00.003-04:00

A month ago a hiker was killed by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone; nothing was done against the bear. Monday the Park Service killed a different grizzly bear that had charged a man and taken the food in his backpack.

The difference? The first bear appears to have been doing nothing but protecting her cubs (a misjudgment, but an understandable one). That sort of behavior doesn't indicate that the bear is any more likely to attack another hiker than any other bear.

The second one, however, seems to have figured out that hikers carry food and that you can get it from them (rather easily, in fact, if you're a bear). Its chances of challenging the next hiker he comes across, and even seeking out the trails where hikers can be found? They might be rather high, which makes this bear far more dangerous than the iconic "mama grizzly." So the bear was destroyed, even though no one had been killed -- yet. Thus confirming the dictum that "a fed bear is a dead bear."

Buyers, beware

2011-08-02T18:45:00.003-04:00

I don't know eBay rules, or even if the seller is serious. But surely this sale will not go through?

$430 bid for the box an iPad came in. On the one hand, the ad clearly says, "the ipad 2 box does not come with ipad 2 or any accessories.this auction is for the box only.it's for someone whom are trying to get the box to make their ipad 2 complete."

On the other hand, the box is also described as having "Connectivity: Wi-Fi + 3G" and "Storage Capacity: 32 GB." I'll bet it doesn't.

Friday photo

2011-07-29T13:13:00.000-04:00

Giant Forest. Sequoia National Park, June 2005

Disaster

2011-07-28T13:00:00.003-04:00

Disaster can strike with so little warning. For example, one day long ago, my younger brother needed to back up my car in the driveway so that he would have room to shoot a little hoops. He touched the gas a little too hard, had to jump on the brake, and skidded through the gravel to a halt just inches short of our oldest brother's truck. Yes, he'd just come within an ace of damaging both of his older brothers' cars! He'd probably have fled to California years earlier than he actually did.

He got lucky, but this poor driver did not:

The wealthy French Riviera city state of Monaco was the scene of a pileup involving five luxury cars with an estimated value of more than $1.1 million.

The collision, involving a Bentley Azure (worth an estimated $400,000), a Mercedes S Class ($120,000), a Ferrari F430 ($230,000), an Aston Martin Rapide ($230,000) and a Porsche 911 ($130,000), occurred in front of Monaco's Place du Casino

So do you call Flo, the gecko, or just sing the State Farm jingle?

"In Jesus' name, boogity boogity boogity amen!"

2011-07-23T20:13:00.004-04:00

This was the prayer before the NASCAR Nationwide Series race this evening:

Yep, that's why Jesus died for you, Southern style.

Friday photo

2011-07-22T12:49:00.007-04:00

Swimmer. Adrian, Michigan, July 2011.

I took my camera to the Ohio-Michigan Summer Swim League meet in Adrian this week and this was my favorite shot of the day, with my brother's youngest daughter performing the ~~breast~~ butterfly stroke. It's a good action shot, one that manages to freeze the action without destroying the impression of motion.

I've done a modest amount of sports photography, mostly of amateur events, and it's amazing how many shots taken at the peak of the action don't make good action shots. Just freezing an instant (in this case, about 1/1000 of a second) usually catches the athlete in an awkward-looking moment, with an arm half-cocked, or the leg one-quarter lifted, or some such thing. If you read up about action photography, they'll tell you to look for the right moment, and give you some hints as to when that's likely to occur. For example, in basketball, the peak of a jump shot is likely to be the "right" moment.

But I haven't seen anyone discuss why, during the right moment, this instant looks right and the instant before just looks clumsy, awkward, and unnatural. I don't have the answer, either, but I suspect that there's something about finding a sort of peak of the motion while avoiding the middle. For example, a tennis player's serve would look good with the ball in the air and the player preparing for the smash, or on the follow-through. But the instant just before the ball is hit would likely appear clumsy and (paradoxically) more frozen, ruining the sense of action.

In the photo above, it seems to make all the difference that the swimmer is caught with arms fully extended and not, say, three-quarters extended. Just to throw out a hypothesis, I suspect that motion is generally seen as movement from point to point (or from position to position) and we like an image that conforms to the way we see it; that is, we want to see those destination points, not the instants in between. Arms fully extended, or arms swept all the way back, look good and action-packed -- but in between is less pleasing. What happens in between is too rapid for our eyes to see properly and looks unfamiliar when it's frozen at 1/1000 of a second.* Perhaps we just prefer those ever-so-slightly-slower moments that our eye can detect in real time, that remain recognizable when they're captured in a still photograph.

One more stroke of luck in this photo's favor: good sports photos need faces and emotion in them and the splash has just the proper break to show at least some of the face, the eyes especially. Even with the swim goggles, an impression of determination and concentration comes through.

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* Bearing in mind that cinema needs only 24 frames per second to give a convincing illusion of motion.

The language bobbies

2011-07-20T19:46:00.002-04:00

The BBC lists 50 of the most hated Americanisms, as nominated by their readers. Some of them are current business jargon, such as "24/7" and "deliverables." Others have been around quite awhile. One person disparages "expiration date" and wonders what ever happened to "expiry." Truth is, that one expired on this side of the Atlantic some tim before I ever started listening to English. In general, it's the usual collection of pointless peeves that language mavens (including myself, at times) always whine about.

Google plays hardball

2011-07-18T16:34:00.003-04:00

Last May Google lost a lawsuit to the Belgian newspaper consortium, CopiePresse, over Google News linking to their newspaper stories without permission or compensation. Today they're firing back in a big way - by blocking all search results to the newspapers in question altogether.

Google claims they're only complying with a court order. CopiePresse claims they have no objection to having their stories referenced in search results; they only object to some of the content appearing in the Google News results and that Google is deliberately obscuring the difference between search results and copying content.

That's probably true, so some extent. But I've never found that Google News provides me with much more than the headline anyway; if I'm interested in a story, I still have to click through to read more than a sentence or two. So I've never understood the absolutist position that some newspapers take on this issue. It's free advertising! Imagine if movie studios tried to claim that tv stations should pay them for showing movie trailers? No, the fiscal incentives run the other way; studios pay tv to advertise their movies. Google is trying to prove to CopiePresse that the incentives do indeed run the other way and, because they're complaining about it, CopiePresse seems to secretly agree.

A lesson in incentives

2011-07-16T17:37:00.006-04:00

Because I have far more important things to do, I've been spending a lot of time lately on iRacing, an online auto racing simulation with some 25,000 subscribers who can run practice sessions or race other members in any of two dozen cars on four dozen different tracks (each of which has been laser-scanned for accuracy to the nearest millimeter). It is, too understate the matter, addictive.

As I usually do when I start in with a new activity or a new system, I've been busy exploring the rules and culture by reading every manual they have and exploring the forums for information on how this all works. And the most interesting thing I have found so far is iRacing's approach to encouraging safe driving.

The problem is simple: you've attracted a bunch of people who aren't professional race drivers, but would like to drive as aggressively as professional race drivers, and you want to encourage them to keep a lid on it and stay within their limits. Somehow, you have to create a system of incentives that will discourage poor driving, reward safe driving, and be self-enforcing -- with 25,000 drivers, there's no way to have an impartial judge watching every race.

To that end, the system automatically monitors "incidents" and awards "incident points" based on the severity. Going off the track is 1 point. Spinning around or making contact with another car is 2 points. Especially hard contact is awarded 4 points. Based on a weighted moving average of "incidents per corner," a safety rating (SR) is awarded and continually updated. You need to maintain an adequate SR in order to advance your license, which you need if you want to race in advanced series with faster and more powerful cars. Don't take care of your SR and you'll be stuck racing the rookie series with the clueless noobs forever.

The controversial part is this: the SR is based on a no-fault system. If you and I make contact, we both accrue incident points. It makes no difference whether I hit you, you hit me, or we were both being too aggressive ... none of that matters. We both get points and, if we accumulate too many, our SR's suffer. That pisses people off. The forums at iRacing are filled with bitter complaints from drivers who've accumulated points and can't raise their SR's high enough to get our of the Rookie class, because all those other dolts keep crashing them out of races. Why does the service tolerate all those bad drivers who are holding me back?

And more experienced, wiser drivers will reply that the system is working exactly as it's supposed to work. When the complainer posts replays of the incident, as often as not they'll point out that the driver himself was often at fault, not holding his line as well as he thought, or getting impatient and trying a high-risk passing maneuver. Most of the time, you can examine the guy's record and discover that doesn't have nearly as much control of his car as he thinks he has. Usually he has some sort of expectation that he should be able to drive the same line in traffic that he does in practice and everyone else should just get out of his way.*

More importantly, though, they'll try to impress a driver with the necessity of thinking safety first. In real life, if your race car gets crashed, you suffer the injuries and you pay for the repairs, no matter how it happened. You don't rush into a dicey situation thinking, "If there's a crash, at least it won't be my fault." You suffer the same as if it had been your fault. And that makes you more cautious. In a no-fault system -- and God himself runs a no-fault universe -- it's always your responsibility to avoid trouble. You do that by being patient, by watching to see if your opponent is driving steadily or erratically, and by taking the approach that it's more important to finish the race than it is to get to the front.

This seems to be a hard lesson for some to learn. If you're constantly getting involved incidents that don't seem to be your fault, the first step is to examine replays and see if you aren't really more at fault than you thought (often you are). But the next step is to ask yourself, "Am I putting myself in dangerous situations too often? Am I taking risks that, even if I keep it together myself, have a high chance of ending badly?" 'Cause if you are, then you're not a safe driver, regardless of whose fault the final incident turns out to be.

That's the beauty of the no-fault system: you can never avoid the consequences and so you can never shirk responsibility. If you want to advance very far in iRacing, you have to temper your aggression and learn at least a modicum** of good judgment. It's all about the incentives.*** The drivers who complain about the system would generally like to do what they do and make everyone else responsible for the outcome. The no-fault system does exactly the opposite by making it always your responsibility, no matter how bad the drivers are around you. Just like it is out on the street.

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* I came across this attitude back in my undergrad days playing pickup basketball. Quite a few guys were of the opinion that once they had begun a drive to the basket, it was some sort of violation if the other team still tried to defend it. In fact, I find a lot of the same attitudes at iRacing that I did on the basketball court -- the inflated egos and sense of entitlement, the win-at-all-cost attitudes conflicting with the let's-just-have-fun approach, and the mildly inverse relationship between whining and talent.

** You don't necessarily need much more than a modicum. The SR system is pretty generous and drivers who are conscientious, but unskilled, can still do pretty well. And even the upper level series contain a pretty fair amount of trouble. But then, have you watched a NASCAR race lately?

*** When the developers put the system together, they actually considered charging small amounts of money for excessive incidents. They decided against it, probably wisely.

Friday photo

2011-07-15T13:45:00.002-04:00

George Gordon Meade Memorial. Washington, D.C., March 2007

Friday photo, public softcore edition. George Meade, of course, was a Union general of the Civil War who took command of the Army of the Potomac and, in his first battle, decisively defeated Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, crippling the Confederate army and and earning a statue of a naked woman ministering to him. If he was awarded the real thing, it has gone discretely unrecorded

According to the description on Wikipedia, that's Chivalry to Meade's left, accepting the offer of a coat she obviously needs a hell of a lot more than he does. The dude copping a feel from behind her is Progress; it's not clear whether he's progressing upwards or downwards.

It might only be my inner sixth-grader that gets so amused by this statue, but it also amuses me to see how dramatically cultural tastes and norms change from generation to generation. The 1860's were a pretty religious and typically prudish age, but even the genteel classes saw no embarrassment in adding a naked figure to a statue of a hero and putting it up in the nation's capital, for all to see. I'm guessing this is because they still admired the art and literature of Classical Greece and Rome, whose statuary features plenty of nude figures. I'm not an art historian, but I would hazard a guess that any nude in a 19th Century statue almost certainly represented one of the ancient gods or was the personification of some abstract virtue. Nudity in the 19th Century was not about sensuality; it demonstrated your good taste and your classical education.

Heroics

2011-07-11T19:07:00.005-04:00

It's hard for me to fathom, but there are still a lot of people out there - not all of them men - who dismiss women's sports as some sort inferior endeavor. Slower, weaker, less athletic, less skilled. Less deserving of attention. What nonsense. Two of the most dramatic, clutch, courageous, even heroic athletic performances I've ever seen were performed by women.

Here is one, which fifteen years later still puts a lump in my throat:

And yesterday was another that I shall never, ever, ever forget:

[UPDATE: Dammit! Video pulled because of a copyright claim by FIFA! What sort of idiots try to quash free advertising? Most sorts, it seems.]

Friday photo

2011-07-08T17:06:00.001-04:00

Devils Tower, Wyoming. December 2004.

I consider this the most perfect photo of Wyoming that I've ever taken. Geology and culture blended seamlessly. Perhaps it would be even more perfect if the grazing animal were a cow rather than a horse, but that's a pretty close call. After all, one could hardly have run cattle without horses. Either way, this is iconic Wyoming.

And Devil's Tower, that magnificent, 867' tall, exposed igneous intrusion. That is, it was a plume of magma that forced its way into the surrounding rock before cooling some 40,000,000 years ago. That seems ancient, but geologically I suppose that counts as recent history. The rock one finds on the surface today is 200,000,000 years old, five times older than the Tower itself. The ground used to be a lot higher than it is today, but that's all gone now, softer sandstone that's been eroded away over the ages, leaving the harder, granite-like plug standing in place, with nothing left to plug but the sky.

When I first visited Devils Tower, perhaps in 1978, Close Encounters of the Third Kind had recently made the site known to the rest of the world and the Visitor Center bookshop was selling Bob Balaban's diary of the filming of the movie (Balaban played François Truffaut's interpreter and had the honor of being the only actor in the movie to utter the phrase, "close encounter"). I no longer have the book, but I recall his account of being driven to the location. Like most of us at the time, Balaban had never heard of Devils Tower and had no idea what he was going to see, just that there was some sort of Point of Interest. His account of the drive went something like this:

Balaban: "Is that it?"

Driver. "You'll know it when you see it."

Balaban: "Is that it?"

Driver. "You'll know it when you see it."

Balaban: "Is that it?"

Driver. "You'll know it when you see it."

Finally they drove around a bend in the road ... and he knew it when he saw it.

Death in Yellowstone

2011-07-08T08:21:00.004-04:00

I missed this story a couple days ago, but a hiker was killed by a grizzly bear east of Canyon Wednesday. He and his wife had the bad luck to surprise a bear with cubs, who charged the pair and fatally mauled the man. The Park Service plans no action against the bear, since it seems to have been acting only in perceived self-defense and has no history of aggression against people.

It's only the sixth documented fatality from a grizzly bear in Park history, and the first since two killings in 1984 in 1986 (although perhaps one should also count the death that occurred just outside the arbitrary Park boundary last summer). Both of those victims were hiking alone in bear country, just as I always did. In '84, a Swiss woman died in her tent after taking all proper precautions; Pelican Valley, where she was camping, has been closed to overnight travel ever since. Two years later, a wildlife photographer was killed and devoured by a grizzly near Otter Creek, south of Canyon. His tripod held a camera with a wide-angle lens mounted on it, indicating that he probably made a choice to approach too close to the bear that killed him.¹

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1. Whittlesey, Lee. Death in Yellowstone, 1995.

Dying for what you believe in

2011-07-05T22:45:00.002-04:00

My sister's friend likes to say, "Some things are tragedies; others are just too bad." It's a mean thing to smirk at a fatal accident, but when this happens:

A New York man died Sunday while participating in a ride with 550 other motorcyclists to protest the state's mandatory helmet law.

Police said Philip A. Contos, 55, hit his brakes and his motorcycle fishtailed. Contos was sent over the handlebars of his 1983 Harley Davidson and hit his head on the pavement.

He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

"The medical expert we discussed the case with who pronounced him deceased stated that he would've no doubt survived the accident had he been wearing a helmet," state Trooper Jack Keller told ABC News 9 in Syracuse.

Fast squirrel

2011-07-02T12:04:00.002-04:00

The guys on the iRacing forum post some terrific automobile-related videos. This one has a wildlife theme as well:

Friday photo

2011-07-01T12:31:00.005-04:00

Rainbow over Hayden Valley. Yellowstone National Park, June 1995.

Rainbows. The only cheaper subject for a nature photographer is sunsets, and that only because they happen to you more frequently. You get especially spoiled living in the mountains, because unlike the Midwest, where the clouds may cover the entire sky for hours on end, a sharp end to the storm is likely to arrive while the rain is still falling. Also, thunderstorms are especially common in late afternoon and when the cloud's edge approaches, the sun is sinking down to the optimal level for creating rainbows (a 42° angle from sun to rainbow to observer).

As far as the mythology of rainbows goes, I'm mostly familiar with the Noah story, where God promises never again to destroy the Earth with a technique that could never have worked in the first place. You can read a quick summary of some alternative mythologies at the relevant Wikipedia article. I often wonder how much anyone took these stories seriously; after all, we all still know the myth of leprechaun's gold at the end of the rainbow, although people who believe it are probably as scarce today leprechauns. Were these stories ever for the adults, or were they always meant as children's entertainment?

Still, I was a bit surprised to learn how long ago people were trying to figure out how rainbows work, from a naturalistic framework. Based only on surviving writings, we can push it back at least as far as Aristotle in the 4th century BCE. It was probably easy enough to understand that the sunlight was being reflected back from water droplets in the air, since the rainbow always appears in the opposite direction from the sun and, in fact, you don't even need rain. The spray from a waterfall will do nicely. But the Greeks were also damned good with geometry, and Aristotle used these skills to explain how logical it was that that the rainbow should have such a perfect semicircular shape. He grasped that the light had to be reflected at a particular angle back to the observer and that the entire set of points that satisfy this condition would form a circle.*

Figuring out why their are colors is pretty tricky, but sometime around 1300 the Persian astronomer Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī used a large, spherical globe filled with water to model a raindrop and worked out that the ray of light is refracted twice, once as it enters the droplet and again as it leaves, having bounced off the far interior wall. He eventually concluded that the white light was somehow being decomposed into the various colors, anticipating Isaac Newton's famous prism experiments in the 1680's

Traditionally, we divide a rainbow into seven colors, but those bands don't really exist and Roy G. Biv is as fictional as Cupid. The bending of the light is seamless and the change in colors ought to appear perfectly seamless as well. But we don't see color that way. We have three types of photoreceptor cone cells in our eyes that each respond to a different wavelength and what we see is a calculation based on those three inputs. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians, on the other hand, have four or five different types of cones and almost certainly can discriminate colors far better than we can. Set your monitor to 256 colors and take off your glasses - that's probably how a bird would feel if you were to suddenly give them human vision.

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* The ground cuts off the bottom half of the circle, of course, but full circle rainbows can be seen from the air. I have a cousin who flew on helicopter gunships in Vietnam and tells me that he saw one. I could really envy him the experience, if it weren't for all that war and shooting and danger business that went along with it.

Friday photo

2011-06-24T11:53:00.003-04:00

Kaweah Valley from Moro Rock. Sequoia National Park, California, June 2005.

Moro Rock is an impressive chunk of granite which, if I understand the process, formed deep underground, got pushed up toward the surface during the uplift of the Sierra Nevada, and was then exposed when softer material eroded away. As you drive up into Sequoia National Park, you'll see it rising impressively above you. But you don't get the full effect until you take the 800', 400-step climb to the top, when you see the Kaweah Valley falling away, some 3500 feet below. That contrast is the primary feature of this photograph here. If you were to try to hike down, you'd find it three times steeper than the Grand Canyon, which is probably why Moro Rock prefers to sit where it is and just look around at the crest of the Sierra.

Moro Rock has a special meaning for me because it is, as best I can recall, the very last place on Earth that I ever tried to pray, on a late September evening when I pleaded with God to convince me he was there and was listening to me. When you have it all to yourself, Moro Rock is a very quiet place.

Sky diving elite

2011-06-17T17:24:00.002-04:00

I just might never have seen anything quite this awesome:

We earth-bound schmucks can scarcely appreciate what's going on here, because we have the ground to help us control our motion. In the air, there are six degrees of motion these guys need to control: three for movement (up-down, left-right, and forward-backward) and three for rotation (forward or backward roll, spinning left or right like a skater, and rolling left or right like a cartwheel). If you ever made the mistake of watching that forgettable Space Camp* movie, you might recall the spinning chair that combines all three degrees of rotation in a bewildering fashion, and how hard it was to sort them out and gain control. These guys have mastered that and movement through space.

It's hard, really hard. That's why the Wright Brothers spent years working with gliders a few feet off the ground before building their airplane. They knew that learning to fly was going to be far harder than figuring out how to get the machine in the air.

The way these guys exit is just beautiful.

Via Daily Dish

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* Not only a forgettable movie, but one which had the bad luck to be released all too soon after the Challenger disaster.

Friday photo

2011-06-17T08:52:00.005-04:00

Surf. Humboldt County, California, July 2005.

There are rumors, no doubt fueled by Hollywood boosters, that California is a land of sunshine. I think they forget there's a northern California, too. The last time I drove north out of San Francisco, the clouds moved in just as I reached Eureka and I decided, This is where the pacific Northwest begins. Good to know.

Friday photo

2011-06-10T12:42:00.001-04:00

Turkey Run State Park, Indiana. July 2007.

I wrote a small blurb about Turkey Run here a while ago. I'm gone this weekend, so you'll just have to reread that one.

Baring the soul (eHarmony spoof)

2011-06-09T12:44:00.003-04:00

This brought tears to my eyes ....

... while laughing out loud.

Via the Daily Dish,

Knowin' my history ....

2011-06-08T13:20:00.006-04:00

In the wake of Sarah Palin's defiant defense of her description of Paul Revere's ride, a lawyerly defense that she certainly must have needed explained to her after her sycophants dreamed it up for her, I'm trying to imagine her book report on George Washington. I picture it going something like this:

He who chopped down those cherry trees so that we could have homes and towns and, um, making sure while he's standing in that boat fathering our country that, uh, we're not going to lie about defending free enterprise and we're going to develop our country.

Makes as much sense as her comments on Revere, I'm afraid, except that the cherry tree story isn't at all factual. Doesn't matter; neither was Palin's portrayal of Paul Revere. Oh, sure, if you tear her paragraph limb from limb, you could overlay each part onto an accurate version of the event, but that's not historical knowledge. Poor students do this all the time and anyone who's taught history has seen it in exam booklets over and over: disconnected facts dropped almost randomly on the page, with no sensible connection between them, which read like a 2-year-old playing with a jigsaw puzzle. It's simply not possible for someone with any adequate understanding of the night of April 18, 1775, to have uttered that phrase.

Palin is that student who sat in the back of the class without listening, absorbing a few scraps of information without understanding any of it. She knows Revere rode a horse, she knows it was during the Revolution and that the British were the enemy, she's been told something about bells being rung in warning, and she even knows that it somehow connects to the famous "Shot Heard 'Round the World," although she doesn't know how. And she hurriedly assembles these random facts and comes up with a mental image that's completely wrong: Paul Revere riding through the streets of Boston ringing bells and firing warning shots.

As the saying goes, historians never miss a chance to miss a chance to educate the public on historical knowledge. It's depressing to see some historians, however reluctantly, declare that if her isolated factoids aren't entirely bogus, than her whole story has to be considered historically accurate. It does not, any more than a NAPA store is an automobile. That's why history exams include essay questions, where you can't make the lucky guess that might win on Jeapordy! You have to show you understand what your facts mean. By letting Palin's comments pass for "historically accurate," the whole concept of historical understanding gets short-changed.

Friday photo

2011-06-03T12:41:00.003-04:00

Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. May 2005

Here's a nice little view of Mammoth Hot Springs, the headquarters for Yellowstone National Park. It's just inside the northern boundary, 50 miles from Old Faithful and even farther from the more remote reaches of the park; it was selected more for its convenience to the outside world than to the rest of the park. The first government building¹ in Yellowstone was a blockhouse built in 1879 on Capitol Hill (the slope you see extending out of the upper right of the frame in the photo); the superintendent was still worried about the possibility of Indian raids (the Nez Perce, fleeing the US Army, had come through just a couple years previously and had killed a couple of tourists).

The red-roofed buildings in the distance are stone officer's barracks from the Fort Yellowstone days, when Yellowstone was an army post between 1886 and 1918. The US Army had been given control over the park after understaffed civilian administration failed to prevent poaching and other destruction. By all accounts, the Army did a commendable job, policing the tourists effectively and reducing poaching to levels that the wildlife could survive.

Those officer's barracks are still in use, most of them serving as residences, while the one nearest the main road is now the Visitors Center. The cottonwood trees lining Officer's Row were planted with, shall we say, military precision: they form a perfectly straight line from one end to the other. That flat area between Capitol Hill and the yellow hotel and restaurant on the left was a parade ground for the cavalry troop stationed there -- even though it's prone to sinkholes. In the winter, the parade ground was sometimes flooded to form a skating rink.²

The Army gave up command in 1918, when the newly-minted National Park Service was up and running. They were ready to go, since it no longer made sense to station soldiers along the former frontier when they were badly needed elsewhere. But they left behind some solidly-constructed buildings and a helluva lot more wildlife than there would have been without them.

More reading:
Bartlett, Richard A. A Wilderness Besieged
Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story

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1. There was already a hotel at the site, to serve tourists who wanted to explore the hot spring terraces before heading off into the interior.

2. This is still done today, but behind the hotel and not on the parade ground.

Alexander Hamilton, borrower and taxer

2011-06-02T21:30:00.002-04:00

Dragooning the Founding Fathers to fight contemporary political battles is a time-honored tradition. Without a doubt, if Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were all here, they would ... well, they'd agree with me and take my side on every question. And since their word is Holy Writ, that proves I'm right. About everything,

Okay, not really, but I do sometimes find myself wondering what the FF's would think if they could suddenly be transported from their day to ours. I tend to imagine them stumbling around dazed for a few days, loading up on hard liquor, and then, when that runs out, quietly going off to kill themselves, James Madison perhaps muttering darkly “I told you it would never last.” Only Alexander Hamilton, I suspect, would recover from the dizzying shock and slowly come to think, “Hey! It worked! Commerce! Wealth! Power! Oh, it's everything I wanted!”

Hamilton, as the man most responsible for putting the United States on a sound, capitalist-friendly fiscal footing, has long been a favorite of conservatives. A historian whom I can't recall once noted that one can trace the relative ebb and flow of conservatism and liberalism by counting the rise and fall in biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. It's no coincidence that one popular biography of Hamilton was penned by a senior editor of National Review.

So, while the question of the day is about our national debt, and whether or not the GOP is bluffing about be willing to default, if I could conjure up just one of those Founding Fathers, I would want to hear what Hamilton had to say. Because if there could be such a person as the patron saint of the national debt, Hamilton is the man. He believed in a national debt. More importantly, he believed in timely, reliable payment of that debt. That last point is crucial; in fact, Hamilton actually advocated having a national debt just so that the government would need to make timely, reliable payments. Long before there were any guitar-playing pirate-waiters to make the point, Hamilton preached the value of a solid credit rating.

Hamilton knew that, whether they like it or not, governments sometimes have to borrow money. Emergencies happen, mainly unexpected wars when the country would need to quickly raise, train, and equip a larger army than it could afford to maintain permanently.¹ The kings of Europe had found themselves borrowing money from banks for centuries and the US would be no different. It couldn't be helped.

What could be helped, however, was the rate of interest that the government would need to pay when it did borrow. Governments needed a good credit rating at least as much as merchants did. Hamilton had closely watched how the British government operated and was deeply impressed. The British borrowed constantly, repaid promptly, and by proving itself the pinnacle of safety, could borrow at the lowest possible rates. Hamilton had come away deeply impressed with England's ability to leverage money and, as the first Treasurer of the United State, he wanted his new country to do the same.

To do so, however, was going to require a hard-core sales job. The Continental Congress had borrowed outrageous sums of money financing the War of Independence, still owed soldiers their back pay, and was hard-pressed figuring out how to pay off everyone they owed. Millions of dollars in loans were owed to private individuals, but many of those people were not the original lenders. Over the years, as the nation's poor financial standing became increasingly apparent, many people had sold their securities to speculators, at a substantial discount (often as low as 15% of face value). To many traditionalists in Congress, men who approached financial matters from a moral perspective, it stuck in the craw to simply pay the current owner full value. Hard-working, patriotic Farmer Brown, who had risked his scarce capital to aid the struggling Revolution when the outcome was uncertain, would never get more than his 15¢ on the dollar. The sharp speculator who bought the loan from him would succeed in making a killing off Mr. Brown's distress.

Hamilton did not say, “Morality be damned, we have bigger fish to fry,” but that is the gist of his 1790 Report on Public Credit. At all costs, the United States must demonstrate good faith in paying its debts. "Credit rating,” although the term hadn't been coined yet, but the concept is foundational to all of Hamilton's policies. The people with money should be willing to lend it to the government. No, they should be eager to lend money to the government. They should be so certain that their investment is rock-solidly safe that they will lend at the lowest possible rates. Anything else, any policies that shake the confidence of investors in the reliability of the Treasury, will end up increasing costs, squandering treasure, and draining investments. Everyone loses, both as individuals and as the Public.

But why was it necessary that the current holder get the full payment, and the original purchaser nothing beyond what he had sold the bond for? Hamilton made a feeble effort to defend the speculators on moral grounds, arguing that he too had risked his money on an uncertain outcome and demonstrated his faith in the nation. Given the way government officials were moving to profit off a scheme that looked less and less risky,² it was an unconvincing argument. Hamilton may have advanced it only half-heartedly anyway, since it was beside the point. Again, he was looking to the future and the future he wanted was one where investors not only could loan with complete safety, but could sell their bonds at full value anytime they needed to. The bonds would be easily traded because the purchaser would know that he could redeem it at full value. With that kind of value, a government loan would be as good as money. It would be money, for all practical purposes, and those practical purposes were uppermost in Hamilton's mind.

Specie, that is, gold and silver coin – the original cold, hard cash – was scarce in North America and hard to increase without discovering more metal. A growing economy needs a more flexible money supply and rock solid government bonds would fit the bill nicely. If money is more plentiful, it can be borrowed more cheaply, to the benefit of everyone attempting a profit-making venture. Settlers could purchase homesteads; merchants could fill ships with goods. Again, everyone wins.

A solid, reliable national debt was an essential foundation to it all. It meant cheaper borrowing for the government, and ultimately lower taxes to pay for it. Entrepreneurs would have access to cheaper money, too, removing an impediment to trade and development. Hamilton was the great advocate of capitalist development, but it all depended on a government that was scrupulous about meeting its obligations.

No doubt Hamilton would have abhorred the way we spend tax money; I can't imagine him approving of Social Security or Medicare. But would he have been willing to gamble the nation's credit rating, even to eliminate the evils of social spending and high taxes?³ Perhaps, if he had to choose between modern levels of government spending or toying with default, he would tell Madison to move over and also drink himself to death.

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1. If I had to list the number of ways in which the United States departs from its founding ideals, the modern military would be at the top of the list. A large standing army, it was believed, would almost inevitably be used to control the public; it would tempt Presidents to seek glory in foreign adventures; and if neither of those happened, it would still be an enormous financial burden. Of the three, only the first danger has failed to emerge. On the other hand, we've so militarized our police forces that it hardly makes a difference.

2. Several Congressmen, and at least one Treasury employee close to Hamilton (although apparently not Hamilton himself) were sending agents scouring the country for loans to buy up before word got out and the price began to rise. Such insider trading is, of course, illegal today.

3. High to him; current tax collection is, overall, a bit low compared to late 20th Century norms.

Friday photo

2011-05-27T01:47:00.002-04:00

Rain on North University Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan. February 2011.

Rain. We have rain. We've had rain. We've had rain all month. We've had rain all spring. We've had rain since late winter. I think I could use up fingers counting the days without rain and still have enough left over to plink out Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude.¹

So far this month Ann Arbor has received over 6" of rain, which is twice the 3" average for May, and it's expected that we'll add to that throughout the weekend². For April, it was 5.5" and for both March and February it was somewhere around 4" (including snow). This past Wednesday, it was 2.2" in one day. That's a lot of water, far above the monthly average for at least four straight months now.

Fortunately, Michigan drains to both west and east. That means neither the Grand River draining into Lake Michigan, nor the Huron River flowing through Ann Arbor toward Lake Huron, has to contain the full collection of rainfall in the way that the Mississippi River does. Here's a map of the Mississippi drainage. Just look at that! Half the country's waters drain through New Orleans! No wonder the lower Mississippi is so vulnerable to flooding -- they have to receive everyone else's water, not just their own.

So for all the rain we've had in Michigan, flooding has occurred only sporadically. Michigan sheds its excess water quite easily and has enormous basins on either side to catch the runoff. Lucky us.

So far, I've seen no rainbows in the sky, but I don't worry too much about the entire world flooding.³ For that, I have something better than a rainbow: a basic understanding of how the world works and some basic arithmetic. For example, Michigan averages 35 inches of rain per year. But to flood the earth enough to cover the mountains with just 40 days of rain? Let's use that arithmetic: Mount Everest is 29,035' above sea level and there are 960 hours in 40 days and nights. That requires a rate of flooding of 30 feet per hour! Ten times as much water, in a single hour, as a Midwestern state receives in an entire year! That's ... well, incredible. As in "not credible," not to be believed

Where would so much water come from? The ancients of the Near East seem to have imagined that the sky was a solid shell and that the "waters of the deep" surrounded both earth and sky in all directions; when Genesis 1:6 has God declare, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters," that should be understood as a division in three dimensions, not just two. There was water below the earth and above the sky, so in order to flood the earth, "the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." [Genesis 7:11] For those forty days and nights, the waters were no longer divided from the waters. It wasn't just raining. The earth was simultaneously foundering and receiving an infinite ocean pouring through those windows in the sky. Under that kind of assault, an ark might have to be as watertight as a submarine to avoid flooding itself!

Fortunately, we have a more accurate cosmology today and we know that such quantities of water just don't exist anywhere within reach. The moisture in the ocean, lakes, rivers, and clouds is all there is on earth and if there were enough to cover the entire planet, it would do it every day. That doesn't save us from floods altogether, alas; it just means that floods are very local affairs. Some are big enough to feel like the end of the world, if you were to experience them, such as the Glacial Lake Missoula floods I mentioned last autumn. William Ryan and Walter Pittman have even suggested a breakthrough of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea as the origin of the Flood mythology. But that's a local catastrophe nonetheless; if you have too much water, that just means that somewhere else has less than it did before. Now doesn't that make you feel better?

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1. Not Chopin's name for opus 28, no. 15, just so you know.

2. The forecast looks a little better for the race in Indianapolis Sunday, but it's likely to be hot and breezy, which should make life exciting for the engineers. I won't be surprised if some good drivers struggle with unexpectedly slow cars when the race gets under way.

3. We just escaped yet another prediction of the end of the world, so I'm just wallowing in complacency these days.

Friday photo

2011-05-20T13:29:00.006-04:00

Sequoia tree, Giant Forest. Sequoia National Park, June 2005.

Here's a curious arrangement of rock and tree. I can't say much about it, except that it's obvious the rock was there first. What's peculiar to me is that it looks like the tree has gone out of its way to incorporate the boulder. I suppose the circumference of the tree began to butt up against the stone several centuries ago, altering the pattern of growth. Now it just looks like it can't decide if it's a sequoia tree or a python.

Friday photo

2011-05-13T14:10:00.011-04:00

Pelicans on Yellowstone River. Yellowstone National Park, June 2005

One of the last photos I took in Yellowstone and one of my favorites (you'll probably need to click and enlarge it). I had just composed this scene of the sunset over the Yellowstone River -- the cheapest and easiest way to engage in nature photography, let's be honest here -- when three pelicans swooped in from the left. I saw them just in time to delay tripping the shutter* and waited until they entered the frame. Ah, and then one of them tired of the others' conversation or something, and decided to land in the river. What a stroke of fortune; the outstretched wings and the ripples from his feet breaking the water are just so much more dynamic than the river and sky, or even than the three birds in flight would have been.

Pelican flight is absolutely gorgeous and stately. They don't do aerobatics like the swallows that nest under the eaves of Lake Hotel. They don't flap frantically. They glide through the air as if on a tram, faster than hawks and eagles normally soar, more immune to buffeting breezes that bounce seagulls about. Once my sister and I were standing on the high bluff on the east side of LeHardy Rapids, looking down on the river, when a similar flight of three pelicans suddenly swooped into view below us. A video could never convey the effect; such serendipitous beauty can only be savored in the moment.

Which is to say, I hope you enjoy the photo. But it's not the same as being there.

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* An unfortunate feature of digital cameras is that they take several seconds to save the digital file between each shot, unless you've set the camera to 'burst' mode. Landscapes don't usually move, even in a volcano like Yellowstone, so I didn't typically use burst mode.

Arab spring in Tunisia

2011-05-12T12:32:00.000-04:00

Via Global Museum, this article about the cultural benefits of removing ignorant autocrats from power: Tunis museum flourishes after Ben Ali fall

Just as a fresh breeze now blows through the country's politics and press, Tunisia's cultural institutions too have the chance to flourish.

Instead of protecting the nation's treasures from the hands of former ruler Ben Ali and his wife, [Taher] Ghalia is heading up a major renovation project to bring them to the people.

"They weren't interested in culture. There was a trade in antiquities, but fortunately the Bardo wasn't touched," said Ghalia who clashed with the couple earlier in his career.

*snip*

"It wasn't even about politics," says Ghalia. "It was simply that these people weren't very educated and didn't bother about our heritage.

Friday photo

2011-05-06T12:24:00.002-04:00

Dirt road. Jackson County, Michigan, September 2005.

I don't know about you, but this looks nothing like Michigan to me. Even the foliage looks foreign, even though there's nothing in here that you can't see in southeast Michigan. Maybe it's the combination of dirt and hill; in the farm country where I grew up, unpaved roads tend to be gravel and flat, straight, and open to the sky.

For this shot, I timed it so that a car had just disappeared over the hill and its cloud of dust was not quite dispersed, giving the image a lonelier, remote feel .

Who is Bin Laden?

2011-05-04T15:15:00.003-04:00

Years ago I came across a pile of 'ancient' Reader's Digests and found an anecdote from 1944 or 1945, which told of British mother whose young son was puzzled when she referred to an object on the beach as a "shell." He knew nothing of seashells; the only shells he knew were the exploding kind.

That came to mind when I read this post by Jamelle Bouie at the American Prospect blog. The 5th-most-common Yahoo search on Osama Bin Laden this week is the basic question, "Who is Osama Bin Laden?" Mostly, this came from teenagers, the oldest of whom were only 7 or 8 when 9/11 occured. Observes Bouie,

Given the extent to which bin Laden had mostly drifted from our national conversation (especially in light of the Great Recession), it's not a huge surprise to learn that a non-trivial number of teenagers are baffled by his significance. Still, it's sobering; not because it reveals anything profound about our educational system or the attacks on 9/11, but because it points to an absolute truth: for each generation, America is a very different place, and the America we lost on 9/11 -- the America that didn't profile citizens, torture people, or monitor their phone calls -- isn't even a distance memory for the children and teenagers of today's America.

Friday photo

2011-04-29T10:59:00.003-04:00

Flag reflected in rain puddles. University of Michigan, April 2011.

How can you miss Oregon when it's been raining every day in Michigan for the last couple weeks? It seems like every day, anyway, although the National Weather Service may have statistics to prove otherwise. But rain is visually interesting, so I dawdled my way across campus the other day, trying out a few shots that featured the rain and its effect. This one came out ... not especially attractive, but interesting in its own way.

Freezing the flag's motion, and the ripples' motion, gives it an entirely different look than in real life. It's barely identifiable as a flag, but a touch of extra saturation brings out enough red to trigger recognition. The bricks are red, too, but reflect the overcast sky so strongly that they remain a particularly ugly shade of greenish-gray.

To my cynical eye, it almost looks like a pool of blood flowing across the bricks, which is not any effect I had in mind when I took the photo. Nor did I intend the flag to represent any political critique of our country. But now that the photo is there, it almost seems to have its own ideas on what it's going to mean. Or, to take more responsibility, my own mind doesn't reject the association of American flag + blood on the streets = some appropriate commentary. It's just too easy these days, with Americans now fighting in three different Middle Eastern countries where they too often can't tell what they're shooting at, and too often kill people who only want to be left alone. And supporting a few other countries where the rulers are celebrating spring by deliberately shooting down their own people in the streets.

I wish our flag didn't trigger those associations so easily. One of the more painful moments for me is to watch the Olympics or the World Cup and watch fans waving their nations' flags with joy and pride. I can cheer for our athletes, but it's hard for me to wave our flag; it's been coopted by the uglier nationalists in our midst, whose cry of "God Bless America!" always seem to carry the subtext, "(and no one else, unless they toe the line)." Most often, that phrase carries an overtone of belligerence, and too often the vocal tones are undeniably angry. While other nations have their ugly nationalists, too, I just don't get that impression of hostility when I hear hockey fans give a full-throated rendition of "O Canada", even if that sort of national consciousness surely must owe a lot to awareness of those noisy foreign neighbors.

As I said, I get jealous. I wish my flag triggered a more innocent kind of pride.

Friday photo

2011-04-22T12:53:00.010-04:00

Tower Fall. Yellowstone National Park, May 2002.

It's peculiar that I had lived in Yellowstone for so many years before I ever caught Tower Fall at the right time of day for this scene: the massive spray from the waterfall backlit by strong sunlight, filling the entire canyon with a dazzling light. I have this scene in both slides and born-digital images and may have to scan one of the slides someday for comparison.

Tower Fall is a fine example of a hanging creek, a small river that's cutting downward as fast as it can, but just can't keep up with the more powerful and erosive river that it empties into. In this case, Tower Creek has to drop 132 feet in order to catch up with the mighty Yellowstone River just a couple hundred yards away. Multnomah Falls near Portland, Oregon, is an especially spectacular example, if you happen to be going that way.

The creek and waterfall were named by the members of the Washburn expedition of 1870 early in their explorations. In his account of the expedition, Nathanial Langford added this footnote to the story of the naming of Tower Fall:

At the outset of our journey we had agreed that we would not give to any object of interest which we might discover the name of any of our party nor of our friends. This rule was to be religiously observed. While in camp Sunday, August 28th, on the bank of this creek, it was suggested that we select a name for the creek and fall. Walter Trumbull suggested "Minaret Creek" and "Minaret Fall." Mr. Hauser suggested "Tower Creek" and "Tower Fall." After some discussion a vote was taken, and by a small majority the name "Minaret" was decided upon. During the following evening Mr. Hauser stated with great seriousness that we had violated our agreement made relative to naming objects for our friends. He said that the well known Southern family -- the Rhetts -- lived in St. Louis, and that they had a most charming and accomplished daughter named "Minnie." He said that this daughter was a sweetheart of Mr. Trumbull. Mr. Trumbull indignantly denied the truth of Hauser's statement, and Hauser as determinedly insisted that it was the truth, and the vote was therefore reconsidered, and by a substantial majority it was decided to substitute "Tower" for "Minaret." Later, and when it was too late to recall or reverse the action of our party, it was surmised that Hauser himself had a sweetheart in St. Louis, a Miss Tower. Some of our party, Walter Trumbull especially, always insisted that such was the case. The weight of testimony was so evenly balanced that I shall hesitate long before I believe either side of this part of the story.

Given Nathanial Langford's track record with campfire stories, I wouldn't hesitate an instant before disbelieving every side of this part of the story. His tale of the origin of the national park idea, that the party was camped at the confluence of the Firehole and Gibbon Rivers (to form the Madison) discussing the profits to be made from claiming the areas around the waterfalls and geysers under the Homestead Acts and charging tourists to see them, when one of his companions solemnly declared that they should reject such base scheming and work to have the area given over to the people as a national park -- well, that story has long been debunked, with a corresponding decline in Langford's reputation as a scrupulous man.

In any event, Walter Trumbull ended up marrying a woman named Slater, while Samuel Hauser married one Helen Farrar only a year after this supposed campfire spat. You'd have thought naming a waterfall in the first national park after your lover would earn you a few more boyfriend points than that, but women are fickle, I suppose. Neither man ever managed to marry a Miss Tower or Miss Rhett.

This William Henry Jackson photo nicely illustrates why "Minaret" would have been an entirely appropriate name for this waterfall. The sketch below was made by one of the soldiers on the Washburn expedition and, as far as us white folks go, is certainly the very earliest pictorial representation of Tower Fall.

By the way, if you click on the Jackson photo and look closely, you'll spot a small boulder perched precariously on the edge of the waterfall. For over a hundred years, tourists enjoyed speculating on how long it could stay there; it looked like it should fall any minute, but maybe it would last another century, or two, or three? Well, it didn't. Spring floods knocked it off the edge in 1985 or 1986, shortly before I first laid eyes on Tower myself. Alas.

Who wants to play?

2011-04-15T18:41:00.001-04:00

Surely I'm not the only one who hears the term "mixed martial arts" and thinks of this?

Friday photo

2011-04-15T13:43:00.005-04:00

Sand Dune. Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley National Park, April 2002.

I made my one and so-far-only trip to Death Valley at the end of a winter season in 2002. It was late March, shading into April, and I was still acclimated to winter in the Northern Rockies. Shouldn't be too bad, I thought, since the average high in DV this time of year is around the mid-80's. I can do that.

I probably could have, but that isn't what I got. It was already as warm as June when I got there, topping out a few degrees into triple digits. And it turns out there isn't much shade in Death Valley - who knew? I lasted about three days, then decided to spend the rest of my break in Bryce Canyon, at 8000', where the temperatures were a little closer to what I was used to.

I had seen Ansel Adams's photos of sand dunes in Death Valley and from them had ignorantly concluded that the entire park is full of dunes. That's not so, but there is an impressive sandbox-of-your-dreams at Stovepipe Wells. As the interpretive signs explain it, the configuration of the surrounding mountains is such that the normal wind tends to drop in speed, which means it can no longer carry its load of sand and dirt. Thus the dunes pile up in that particular location. I spent most of my time there, because it was the dunes I wanted to shoot.

If you try this, be aware that you want to get up early in the morning. First, you want to be active before the sun gets too high and you can benefit from the long shadows (as this photo does). You can get the shadows in the early evening, too, but that's point number two: it's a lot cooler in the morning. Finally, you're not the only one there and before too many hours have passed, the dunes are thoroughly marked up with footprints. The night breezes will erase the previous day's trampling, but you need to get up pretty early to catch them while they're still clean.

Friday photo

2011-04-08T20:30:00.001-04:00

Topnotch Peak. Yellowstone National Park, June 1998

Here's a photo of Topnotch Peak, one of the more identifiable peaks of the Absaroka Range that forms Yellowstone's eastern boundary. It's a fairly generic photograph, just a mountain top rising above the forest. It doesn't even give you a good view of the eponymous “notch.” In fact, I find the photograph so non-descript that I'm slightly surprised to have found it still amongst my 35-mm slides.

I recall a conversation in the Employee Dining Room at Lake once: one of my coworkers was explaining to someone how he had thrown away thousands of slides over the years. “Oh, you throw them away because you don't have room to keep them?”

“No, I throw them away because they suck!”

I've thrown away a lot of slides over the years, for both of those reason. Some were just too dreadful to ever pass muster with the editor (me). Others were not bad, but I didn't have room to save every slide I ever shot. I was traveling between Yellowstone every summer and wherever I was during the winter. I lived out of dorms for the entire 1990's, moving at least twice a year and having to pack all my belongings into a Ford Escort. You get good at packing; I recall having to empty the entire car to get at the spare tire on the side of a Nebraska highway one night, repacking to get back on the road, then repeating the process at the tire shop the next morning. One of the guys in the shop just shook his head in amazement: “I never thought that would all go back into that car.” Having my entire photo collection whittled down to three 3-ring binders was just one way of keeping the load manageable.

It means that there are some feature or places for which I have no photographic record at all, because whatever picture I took of the place didn't survive the editing process. If I didn't like it as a photograph, I didn't save it as a “record shot.”

Now that I don't need to save space, it's ironically so much easier to save space. I no longer throw away – i.e., delete – digital photographs, because I can easily archive everything onto a hard drive that's smaller than a desk phone. And those two bulky cases filled with 120 cassette tapes are gradually being replaced with MP3 downloads (the later collection of CD's having already been ripped to disc) and I can have as much music as I desire without worrying about where I'm going to fit it all.

The electronic gadgets sure makes the peripatetic life more comfortable. In fact, I read a blog entry a couple years ago about a young man who was experimenting with being homeless. He had a duffle bag with clothes and a few electronic devices that gave him all the music and reading material he needed, while still being able to carry everything he owned. He was also depending on a network of friends to provide him with couches to sleep on, so I don't expect he's made a permanent life out of it. But the idea that you could have such an array of cultural amenities without a permanent home to store it in still amazes me. How Young Me would have envied Old Me!

What are we teaching teachers?

2011-04-08T12:51:00.003-04:00

Disturbing reference interaction today: "I need help looking up information on x. I'm a teaching major, so I've never had to look up information before."

Virtual physical library

2011-04-03T16:51:00.003-04:00

Via the Daily Dish, a 360-degree panorama of the Philosophical Hall in Prague's Strahov monastery. You can zoom in close enough to read the spines of individual books, or zoom out enough to see the entire room. Don't forget the ceiling!

Story here at Wired.

Efficiency in publishing

2011-04-02T07:58:00.003-04:00

For a streamlined publishing experience: The Journal of Universal Rejection, proudly proclaiming itself to be the most prestigious journal in the world (as measured by acceptance rate). Also, no page fees.

Via UM's Desktop Support Services newsletter

Friday photo

2011-04-01T13:46:00.002-04:00

Elk, Madison River. Yellowstone National Park, May 2004

An indecisive leader. This cow was at the head of a small herd crossing the river and had picked out a spot on the opposite bank to climb out when -- how unexpected! There was this stupid photographer standing in her way. Not at all sure how dangerous he might be, she hesitated and the rest of the herd stopped behind her while she dithered.

I hadn't meant to be so obnoxious. I just saw the elk in the river and thought "cool picture." It wasn't until I had snapped a couple that I realized what was going on -- I was a strange animal standing in her path and the elk were being extra cautious about me.

It's a funny thing about elk, and bison and bears and moose as well. They get used to seeing people in certain places, especially along the roads. They'll scarcely notice. I remember reading a magazine article once where some young environmentalist claimed, "If you look at photographs of animals in Yellowstone, you can see the fear in their eyes from the crowds!" It's nonsense, of course. Even if you could accurately judge an elk's emotions from a 1/250 seconds glimpse of its face, the fact is that wildlife can become quite accustomed to humans.

I've often seen elk grazing right alongside the roads in some place like Gibbon Meadows, where they had a mile or more of unoccupied meadow to retreat into if the people bothered them. Or the herds that regularly descend on Mammoth Hot Springs and its manicured lawns, scarcely less human-infested than Old Faithful itself.

Speaking of Old Faithful, I recall one summer when an old bull bison decided he liked the shade between the Bear Pit lounge and the Inn's back door (a busy door, since the parking lot in the back is much bigger than the one in front of the Inn). It lasted about a week or two, with the rangers blocking off the sidewalk whenever the bull showed up; the crowds certainly didn't intimidate him in the least.

But as I said, that's in certain places. Hike just a little ways from Mammoth and that same herd of elk will not allow you near them; I've had elk stop and stare at me from half a mile away, and then turn and run over a hill. I'm about the size of one large wolf, if it stood upright, which seems to be enough to alarm an entire herd of 500-lb cows. Even a herd that wouldn't blink at an entire busload of 200-lb Americans unloading a few steps away, had they been down the hill in Mammoth. But they do get alarmed. Some places they expect people. In other places they don't, and in those cases they don't have the same expectations of harmlessness. It's almost as if they don't recognize that it's the same sort of animal in the woods as it was by the road.

The cow above had just come from the side of the river opposite the road. She was coming from the backcountry into the frontcountry and I don't think she was prepared to see people at all. So it triggered all the attentive caution that is natural to heavily-predated animals. "Wait! What's that in front of me? I don't know, but it's looking at me. This could be trouble; better stay put until I see what it's going to do...."

I didn't want to be an asshole, so I snapped the last photo and scurried back to my car. The elk finished their crossing in peace.

Pirates win

2011-03-31T15:35:00.003-04:00

I've been keeping an eye out for this ruling and here it is: Men at Work have lost their appeal of a copyright infringement suit and must pay 5% of the all the royalties they have ever earned, or ever will earn, from their terrific song "Down Under," because it contained a 2-bar riff from the children's song "Kookaburra." In the name of promoting creativity, an Australian court is now punishing a remarkably creative work by transferring a huge sum of money from the creative people to the non-creators who did nothing but purchase privileges. This is not what copyright is supposed to be about.

Friday photo

2011-03-25T23:05:00.002-04:00

Petrified tree stumps on Specimen Ridge. Yellowstone National Park, June 2004.

When I began Googling around for some quick info about the petrified trees on Specimen Ridge, I got a surprise: most of the hits that came up were from creationist websites. Yes, believe it or not, the young-earth creationists get all in a tizzy about Yellowstone's ancient forests. They're worth getting excited about, no doubt about that, because like most things fossilized, they give you a rare glimpse at a long, long vanished world.

The geologists who have examined the slopes of Specimen Ridge have identified at least 27 successive layers of forests, each destroyed and partially buried under volcanic ash from Mt. Washburn, then an active volcano. The estimate is that these layers represent some 20,000 years of growth/catastrophe/regrowth/catastrophe/regrowth, beginning some 50 million years ago.

If that seems like a long time ago, just remember that the Earth had already completed 99% of its current history by then. The dinosaurs were only recently deceased, the supercontinent of Pangaea had broken up, and the continents of the western hemisphere looked pretty much as they do now:

(Image via the Paleomap Project)

Still, from our vantage point, a long-vanished world. The trees found in these buried forests have living relatives and, if their current environments are any indication, Yellowstone in those days was a warm, humid place comparable to present-day Georgia. There are plenty of redwoods in these forests, but also maple, sycamore, walnut, chestnut, oak, dogwood - even magnolia trees. It doesn't take too close a look at my photo to realize that nothing like these will grow there today. Judging from the fact that all of the fossilized roots (when they can be found) show horizontal development, none of these trees seems to have grown on a hillside; each forest occupied a fairly flat valley and was buried under another level accumulation of ash and mud, until the earliest layer was some 1200 feet deep. The silica in the ash was absorbed into the wood, causing the fossilization that has preserved the trees to this day.

That all of this should provide fodder for creationists comes as rather a surprise, but it seems to all trace to a single geologist named Harold Coffin (Ph.D. from USC in 1969). He appears to have been associated with the creationist Earth History Research Center at Southwestern Adventist University (where they have a single Department of Biology and Geology!), but isn't listed as a current faculty member, so I'm not sure where he is nowadays. But Coffin has published on Specimen Ridge, claiming that the trees must have been transported to their present location; he has also reported finding upright floating stumps in Spirit Lake at Mt. St. Helens, which he suggests would explain the standing trees in Yellowstone.

Not everyone agrees that the trees have been transported; in fact, I don't find that anyone else believes that Yellowstone's fossil trees came from anywhere but Yellowstone, allowing for some movement due to rapid lahars. But Coffin's work is all over the creationist websites, the same claims over and over again. Upright logs in Spirit Lake! Therefore the Flood! QED! It takes so little to make a creationist happy, particularly when you're talking about evidence.

But that's the general approach that creationists rely upon: pick out one little line of evidence, try to poke a hole in it, and then imagine that all of geology, paleontology, and biology would collapse along with it. Why petrified trees being carried to Yellowstone by flood waters or mud flows would prove a young earth is hard to fathom, but they're sure it's so.

If you really want to look at the trees in my photo and imagine that they floated there in a magic flood and came to rest in an upright position, go ahead; I can't stop you. I'll wait until some geologists who aren't under the influence tell me that it's so and, until then, use my imagination to picture beautiful hardwood forests filled with strange-looking animals (Uintatheriums, for example) walking across land that's going to get buried under volcanic ash, then get eroded away again until, 50 million years later, I can hike up a ridge and sit next to three of those very same trees. That's grander than any creation story I've ever heard.

________________________________________________
Main sources:
Erling Dorf, Petrified Forests of Yellowstone. National Park Service, 1980.
William J. Fritz, Roadside Geology of the Yellowstone Country. Mountain Press, 1985.

What Would You Do?

2011-03-21T17:49:00.004-04:00

At Outside the Beltway, a cogent comment on how dictators will respond to our attack on Libya:

Indeed, there was hope by the Bush administration and amongst its allies eight-ish years ago that the US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq would prove to be a deterrent to states who might be contemplating such actions.
As history shows, it had the directly opposite effect on Iran, as it did not go without notice that Iraq was invaded to prevent a nuclear program ... and that the only member state of the “Axis of Evil” that no one seemed interested in invading was the one with nukes (i.e., North Korea). As such, the rational choice to procure a nuke PDQ was made.

Libya didn't get nukes; now they're vulnerable to attack. That will be the take home message among strong men the world over.

In today's continuation of the World's Longest Book Review at slactivist, Fred Clark maintains that the authors can't even make a compelling disaster story out of Armageddon because they're incapable of asking, What if that was me? Ironically, our politicians are perfectly capable of creating a disaster story our of our foreign policy because they, too, are incapable of asking, What if that was me? How would I respond to make myself secure?

Empathy. It's not just for the wishy washy can't-we-all-just-get-along types. If you want to be a successful hard-headed realist, you need to cultivate it, also.

[Update: North Korea says the same]

Friday photo

2011-03-18T13:29:00.000-04:00

Yellowstone River at twilight. Yellowstone National Park, June 1995.

The beautiful Yellowstone River moves gently down from its slow, meandering sojourn through the Hayden Valley. All is calm as night falls, and has been ever since leaving Yellowstone Lake some twelve or thirteen miles ago. Oh, a few small rapids here and there, but otherwise as placid as you could ever hope for a mountain river to be.

What awaits it in just a couple of miles is something entirely different: two large waterfalls and a deep, narrow canyon that will change its character from gentle serenity to murderous, frothing fury in just a few hundred yards. The first fall is 109 feet; the second is 308*. During the spring runoff, that can be some 50,000 gallons of water racing over the edge every second. And if you can't imagine what it's like to be a river pulled off the edge of a cliff, you can park your car and walk down to the brink of either one of these falls and get a strong sense of its power - deafening and vertigo-inducing.

There's another significant waterfall before the river leaves park, Knowles Fall in the Black Canyon, a mere 15-footer that still manages to impress. More rapids and canyons. But no dams, none at all until after it has joined the Missouri and surrendered its name. The Yellowstone has the eminent distinction of being the longest free-flowing river remaining in the lower 48 states today, at almost 700 miles without a dam. It arises just outside the southeast boundary of the Park, in the Thorofare Region that is reputed to be the most remote place in America, outside Alaska -- you could find yourself as much as thirty miles from any excuse for a road. And between its headwaters and the falls, it becomes Yellowstone Lake, the largest freshwater lake in North America at greater than 7000 feet of elevation. It is indeed a river of superlatives.

This is the river that gave Yellowstone National Park its name. My one and only contribution to Wikipedia was to correct the mistaken notion that the park was named for the color of the rocks in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (just below the aforementioned falls). Not so. The river was already known to American fur trappers as the Yellowstone when Lewis and Clark came through in 1804-05, a name the English had translated from the French, which the French had probably picked up from the Minnetaree.

Who knows how far back the name goes? A good bet is that the Indians named the river for the yellowish rock you can find downstream in the general vicinity of modern-day Billings. And so, even without much knowledge of the Canyon area and its impressive colors, it was natural that the Park would carry the river's name. In the late 1860's people knew only two things about the region: some mountain men's very tall tales came out of that area, and so did the Yellowstone River.

____________________________________
* The Lower Falls is commonly described as "twice the height of Niagara," but it's really about 25 feet short of the mark it would need to make that accurate. But close enough that you should be suitably impressed.

Nose cut off, face effectively spited

2011-03-18T09:43:00.004-04:00

It's true that legitimate copyright has become ever more challenging to defend these days, as almost anything can be digitized and instantly transmitted anywhere.* It's also the case that copyright is being used to exert more control over information than anyone is legally entitled to.

And then, sometimes the confusion and fear over copyright lead to just bizarre, self-defeating CYA types of actions. Such as Barnes and Noble preventing their customers from providing them with free advertising, when the customers tried to photograph and tweet a book display.

The blogger has a couple of things wrong here, actually. You don't have to register your creation to gain copyright protection; copyright is automatic at the time of creation and has been for many years. And I don't think B&N is claiming copyright over the arrangement of their book display. More likely they're worried that they could be sued as an accessory to reproducing the copyrightable artwork of the covers.

But while the latter might be technically true, it only shows how ridiculous the protectionist regime has become. It was an offer free advertising! Not just for the store and company, but for the authors and publishers! You spend a fortune to advertise your store and its wares, and then someone offers to do it for free! It's win-win -- except that it's not, because the bookseller has come down with copyphobia, which often leads to impaired judgment and self-destructive behavior. Very sad, and modern medicine has not yet discovered a cure.

__________________________________
* So far, not pizza yet. But someday.

UM gaming frenzy

2011-03-16T20:34:00.001-04:00

A fun story of the great Sega Genesis Hockey tournament of 1992

Friday photo

2011-03-11T11:40:00.001-05:00

Sunrise over Libby Flats, near Laramie, Wyoming. September 1990

An early morning drive into the Snowy Range, well rewarded.

Found in the archives

2011-03-10T08:17:00.005-05:00

A volunteer at the Smithsonian Institute has discovered color photographs of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

Although hand-colored photographs of the quake's destruction have surfaced before, [Eugene] Ives' work is probably the only true color documentary evidence, Shannon Perich, associate curator of the Smithsonian's photography history collection, told the Chronicle.

Update: the volunteer himself blogs the discovery

Friday photo

2011-03-04T12:24:00.001-05:00

Ice on sidewalk. Ypsilanti, Michigan, March 2011.

The sidewalk was a bit treacherous when I came home Wednesday evening, but it offered some visual interest to offset the navigational hazard. My first thought was that the ice seems to have formed with a lot of air pockets inside, whose tops have melted away and created all these little pits. But that's probably wrong - I think these pits were melted by the salt pellets scattered by the maintenance men, which is a disappointingly artificial process. So back to the imagination: if you picture China as somehow disintegrating into a hundred archipelagos, that long connected section to the right almost resembles a map of Japan ....

Who said it?

2011-03-03T13:52:00.001-05:00

Charlie Sheen, Glenn Beck, or Muammar Qadaffi? This is not easy.

Facing off with the universe

2011-03-02T22:39:00.005-05:00

I blogged once before about our propensity to see faces in rather mundane arrangements of every day objects. Here's one where Phil Plait, at Bad Astronomy, saw a frowning face in a comet:

In case you don't see it, Plait has circled the key features, right in the middle of the image, to help you out:

Which puzzled the heck out of me, because when I first looked at the comet photo, I saw a face alright. I saw this face:

There's just no way to avoid seeing faces (unless you're autistic, perhaps?). Even a stupid ball of ice provides not one, but (at least) two different ways to interpret it as a face. We're overprogrammed, we are.

What Would Gandalf Do?

2011-02-27T22:35:00.003-05:00

Oh, oh. I hate seeing a dispute where the guys who I would like to be the Good Guys are on the Wrong Side, but that may be the case here. The estate of JRR Tolkien, managed by his son Christopher (an indefatigable editor of his father's works), is suing an author for inserting Tolkien as a character into his novel. It may turn out that I know a lot less about copyright than I think I do -- in fact, I can just about guarantee that, which is a sort of paradox, although not the sort that will cause the universe to vanish into a black hole, or even keep me up at night, or --

Excuse me. Anyway, I may discover I'm wrong, but at least under American copyright law, I can't see what possible claim C. Tolkien could make to stop this novel. You can't copyright a fact and it would certainly blow my socks off to learn that JRR Tolkien was, in fact, a fictional character. (It would blow off a lot of socks, perhaps more than all the socks that have ever been lost since the invention of the clothes dryer.) Nor could you make a claim for defamation or invasion of privacy, since Tolkien is dead and you don't get to take those legal considerations with you when you go. And it seems the author is not using any of Tolkien's invented characters. So what use of copyrighted material is there? I don't know; it almost sounds like the estate's lawyers are confused about the difference between copyright and trademark, although lawyers ought to know that sort of thing.

So I'll have to add this to my Google News alerts and see how it turns out. Either Christopher Tolkien is making an ass of himself, or I'm going to learn something I didn't know.

Friday photo

2011-02-25T13:38:00.002-05:00

Detroit Observatory, University of Michigan. February 2011.

One of my archives classes took a field trip to the Detroit Observatory one week and, misled by the name and still new to campus, I almost began planning a drive to Detroit. As it turns out, the Observatory is right here near the UM campus, and was only named "Detroit" as a tribute to the upstanding citizens of that city who donated much of the money to build it. When it was built in 1854, it stood by itself on a high point overlooking the Huron River, well away from town, and the viewing conditions were no doubt excellent. The medical campus long ago encroached upon its solitude, however, and the lights of the ever-bustling hospitals would certainly spoil its work today. Now it's a museum, one of the oldest buildings on campus, and the one most nearly in its original condition and still containing its original telescope (a unique and well-preserved piece in itself).

I've antiqued this photo, not so much because of its subject, but because the unaltered image has too little color and actually benefits from removing it altogether. I've also increased the contrast, brightening the sky and darkening the foliage. In the original, the shadows aren't entirely black, nor are the highlights entirely white. That gives me maximum flexibility in adjusting the contrast without obliterating either lights or darks.

I mention that because it gives me an excuse to talk about my favorite feature on digital cameras: the histogram. The histogram is essentially a bar graph that tells you how many pixels fall into each tonal value, from dark to light. In a dark scene, the bars will be very high on the left; in a bright scene, they will be higher toward the right. Or ... if you're about to overexpose your shot, the histogram will skew to the right, and if you're about to underexpose, it will skew to the left. Here's what it looks like:

(Image from thedigitalstory.com)

Once you get used to it, this is as easy to read as the old in-camera meter, and far more informative. My old SLRs -- a Canon AE-1 and its replacement, a used Ftb -- could only give me a needle that told me when I was about to achieve a normal exposure. You had to be careful or it would make your shadows too bright, or your snow too dark, as "normal" was defined to be about as bright as grass and you had to always ask yourself: If I set the camera for normal exposure, will there be any detail in the shadows? Will that bright portion of the scene be blasted into pure white? Will the most important colors fade out through overexposure? That was part of the skill of manual photography - you had to make your best guess, based on experience and judgment. And maybe shoot three frames at different exposures, just in case.

The histogram gives you those answers. You can tell if your highlights are off the right edge, or whether the shadows are going to be all black. You can tell if, as in the photo above, the entire tonal range of the photo falls between black and white. In fact, I would have adjusted the exposure to lighten the whites even more in this photo, except that I was already at a slow shutter speed for a handheld shot at moderately high zoom and didn't want a blurry image.

I love that control. Right there on the screen, while composing the shot! I think Ansel Adams somewhere is jealous of me that I have a histogram and he never did.

TJ's library

2011-02-23T11:33:00.005-05:00

In the news today: the discovery that Washington University in St. Louis has (previously unbeknownst to them) been harboring some six dozen books from Thomas Jefferson's private library.

It took a little detective work: knowing that Jefferson's granddaughter's husband had purchased some of his books at auction; learning that the family of said grandson had donated their books to Washington University in 1880; finding an early-20th Century library ledger that helped to identify the donated books; and then discovering Jefferson's initials in the suspect books. It's no wonder that even the library didn't know the noteworthy provenance of their possessions.

Jefferson initialed his books in a peculiar way. When books are bound, groups of pages known as signatures are stitched together; the signatures need to be marked so that they get assembled in the correct order, and were often marked with letters of the alphabet. So where Jefferson found "I," he added a "T" in front of it; after the "T," he added an "I." Why "I"? Doh! You saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! You know that "I" is used in Latin for "J," and why it's a matter of life or death to know that!

This reminds me of a memo I read a few months ago in the Special Collections here at UM. The very first purchase of books for the Library were made in 1838 by Asa Gray, who had been hired by the University of Michigan before some sort of funding mixup led him to take a position at Harvard instead. Around 1970 or so, the Library got a little history-conscious and began trying to track down those books that had been part of his original purchase. Some of the departments that held the books didn't want to give them up and I recall a pleading memo to the effect of, "If you can't take this rare and singular book off your shelves, could you at least put it on reserve and stop letting the students take it home?" I expect Jefferson's books were no longer in open stacks, but had probably experienced similar use in their day.

By the way, how cool is it that some of Jefferson's books would have accidentally ended up in St. Louis, of all places, the Gateway to the West that he had purchased? Seems utterly fitting.

Friday photo

2011-02-18T12:46:00.008-05:00

Ice on Rock. Hudson Mills Metropark, Dexter, Michigan, February 2011

Last Saturday I finally got out to do a little bit of skiing and decided to check out the Hudson Mills Metropark, a 1500 acre spot of woodlands northeast of Ann Arbor. It's a good thing I did, since the snow began melting that morning and, with several days near 50°, the snow has turned to puddles. In fact, I think we're halfway to flood stage around here.

The park doesn't have much in the way of hills, so the skiing was just a bunch of looping round a 5-mile trail system, with an occasional bit of glide. But there were a lot of novices out and it was fun to watch them approach these tiny little slopes, with their terrifying 5% grades. Knees locked, thighs stiffened, weight thrown forward, skis locked into wedge positions, pushing tentatively on the poles, probing for that point at which gravity will take over and speed them into reckless disaster. It was so cute.

I say that with compassion, because to this day I am not a strong skiier and I vividly remember how helpless you feel when you first bind boards to boots. Sure, you don't get going all that fast on a small slope, but since you have no control yet, anything is too fast. As soon as you begin to glide downhill, you're a passenger. I would regale coworkers with my latest crash: I didn't get my arms and legs fully extended, so I guess it wasn't a proper cartwheel ....

What astonished me after that first winter was to go back after the snow was gone and to realize how gentle many of those slopes were. Not that they weren't racy - there are some good speedy hills around the Old Faithful area. But they still didn't look as steep as they felt. Surely that slope at the bottom of the Fern Cascades trail was 45°, wasn't it? It was so fast! But it's probably closer to a 10°-15° slope.

I spent that summer examining all the hills I encountered with a sort of slideshow in my mind, one that would replace the grass with snow and imagine that I was about to hurtle down on my second-hand Rossignols. It's a funny thing, but the world's terrain just doesn't look as rugged as it feels. Which is why cartographers who want to portray relief often have to exaggerate the vertical scale relative to the horizontal; everything looks too flat otherwise, even in the mountains.

Here's an example by the cartographic artist Heinrich Berann, who did a series of panoramas for the National Park Service. He produced his view of Yellowstone in 1989:

That's a hell of a lot of vertical exaggeration, especially of the Tetons in the distance. But it gives you a more intuitive sense of the shape of the land than a truer representation would. Much like people may be more readily recognized from a caricature than from a photograph, I suppose.

Super Bowl I

2011-02-11T19:28:00.002-05:00

It seems odd, in this era of YouTube, where every video in the world finds its way online and becomes harder than kudzu to eradicate, but even classic programs use to get broadcast once and disappear into the ether without an archived film or videotape copy. But a football fan has come forth with one of the most coveted missing links in sports history: a videotape of Super Bowl I in 1967.

Note how the instant replay boasts the technical miracle of "video tape," much as fans a few years later would marvel at "live via satellite."

From the WSJ

Friday photo

2011-02-11T12:47:00.003-05:00

Bison in meadow. Yellowstone National Park, December 2003

It's been a cold winter in Michigan this year, with heavy snowfalls to boot. Here in the southeast corner, we didn't get hit as hard with the last storm as, say, Chicago, because the heaviest snow passed to the north of us. But the last several evening have seen temperatures drop below zero Fahrenheit and bundling up is a useful skill.

I still benefit from my winters in Yellowstone. On cold days like we've had lately, I add a layer of thermal pants and shirt, two layers of socks, and a heavy sweater. With that, I only need add the windproof jacket and I'm plenty comfortable at the bus stop. It means I'm a little overdressed for indoor work, but I've always found that easier than being too cold. And I get the smug pleasure of enjoying weather that even hardened Michiganders gripe about. I still own a heavy coat that I bought for my first winter at Old Faithful, and which I wore perhaps two dozen times in while I was there and not once since leaving the Park.

The photo above? Taken at sunrise while temperatures were still fifteen or ten below zero. The sun isn't quite high enough to illuminate that layer of low-hanging fog, which seems to divide the world into a dark side and bright side.

A warning to legislators:

2011-02-07T08:38:00.000-05:00

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Projection Project

2011-02-06T10:29:00.000-05:00

A little searching leads me to suspect that next Sunday evening will feature an updated version of 30-year-old failed prophecies. Given the conservative propensity for psychological projection, however, I had imagined an outline rather like this:

I. Truth-seeking

A. Evolutionists ignore evidence
B. Global warming scientists scam for big money
C. Why atheists are angry evangelists
D. David Barton on historical revisionists
E. Fox News the antidote to propaganda

II. Protecting freedom

A. Tolerating other beliefs violates the First Amendment
B. Gays are indoctrinating children
C. Scott Lively on the imminent ban on Christianity
D. Combating sharia by enforcing the Ten Commandments

Some good photoshopping

2011-02-05T23:54:00.004-05:00

"Impossible Celebrity Couples" at Buzzfeed, including this all-too-plausible scene of JFK with Anna Nicole Smith:

And twenty more. The Photoshop work throughout is just topnotch: the focus, grain, and contrast are matched perfectly.

Via The Daily Dish

Friday photo

2011-02-04T12:33:00.000-05:00

Sycamore and shadow. Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 2011.

Friday photo

2011-01-28T12:23:00.004-05:00

Burton Memorial Tower, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 2011

Marion Leroy Burton served as the University of Michigan president from 1920-1925, and he had a dream. He wanted a bell tower. The University Library had contained a clock tower with chimes, which rang at 8:00 am and 6:00 pm to mark the beginning and ending of study time - kind of a cross between the bells of a monastery and a factory whistle - but the library was torn down in 1917* and now there were no bells. Burton wanted bells. In a tower.

He thought he had a good plan to sell the idea: it would be a memorial to the UM alumni who had perished in the Great War. But somehow, he couldn't drum up enough interest and the idea languished. And then ... Burton died. He had been only fifty years old and folks wanted to do something in his memory.

So Burton got his tower. With bells, an entire carillon, in fact. And it was a memorial, as he had proposed. I don't suppose he intended himself as the honoree, but that's why they call it irony.

It also shows what it takes to earn a building at UM. Meeting your demise during the greatest war the world had ever known is not sufficient. Were you to cure cancer, invent a cheap and abundant source of energy, bring peace to the Middle East, end world hunger, or discover an alien civilization, it wouldn't be enough to get a building named for you. You have to have been president of the University. Or else pay for it yourself.

As a side note, this also happens to be the first Friday photo from my new camera, a Canon SX30IS. It has a ridiculous 35x zoom capability, but I'm really more excited about its wide angle capacity. My previous digital cameras have had very little in that department and near-far composition has almost disappeared from my repertoire.

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* And replaced with a new one, no worries

Thinking about the children

2011-01-27T08:07:00.002-05:00

Ben Sargent nails it:

Friday photo: hot water, cold air

2011-01-21T14:30:00.001-05:00

Grotto Geyser. Yellowstone National Park, December 2002

Last Monday it was so warm that it rained, but now it's turned cold again and we're not expected to reach 20° over the weekend. So here's some cold weather fun.

Geysers are at their best on a cold winter's day, when the hot water turns into volleys of little ice rockets, each at the end of its personal vapor trail, as you see above. It's a simple matter of surface area:mass ratio -- lots of little drops will freeze or evaporate faster than one large body of water because more surface is exposed to the air. It happens so fast that most of the water evaporates and the remainder freezes before it can ever hit the ground.

I don't understand why hot water evaporates quicker in cold air than warm air. You'd think it would be easy to discover, what with this awesome new intertubes thingy, but no. I haven't found anyone who explains it directly. So here's my best guess: since transitioning between water and vapor requires energy, evaporation happens easier when more energy is transferring between the water and the air, which happens faster when there's a greater difference between water and air temperature. So T_(water) - T(_air) = k*Evaporation rate.

That might be totally wrong. Maybe it's all about the humidity. We all know that cold air is drier than warm air, so maybe that's the major reason why the geyser basins so fill up with steam on colder days - because the air is drier, not because it's colder. That's certainly a factor, but I'd be surprised if it's a large one.

I posted this photo is a response to this great video which is getting a lot of attention this week. Yellowknife is only 4° south of the Arctic Circle and they expect a high of -27° F. today, which is quite a bit colder than it was the day I took my photo above. The evaporation is wickedly dramatic:

Not even a hat or gloves. Now that's a Canadian.

Video via Daily Dish

I dunno, it sounded good

2011-01-18T22:14:00.001-05:00

At Oh, For Goodness Sake, a perpetual roundup of all things Birther, another hilarious example of amateur lawyering:

REPLY AFFIDAVIT IN OPPOSITION
TO DEFENDANTS ANTICIPATED MOTION
FOR DISMISSAL OF THE PEOPLE’S
MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGEMENT
THAT MUST BE DENIED
ON THE MERITS AND LAW

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

OFGS sums it up pithily: "Court records being public records, except in extremely limited circumstances, there are no rights to reserve."

It's not uncommon for people to have no clue what copyright law is about, but in this case I wouldn't be surprised if these poor slobs didn't even know they were referencing copyright law.

Zuckerberg's brave new world

2011-01-17T19:20:00.003-05:00

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care what you think, so long as you keep giving him your private information. Everyone knows that, but it's still interesting to hear him say so himself.

Talking in San Francisco over the weekend at the Crunchie Awards, which recognise technological achievements, the 25 year-old web entrepreneur said: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.”

He went on to say that privacy was no longer a ‘social norm’ and had just evolved over time.

I suppose my opinion doesn't count, since I'm way over 40 and out of touch with the hip new privacy-scorning generation. They don't think like me. Although, truth be told, some of them might come around to my way of thinking after learning of their ways. There have always been things you can do and say among close friends that you can't get away with in public and it's an almost unfathomable leap of utopianism to imagine that will change in one generation. Strangers are happy to rush to judgment based on scanty information; always did, always will.

Those pesky social norms exists for reasons; oftentimes bad reasons, but reasons nonetheless. Zuckerberg doesn't realize that. He sees privacy as just some random fad that some previous generation latched onto for no apparent reason, and that the present generation will discard with no regrets. Since privacy also happens to be a nuisance and impediment to his business model, I'm sure he feels no great incentive to inquire further. He just wants privacy concerns and the squares who value them to fade away into that long good night - or better yet, blink out immediately.

But there are good reasons for valuing privacy. Most of us don't live in tiny little communities where we've known everyone we meet for all of our lives. Instead, we often need to appeal to strangers, strangers who don't know our good qualities and might not spend the time to look past our faults. Hiding your shortcomings and missteps becomes a valuable strategy and failing to do so can really mess with your social life and job prospects. That's where Zuckerberg's analysis* fails: he thinks people will abandon privacy without asking whether or not it is becoming safe for them to do so. The current evidence from employers suggests that it is not. It's the latter norm - the willingness of total strangers to form negative opinions about you, given half a chance - that makes privacy so necessary.

The enlarged world of the internet only exacerbates that problem; you can lose even the chance to put your best foot forward. There are costs to being anonymous, but there are also costs to being too open, and protecting one's privacy - especially retaining the power to determine what you will keep private - is a necessary strategy for balancing those costs. The value of privacy won't change until the cost of being too revealing goes down, where you can expect to encounter generous-minded people who look only for the best in you. And that, I'm afraid, will require a vastly more far-reaching change in human behavior than even Zuckerberg imagines. Brave new world, indeed.

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* To the extent that he's truly analyzed privacy concerns; I might be a tad generous using that word in this context.

Greatest prank ever

2011-01-15T07:53:00.004-05:00

I should have posted this one for the Rose Bowl game two weeks ago, but better late than never. Here is the greatest prank in the entire history of the planet, or at least that portion of history that's come to my attention, which surely must amount to nearly the same thing. You almost wish the word pwned had existed then.

Anyway, read about the great Rose Bowl prank of 1961, when fourteen Cal Tech students stole the plans to the University of Washington's proud flip card routine, and offered a few improvements of their own.

Friday photo

2011-01-14T16:45:00.000-05:00

Relaxing bison bull. Nez Perce Creek, Yellowstone National Park, September 2001.

Relaxation made flesh. Once you've packed on the extra hundreds of pounds and are just waiting around for winter, that's how it goes.

It was a few years earlier, at this same site, that I thought I might get killed by a bison. Nothing came of it, but for a minute I thought I was in considerable danger. I had shot a couple photos of bison, just like this one, then saw the sun going down behind the creek, so I moved up onto the bridge to take a few shots of the creek. When I finished, I turned around and found that a number of cars had stopped to look at the bison, spooked them a little, and they were all fleeing the pack of cars -- right across the bridge. The one I was standing on.

Normally, a bison has a very sedate, deliberate walk. He'll cover a surprising amount of ground in a short time, but he won't look like he's in a hurry. When a herd starts trotting and huffing and grunting, it means they're a little agitated. That's what these guys were doing and half the herd was passing right by me, blocking both ends of the bridge.

I had the option of jumping over the side and down to the creek, but it was a fifteen foot drop and the creek is too shallow to break a fall. I mean, the bottom of the creek would break your fall, not the water, which means it would hurt more. Besides, the hitherto-unaccounted-for other half of the herd was crossing the creek right below me. It looked bad.

So I turned, sat on the abutment, and waited. One particularly large fellow seemed to be headed straight for me and I braced myself for impact. Then he swerved and just hustled on by. The rest did the same.

I've seen bison tolerate an entire busload of tourists lining up five feet away for a photo; at other times, I've seen them charge people from over a hundred feet away. It's not always clear what triggers a response. Here's a video of a bison chasing tourists at Old Faithful, for unclear reasons. When the bison lies down to wallow at the end, the narrator says, "Now he's taking a nap." Not really; wallowing is what a bison does to deal with the discomfort of skin parasites and maybe this animal was already in a bad mood because of the itching.

Here is what a bison usually does: just charge the annoying people and, when they run, settle for having made his point; without language, he still manages to say "Get out of here" in unmistakable terms. Here's what happens, though, when they carry through with the attack. You don't want that to happen to you.

AP, Fairey settle over Obama poster

2011-01-14T10:23:00.005-05:00

Almost two years ago I predicted that serial plagiarist Shepard Fairey was likely to win his defense of using an AP photograph as the basis for his famous Obama poster. And this week, my prediction ... became moot. Fairey and AP settled the case and there is no ruling.

But if I score my prediction anyway, I might have to call it a miss. Under the terms, AP will share the revenue from the poster and Fairey agrees not to use any more of their photographs without permission. That's hardly a victory for Fair Use.

I thought the poster would pass muster as a transformative use of the photograph, that the original was more of a factual than a creative work, that Fairey's use did no damage to the market for the original, and that these factors would provide a reasonable chance of success in defending his poster. Fairey must have concluded otherwise, since all this deal does for him is make the threat of larger penalties go away. AP, on the other hand, probably couldn't get a much better deal even with a clear win, so it was better to settle on these terms than to keep spending money fighting a court case.

As I said two years ago, I'm no fan of the way Fairey uses other people's work, but this was one of his less egregious borrowings and I would have preferred to see it vindicated.

PS. Law.com reminds me that Fairey sabotaged his own case when he initially lied about which photograph he had borrowed and destroyed evidence to hide that fact. I had forgotten about that and no doubt it factored into Fairey's estimation of his chances in court.

Good popcorn - you need to know this

2011-01-11T22:50:00.001-05:00

From "Investigation of the properties influencing popcorn popping quality," Maga J.; Blach, B.; Developments in Food Science (1992), 29, 543-50:

The roles of popcorn moisture content and storage temperature prior to popping as well as popping temperature and the amount of added oil and salt on resulting popped volume and number of unpopped kernels were evaluated. Max. popped volume was in the 12.5-13.5% moisture range while the proportion of unpopped kernels increased with increasing moisture. Popped volume decreased while unpopped kernels increased with an increase in storage temperature. The addition of 2-4% oil maximized popped volume and minimized unpopped kernels. The addition of 2% salt gave the highest popped volume and the lowest amount of unpopped kernels. Optimum popping temperature was 180°.

Friday photo

2011-01-07T16:22:00.000-05:00

Winter scene. Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, February 2005

Our scenery in SE Michigan isn't quite so wintry as this, but we've had snow on the ground since before Christmas and the sky is full of big fluffy flakes even as I type. Just as it should it be.

Worth the trip

2011-01-04T20:30:00.005-05:00

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy likes to feature the photography of Thierry Legault, and why not? He's just an amazing astrophotographer. Legault is especially fond of photographing transits of the International Space Station across the face of the sun and he made a special trip to Oman to catch one of these events during the latest solar eclipse:

Clever thinking

2011-01-02T19:59:00.003-05:00

Via The Friendly Atheist, a clever way to get someone to clear the snow off your car for you:

I may have to try this some day.

Unhappy New Year

2011-01-02T14:46:00.002-05:00

UConn proved their critics right - they weren't good enough to merit a BCS bowl. But they may still be too good for the Big Ten.

Friday photo

2010-12-31T12:44:00.002-05:00

Kitten at the window. Monroeville, Indiana, Christmas 2010.

'Cause it's just too pwecious, idn't it?

A few years ago, my Mom and her neighbors were feeding three or four cats. Now there are a dozen of them, because cats aren't all that different from birds and bees. I have it on good academic authority that this cannot end well.

Questions that arose while offline

2010-12-31T00:09:00.003-05:00

I'm back from the finals of the Great Lakes Invitational hockey tournament in Detroit, where the University of Michigan bested Colorado College 6-5 in a sloppy, but dramatic, game. UM scored the first goal just half a minute into the game and later went up 2-0, then let Colorado College tie the game by the end of the first period. Trailing the Wolverines 4-3 entering the third period, the Tigers scored two goals to take a 5-4 lead and make the home fans squirm in their seats. But fickle Fortuna gave Michigan a pair of late goals, with six and four minutes left in the game, reversing the outcome and filling Joe Louis Arena with great joy and relief. Sports are such a strain on the soul.

While watching the game, several questions came up in conversation and no answers were available until I could get home and access the invaluable Wikipedia. So here, for no particular reason, are answers relating to a pair of random hockey questions:

* The Joe Louis Arena was constructed in 1979 and seats 20,000 spectators.

* We all know that the Original Six hockey teams in the NHL are the Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks, Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadiens, New York Rangers and Toronto Maple Leafs. The next six? The Los Angeles Kings, Minnesota North Stars, Philadelphia Flyers, Pittsburgh Penguins, Oakland Seals, and St. Louis Blues, who all joined for the 1967-68 season.

* The first indoor hockey game was played in -- are you ready for this? -- 1875, in Montreal. In one crucial respect, it was even the first true hockey game: the puck was invented just for this match! Hockey was still played with a ball, but there were concerns over spectator safety. So the ball was replaced by a flat block of wood that, it was reasoned, would stay down on the ice (on Thursday night, one puck flew high enough to clear the tall net at the end of the rink, to the complete astonishment of a young first-time spectator behind me).

Also surprising is learning that, while popular in New England, hockey wasn't much known in Canada at the time. Who would guess such a thing? And curling was invented in Scotland - all the great Canadian games turn out to be imports!

Too funny

2010-12-29T21:40:00.003-05:00

Via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub

Hooray for True Grit!

2010-12-29T20:56:00.001-05:00

I don't do movie reviews and I don't consider myself anything of a movie critic. I don't know movies, ~~but I know what I like~~ and I don't even know what I like. I know what I hate, though, which often turns out to be historical fiction. They never get it right, never resemble anything but modern day folks in outdated clothing. How often do you see someone spend millions of dollars researching and recreating, say, a ship from a century ago, but fail to create a single character who seems to belong in that era. Or present me with Roman senators pining for democracy.* Or not even try that hard, ending up with a Western that does ... ugh, this.

The dialogue is usually the worst offender. Inevitably, 'historic' characters will speak in modern colloquialisms, as grating to me as if a crew member walked in front of the camera and no one yelled "Cut".** Producers spend millions researching costumes, but almost never pay a historian to review the script and say, "No, stop, they just didn't talk like this in the 19th Century. Read some books and speeches from the time period and get an idea of how people spoke then."

Generally, the best way to capture a previous time period is to use a contemporary book. It's why adaptations of Jane Austen always conjure up their period better than anything written by a modern screenwriter. Modern writers just don't realize that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

However, I thoroughly enjoyed the Coen brothers' remake of True Grit. Not a modern coinage to be heard! The early scenes in Fort Smith are really one of the best representation of 19th Century westerners that I've ever seen. The actors all delivered their lines with an admirable naturalism that had me thinking, I'm really in Arkansas in the 1880's. The only fault is the impression that English speakers used no contractions a hundred years ago; they did. But if the dialogue sometimes seems slightly forced, it's never laid on so thick as the North Dakota dialect in Fargo.

The character actors populating Fort Smith actually outshine the big money stars in this regard. Jeff Bridges performs well, but gets some assistance from his character's gruff mannerisms; it works for him to sound a little stiff and self-aware. Matt Damon, unfortunately, never does manage to sound like he's doing aught but reading lines, and Josh Brolin does only slightly better. Hailee Steinfeld is amazing. Like Bridges, she gains an advantage from Mattie Ross's cold determination, so that it's appropriate if she never sounds entirely at ease. Nonetheless, I could easily believe she grew up speaking the way her character does. This film was a treat for the ears.

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* I saw Gladiator for entertainment relief after driving 2 hours to Bozeman for a dental appointment on my only day off during a two-week stretch. One of the worst days of my life.

** One of the all time worst: a 14th Century bishop saying, "I believe in miracles. It's part of my job."

That's snow!

2010-12-29T10:05:00.004-05:00

Seventeen meters of snow in the mountains on Honshu:

Via Why Evolution is True

Friday photo, Christmas Eve edition

2010-12-25T10:04:00.000-05:00

Scott the Drummer Boy. Fort Wayne, Indiana, December 25, 1964.

Awesome Christmas! A huge drum and a sand-bucket helmet! I bet your haul isn't half as good, but have a Merry Christmas nonetheless.

Imitators of Pilate?

2010-12-22T08:53:00.008-05:00

At Slate, Kathryn Schulz interviews Josh Stieber, a man who entered the military as a militaristic Christian and became a conscientious objector. What his conscience objected to was actions like this:

There's really no way to defend yourself against a sniper shot or a roadside bomb, so some of our leaders felt that the only way we could defend ourselves was to intimidate the local population into preventing the violence in the first place. So our battalion commanders gave the order that every time a bomb went off, we were entitled to open fire on whoever was standing around. The way I interpreted that was that we were told to out-terrorize the terrorists.

Stieber is far from abandoning his Christian values. He takes them seriously, so seriously that he can't ignore or rationalize the contradictions between military action and Christian ethics. That makes Stieber a rare bird. One of his hometown buddies, in the same unit in Iraq, shocked him by describing the abuse he wanted to perpetrate on an Iraqi prisoner. When Stieber challenged him on the the contradiction to American principles, his friend replied, "No, he's Iraqi, he's part of the problem, he's guilty," and reaffirmed his desire to torture the man. Stieber escalated his critique - what about the Christian values of loving one's enemy and returning good for evil? "My friend said, 'I think that Jesus would have turned his cheek once or twice but he never would have let anyone punk him around.' "

It's as fine an example of cognitive dissonance as you'll ever see. Jesus, who allowed himself to be arrested, rebuked the disciple who tried to defend him, offered no defense during his trial, and allowed himself to be crucified even though innocent*, is now a tough guy who'll show a little token patience and then deliver the hammer. Yes, it's easier to redefine Jesus and contradict his clear representation in the Bible than to admit that you're contradicting your (stated, not felt) morality. Even if you have to turn Jesus into a Pontius Pilate. Alas, Stieber is the exception and his friend is the rule, as he discovered when he explained himself to his family:

I think a lot of what I've done has been a manifestation of those values, and to see the people who taught them to me enact them in such different ways, or at times it seems other things have taken priority over those values -- that can be challenging. Of all the people in the world who should see things the same way I do, who should be passionate about the same things I am and offended by the same things I am, it would make sense that it would be the people who taught me to think this way. When that's not the case, that can be very hard.

To their credit, his family accepted Stieber's decision, but they don't understand it -- even though it's the logical, perhaps inevitable, consequence of taking New Testament ethics seriously. For a certain strain of Christian, imitating Christ is literally incomprehensible. Fortunately, there are a few serious people like Josh Stieber who take ethics seriously, who understand morality as something to govern their own actions and not as just a club to compel obedience from others.

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* Innocent by our lights, anyhow. By the standards of the Roman Empire, Jesus had indeed committed a capital offense: he was a no-account yokel who was disturbing respectable folks. Which makes him somewhat comparable to, say, illegal immigrants or Muslims in certain American municipalities today.

Interesting documents

2010-12-20T18:53:00.000-05:00

[While I'm cleaning up my unpublished posts....]

Even the underworld needs accountants:

Via BoingBoing

Copyrighting T-Rex?

2010-12-20T18:34:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting case I started to write about, and then forgot to finish. But I'm still going to keep an eye on it. The Black Hills Institute of Geological Research is a private company in South Dakota that specializes in selling prepared fossils and casts. They claim that they loaned some Tyrannosaur bone casts to a Montana company called Fort Peck Paleontology, who never returned them and has been selling their own copies of these casts. BHIGR is suing.

Now I don't know what the terms of the loan were, and since BHIGR is a professional and commercial operation, you'd think they would write these restrictions into any contract they made. If they didn't, that's their mistake. But what intrigues me is that the lawsuit is claiming copyright infringement, not breach of contract. They are claiming they own a copyright on these bone casts.

As a general rule, you can't copyright a fact. The landmark case here is Feist v. Rural (1991), where the US Supreme Court held that a company could not claim copyright of its list of names and phone numbers. The particular medium, method of presentation, any commentary or editing - those can all be copyrighted as creative work. But the bare facts - the list of numbers - could not.

So can BHIGR claim that their bone casts are original, creative works? The president of the company, David Larson, claims that making dinosaur bone casts requires "a blend of scientific and artistic creativity," but otherwise emphasizes the amount of time and effort that they require. That smacks of the "sweat of the brow doctrine," which claims that amount of sheer labor that went into a production justifies the creator's monopoly over the product. That's an attractive, seemingly even a common sense, doctrine, especially to producers. But since Feist v. Rural, it's not the law in the US.

The pitfall for BHIGR is that the creativity lies mainly in their methods, not in the finished product. In fact, it's hard to imagine that they could be successful selling products they claimed were artistic representations of a dinosaur bone, rather than faithful and exacting reproductions of the original. Their website emphasizes, on the one hand, that "Perhaps the most important factors required in making fine molds and cast replicas are ingenuity and creativity." On the other hand, they also boast that they "have successfully developed new methods and materials for molding fossil specimens and producing cast replicas that retain the look and feel of the original fossils." That makes it sound like the value of the casts is not in their artistry, but in their adherence to fact.

I might be looking at this wrong. Perhaps the best example is a photograph of a building: you can still copyright the photograph, even though it's a representation of an uncopyrightable fact. If so, I look forward to the ruling setting me straight.

[Post script] It occurs to me that another comparison that might work in BHIGR's favor would be translations of old texts, which are original works for copyright purposes. Thus the New International Version translation of the Bible is under full copyright, despite the great age of the Bible itself. The 400-year-old King James Version, of course, is in the public domain.]

Why tonight?

2010-12-20T07:20:00.003-05:00

We're expecting snow tonight, which should have me in great cheer, snow-lover that I am and all. Yet ... yet ... it's the first lunar eclipse to fall on the winter solstice in some 500 years and it's not likely that I'll get to see any of it. But I don't have to work tomorrow so I just might stay up until 3:00, just in case.

(The good folks at the BBC will surely be embarrassed to realize they've called the winter solstice the longest day of the year. That would be the longest night of the year, of course, with the exception of Christmas Eve for children.)

Friday photo

2010-12-17T12:02:00.001-05:00

Snow on pines near Midway Geyser Basin. Yellowstone National Park, January 2004.

Whee! Winter has arrived in southeast Michigan, snowy and cold as God intended it. Now if we can only get still more snow, and maybe have steam rising out of the ground to coat the trees with ice, it would look as wintry as Yellowstone.

Where have all the colors gone?

2010-12-17T09:44:00.003-05:00

Finals are over and it's slow on the desk, so I'm playing with Google's latest toy: the Google Books Ngram Viewer. You can graph the usage of words found in Google's collection of scanned books, one at a time, or comparing one phrase against another. It's quite addictive.

But here's a weird trend that I found. If you search for simple words, there's a tendency for their frequency to drop somewhere around 1950, and then begin rising again in the 1990's. Here's a graph of the words blue, red, green, and yellow between 1900 and 2008. Each of them shows this same patter. (I've cleverly arranged for each word to show up in its proper color so that you don't have to read the tiny text)

Other common words show the same thing. For example, man, boy, and girl show that same dip and recovery. Woman appears to start down the same path, and then gets a sudden boost in the mid-1960's. (Damn you, Betty Friedan, for messing with my data!)

Recall that the y-axis represents the frequency of these words compared to other words appearing in print. Did postwar publishing trend away from simpler terms (I mean, "eschew monosyllabary")? And what about the recent trend back upwards? There's been a boom in children's and young adult literature in the past decade or more, but would it make up such a large proportion of publishing as to explain why simpler words are becoming more common again? That's the best guess I have, but I'm none too confident in it. Ideas?

The Peculiar Institution - the South

2010-12-14T10:00:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting article in the NYT about a map showing slave populations in the South, compiled from the 1860 Census data - the high water mark for American slavery. And the last time a Census could even compile information on that particular demographic. Historian Susan Schulten notes,

The map uses what was then a new technique in statistical cartography: Each county not only displays its slave population numerically, but is shaded (the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves) to visualize the concentration of slavery across the region. The counties along the Mississippi River and in coastal South Carolina are almost black, while Kentucky and the Appalachians are nearly white.

Translating numerical data into visual representations is one of the most powerful communication techniques available. The patterns just pop out at you. No wonder people were so taken with this map.

The presence of slavery, and (after 1865) large populations of African-Americans, wasn't the only thing peculiar about the South, though. There was a remarkable absence of foreign-born whites as well. Recently I was poring through the Statistical Atlas from the 12th Census of the United States -- that's from 1900, just to save you the arithmetic -- and came across this fascinating chart.

Click on the "Go to source" button to see it. The chart shows a breakdown of each state's population by race and origin. Four races are listed: Indians, Chinese & Japanese, Negro, and White (corresponding to the "Red and yellow, black and white" that I learned singing "Jesus Loves the Little Children" 'way back in Sunday School*). For whites, there are three further subdivisions: native white of native parents (baby blue), native white of foreign parents (pink), and foreign-born white (green). These were the categories that mattered in 1900.

Notice the states with the longest black lines - those are the Old South, the slave-holding South before the end of the Civil War, and the states that still held the majority of the nation's black population before the Great Migration. And in 1900, a period of intense immigration, most of those states had little to negligible pink and green in their bars. In other words, almost everyone who wasn't black was a white of at least the second generation. In a nation of immigrants, the South drew almost no immigrants.

According to the next couple of Censuses, little changed during the next 20 years. Bear in mind that this is one of the most immigration-heavy periods in US history. Yet the South missed it. They first developed enough of a separate identity to secede from the rest of the country, then learned to resent outsiders all the more intensely -- as you would, too, if you'd suffered invasion, defeat, and military occupation for a dozen years. And then they had the privilege, if privilege it is, of remaining insular while the rest of the country went through the wrenching experience of assimilating people who were as foreign as could be imagined (not only Chinese and Japanese, but Irish, Italians, Greeks, and so forth).

In respect to immigration and Americanism, it was even uglier 100 years ago than it is today. The "hyphenated American" (e.g., German-American) was no American at all, said Theodore Roosevelt, while Woodrow Wilson compared the hyphen to "a dagger that [the immigrant] is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic." The 1924 National Origins Act represented an unabashed attempt to keep the US not just white, but lily-white, by limiting the number of immigrants from unpopular nations.

The South didn't need the help, though. Aside from a few Yankee carpetbaggers, unwanted immigration wasn't part of their experience. Other people's families had been there just as long as yours and their brand of religion was probably the same as yours. No one had to accommodate diversity, when there were only two ethnic groups and their status was legally defined.

If it seems at times that Southern culture is especially prone to creating parochial mindsets, and people who steadfastly refuse to accept that not everyone thinks the same as they do -- and that is how Southern culture often comes across to me, at least as expressed in politics and the culture wars -- then maybe this is part of the reason why: no other region in the country was allowed to remain so culturally insular for so long a time.

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* Which dates from about the same era, interestingly enough. This piano rendition renders the tune in fine 19th Century style.

Friday photo

2010-12-10T12:44:00.006-05:00

Doublet Pool. Yellowstone National Park, November 2004.

Doublet Pool is one of the most attractive thermal features in the Upper Geyser Basin, if you find it - it's tucked away on Geyser Hill, across the Firehole River from the lodges, stores, and benches for viewing Old Faithful. I don't mean that it's really hidden away, but just that the folks who don't bother walking through the basin won't get to see it.

Doublet has been known to erupt slightly with a bit of bubbling, and on rare occasion even throw some water a couple feet in the air. Usually, though, it's just another of the steaming hot pools, with that clear blue (bacteria-free) water that the hottest pools have, and the red bacteria mats in the shallow areas where the water is merely warm and can sustain thermophilic life. It's called Doublet because there are two small pools connected by the narrow channel that you see in the photograph.

I don't entirely understand how the scalloped edges form. Silica is precipitating out of the water, slowly building up the mass on the sides of the pool. But why the round scallops? There's no sign of water draining into the pool and cutting channels; those would look like gullies instead of scallops, anyway. My best guess is that the edges begin jagged and random, but as the silica accumulates, it does so at equal distances around any pointed surface (recall that a circle is defined as the set of points equidistant from a given point). The tendency would be to grow the rounded scallops out from the edges of the wall and ever farther into the pool; pointy edges can't help being a passing phase. Or maybe there's some entirely different reason for that shape.

An English major finds a job!

2010-12-09T19:36:00.003-05:00

Writing for the Colbert Report (jump to 3:20):

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Tip/Wag - Art Edition - Brent Glass

www.colbertnation.com

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