Mad Housewife Chardonnay

Kathryn isn’t exactly a haus frau, not with all the lawyers she must deal with daily.

Probably more of a comment on her husband.  A good friend offered this gift a while back:

Mad Housewife Chardonnay - Photo by Ed Darrell, Creative Commons license

We laughed.  Then we found, in the box, an accompanying chardonnay glass:

Change of Life wine glass

“Hot with complex characteristics.”  Still hot after all these years (that many? really?).

Drinking it poses a conundrum:  A Trophy Wife ™ really should be taken out on an occasion to drink a wine with a name like that, right?  But I’m stingy enough not to want to pay the corkage on a bottle brought in.  In no case should this one be drunk with a dinner she’s slaved over for hours.

Maybe it’s time I hit the kitchen.  Old Bay crab cakes, maybe?  It’s a great wine.

American native language, and the Comanche Code Talkers

Our friend, the historian and curator of the Jack Harbin Scout Museum in Dallas, Bob Reitz, will present a paper on the Comanche Code Talkers of World War II at the meeting of the West Texas Historical Association meeting March 30-31, at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.

Which, for some reason, made me think of this classic XKCD:

XKCD cartoon on the national language

More, resources: 

• U.S. Army history page on American Indians in the Army, including code talkers of World War I and World War II; “In Europe, the 4th Signal Company, 4th Infantry Division, was assigned 17 Comanche code talkers. From the D-Day landings at Normandy in June 1944, to the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge, they kept the lines of communications secure.”
• The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II, by William C. Meadows, University of Texas Press
• Navajo Code Talker Keith Little Dies (npr.org)
• Oh – the Cherokee in that cartoon?  “Hello, Sarah is my name,” roughly.

Comanche Code Talkers of World War II, 4th Signal Company, U.S. Army - Image via Wikipedia

Charles Chibitty, the last surviving Comanche Code Talker, died in 2005

Time lapse flight, San Francisco to Paris

I continue to like time-lapse photo compilations, and I continue to wonder about how to use them to expand geography teaching.  It’s a great circle route, over the Arctic nearing the North Pole.  This movie comes from Nate Bolt, who posts his work at Beepshow.

Obviously I’m not the only one who likes it — between the YouTube and Vimeo sites, the movie has more than 4 million viewers.

Bolt explained at YouTube:

More of these time lapses at http://beepshow.com

I shot a photo roughly every two miles between take-off in San Francisco and landing in Paris CDG to make this airplane time lapse. For some reason the Vimeo version of this is more linked to: http://vimeo.com/21822029

Shot with a 5d2, a time-lapse controller, and a 16mm – 35mm, mixed with some iPhone shots. The flight path from SF to Paris goes well over greenland and the arctic circle, where you can see “northern” lights from all sides of the plane, which explains why I could shoot them facing South.

Big thanks to the folks at http://uxlondon.com for inviting me to europe to speak – if it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t have made the trip. The music is a modified template of “Gain” used with permission from DETUNE ltd. denkitribe http://soundcloud.com/denkitribe/gain – I created this arrangement on the Korg iMS20 iPad App, and it’s my first custom score. Edits and pans in After Effects CS5 and iMovie.

The photos during take-off and landing are all computer models and totally rendered because I would never use an electronic device during times when the FAA prohibits them. I did get lucky and have a whole row to myself to setup the tripod and gear.

Thanks to my neighbors for not minding an SLR click every 2 to 30 seconds for 11 hours, and thanks to the whole Air France flight crew for being insanely friendly and allowing me to shoot. Thanks to @ztaylor for showing me the Korg iMS20 iPad App. Thanks to @jayzombie and the #nerdbird on the way to SXSW this year for helping me come up with the idea. Thanks to @somnabulent for the idea of live scoring. Thanks to you for actually reading this far. You are a champion.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Boys’ Life Heads Up blog.

U.S. government propaganda circa 1943: “Don’t be a sucker”

If only the Republican Party still subscribed to these all-American, egalitarian values  . . .  A few sources say the film was intended to be an anti-racism film after the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces by President Harry Truman, and was not intended for general public viewing.  (Is it fair to say this is secret stuff?)  The Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) said the film was made in 1943, and reissued by the Defense Department later; good movies stay fresh:

Financed and produced by the United States War Department, and shot at the Warners [Bros.] studio, although it was distributed through all of the major studios’ film exchanges and also by National Screen Services free to the theatre exhibitors: A young, healthy American Free Mason is taken in by the message of a soap-box orator who asserts that all good jobs in the United States are being taken by the so-called minorities, domestic and foreign. He falls into a conversation with a refugee professor who tells him of the pattern of events that brought Hitler to power in Germany and how Germany’s anti-democratic groups split the country into helpless minorities, each hating the other. The professor concludes by pointing out that America is composed of many minorities, but all are united as Americans. (Reissued in 1946 following the end of World War II.) (Written by Les Adams)

From the Department of Defense in 1943 and 1946, “Don’t Be a Sucker,” about 18 minutes:

More, resources: 

• “Don’t Be a Sucker” is available for free download in several formats, at the Prelinger Archives/Internet Archives
• The actor playing the professor is Hungarian-born Paul Lucas, who won an Academy Award for his performance in 1943′s Watch on the Rhine
• Narrator of the film is veteran actor Lloyd Nolan
• The role of the Nazi supporter was played by Felix Bressart, who himself had been forced out of Nazi Germany in 1936.
• Contrast this film with Make Mine Freedom, a cartoon from 1948

Odd conjunction of history: January 21, Louis XVI and Vladimir I. Lenin

The Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press inform us that France’s King Louis XVI died on January 21, 1793.  In 1924, Russian revolutionary Vladimir I. Lenin died on January 21.

France's King Louis XVI died on January 21, 1793. He is seen here in his most famous portrait, in happier times. Image via Wikipedia

Both died of strokes, but of different kinds of strokes.  Lenin’s was a cerebral stroke; Louis’s was the stroke of the blade of a guillotine.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Painting of Lenin in front of the Smolny Institute, circa 1925, by Isaak Brodsky

Ruminations on the date, and the men:  How much of current history can be understood by studying those two events, and those two men?  How much if we add in George Washington, and Napoleon, other men affected by revolution?

A few years ago I had a sophomore student spell out the importance of people in history.  Israel Pena observed that  Americans got rid of their king through revolution, and ended up with George Washington as leader, and then president.  Washington’s modeling of his life after the Roman patriot Cincinattus led Washington to resign as commander of the Continental Army when the warring was done, instead of declaring himself king, and then later to step down from the presidency after two terms, to promote peaceful retirement of presidents.  The French got rid of their king through revolution in 1789, but in the chaos that followed, got Napoleon who took over the government after battlefield victories against France’s enemies.  Then Napoleon declared himself emperor, and took off on a reign of conquest and war across Europe.

Mr. Pena’s commentary compared only those two nations.  What if we add in a third, Russia?  Russia got rid of its king (czar) through revolution in 1917.  In the chaos that followed it got a government led by Lenin, and upon Lenin’s early death, taken over by Joseph Stalin.

George Washington, by Gilbert Stuart - Wikipedia

Is the future written by the character of the men who run the government?  One might make a good case of that in the deaths paint most of the picture we really need to have, that of Louis XVI, at the age of 39, on the guillotine; of Vladimir I. Lenin, at the age of 53, of stroke, both still working to cling to the strings of power; and compare the death in 1799 of George Washington, at the age of 67, of complications from a strep throat, in retirement and in his bed at Mount Vernon, Virginia; and of Napoleon Bonaparte, 52, probably from stomach cancer, while he suffered in humiliating exile on the far distant South Atlantic isle of St. Helena, in 1821.

The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, by Jacques-Louis David, 1812 - Wikipedia

Revolution marked these men, three of whom led them, and the fourth of whom was put out of power by one.  Whose life would you have preferred to follow?  Which of these lives is most meritorious of modeling?

Boys’ Life on YouTube, February issue preview

Every time I pick up an issue of Boys’ Life I think how much better students could perform if they just looked that this magazine once a month; you don’t have to be a Scout to subscribe, but why not live the adventures, too?

Will 30-second montages sell more magazines?  What more could/should Boys’ Life do on the web?

Here’s an example of the sorts of skills I wish my students had, again from the Boys’ Life YouTube offerings.  In “Cache Me If You Can,” these are young Scouts, I’m guessing ages 11 to about 13 from a Troop 6 somewhere in Colorado, out navigating a path through the woods using GPS and hand-held ham radios.  I fear most of my 16-18-year-old students would be challenged to do the stuff these younger kids are doing, if they could do it at all.

Of course, while those skills would make them better students more able to understand and use maps and charts, very little of those skills are listed in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.  I’m given neither time nor resources to teach them.

More, resources: 

• A feature at the Boys’ Life site I really like is the “Wayback Machine,” which allows viewing of many issues of the magazine dating back to 1911 — actualy from March 1911 through December 2009.  Alas, the features uses Google Books, so viewing at the site is about all you can do — no copying of the great covers by Boy Scouts of America art director Norman Rockwell, no copying of articles with teachable skills for use as illustrations in lessons.   This would be a good research site for high school history projects — Scouts in time of war, Scouting and education, map use, youth in exploration, etc.

Stimulus spending: Texans remember how the CCC helped save the nation

New video history piece from the Texas Parks & Wildlife people:

63

Uploaded by TexasParksWildlife on Jan 17, 2012

The Civilian Conservation Corps provided jobs for over 3 million young men during the Great Depression and helped establish the foundation of our nation’s park system. 70 years after the creation of the CCC, Conservation Corps veterans reunite in one of the parks they helped build, sharing stories and rekindling old memories.

A pictorial map showing Texas State Parks with significant work performed by the CCC:

Map of Civilian Conservation Corps Legacy Parks in Texas - TPWD image - Click on map for original, larger version

More, resources:

• CCC in Texas Parks, on-line exhibit from TPWD
• “A New Deal for Texas Parks,” on-line exhibit from TPWD (great DBQ materials)
• CCC at White Rock Lake (Dallas)
• PBS’s American Experience, “The Civilian Conservation Corps”
• Why the Civilian Conservation Corps Should be Restablished (triplepundit.com)
• Would FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps Work Today? (socyberty.com)
• Photographs capture ways in which blacks claimed citizenship in Great Depression (thegrio.com)
• Guide to records of the CCC at the U.S. National Archives
• CCC article at U.S. History.com
• CCC Legacy site (special history section)
• Wikipedia’s excellent article with links to photos and other resources
• Great Depression gateway at Library of Congress’s “American Memory” collection

The old waiter and tablecloth trick, with a twist

As almost always, spending a few minutes at Richard Wiseman’s blog produces interesting stuff.

Here’s a twist on the old trick performed by “fab juggler Mat Ricardo” (Wiseman’s description).  Ricardo’s trick, to me, makes the commercial message much more palatable — do you agree?

Annals of Global Warming: NOAA calls 2011 “year of climate extremes”

2011 saw 14 severe weather events that caused more than $1 billion in damage each.  The pre-Halloween snow disaster may push the total up to 15 such events.  NOAA is calling these billion-dollar-plus events “climate disasters.”

On top of the year 2011′s rating in the top 10 of warmest years on record, the sheer number of expensive weather extremes powerfully suggest that global warming already costs Americans billions of dollars in damage, lost production and disease.

NOAA: 2011 a year of climate extremes in the United States

NOAA announces two additional severe weather events reached $1 billion damage threshold, raising 2011’s billion-dollar disaster count from 12 to 14 events

January 19, 2012

Selected Annual Climate Records for 2011 - Green dots show the wettest, yellow dots the driest, red dots the warmest and blue dots the coolest records. Click image for high resolution version from NOAA (NOAA image)

According to NOAA scientists, 2011 was a record-breaking year for climate extremes, as much of the United States faced historic levels of heat, precipitation, flooding and severe weather, while La Niña events at both ends of the year impacted weather patterns at home and around the world.

NOAA’s annual analysis of U.S. and global conditions, conducted by scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, reports that the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 53.8 degrees F, 1.0 degree F above the 20th century average, making it the 23rd warmest year on record. Precipitation across the nation averaged near normal, masking record-breaking extremes in both drought and precipitation.

On a global scale, La Niña events helped keep the average global temperature below recent trends. As a result, 2011 tied with 1997 for the 11th warmest year on record. It was the second coolest year of the 21st century to date, and tied with the second warmest year of the 20th century.

Key highlights of the report include:

U.S. weather and climate disasters

• NOAA has identified two additional events in 2011 that caused an economic impact of $1 billion or greater, bringing the total number of major billion-dollar weather and climate disasters to 14 (not including the pre-Halloween snowstorm in the Northeast, which is still being analyzed).

From extreme drought, heat waves and floods to unprecedented tornado outbreaks, hurricanes, wildfires and winter storms, a record 14 weather and climate disasters in 2011 each caused $1 billion or more in damages — and most regrettably, loss of human lives and property. Click image for high resolution version. (NOAA image)

• Tropical Storm Lee, which made landfall on the Gulf Coast on September 2, caused wind and flood damage across the Southeast, but considerably more damage to housing, business and infrastructure from record flooding across the Northeast states, especially Pennsylvania and New York. The storm occurred in an area that had experienced high rainfall from Hurricane Irene barely a week earlier.
  

  Tropical Storm Lee, on September 3, 2011 - Image via Wikipedia

• A Rockies and Midwest severe weather outbreak, which occurred July 10-14, included tornadoes, hail and high winds. Much of the damage was from wind, hail, and flooding impacts to homes, business, and agriculture.
• Together, these two events resulted in the loss of 23 lives (21 from Tropical Storm Lee, 2 from the Rockies/Midwest outbreak).

Nationally

• Warmer-than-normal temperatures were anchored across the South, Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. Delaware had its warmest year on record, while Texas had its second warmest year on record. The U.S. has observed a long-term temperature increase of about 0.12 degrees F per decade since 1895.
• Summer (June-August) 2011 was the second warmest on record for the Lower 48, with an average temperature of 74.5 degrees F, just 0.1 degree F below the record-warm summer of 1936. The epicenter of the heat was the Southern Plains, where Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas all had their warmest summer on record. The 3-month average temperatures for both Oklahoma (86.9 degrees F) and Texas (86.7 degrees F) surpassed the previous record for warmest summer in any state.
• With the exception of Vermont, each state in the contiguous U.S. had at least one location that exceeded 100 degrees F. Summertime temperatures have increased across the U.S. at an average rate of 0.11 degrees F per decade. Much of this trend is due to increases in minimum temperatures (“overnight lows”), with minimum temperature extremes becoming increasingly commonplace in recent decades.
• Despite a “near normal” national precipitation average, regional precipitation outcomes varied wildly. Texas, ravaged by exceptional drought for most of 2011, had its driest year on record. In contrast, seven states in the Ohio Valley and Northeast — Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — had their wettest year on record.
• The past nine years have been particularly wet across the Northeast region – since 2003, the annual precipitation for the region is 48.96 inches, 7.88 inches above the 20th century average. Precipitation averaged across the U.S. is increasing at a rate of about 0.18 inches per decade.
• Precipitation extremes and impacts were most prevalent during spring (March – May) 2011. Across the northern U.S., ten states were record wet, and an additional 11 states had spring precipitation totals ranking among their top ten wettest. These precipitation extremes, combined with meltwater from a near-record snow pack, contributed to historic flooding along several major rivers across the central United States.
• Meanwhile, drought rapidly intensified in the southern Plains, where Texas had only 2.66 inches of precipitation, its driest spring on record. This led to record breaking drought and wildfires, which devastated the southern Plains. Following 2010, during which drought across the country was nearly erased, the 12 percent of the continental U.S. in the most severe category of drought (D4) during July 2011 was the highest in the U.S. Drought Monitor era (1999-2011).
• The spring brought a record breaking tornado season to the United States. Over 1,150 tornadoes were confirmed during the March-May period. The 551 tornado-related fatalities during the year were the most in the 62-year period of record. The deadliest tornado outbreak on record (April 25-28th) and the deadliest single tornado (Joplin, Missouri) contributed to the high fatality count.

Globally

• This year tied 1997 as the 11th warmest year since records began in 1880. The annual global combined land and ocean surface temperature was 0.92 degrees F above the 20th century average of 57.0 degrees F. This marks the 35th consecutive year, since 1976, that the yearly global temperature was above average. The warmest years on record were 2010 and 2005, which were 1.15 degrees F above average.
• Separately, the 2011 global average land surface temperature was 1.49 degrees F above the 20th century average of 47.3 degrees F and ranked as the eighth warmest on record. The 2011 global average ocean temperature was 0.72 degrees F above the 20th century average of 60.9 degrees F and ranked as the 11th warmest on record.
• Including 2011, all eleven years of the 21st century so far (2001-2011) rank among the 13 warmest in the 132-year period of record. Only one year during the 20th century, 1998, was warmer than 2011.
• La Niña, which is defined by cooler-than-normal waters in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean that affects weather patterns around the globe, was present during much of 2011. A relatively strong phase of La Niña opened the year, dissipated in the spring before re-emerging in October and lasted through the end of the year. When compared to previous La Niña years, the 2011 global surface temperature was the warmest observed.
• The 2011 globally-averaged precipitation over land was the second wettest year on record, behind 2010. Precipitation varied greatly across the globe. La Niña contributed to severe drought in the Horn of Africa and to Australia’s third wettest year in its 112-year period of record.
• Arctic sea ice extent was below average for all of 2011, and has been since June 2000, a span of 127 consecutive months. Both the maximum ice extent (5.65 million square miles on March 7th) and the minimum extent (1.67 million square miles on September 9th) were the second smallest of the satellite era.
• For the second year running, NCDC asked a panel of climate scientists to determine and rank the year’s ten most significant climate events, for both the United States and for the planet, to include record drought in East Africa and record flooding in Thailand and Australia. The results are at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-monitoring.

Scientists, researchers and leaders in government and industry use NOAA’s monthly and annual reports to help track trends and other changes in the world’s climate. This climate service has a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what and when to plant, to guiding resource managers’ critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and our other social media channels.

Denialist bedbugs complain that there is no definition of “climate disaster” offered from the agency.  (Denialists are dictionary-challenged?)

More, Resources:

• National Climatic Data Center site for Billion Dollar Weather Disasters
• Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware
• “What is a disaster?” from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies;  also see types of disasters
• Billion-Dollar Disasters ‘Harbinger’ of Future Extreme Weather: NOAA (livescience.com)
• Record global warm streak extended through June. (climatecentral.org)
• 2011 was UK’s second warmest year on record – The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)

Annals of Global Warming: 2011 comes in as 9th warmest year ever recorded

If global warming is not reality, if the anti-warmists are to be found correct, we’re going to need some great cooling to start happening, very, very quickly!

From NASA today:

NASA Finds 2011 Ninth Warmest Year on Record

RELEASE : 12-020, January 19, 2012

WASHINGTON — The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

“We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting,” said GISS director James E. Hansen. “So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Nina influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.”

The difference between 2011 and the warmest year in the GISS record (2010) is 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). This underscores the emphasis scientists put on the long-term trend of global temperature rise. Because of the large natural variability of climate, scientists do not expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year. However, they do expect a continuing temperature rise over decades.

The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998.

Higher temperatures today are largely sustained by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. These gases absorb infrared radiation emitted by Earth and release that energy into the atmosphere rather than allowing it to escape to space. As their atmospheric concentration has increased, the amount of energy “trapped” by these gases has led to higher temperatures.

The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, when the GISS global temperature record begins. By 1960, the average concentration had risen to about 315 parts per million. Today it exceeds 390 parts per million and continues to rise at an accelerating pace.

The temperature analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature and Antarctic research station measurements. A publicly available computer program is used to calculate the difference between surface temperature in a given month and the average temperature for the same place during 1951 to 1980. This three-decade period functions as a baseline for the analysis.

The resulting temperature record is very close to analyses by the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Hansen said he expects record-breaking global average temperature in the next two to three years because solar activity is on the upswing and the next El Nino will increase tropical Pacific temperatures. The warmest years on record were 2005 and 2010, in a virtual tie.

“It’s always dangerous to make predictions about El Nino, but it’s safe to say we’ll see one in the next three years,” Hansen said. “It won’t take a very strong El Nino to push temperatures above 2010.”

For more information on the GISS temperature analysis, visit:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

- end -

---

text-only version of this release

Tip of the old scrub brush to Rashid’s Blog.

Related articles

• 2011 was UK’s second warmest year on record – The Guardian (guardian.co.uk)

January 19 birthday olla podrida

Pick your cause for celebration — interesting list of birthday people for January 19:

• James Watt, improver or inventor of the steam engine, depending on your text, 1736
  

  James Watt, back then - Image via Wikipedia

• Robert E. Lee, in 1807
• Edgar Allan Poe, born 1809 (just a few days before Lincoln and Darwin, both born that year on February 12)
• Robert McNeil, the journalist, 1931
• Janis Joplin, 1943
  

  Janis Joplin, member of the "Dead at 27 Club" - Image via Wikipedia

   

• Dolly Parton, 1946 (same year as Linda Rondstadt, if I recall correctly)
  

  Dolly Parton, a while ago - Image via Wikipedia

Seems odd to me to think of Dolly Parton younger than Janis Joplin, or the same age as Linda Ronstadt.  But Parton was a star by the age of 14.

Irritates me still that Baltimore hasn’t figured out a good way to fund the Edgar Allan Poe House, which needs about $80,000 to avoid bankruptcy (again, if I recall correctly), in a city with an NFL team named after his most famous poem.  Could they just pass a hat at a couple of games, asking each fan to throw in $1.00?  Or pass the hat in the Ravens locker room?

Dolly Parton's friends, Linda Rondstadt and Emmy Lou Harris, in a celebratory mood - Image by armadilo60 via Flickr

Quote of the moment: Gold standard a “barbarous relic” – Keynes

Portrait of John Maynard Keynes as a younger man (who is the artist? where does it hang?)

• In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
  • John Maynard Keynes, Monetary Reform (1924), p. 172

  Did Keynes foresee the rise of Ron Paul, even in 1924?

  

More, resources:

• Economist Brad DeLong explains why the U.S. cannot go back on the gold standard
• Nouriel Roubini:  “Supporters of a Gold Standard are Lunatics and Hacks”

Sherffius cartoons from the mount

Mount Rushmore, that is:

John Sherffius, Boulder Camera, November 1, 2011

Is John Sherffius channeling Mount Rushmore?  What do you think?

To understand political cartoons, one needs to understand the iconography used in them.  Certainly Mount Rushmore and the four presidents it portrays is one of the more powerful icons in the United States, a Great Depression-era monumental sculpting project, the genius of Gutzon Borglum writ very, very large, and now a part of the National Park System, as a National Memorial in South Dakota, one of our smallest states in population, and one of the last frontier states in America.

I don’t have a favorite — there are too many good versions, in cartoons, in parody, as patriotic symbol, as a backdrop for Hitchcock movies,  and as a representation of the heritage of Chicago blues, among others.  What is your favorite use of the Mt. Rushmore icon, or your favorite photo of the carvings?  Give us a link in comments, please.

January 17, and auspicious births

The First American, Ben Franklin, was born on this day in 1706.  Exactly a century later, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, bore James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House (fitting that Thomas Jefferson’s grandson would be named after James Madison, no?).  And in 1990, James Darrell was born in Dallas, Texas.

Happy birthday, James!

 

Say what? India only now figures out DDT kills birds?

Here’s a troubling thought:  What if India’s use of DDT now is just as destructive as the use of DDT in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s?

Why even mention it?  We’ve been reminded here that in the 21st century India is the world’s leading producer of DDT, and that the nation uses more DDT than the rest of the world combined.

Mon Town Baptist Church in the mist, Nagaland, India. The people of the state of Nagaland are mostly Christian, and local Baptist groups were among the most politically active groups who worked to put an end to fighting in the area in the early 1960s - Wikipedia image

From my perch in Dallas, Texas, it’s difficult to get a perspective on just how much DDT is used in the nation, and how much of the use is abusive, out of doors, or leading to environmental contamination.

One of the news feeds picked up on this opinion piece from Maneka Gandhi, blogging at the Nagaland Post.  Nagaland is India’s most northeastern province.

Among other troubling issues:  Ms. Gandhi talks about “with the disappearance of the vulture.”  Ecologists should sit up and take note of that; what cleans up the roadside carrion in Nagaland?

Killing birds due to human activity

[Maneka Gandhi]

16 Jan. 2012 11:51 PM IST

Last week I wrote about the strange and mysterious deaths of birds and fish that have taken place. But how many birds are killed every year due to human activity? I am not going to take into account the billion chickens that are killed at the rate of 1000 every minute, the turkeys, emus, ducks, quail that are slaughtered in the millions. I am talking about the birds you do not eat but kill anyway with deliberate malice or carelessness. Why are you ignorant of these? Because bird bodies are rarely found on the roads.

Night roaming scavengers finish them off very quickly. Here’s one estimate of numbers. A 2005 paper by Wallace Erickson, Gregory Johnson, and David Young (“A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions”) estimates that 500 million-1 billion birds are killed each year in the U.S. alone from human-related causes.

This includes: Collisions with buildings – 550 million (58.2%) Collisions with power lines – 130 million (13.7%) Cats – 100 million (10.6%) Cars, trucks, etc. –80 million (8.5%) Pesticides – 67 million (7.1%) Communication towers – 4.5 million (0.5%) Wind turbines – 28.5 thousand (less than 0.01%) Airplanes –25 thousand (less than 0.01%) Other sources (oil spills, fishing by-catch, etc) – did not estimate I would put the same number in India.

Perhaps decrease the collision with buildings and increase the pesticide hit ones. While large mortality events make the news, the constant attrition, the constant killing has put one in six bird species worldwide in danger of extinction because of the factors listed above plus habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change. I was in Kolkata recently to start a campaign to save sparrows. It consisted of caps, drawings, speeches and the distribution of bird feeders.

I hope it will work but this much I learnt – very few of the children in the school had even seen a sparrow. How many kinds of birds have you seen? Most cities now just have crows and kites and a few parakeets. Looking at this list, can you see a number of ways that people – from municipalities to individuals can work to prevent at least some of these deaths.

Things like making windows and other structures more visible to birds, keeping cats indoors, and minimizing use of pesticides are all crucial to the survival of many species. The deaths are huge and quick but they are preventable if we just tweak our lifestyles. If I told you that you stood at the edge of a cliff and a little step forward would kill you but if you just sidestepped, you could reach safety, would you not?  Often the disappearance of a bird species alters entire human lifestyles, forcing them to change.

With the disappearance of the vulture most villages have had to think of what to do with cow/bullock dead bodies.

The carcass which would have been cleaned up in an hour by the vultures now becomes a threat to human life. No solutions have been found as yet. The Parsis will have to find another way to honour their dead as the towers of silence have no vultures so an entire religion has changed. China lost its sparrows (killed all of them) and then lost its grain because the insects proliferated. It finally had to import sparrows and start rebreeding them.

Today it is losing them again – as we are. Animal mortality is actually a far larger problem than these numbers might suggest. Just one example: in the U.S. there are some 70 million house cats. Each year they kill off hundreds of millions of native birds and more than a billion small mammals such as rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels. The numbers are staggering. But they tend to go unnoticed, except by ecological researchers.

Most people consider what these cats (which are non-native, invasive pets) are doing to be “natural.” While animals are killed by weather fluctuations, lightning generated fires, the impacts of volcanism, earthquakes or other natural threats, all these hazards pale in comparison to what humans do to them. We have become by far the most significant factor in the deaths of individual animals, or entire species over the past several centuries.

There are many lethal artifacts of civilization. These range from agricultural toxins, to industrial pollution, to lawn care chemicals, to windows and glass buildings (which attract birds to collide with reflections), to predatory pets, to wires to loss of crucial habitats. So many birds have been killed by DDT alone – and it is still being used.

When the Americans finally noticed that their national bird, the Bald Eagle, was disappearing due to DDT, they banned it. We have lost all our birds of prey because DDT does a lot more than just kill insects. It impacts birds of prey to such a degree that it causes their eggs to weaken so that they can’t hatch.

Our consumption of fish is killing all the shore birds. With sonar fish finders and GPS technology, fish harvesters are decimating swordfish, tuna, and a host of other “food species” as our world population swells to 7 billion.

Make a New Year resolution that goes beyond not smoking, drinking and being nice to your mother/daughter in law. Start by making your house less toxic and by eating organic wheat/dal/rice. Plant as many fruit trees as you can so that birds have somewhere to nest. Choose a village and see if you can help them clean up their water body.

More, resources: 

• The research article Ms. Gandhi refers to can be gotten to here:  “A summary and comparison of bird mortality from anthropogenic causes with an emphasis on collisions,” Erickson, Wallace P.; Johnson, Gregory D.; Young, David P. Jr., 2005; in: Ralph, C. John; Rich, Terrell D., editors 2005. Bird Conservation Implementation and Integration in the Americas: Proceedings of the Third International Partners in Flight Conference. 2002 March 20-24; Asilomar, California, Volume 2 Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-191. Albany, CA: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station: p. 1029-1042e: