Remembering Apollo 1

Remembering Apollo 1
Originally uploaded by Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

I hadn't known that this was the source of the Apollo numbering system.:

On January 27, 1967, Apollo 1's crew--Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee--was killed when a fire erupted in their capsule during testing. Apollo 1 was originally designated AS-204 but following the fire, the astronauts' widows requested that the mission be remembered as Apollo 1 and following missions would be numbered subsequent to the flight that never made it into space.

Wow.

That's lovely.

that's what suspension bridges are for

Watch what the subway does to the Manhattan bridge:

obsessive geography brain

I was poking through Grant Imahara's stuff on Twitpic, and found this bridge photo. It's a "from the set" photo, so I assume it's in California, though it might not be. It has California native palms, though Washingtonia palms are used in landscaping so they're everywhere now. It's recent, so it's not the new Zampa bridge being built at Carquinez Strait, right? And it doesn't look like Carquinez Strait anyhow. Where are other steel truss bridges that high in California? What's going on behind it, are they working on a new bridge?

I'm going to poke around online until I find it or can't justify not getting up to plan for a trip we're headed out on soon. (I'll take pics, I could just turn Geographile into a vacation pictures journal. Wouldn't that be fun. :) )

In the meantime, if you know where this picture was taken, please let me know. This isn't a Mythbusters fan thing, it's a MUST KNOW GEOGRAPHY thing. It's an obsession. Clicking through on the picture will make it bigger for you.

(edited to add: Old span of Bay Bridge with new one under construction behind it. I see this a few times a week. But the scale seemed all wrong to me, this seemed much too small for it. Also, I didn't recognize the foreground, which is probably in Alameda or along the Oakland waterfront. Thanks to Paul and Bill for nudges.)

Edited again, July 24: DUH! Casey pointed out that I could have the direction completely wrong, and I did. Google maps confirms it's along Avenue N in the northeast corner of Treasure Island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay.

(maybe not) just one more

DSC_6083
Originally uploaded by Kuan-ming Su.

I'm sure I'll stop finding excellent eclipse photos eventually.

July 22th, 2009
Solar Eclipse
Taipei

Bring on the quakes

Might be my favorite eclipse photo so far:


Click through to see the full size.

Yes, it's a lovely picture of totality, but so many of those show just the moon and corona and maybe a diamond ring.

But for this, having the boats in the foreground, and the clouds, and the slight texture of the water, make it truly amazing to me. This would be a fabulous print... at least, for nerds like me.

日蝕 Eclipse

日蝕 Eclipse
Originally uploaded by holst7.

Some nice eclipse photos are starting to come in from Asia.

So far, so good on the megadisaster. I found more than a few things on the web warning folks to stay off the beaches in India because of the potential for a massive quake in Japan that would somehow cause tsunamis in India.

There are total eclipses on this planet with relative regularity, and earthquakes every day, including a few large earthquakes every year.

My fingers are crossed that Asia won't coincidentally have a big quake in the next few hours, or we'll never hear the end of it from people who think the eclipse caused it.

On first seeing the Colorado River Basin

Deer Creek Falls - Grand Canyon
Originally uploaded by Al_HikesAZ.

From John Wesley Powell's journey through the Grand Canyon, leading a team of the first people to go down the Colorado River in boats:

The upper two-thirds of the basin rises from four to eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. This high region, on the east, north, and west, is set with ranges of snow-clad mountains, attaining an altitude above the sea varying from eight to fourteen thousand feet. All winter long, on its monutain-crested rim, snow falls, filling the gorges, half burying the forests, and covering the crags and peaks with a mantle woven by the winds from the waves of the sea -- a mantle of snow. When the summer-sun comes, this snow melts, and tumbles down the mountain-sides in millions of cascades. Ten million cascade brooks unite to form ten thousand torrent creeks; ten thousand torrent creeks united to form a hundred rivers beset with cataracts; a hundred roaring rivers unite to form the Colorado, which rolls, a mad, turbid stream, into the Gulf of California

My battered copy of this book, which I bought for 25 cents from a box in front of a small used-bookstore, is one of the geographilic books I can just lie around and read bits of, over and over again.



John Wesley Powell , with one arm, with food supplies that got wet and moldy over the weeks, with boats and crew gradually wearing out and falling apart, or leaving the party, made it, more than once, from one end of the Colorado to the other, and wrote richly about what he saw there.




Of course, then we submerged many of his cataracts and fern-lined canyons with the reservoir that bears his name.

Thank God men cannot fly

sunrise
Originally uploaded by Fotopath.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau

Adventure for its own sake ... and for science

Neil Armstrong After Apollo 11 EVA.

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind. ~plaque left by Apollo 11

When I was a little girl, we would lie out in the back yard, or on the hood of the car, and stare at the moon, trying to see lunar landers. Mom never told us it was ridiculous for us to try to look, that we'd never see it. She never pretended she saw it, or tried to give us false hope. She just allowed it. She patiently listened as we came in to tell her our stories, sure we'd seen it. She ignored bedtimes, when Apollo missions were working. She made sure that we got to watch them on TV, every single time, every launch, every moon landing, every splashdown in the ocean at the end. It was part of the fabric of my childhood.

I hope we never stop adventuring for the sake of science ... for the sake of adventure, either. But for science.

This picture of Neil Armstrong after his first Apollo moonwalk, or EVA, on July 20, 1969, is one of my all-time favorite astronomy-related photos. Look at his face: It is glowing with rich delight.

(.... One small step for a man ....)

name-dropping

moonfestCIMG2446
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

Don Pettit is up there among my favorite astronauts because he's *so* nerdy, so much fun, his science videos are wonderful.

He's truly and simply excited, and good at explaining the science he's researching in space, as well as other little things like "how do you eat peanut butter and honey in space?"

He's got a strong sense of wonder, and appreciates the question "what will happen if I do this?"

Dr. Pettit spoke at NASA Ames Moonfest, which is the main reason I went.

Some of my favorite questions from people at Moonfest:

"Can you see a solar eclipse from space?" from a kid. Pettit said it looked like illustrations in a textbook, with a visible umbra and penumbra on the ground, and yes, he's seen one.

One very young child asked, "How old do you have to be to go in space?" Pettit said that technically there's no lower age limit (upper either, for that matter) but that people should go to college, get a degree, then do something with it that shows NASA that you would be useful on their team. Most folks are within a few years of 40 when chosen. And he's going back in a couple of years, via Soyuz, to work on the ISS again.

One child asked, "if you sneeze in space is there just a glob of spit floating around?" There was much laughter. Pettit said that when you sneeze on the ISS or shuttle, you can just reach out and grab it with a dry wipe (I suppose that would be the glob, rather than the atomization), but inside a helmet, "You just have to live with the results."

Pettit also shared that they call the new toilet -> urine-processor -> galley setup the "coffee machine" as it turns yesterday's coffee into today's.

Robert Glennon on the water crisis

Robert Glennon discusses the water crisis with Jon Stewart:

Robert Glennon

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes

Thanks to Aquafornia for the link pointer.

(Perhaps we shouldn't be drinking from the toilets, but why not put a hand-wash basin on top of the toilet?)

map of the solar system

from the most trusted man in America

Walter Cronkite Bust 5.22.2008
Originally uploaded by Notley.

via stopglobalwarming.org:

I am joining the hundreds of thousands who shall be marching in this virtual march to demonstrate the concern that we all hold for the future of our planet and all the living things -- flora, fauna, human and animal -- that exist upon it. The governments of the world have tarried long enough, and the United States is scarcely without doubt the greatest culprit among them.

We the people have the strength to bring our country from our weak-kneed stumbling gait in the last ranks of reason to the leadership of the great march to environmental victory.

I want to be in that parade and if there is a place up front I'd wish to lead the band or at least be assigned a big bass drum to help pound out the rhythm of glorious success.
- Walter Cronkite

I will miss him.

still good with regard to madagascar

The BBC has an animated map showing the spread
of swine flu globally. Iceland, Fiji, Morocco ... it's getting around.

It's still not in Madagascar. It's just a matter of time....

geography matters

I really like this photo. I wonder where it was taken, and why the banner was there:

Give geography its place

What use is geography? (school recruitment video from the UK)

Hot town, summer in the city

manhattanhenge
Originally uploaded by photographsdikdik.

Twice a year, the sun rises and sets in alignment with the (not quite) east-west grid of Manhattan's streets. The sun shines down the length of the urban canyons, and everyone with a camera comes out to take pictures of the phenomenon that has come to be known as Manhattanhenge.

ocean's edge processes - I was transfixed

Typically, I don't much care for the slideshow variety of presenting this sort of information. But something about the way the titles worked in this, and the music -- I might always be a sucker for Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits -- pulled me in, and I watched it until the end.



That said, I'm not sure it helped my understanding of the ocean's edge. I had to poke around on the web afterwards to figure out what a tombolo is.

If there were a simple answer ....

Hut
Originally uploaded by jackol.

A few months ago, when folks were starting to fuss about climate change and overpopulation causing water wars, I read in quite a lot of places that areas that historically have little water tend to use it peacefully, and the world would adapt.

But this, in The Guardian:

It was a little after 8pm when the water started flowing through the pipe running beneath the dirt streets of Bhopal's Sanjay Nagar slum. After days without a drop of water, the Malviya family were the first to reach the hole they had drilled in the pipe, filling what containers they had as quickly as they could. Within minutes, three of them were dead, hacked to death by angry neighbours who accused them of stealing water.

I think we can slow, but not stop climate change, and doing so won't be enough to prevent real suffering. Controlling population will help, but how? We have to almost stop. Otherwise, it will get much worse before it gets better.

So far, I'm not one of those people who believe that technology will help us cope with 10 billion people on the planet, or 15 billion people. Or rather, technology will help, but it certainly won't make it better, just perhaps not as horrible as it could become.

And deep down, I don't think it's ethical or good public policy to enforce family size or procreation. (Look at China: Too many boys, second children -- or first, if girls -- given to orphanages, and rural/poor people still having extra children. "One Child" is controlling the population, but at what cost? And how can we compare that usefully to what Asia would be like now otherwise?)

I get fussy about countries like Japan and Norway complaining about low birthrate and encouraging people to have more babies so there will be someone around whose taxes can care for an aging population. I got downright grotty at Australia's John Howard, who encouraged Australians to have more babies even as the country was running out of water. But then what do they do to keep the population balanced?

I'd say they should be encouraged to adopt from poorer parts of the world -- but that way has led, in the past, to tragic exploitation. I'd say they should encourage families with young children to immigrate from areas that are more bottom-heavy in the age demographic department but then who supports these families as their children are educated and enculturated in the new country, as they move toward long-term residency, citizenship, and tax-paying status? And how do you get past the historically xenophobic practices in some of these developed countries?

I don't feel like I can write about this logically, but I'd like to somehow.

If there were a simple answer, we'd be implementing it right now. No?

*splash*

I'm going to call this geography because the view of the earth from the falling rockets is amazing:



I wonder (and one of you must know): How small is the bit of ocean do the engineers know the rockets will fall into? How far away are the retrieval ships, for safety?

I love the splash at the end, and how the cameras keep working.

One of my all time favorite David Attenborough moments

You might have already seen the fabulous lyrebird of Australia

sense of place - Burney Falls

Burney Falls
Originally uploaded by Buck Forester.

I didn't take this, but I want to share it.

Here's how I commented on the picture on Buck's photostream:

I have visited those falls more times than I know, as my mom grew up in Modoc County and I grew up in Redding, and Mom took us to Burney as often as we could go, pretty much.

Sometimes I google around from photos, just because Burney Falls is sort of my church, it's one of my favorite places in the world, and just looking at photos is sometimes enough to help me feel cool and peaceful.

And this is the best picture of my wonderful falls that I've ever, ever seen. Thank you so much.

Obama on Mount Rushmore

As I post, the Park Service is cutting down the banner. But for awhile this morning, Greenpeace managed to hang a banner on the face of Mount Rushmore (without disfiguring the monument at all) to make a visible statement about climate change.

Whatever you think about them or their methods, and whatever I do (hint: for the most part, I approve), I like that they didn't damage the monument at all, and that they were so live and visible about it at the time.

From Ustream:


(Note: That really is supposed to be Obama's face on the banner, and it was even visible as such now and then behind ustream's less-than-clear streaming quality at the time. There's only so much live datastreaming from a remote location can pull off.)

....and now an update: Treehugger has added video. Please go check out their post, too.

Lego world

Lego world
Originally uploaded by futureatlas.com.

From Future Atlas:

If you loved me, you'd totally make me one of these.

The Joy of Work

The BBC gives us the North American beaver going about its daily business:

I'm curious, too

geography quiz
Originally uploaded by solidstate_.

Unreinforced masonry in Portland, Oregon.

fish_through_wall_08659
Originally uploaded by original_MikZ.

Well, no, not really.

My only phobia besides heights is unreinforced masonry, because of the whole "falls on head in earthquake" issue. But I am quite sure this is reinforced.

Clearly, it was just a very strong fish.

oooh, waves! low pressure systems!

getting by in Bolivia ... the hard way

Coroico Bolivia
Originally uploaded by Chris-Ecuador.

We're not going into the heights thing this time.

Seriously.

But this got to me:

Juana Combata used to cross the valley almost every day with her family-- hanging on to the cable that links her community to the rest of the world. But one day in June of last year, things changed.

A piece of steel holding the plank holding Juana, her husband, and her 3-year-old son, broke, and they plummeted nearly 100 feet to the shore of the river, hitting the rocks below.

Her 3-year-old child died instantly.

Juana and her husband Edwin survived with some injuries.

"Nowadays I don't cross the cable that much, I'm afraid since I fell down. If I have to do it I go alone, I fell with my son, my husband... so now I just grab my baby and go alone with him."

The rest of the interview, with the (non-embeddable, dangit) video is at National Geographic.

They have to cross that cable to survive. They put their kids on it, balance carefully, and slide. I guess I'd do it if I had to, but I can't imagine doing it after a fall like that.

The area is rich in coca-based agriculture. The Combatas grow mandarins, and send them off to LaPaz on a journey that begins in a basket hanging from that river cable.

Now I wonder whether the Combatas are growing mandarins in a way that hurts the forest.

The World Wildlife Fund says:

Although Bolivia has a decent and growing National Parks (NP) system, threats in the form of habitat loss and general degradation due to human activities persist outside protected regions. This ecoregion is threatened because it is easier for local agrarianists to burn this habitat than true montane forest for growing cash crops. In some cases crops and logging have increased due to more intensified road-building efforts. Extensive forest clearance in the Bolivian Andean foothills to cultivate crops has endangered over 70 species of birds, especially in the Departments of La Paz and Cochabamb. Additionally, certain game species from this ecoregion are threatened by over-harvest for protein and/or the wild bird trade.

(citations and more information at original link)

Of course, this sort of degradation is common worldwide, in both developing and well-developed nations.
In many cases, that's what "development" is.

But it's not sustainable.

The Combatas and their neighbors have to eat.

Helping them do so without ruining their local ecosystem is part of the overall, global sustainability picture.

Saraychev Peak is awesome, as are fast-on-the-shutter astronauts

From Bad Astronomy (one of my favorite blogs)
comes a time-lapse series of Saraychev Peak erupting
and wow is this cool. You've seen the photo series, I suppose. This one is run back and forth, looped, run in slow motion, run in slow motion with the pyroclastic flows highlighted .... it's a two-and-a-half-minute video, but I stared at it all the
way through, then ran back over the most compelling bits, then ran it all way through again.

It's worth spending some time with. I just wish the series were longer, that we could watch the
ash bloom further out of the side of the cloud the eruption created as it pushed air into a colder layer.

I guess asking the ISS to stop for a few minutes so the astronauts could take more pictures would have been asking too much.



(Note: It's got some interesting music attached. I'm sure the video won't take offense if you watch it without sound on.)

Alpha Centauri can finally see Janet Jackson's nipple

electromagnetic_leak
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

The Abstruse Goose comic illustrates where the electromagnetic waves we're flung into space are now.

Sadly, folks on the furthest planets haven't yet seen Gilligan's Island. (I assume this means that Thermians come from somewhere near Formalhaut.)

(The big version's back at Abstruse Goose. It'll take you out past Aldeberan.)


(edited to add: This post led to a huge discussion in my house about how long the Thermians would have been able to see our TV shows, how long it took to build the ship, and whether they might have sent probes nearer to us to collect data, then had them return via hyperspace, faster than light, meaning that they would have more information from our TV shows than we realize.)

India decriminalizes homosexual behavior

DSC_1000
Originally uploaded by Pierre Conti.

In an historic judgment
the Delhi High Court Thursday decriminalised homosexuality by striking down section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

That is a huge, big deal.

It's not like the law was always or evenly enforced in India, but it allowed a lot of leeway for abusive police action. And though it's not like the police in India are never corrupt or abusive even within the law, this is still a huge first step.

India managed to shake off the demands of its religious groups to get rid of section 377. I'm glad there are countries that can still pull that off.

Gravity and I need to have a little talk

I am absolutely sure, indeed, that I have mentioned that I am afraid of heights.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I need to get over it.

I was able to go to the top of the Empire State Building easily, I think because I don't feel like I'm going to fall over, all railings are above my center of gravity. Though "the ledge" at Sears Tower is completely enclosed, the visual sensation of potential gravity-assisted exit from the structure made my toes curl up, quite literally, while I was watching the video.

This is indeed geography. Lots of things are.

(link via NPR)

More than I knew about Washington DC

Washington Sightseeing
Originally uploaded by ®oberto's.

US News and World Report has a little quizlet on Washington DC. The easy questions were easy for me, the hard ones really made me think, and I missed a couple. There was no in-between.

NASA's image of the day for today

363734main_image_1400_946-710
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

(from NASA)