If you’ve ever wondered who’s in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It’s your cat.
Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.
This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed.
[snip]
Previous research has shown similarities between cat cries and human infant cries.
McComb suggests that the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of humans’ sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing offspring. Also, including the cry within the purr could make the sound “less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to,” she said.
Cunning little fuckers, aren’t they? Ah, well. I always knew “cat owner” was a complete misnomer anyway.
(Tip o’ the shot glass to John Amato at Crooks and Liars, who also has the exquisite good taste to be owned by a tuxedo cat.)
If you haven’t seen it, the Pew Research Center’s report on scientists and politics really is fascinating. There’s plenty to chew on, but the political views of scientists themselves were of particular interest.
Pew surveyed more than 2,500 scientists, conducted in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which offered a pretty strong sample size. The survey found that more than half (55%) of the scientists identified themselves as Democrats, and nearly as many (52%) call themselves liberal. What’s more, “Many of the scientists surveyed mentioned in their open-ended comments that they were optimistic about the Obama administration’s likely impact on science.”
Only 9% of the scientists, meanwhile, consider themselves conservative, while fewer still (6%) identified themselves as Republicans. It’s just speculation, but the party’s hostility towards the basics of modern biology, global warming, and evidence-based reasoning may have something to do with this. Call it a hunch.
Of course, we know what Cons are going to do with this: every time scientists come up with inconvenient facts, they’ll blow it off as “those damned libruls again.” It’ll never occur to them that scientists might end up as liberal because of reality’s own liberal bias.
“Both scientists and the public overwhelmingly say it is appropriate for scientists to become active in political debates about such issues as nuclear power or stem cell research.”
While scientists self-identify as liberal, most American’s don’t see scientists as liberal. Thus, engaged experts might view themselves as politically liberal, the general public is likely not to view them in this way.
Scientists are the third most respected profession (after the military and teachers)
The winter of 1064-65* wasn’t a particularly good one for the locals. There was the 6 mile fissure that opened and began pumping out lava. Then one end of the fissure started throwing scoria at them, collapsing the roofs of their pit houses under hot heaps of fresh cinders and ash. Then more lava flows filled in forested valleys. By the end of it, fields of corn lay buried, the landscape had undergone a fairly dramatic makeover, and the severely surprised Sinagua had discovered the art of basalt corn cobble making. They relocated to points less explosive nearby, where a beautiful new volcano formed a backdrop and gave a fertility boost to their fields.
These things happen when you live in the San Francisco Volcanic field.
Northern Arizona would be a flat, arid plateau if it wasn’t for the hot spot beneath it. For 6 million years, volcanoes have erupted here, steadily marching east. The field extends from Williams in the west to the banks of the Little Colorado River in the east, and from just below Flagstaff in the south nearly to Cameron in the north – an area of roughly 1,800 square miles. It contains the highest point in Arizona – 12,633′ Humphreys Peak – as well as the youngest volcano, Sunset Crater. If you’re looking for a particular type of volcano, chances are the San Francisco Volcanic Field has it, from lava domes to a stratovolcano to dozens of cinder cones of all shapes and sizes. With 600+ volcanoes to choose from, you can’t complain. And if you’re really lucky, you might get a chance to see a new volcano born, since the field’s still potentially active. Geologists think any future eruptions will be small enough to get a spectacular show without inconveniencing the locals too much.
Sunset Crater would have put on quite the show itself. The six mile long curtain of fire served as the opening act, and while it probably wasn’t quite as vigorous as many Hawaiian fissure eruptions, brilliant red lava shooting up from the ground is still an impressive sight. But that was merely the prelude. Activity along the fissure slowed quickly, becoming concentrated at the northern end, where the real show was starting. Explosions ejected fragments of lava high into the air; as those fragments cooled mid-air, the dissolved gasses within them exsolved and created dozens of vesticles, peppering the fragments with petrified bubbles. They rained down around the vent, piling into a cone. The heat, the smell, and the noise would have been overwhelming.
We have a good idea what the Sinagua saw. It would have been quite a bit like Paricutín’s birth:
Loud, isn’t it? One begins to understand why the Sinagua fed it corn: I imagine they were trying desperately to calm it down.
If they found a good vantage point on nearby mountains, they might have seen bits of the newly-birthed crater rafting away on lava flows. You can still see chunks of red oxidized agglutinate, pieces of the original cone, trapped in the Bonito flow. The explosions continued, filling Sunset Crater’s gaping wounds with fresh scoria, and leaving the volcano with smooth, unblemished flanks.
As the eruption waned, something wonderful happened. Fumaroles formed near the crater’s rim, venting hot gasses that oxidized the basalt scoria. The iron contained within basically rusted, painting the rim in gorgeous sunset colors. The fumaroles cemented the rim with silica, gypsum and iron oxide; as a finishing touch, they deposited sulfur compounds, opal, hematite, jarosite, and magnetite. Nature had created a masterpiece.
When all was said and done, the volcano topped out at 1000 feet in height, a mile in width, and contained a crater 400 feet deep, which itself hosts a 160 foot deep secondary crater. The local Sinagua might have considered it a decent consolation prize for getting volcanically evicted from their forested valley.
The visible interior of Sunset Crater is covered with a smooth coating of scoria, but we can get a look inside her if we head over to Red Mountain, many miles to the west. This is the eroded interior of a cinder cone. Steam and percolating water welded its layers of cinder and ash together with the same sorts of mineral oxides that cemented Sunset Crater, creating a volcanic material called tuff. We get this inside-look at the anatomy of a cinder cone because the entire western side of Red Mountain got itself rafted away by a lava flow, leaving an enormous ampitheater carved out of the cone. This time, there was wasn’t any explosive action to replace the missing bits.
Lava can do some pretty outrageous things. And thanks to Northern Arizona’s cool, dry climate, we can get a nearly unweathered view of its antics. Rain and snowmelt just sink right in without disturbing the surface of the flows too much. If it wasn’t for the lichens and hardy bushes peppering the flows, you’d think they’d just erupted last week.
Most of the flows around Sunset Crater are composed of a’a lava. There is a good reason why the Hawaiians call it a’a, which means, basically, “stony, rough lava.” It’s a stony, rough lava comprised of clinker, broken chunks of lava carried along the top by a dense, pasty core. As that hotter core oozes its way downslope, the clinker goes along for the ride, tumbling over the leading edge like a bunch of over-excited kids at a slow-motion water park. The tumbled chunks get buried as the flow ambles on. Thus, you get a sort of lava sandwich: clinker top and bottom, paste in the middle. Don’t bite into a fresh flow, though: it’s erupting at temperatures of 1000-1100 degrees C. That’s 1800-2000 degrees F. That’s bloody hot.
Back when I was a wee kiddie, our teachers showed us a video of an a’a flow filmed in Iceland. I’ll never forget the sound. As the clinker tumbles, it makes a cacophony like a monstrous china cabinet getting knocked over. This video from Hawaii demonstrates that nicely:
Is that, or is that not, simply awesome?
There are two ways a’a is formed from a basalt flow. One of them is when the basalt is high in gas bubbles and (relatively) low in temperature, thus high in viscosity. The other is when the strain rate of the flow is high – such as when it hits steep ground. Remember this, as it will factor in to the following discussion.
Sunset Crater’s lava flows weren’t limited to a’a. The Bonito flow began close to the western margin of the volcano as pahoehoe, a Hawaiian word meaning “smooth, unbroken lava.” It’s a far more liquid basalt that forms a beautiful, smooth surface, sculpted into undulating billows or ropy loops. It forms that way because of the way very fluid lava moves under a congealing surface crust. It’s hot stuff, 1100-1200 degrees C (2000-2100 degrees F), with a low gas bubble content.
Now, the interesting thing is this: pahoehoe can easily turn to a’a, depending on how the flow goes. If pahoehoe hits an uphill climb, it’ll cool down, slow down, and get all clinkered up. Same thing can happen as the flow cools further from its eruption site. Isn’t that neat?
You can get an idea of what something like that looks like from this video of pahoehoe and a’a flows merging:
Pahoehoe also means “good to walk” in Hawaiian. When I was a kid visiting the Crater, our field trip guide explained the name origins thusly: the Hawaiians, walking barefoot over flows, would try to tiptoe over the rough stuff, exclaiming: “Ah! Ah!” And then, when their feet hit the smooth, soothing surface, they’d sigh in relief: “Mmmm, pahoehoe!”
You’ll never forget the difference now, will you?
The Bonito flow turned from pahoehoe to a’a as it lost its gas on the trip out from the mountain. Big cracks formed in its surface from the frictional drag of the liquid lava below the cooler crust, and as that weak crust collapsed when lava drained away from beneath it. It’s the youngest and biggest of Sunset Crater’s two flows. It covers almost two square miles, and ranges from 100 feet deep in its center to less than 6 feet along the margins. It filled in a basin surrounded by older volcanoes. The other major flow, Kana’a, flowed down an old stream bed for several miles, and never got more than 1000 feet wide. Sunset Crater’s continued eruptions covered it in cinders, allowing a lot more vegetation to take root along its surface. Both flows, as well as the cinders, are alkai olivine basalt, which is composed of microscopic crystals of plagioclase, olivine and augite. The occasional big white chunk of stone embedded in the basalt is a xenolith, in this case formed when lava ripped a hunk of Kaibab limestone out of the underlying formations and took it along for the ride.
The Bonito lava flow is where you’ll see most of the interesting formations. For a crash course in lava, there’s nothing better than the trail that meanders through it. You can take an online field trip, but we’ll hit some of the high points here.
If you’ve never used “lava” and “toothpaste” in the same sentence before, that’s probably because you’ve never seen a squeeze-up. These form when gummy, partially-cooled lava squeezes its way through already-hardened cracks in the flow. It’s pretty much the consistency of toothpaste. A close inspection will show you the marks left as it scrapes by the solid stone around it.
The Bonito flow also contains lava tubes, formed when molten rock drained from its solidified surroundings. Those tubes are cold – basalt’s a terrible material for trapping heat. In colder, wetter Arizona days, the tubes used to contain ice full time. Now, they’re usually dry, but frigid. Alas, Bonito’s main tube collapsed some time ago, so you can’t go exploring it anymore. This is good news for the claustrophobic set, not such good news for the spelunkers among us.
You can console yourself with a hornito. Yes, I know most of you associate the word “hornito” with tequila, for good reason – Hornitos is an excellent brand. In this case, though, hornito means a small spatter cone formed on the surface of a basalt flow. It’s created when lava is forced up through the cooled surface. Hornitos are fed by the flow itself, rather than its own magma source as is the case with a regular spatter cone. They’re steep-sided heaps of splattered lava that splashed down and over the developing cone, welding itself as it goes. The lava’s still partially liquid when it falls, which is why it doesn’t form distinct cinders, although the principle’s roughly the same.
Watching one form is a fascinating experience:
Sunset Crater’s hornito used to be taller, but volcanoes aren’t all that good at welding, and people broke it down by sitting on it and taking away chunks. It’s still an impressive feature, though.
Just past the hornito, you’ll catch sight of something that looks like a mini-cinder cone. It’s a cinder dune. This gives you some idea of just how much material Sunset Crater ejected.
Sunset Crater is a geologists’ dream. There are few places in the continental United States where volcanism is so wonderfully demonstrated, without all the pesky plants in the way. And, just over the horizon, ancient oceans lie exposed, and prehistoric apartments look out over Painted Desert vistas.
But that’s a story for another Sunday Sensational Science. For now, I’ll just leave you with a portrait of Sunset Crater and her lava flows, and let you ponder the power of hot rock to create a work of art:
* Scientists are still bickering over the dates. The paleomagnetic guys think the dendrochronology guys are full of horse hockey, and the dendrochronology guys are busy arguing over whether the eruption or drought or beetles caused the slow tree growth that year. The dates used in this post were acquired from logs used in Wupatki’s roof, and they fit comfortably within the paleomagnetic dates, so we’re running with ’em. All images except the map of the volcanic field are courtesy of yours truly and her traveling companion. Clicky for large, glorious versions.
This gives me the chance to mention a little something Gould pointed out about statistics: if you’re not seeing the full picture, you might be missing an important point. Such as, increased complexity in evolution. Those who look at the fact that life began with simple unicellular critters and ended up with complex multicellular critters and automatically jump to “ZOMG! Evolution = progression in complexity!” miss a little something in the data:
Life, y’see, started out as simple as it could get. There was nowhere to go but more complex. But plenty of it stayed comfortably against the left wall of minimal complexity.
Here’s an analogy to get the right model into your head. Imagine a busy bar that closes at 2am, and sends all the drunks out the door to walk home. Since scienceblogs was so unfair to our Australian readership last night, let’s imagine it is an Australian bar, and a million brain-blitzed Australian drunks spill out the door and start walking determinedly down the street. There are a few properties at play here. One is that this street happens to be paralleled on the right by a wall, so the drunks can’t stagger too far in that direction. The other is that on the left is a wide-open sheep pasture which provides no obstacle to their progress that way. Another is that they are all initially aimed straight down the street, but because they are drunk, they stagger every once in a while and veer off a few degrees to the left or the right, entirely by chance.
You’re hovering overhead in a helicopter. What do you think you will see?
The mob will proceed down the street, but as it goes, it will spread out gradually to the left. The majority will stagger right and left with equal frequency, and wobble roughly down the street. There will be a subset that will, by chance, stagger left a little more than to the right, and they’ll drift off into the sheep pasture. Some may veer more to the right than the left, but they’ll just bounce into the wall and get straightened out that way.
No drunk Australian has a preference to stroll into the sheep pasture. There is no intent to end up there. But some do, just by the odds. You, in your helicopter, can even look at the shape of the sprawling mob and make useful calculations about drunk Australian kinetics and make predictions about the aggregate trajectories of strolling drunkards, although you wouldn’t be able to predict the pattern of an individual drunk.
This is the general model for how size and complexity vary over time.
Statistics will bite your butt if you don’t use ’em wisely. That’s why I recommend Full House, despite the fact Dawkins blew some of Gould’s major arguments out of the water. That book is a wonderful primer on statistics, even if it does natter on and on and on about baseball. You’d also be wise to check in regularly with Efrique at Ecstathy, since he regularly deconstructs wooly statistical arguments and shows you precisely how you’re being had.
We’re also going to have a little discussion about mean, median and mode. You’ll probably never forgive me for this:
Go to YouTube, type in “mean, median and mode,” and realize it could’ve been much worse. Much worse.
The whole point of that obnoxious little video was to show you the difference between the three, in case you didn’t already know (or didn’t bother to remember). I’ve also just provided you with ammunition to use against people who won’t provide their data sets, or who won’t tell you if the number they’re so proud of is the mean, median or mode. Threaten to make them watch this video until they give in. Don’t worry, it’s not against the Geneva Conventions – yet.
George at Decrepit Old Fool posted a thought-provoking video as I worked on this post, and I think it (and he) makes an important point:
I think this is a good idea. Sure, calculus is important for engineering and advanced business courses. But statistics is key to allocating the use of limited resources (for example in health care), to mitigating risk, to epidemiology, even to understanding the environment – to lots of stuff. It would be generally useful to a huge section of the public.
Like Arthur Benjamin said, “In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what ‘two standard deviations from the mean’ means, and I mean it.”
The standard deviation is the root mean square (RMS) deviation of the values from their arithmetic mean. For example, in the population (4, 8), the mean is 6 and the standard deviation is 2. This may be written: (4, 8) ≈ 6±2. In this case 100% of the values in the population are within two standard deviations away from the mean.
See how easy that is?
Statistics can be meaningless, and they can lie – but with a little savvy on our part, we can tell the difference between legit and ZOMG GLOBAL WARMING’S CAUSED BY NOT ENOUGH PIRATES!!1!11! Not that we’d ever fall for something that obviously silly, right?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to save the planet.
You will shortly understand the reason for this illustration:
Tonight, for the first time all week, my cat did not shove her dear little face into mine whilst howling, or use the bed as a trampoline, or do any of the other things designed to wake Mommy up from her nap because Kitteh wants to go hang out on the porch. This allowed me to dream. I dreamt of Edward (is that his name?) from Twilight.
Now, ordinarily, this would have been a traumatic experience. I haven’t read the books or seen the movies, but heard just enough to realize that reading the books or seeing the movies would induce terminal vomiting. However. This dream answered an important question: why the fuck would a vampire want to afflict himself with perpetual high school?
Enter Desmonda. I’m not sure what she was. Some kind of immortal, not a vampire, who as a tween (apparently before becoming immortal, or discovering she was immortal, or whatthefuckever) had been taken in by Edward during a runaway episode. Apparently, he raised her right. The dream opened with her, and she was h-h-hot and Einstein-smart. Picture her, dressed in skin-tight jeans and some sassy red shirt, purse flung casually over her shoulder, dark hair flowing, and striding up the sidewalk with an attitude destined to leave you awestruck. K? Got her envisioned?
She was going back to high school.
She was posing as a teenager specificially so she could go back to high school.
And my brain supplied the backstory: she was posing as a teenager so she could go back to high school in order to make being a nerd so irresistably sexy, so unutterably cool, that all the kids would of course strive to become nerds themselves. She was going to influence a generation to believe brains = beauty (which they do, but how many kids believe that?). And she wasn’t just preaching it to the kids, because we all know that talking to teens is rather like telling your cat to go play trampoline somewhere else.
Desmonda meets Edward coming up the sidewalk near the school from the other direction, and lo, he has independently reached the same conclusion. He, too, is returning to high school in order to make nerd the ideal every teen wishes to attain. And I can guarantee you that reason for endless high school is so much more awesome than whatever excuse Stephanie Meyer cooked up that they can only be fit onto one graph if one uses a logarithmic scale.
I may have to write this as a fan-fic story someday, just for shits and giggles. It delighted me. It puzzled me for a moment – I mean, WTF? But then I discovered the genealogy of the dream.
My friend Raji at work had been yammering about having to get New Moon soon, which made me want to cry. I can’t believe so many of my friends are so tragically coming down with this Twilight disease.
In order to be what it is, though, science must live. It’s a process carried out by human beings, and it can’t be gagged and enslaved and shackled to a narrow goal, one that doesn’t rock the boat. Imagine they’d written a book that tried to tell artists that they shouldn’t challenge the culture; we’d laugh ourselves sick and tell them that they were completely missing the point. Why do you think some of us are rolling our eyes at their absurd request that scientists should obliging accommodate themselves to a safe frame that every middle-class American would find cozy? They don’t get it.
Somehow, they think that Carl Sagan’s great magic trick was that he didn’t make Americans feel uncomfortable. I think they’re wrong. Sagan’s great talent was that he showed a passion for science. People made fun of his talk of “billyuns and billyuns”, but it was affectionate, because at the same time he was talking about these strange, abstract, cosmic phenomena, everyone could tell he was sincere — he loved this stuff.
[snip]
Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited. They shouldn’t hesitate to say what they think, even if it might make Joe the Plumber surly. If you want to improve American science and the perception of science by the public, teach science first and foremost, because what you’ll find is that your discipline is then populated with people who are there because they love the ideas. And, by the way, let them know every step of the way that science is also a performing art, and that they have an obligation as a public intellectual to take their hard-earned learning and share it with the world.
Thus you have Edward and Desmonda, headed back to high school to turn science into chic.
You know, the Con’s ignorance about basic science is just getting abjectly pathetic:
“Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade probably isn’t quite sharp enough to realize why his comments this morning were a little crazy even for Fox News. It’s a shame, because if he thought about it, he might be embarrassed.
Kilmeade was reflecting on a study that found married people fare better when it comes to Alzheimer’s than divorcees. Fox News is “pro-family,” so it might seem like the kind of study Kilmeade would approve of.
Alas, no. The Fox News personality took issue with where the study was done, which he said discredited the results. Alex Koppelman, who posted the video, explains:
Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, “We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other …”
At this point, his co-host tried to — in that jokey morning show way — tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn’t get the message, adding, “See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes…. Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society.”
We’ll just skip right over the fact that people who advocate that sort of purity generally belong to white supremacist organizations, and get to the science. First off, how “pure” are their societies? Lessee:
Sweden: Of the 2007 population 13.4% (1.23 million) were born abroad.[96] This reflects the inter-Nordic migrations, earlier periods of labour immigration, and later decades of refugee and family immigration. Sweden has been transformed from a nation of emigration ending after World War I to a nation of immigration from World War II onwards. In 2008, immigration reached its highest level since records began with 101,171 people moving to Sweden.[97]
Finland: The share of foreign citizens in Finland is 2.5 percent[29] being among the lowest of the European Union countries. Most of them are from Russia, Estonia and Sweden.[29]
Well, Swedes seem to be mutts, and while Finland looks “pure” on the surface, let’s keep in mind their history, which seems to include a lot of people who weren’t from Finland moving in and becoming Fins. Europeans have been sloshing around interbreeding for a damned long time. I didn’t even bother to look at the genetic studies yet, but I doubt there’s any sort of genetic markers that differentiate “pure” Swedes and Fins from all of those icky mixed breeds. Thus we dispense with the “purity” argument.
Moving on. Kilmeade says Americans keep marrying “other species.” I do not think he knows what the word “species” means:
Biology.
A fundamental category of taxonomic classification, ranking below a genus or subgenus and cons
isting of related organisms capable of interbreeding.
An organism belonging to such a category, represented in binomial nomenclature by an uncapitalized Latin adjective or noun following a capitalized genus name, as in Ananas comosus, the pineapple, and Equus caballus, the horse.
Now, we could be generous and say he was using the term in a rather vulgar sense, but from the context he seems to believe that humans are really divided into biologically distinct species, which is utter and complete ignorant bullshit. Y’see, all humans are Homo sapiens, which are:
The modern species of humans, the only extant species of the primate family Hominidae.
Emphasis added specifically for Brian Kilmeade, who apparently never took high school biology.
And, finally, let us have a look at another statement Kilmeade made in that same segment:
“In America, we marry everybody. Some will marry Italians, the Irish….”
Yes, we do indeed marry the Irish, don’t we, Brian? In fact, we may even marry people from the Irish parish of…. Kilmeade.
I do believe if you took a “purity” test, you’d flunk it. Imagine that.
My cat may be homicidal, but she’s also a discerning reader. Here she is, drawing your attention to a particularly interesting passage in Guns, Germs and Steel:
I’m not sure which passage it was, alas. Too busy photographing the cat. It looks to be the Epilogue, but I can tell you that the entire book is an excellent read. You’ll never see the world in quite the same way again. And it answers that pesky question: why were Europeans the ones who pretty much took over the world?
Bad news for those who wish to believe in the inherent superiority of a subset of humanity, I’m afraid.
For those who haven’t read it, but like me spent years intending to, let this be your meaningful nudge: it’s a really fucking excellent book. And my cat says you should read it. When a homicidal feline places a meaningful paw on a book and recommends you peruse it, it’s probably safest just to do what she says.
Summer Milky Way above Yavapai Point Trail in Grand Canyon. Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com.
Nothing chock-full of scientific facts this week, but plenty of beauty. Whilst I was on vacation, I came across the photography of Wally Pacholka in various visitors’ centers. What’s remarkable about his photography is that it isn’t contrived:
Pacholka said he employs simple techniques and does nothing extraordinary to get his shots. He uses a standard 50mm lens mounted on a tripod, and points a small flashlight on nearby desirable rocks and other land features he wants to stand out in the photo.
He allowed that his digital camera has a light-gathering power that is in some instances more than 50,000 times greater than a typical daylight camera setting. Pacholka runs his exposures anywhere from a few seconds to a minute. But he doesn’t consider himself a guru.
“This is something the average person could do, absolutely,” he said.
Well, if the average person was willing to hike remote trails in the dark and had an eye for the right moment, I suppose. And believe me when I say that hiking around Sunset Crater even in broad daylight is a perilous proposition. Jagged lava flows, slippery cinders, unexpected Ponderosa pine roots – the average person’s more likely to end up with a broken neck than a spectacular photo.
Sunset Crater Volcano – Milky Way & Jupiter. Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com.
Images like these remind us just how gorgeous our universe is. We’re damned lucky to live on a planet where such vistas paint the night sky. And with a little wisdom in our lighting choices, we can protect those skies, allowing ordinary people to point an ordinary digital camera and capture some really astounding astronomy.
Gemini Twins – Orion – Sirius – Meteor over Windows Area. Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com.
Both astronomy and photography take us to other worlds – one a little more literally than the other. I think this picture captures the other-worldly quality perfectly. Little hard to believe this was taken at the Valley of Fire on Earth, isn’t it?
Mars at Closest Point. Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com.
And there are few things as other-worldly as a comet soaring over Joshua trees, which look a little alien to begin with:
Comet Hale Bopp over Joshua Tree. Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com.
Wally’s work gave me a new appreciation for my home state, where cosmos and continent always seemed close enough to touch each other. The first two photos in this post will be gracing my home just as soon as I’ve identified a suitable wall. Next time you’re in a national park, have a look inside the visitor’s center – his work may be there, and you can take a little something special home with you. If you love sensational science, here’s a photographer who captures its essence perfectly.
Mauna Kea view of Milky Way from Northern Cross to Southern Cross Panorama. Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com.
(All photos filched from Wally’s website, except the first one, which I pilfered from TWAN. You’ll find plenty of other sensational science photographers there, too.)
Remember how Brian and PZ and about twenty bajillion other science bloggers warned us that all the hype over Ida was going to become a creationist field day? It did:
Right on cue, the Worldnutdaily shows us why what the scientists, PR people and media outlets who overhyped the find of an early primate fossil did was detrimental to the public’s understanding of science. Such exaggerations and overblown statements are easily turned around and made to cast doubt on the validity of science and the theory of evolution.
[snip]
Of course, the Worldnutdaily also has to add their own distortions to the list:
History is replete with discoveries initially proclaimed as some sort of missing link, but later proved to be hoaxes.
And then, of course, they can only name two – Archaeoraptor and Piltdown Man. The Archaeoraptor hoax was perpetrated by a Chinese farmer, not by a scientist, and the Piltdown Man hoax was nearly a century ago – and was discovered by scientists.
Ironically, the article also mentions Nebraska Man, which was another textbook example of the media overhyping a fossil find and building far too much out of a simple tooth. The scientist who actually reported the find, HF Osborn, authored a careful and tentative identification of the find; it was a popular British magazine that turned that into a picture of an ape man, complete with wife and child.
But in this case, the scientists themselves have been caught up in the hype and participating in the very thing that destroys their credibility. I hope this will serve as a warning to other scientists not to do the same thing, but I fear it won’t.
Probably not. But for once, just once, I’d like to see people learn from boneheaded mistakes.
Hell, while I’m wishing, I’d like a ranch with horsies, too.
There is some irony in calling Ida the missing link. She was named Darwinius in honour of Charles Darwin, but the phrase “missing link” harkens back to a pre-evolutionary idea of nature. Called the Great Chain of Being, this interpreted all life as forming an immutable hierarchy, ordained by God, from “lower” to “higher”. Scholars believed that God favoured a full creation and each rank connected to the next, but “missing links” presented a problem. The link between humans and lower animals was the most elusive of all.
Our understanding of evolution could scarcely be more different. There is no evolutionary end point or fore-ordained hierarchy of beasts. Life is better understood from Darwin’s perspective – as a wildly branching bush constantly being pruned and sending out new shoots through evolution. Calling Ida a missing link may grab attention, but it is incongruous with what Darwin proposed.
It’s a great article, and it’s wonderful to see him get the recognition he deserves. Pop on over and give Brian some love, then stay tuned for his upcoming Ida Carnival (contributions welcome).
Congratulations, Brian!
(Tip o’ the shot glass to John Pieret, who knew Brian when.)
