Feynman: Last Journey of a Genius (NOVA, 1998)

Richard Feynman, and a rubber O ring. See materials on Feynman’s role on the commission investigating the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. Image from Callum Hackett via Nic Hammond

Geography and history teachers, you should watch this on the day after Feynman Day.  Can you make use of this in your classes — say, after the state tests?

How about you physics and science teachers?

Tuvan People’s Republic, marked in green. Wikipedia image

In 1998 NOVA produced and broadcast a film that rather defies categorization.  Biography? Drama? Humor? Frustrated travelogue?

“Last Journey of a Genius” tells a lot of biography of Dick Feynman, but it focuses on his unusual drive to learn about, and travel to an obscure Central Asian country/province/area/culture called Tannu Tuva.  Feynman’s close friend Ralph Leighton plays a big role in this film, too.  This film reveals more about the character of Richard Feynman, his overwhelming curiosity and humanity, than you can get any other place, including his memoirs (which every civil human should read).

NOVA captivates me almost every week.  Good fortune found me in front of a television somewhere when this was first broadcast.  For several reasons, I’ve been unable to get a VHS, or a DVD version of the story despite many attempts over the years.

But fortune and good history smile again.  Open Culture collected the film, and it’s available for free in their documentary section.

Drumming, story telling, geography, Cold War politics, ballet, more drumming, some nuclear physics, astronomy, a lot of good humor, and a plea for orange juice.  It still makes me smile.

From Open Culture:

In 1989, PBS’ NOVA aired The Last Journey of a Genius, a television film that documents the final days of the great physicist Richard Feynman and his obsession with traveling to Tannu Tuva, a state outside of outer Mongolia, which then remained under Soviet control. For the better part of a decade, Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton schemed to make their way to Tannu Tuva, but Cold War politics always frustrated their efforts. The video runs roughly 50 minutes and features an ailing Feynman talking about his wanderlust and their maneuverings. He died two weeks later, having never made the trip, though Ralph Leighton and Feyman’s daughter Michelle later landed in their Shangri-La. Her journey was recorded by the Russian service of the BBC.

The film now appears in the Documentary section of our collection of Free Movies Online.

via Metafilter

Related Content:

Richard Feynman’s Physics Lectures Online

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Hang on to this link for Feynman Day 2014 (May 11).  What’s your favorite Feynman story?

This kind of history and science is exactly the sort of stuff CSCOPE critics in Texas, and critics of the Common Core standards, worry that children will see.  Very odd, because stuff this good is not even mentioned in CSCOPE, nor in CCSS.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Kenny Darrell, who found this film and let me know about it.

More:

• Feynman Day! Richard Feynman, mensch, drummer, Nobel winner, born May 11, 1918 (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• The Eccentric Life Of Noble Prize-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman (telegraph.co.uk)
• Celebrate Richard Feynman’s birthday with this beautiful video (trollishdelver.com)
• Richard Feynman Biographical Comic Out Today (tested.com)
• Theory and Practice (futilitycloset.com)
• Feynman: his birthday, his diagrams and his lectures | Jon Butterworth | Life & Physics (guardian.co.uk)
• The Common Character Trait of Geniuses: A Passion for Abstraction (bigthink.com)
• Feynman was right about nanotechnology, and years ahead — but nobody knew it until later; the controversy about whether Feynman invented nanotechnology and computer memory solutions

L Banks: Artist’s version of the world’s oldest animation

L. Banks illustrated a publication about an ancient bowl found at the Burnt City, in what is now Iran.

It’s a nice rendering of . . . gee, what is that?

If you remember correctly, it’s a goat.  It’s a goat.

More specifically, it’s the goat depicted on “the world’s oldest animation,” a bowl more than 5,000 years old that some researchers think may have been the earliest attempt to depict animals in motion.

I wrote about the bowl back in 2008.  I learned of it from Kris Hirst at About.com, and I thought it was interesting.  “Animation” in the headline, at spring break, and tens of thousands of kids took a look at the little .gif animation from photos of the bowl.  The post took about ten minutes to compose, and it remains the single most popular post ever at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub (even more popular than the posts about the imaginary Texas chainsaw massacre).

So I stumbled on Banks’s drawing.  Illustration is often high art — the image above is identified as an educational image.  Children’s book?  Don’t know.

Banks has some other very nice illustrations on display, on completely different subjects.  You should go see.

What was that bowl maker trying to show with the goat and tree on that bowl?  Did s/he dream that people would be making images inspired by the bowl, 52 centuries later?

An animated .gif made from photographic images of a bowl found at the Burnt City, and dated at 5,200 years.

Grosbeak!

Our goldfinches left several weeks ago.  The cedar waxwings came through in at least three big waves, starting in February (and the last just over a week ago).  House finches moulted, and the breeding males have bright red heads. Migrating robins left us by the end of January, but a lot more residents stayed with us.

We have at least one, and maybe three cardinal families.  A black-capped chickadee family stuck around.  Haven’t seen a titmouse in a month, but I think they’re still in the neighborhood.  The black-chinned hummingbird family is back, and maybe a few other hummers.  The resident blue jays and white-winged doves duke it out every day.  Carolina wren stayed, and may have already fledged; but there are too many wrens for one family — is that a Bewick’s wren?

What’s THAT?

White-winged dove, left, can’t scare away the rose-breasted grosbeak from the songbird feeder. Photo by Ed Darrell

Look closer. Photo by Ed Darrell

It’s a rose-breasted grosbeak, Pheucticus ludovicianus.  It seems late for migrating birds, but only because so many migratory species migrate earlier these days.

Haunts of the rose-breasted grosbeak, from Cornell University’s ornithological laboratory.

Would love to have a grosbeak family, but the Cornell ornithologists say this is fly-through territory.  Maybe that explains why it won’t scare by the white-winged dove, Zenaida asiatica.  Dallas is the western edge of the grosbeaks’ migratory path, but the eastern edge of the dove’s territory.  They probably don’t see much of each other.

We don’t even advertise clean restrooms.

More:

• Gorgeous Grosbeaks (georgiabackyardnature.com)
• The long flight home (toledoblade.com)
• Bird Songs for Bird Lovers (onegodnews.wordpress.com)
• Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks (naturenotesnow.wordpress.com)
• Grosbeaks and chimney swifts coming and going (heraldtimesonline.com)
• Beedie Bird Photo: Bewick’s Wren (mentalhealthed.com)
• More Signs of Spring…More Birds! (sewingforlife.wordpress.com)
• 294 Species and One Shattered Record on “Almost Perfect” Big Day (birds.cornell.edu)
• spring exploding on Snake Mountain (snakemountainmuse.wordpress.com)

Meanwhile, back at the rice paddy, global warming holds families hostage . . .

See this United Nations Development Program ten-minute video that, to the wise and concerned, lays out the stakes of delaying action against human-caused climate change.

Without enough funding, NGOs work to help farmers getting hammered in the Southern Philippines, and other places.

In the Southern Philippines, farmers’ lives and the weather are intimately interwoven, but something is changing, now that the rains in Agusan del Norte are too heavy, the sun shines too fiercely. Now there’s hope for poor farmers with the community-based approach monitoring and Weather Index-Based Insurance packages, to warn people when heavy weather is on the way.

Though, I do weary of the astonishing abuse of acronyms in this work-of-the-angels. “WIBI?”

Incidentally, though the phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in this material, this is exactly the sort of work carried on by the UN’s Agenda 21 project.  Doesn’t look subversive to me.

Tip of the old scrub brush to the UNDP and ILO Tweet:

How are farmers' in #Philippines adapting to #climatechange? Learn more w/ video from @ilonews : on.undp.org/kx4To #GreenWednesday—
UN Development (@UNDP) May 01, 2013

More:

• Agusan del Norte, and on the map
• Philippines among nations most vulnerable to climate change damage, World Bank report said; ManilaTimes.net
• Climate change discussion, Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration
• “Climate change could devastate Philippines: NASA scientist,” AFP 2008
• “Rich getting richer, poor getting poorer,” Honeybees and Helium
• Long Rainy Season to Help Increase Rice Yields (cambodiadaily.com)
• Basmati Rice Pakistan (ricepakistan21.wordpress.com)
• Hay-granary technology still popular in Krishna (thehindu.com)
• Share experience to overcome challenges in agriculture (thehindu.com)

Map of the Philippines with Agusan del Norte highlighted. Wikipedia image

Resources for World Malaria Day 2013

Today is World #Malaria Day. Invest in the future. Defeat malaria. goo.gl/k9hyG—
  (@WHO) April 25, 2013

#Malaria, a story of elimination bit.ly/ZK39oc Great new slide deck from @ISGLOBALorg for #WorldMalariaDay—
Roll Back Malaria (@RollBackMalaria) April 25, 2013

Download or listen to this short #podcast to learn more about malaria. #WorldMalariaDay go.usa.gov/TNmG—
  (@CDC_eHealth) April 25, 2013

"As a result of our investment, as many 200,000 children don't die from #Malaria" #WorldMalariaDay @RajShah testifies #2014Budget #GlobalDev—
  (@USAID) April 25, 2013

Not a word about condemning Rachel Carson.  No plea to use DDT to try to poison Africa or Asia to health.  That’s a great start.

More:

• World Malaria Day 2013
• Rollback Malaria, World Malaria Day 2013
• WHO – World Malaria Day 2013
• Nothing But Nets campaign
• Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, World Malaria Day 2013
• US Africa Command partners with USAID to host live web chat on World Malaria Day (dvidshub.net)
• The Power of One: An Anti-Malaria Campaign With Some Powerful Partners (fastcoexist.com)
• Mother: Malaria deaths come from ‘lack of education’ (itv.com)
• African Students Invent Anti-Malaria Soap (mybrowneyedview.com)
• World Malaria Day, 2013 – Join Bill Clinton in fighting a nasty disease? (molinahistory.wordpress.com)
• April 25 is World Malaria Day – right, Bill? (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Rachel Carson/DDT hoaxing from the Ayn Rand Institute (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
• Winnie Ssanyu Sseruma, blogging at The Independent

Mother and son under a protective bednet, the most efficient method to prevent malaria. Columbia University MVSim image

More Aurora borealis, and Iceland

More Iceland than Aurora.  Not necessarily bad.  Great timelapse photos.

You have my permission to turn down the music volume.

Filmmaker Anna Possberg wrote:

Iceland has become a popular destination since the singer Björk made her island famous by her songs. Yet few people know Iceland during wintertime. And I am sure that they miss a beautiful part of the island: the snow covered rocks, the magic arctic light and especially the phantastic aurora borealis dancing in the sky. The days spent at the Jokülsarlon glacial lake were one of the most beautiful and peaceful Christmas time I remember.

Jökulsárlón, a glacial lake in Iceland. To the right, the mouth of the glacier Vatnajökull. Wikipedia photo

More:

• Skies over Iceland light up (cnn.com)
• Aurora Borealis dances across northern latitude skies (itv.com)
• Dazzling Northern Lights over Iceland (science.time.com)
• Video: Marriage proposal by aurora light (earthsky.org)
• Will you see the Northern Lights from Iceland’s new ION hotel? (metro.co.uk)

Fireworks for James Madison’s birthday! Aurora borealis in Alaska, March 16, 2013

Fireworks for James Madison’s birthday?

Loren Holmes photograph straight up of Aurora borealis over Eureka, Alaska, on March 13, 2013. AlaskaDispatch.com

I love fireworks.  Kathryn and I have been known to drive a couple hundred miles to see a good show.  Fireworks in honor of the guy who gave us the Constitution and the First Amendment (and much more), seems a great idea to me.

But no one did it . . .

Sometimes the Sun, Moon, stars and planets conspire.

Here’s one of the best, most inspiring five minutes you’ll spend this week. Look what the Sun sent us, filmed in time-lapse glory above Eureka, Alaska, on March 16, 2013, the anniversary of James Madison’s birthday; from AlaskaDispatch.com:

A timelapse of the Aurora Borealis, Northern Lights, over Eureka, Alaska on March 16, 2013. Taken with a Canon 5D Mark III and 24mm f/1.4 and 70-200 f/2.8 lenses. Compiled from 3800 images, with exposures between 2 seconds and 30 seconds.

Loren Holmes, the photographer, provides a more poetic description of the lights he filmed, and more scientific, too, at AlaskaDispatch.com.

AlaskaDispatch.com provided a slide show of Holmes’s better photos, too.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. M. P. Bumsted.

More:

• Aurora Borealis in Alaska (smokinchoices.wordpress.com)
• the aurora has been seen all over the state (auroranotify.com)
• Aurora borealis: Northern lights dance in the night skies (photos.mercurynews.com)
• Video Of The Day: Aurora Borealis Iceland (gadling.com)
• Can you see an aurora borealis when there’s a full moon? (earthsky.org)

Annals of global warming: No, polar bears are not “fine” — suffer from loss of sea ice

Press release from The Journal of Animal Ecology (links added here):

For polar bears, it’s survival of the fattest

One of the most southerly populations of polar bears in the world – and the best studied – is struggling to cope with climate-induced changes to sea ice, new research reveals. Based on over 10 years’ data the study, published in the British Ecological Society‘s Journal of Animal Ecology, sheds new light on how sea ice conditions drive polar bears’ annual migration on and off the ice.

Led by Dr. Seth Cherry of the University of Alberta, the team studied polar bears in western Hudson Bay, where sea ice melts completely each summer and typically re-freezes from late November to early December. “This poses an interesting challenge for a species that has evolved as a highly efficient predator of ice-associated seals,” he explains. “Because although polar bears are excellent swimmers compared with other bear species, they use the sea ice to travel, hunt, mate and rest.”

Caption from EurekAlert: An adult female polar bear wearing a GPS-satellite linked collar with her two 10-month-old cubs waits for the sea ice to re-form onshore in western Hudson Bay, Manitoba, Canada. Photo Copyright Andrew Derocher, Univeristy of Alberta.

Polar bears have adapted to the annual loss of sea ice by migrating onto land each summer. While there, they cannot hunt seals and must rely on fat reserves to see them through until the ice returns.

Dr. Cherry and colleagues wanted to discover how earlier thawing and later freezing of sea ice affects the bears’ migration. “At first glance, sea ice may look like a barren, uniform environment, but in reality, it’s remarkably complex and polar bears manage to cope, and even thrive, in a habitat that moves beneath their feet and even disappears for part of the year. This is an extraordinary biological feat and biologist still don’t fully understand it,” he says.

From 1991-97 and 2004-09, they monitored movements of 109 female polar bears fitted with satellite tracking collars. They tagged only females because males’ necks are wider than their heads, so they cannot wear a collar. During the same period, the team also monitored the position and concentration of sea ice using satellite images.

“Defining precisely what aspects of sea ice break-up and freeze-up affect polar bear migration, and when these conditions occur, is a vital part of monitoring how potential climate-induced changes to sea ice freeze-thaw cycles may affect the bears,” he says.

The results reveal the timing of polar bears’ migration can be predicted by how fast the sea ice melts and freezes, and by when specific sea ice concentrations occur within a given area of Hudson Bay.

According to Dr. Cherry: “The data suggest that in recent years, polar bears are arriving on shore earlier in the summer and leaving later in the autumn. These are precisely the kind of changes one would expect to see as a result of a warming climate and may help explain some other studies that are showing declines in body condition and cub production.”

Recent estimates put the western Hudson Bay polar bear population at around 900 individuals. The population has declined since the 1990s, as has the bears’ body condition and the number of cubs surviving to adulthood.

Caption from EurekAlert: This is a subadult polar bear on a lake on the shores of Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada in November waiting for the sea ice to re-form. Copyright Andrew Derocher, Univeristy of Alberta.

Because polar bears’ main food source is seals, and these are hunted almost exclusively on sea ice, the longer bears spend on land, the longer they must go without energy-rich seals. “Climate-induced changes that cause sea ice to melt earlier, form later, or both, likely affect the overall health of polar bears in the area. Ultimately, for polar bears, it’s survival of the fattest,” says Dr. Cherry.

He hopes the results will enable other scientists and wildlife managers to predict how potential climate-induced changes to sea ice freeze-thaw cycles will affect the ecology, particularly the migration patterns, of this iconic species.

###

Seth Cherry et al (2013). ‘Migration phenology and seasonal fidelity of an Arctic marine predator in relation to sea ice dynamics’, doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.12050, is published in the Journal of Animal Ecology on Wednesday 20 March 2013.

More:

• Journal of Animal Ecology site
• An abstract of the study (which study  is, alas, behind a paywall)
• Seth Cherry’s academic page
• Dr. Andrew Derocher’s academic page
• Cherry’s work highlighted in Polar Bears: Proceedings of the 15th Working Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, 29 June-3 July, Copenhagen, Denmark
• For polar bears, it’s survival of the fattest (esciencenews.com)
• For polar bears, it’s survival of the fattest (sciencedaily.com)
• More evidence that polar bears and brown bears have exchanged genes in the past (retrieverman.net)
• Polar bears ‘hit by warm climate’ (independent.ie)
• For polar bears, it’s survival of the fattest (eurekalert.org)
• Fox And Friends: Polar Bears Prove Climate Change Is ‘Not Really Real’ (thinkprogress.org)
• Bid to ban polar bear trade fails (bigpondnews.com)
• Starving polar bears. (loe.org) (This site has a good, but very sad, interview with Dr. Derocher; it also links to an audio of the Living On Earth radio program from which the interview is excerpted.)
• Obama Administration Finalizes Polar Bear Extinction Plan (earthfirstnews.wordpress.com)
• Bid to halt polar bear trade fails (guardian.co.uk)
• Anthony Watts leads denialist charge; a second disinformation site; a source of the incorrect propaganda, and another site pushing it.

New York in time-lapse — a teaser

Another time-lapse film by Samuel Orr, this one on a city, “New York Day.”

I said it is a teaser.  Orr wants to do a longer film, but needs some financial backing to get it done.

Details here:

Please go to the Kickstarter project page and help support a longer version of this short film

kickstarter.com/projects/motionkicker/new-york-year

I shot this film over 4 trips to NYC 2011-2012. The time-lapse sequences you see here were made (mostly) from hundreds of thousands of still images. A Canon 7D and T3i were the main cameras, with backup from a couple of older Nikon Coolpix 5000 point and shooters. A few clips are sped-up video.

Many thanks to the generosity of the musician/composer who allowed his great celtic track “Sawjig” to be used;
Ben Rusch aka Jasmine Brunch
benrusch.com
jasminebrunch.com

For more info on this and other projects;
motionkicker.com
twitter.com/motionkicker

i

• New York Year, Time-Lapse Film Featuring a Year in New York City (laughingsquid.com)
• Samuel Orr Presents a Dazzling Time-lapse Video of New York (Video) (complex.com)
• Watch Nemo Storm Through New York City In This Stunning Time-Lapse Video (embargozone.com)

Other side of the mountain: Timpanogos

East side of Timpanogos, by the Heber Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau:

Mt. Timpanogos, east side. Heber Valley CVB photo. Click image for larger view.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Susan Reeve Lewis.

Anybody got photos of Texas’s Big Lake with, you know, water in it?

Contrary to popular rural and redneck legend, Caddo Lake is not Texas’s only natural* lake.  There’s also Big Lake, near the town of Big Lake.

Problem being, of course, that Big Lake’s water sources these days generally don’t flow.  So Big Lake is often dry.

Which produces a further problem for site like Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:  If Big Lake is really a lake, why are there no photos of the lake with water in it?

A comment at AustinBassFishing.com got me thinking about this again, no photos of Big Lake as a Lake.  In the previous post here, we featured a photo of Big Lake Playa, sans water.  I searched the internet at the time and found no photos showing water in the lake.  My authority on Big Lake, Brad Wachsmann, swore that he had recently seen water in the thing (“recent” being “in the last decade or so”).

So, sorta good news:  A few photos of Big Lake, with water, plopped onto the internet since our last search.  Here are a couple from Panaramio:

Water in Big Lake, near the city of Big Lake, Texas, laps at the State Highway 137 passing nearby. This photo comes from 2004, by doning.

Photo of water in Big Lake from June 2005. Photo by evansjohnc.  This photo appears to be about midway along the intersection of the lake with State Highway 137.

Big Lake in its dry phase, from looking north from the southern end of State Highway 137′s transection of the lake. Photo by cwoods.

Non-historic marker for Big Lake, also along State Highway 137, looking west. Photo by cwoods. Photo taken during Big Lake’s dry humor phase.

Now:  Can we track down the rumors of other natural lakes in Texas?  Sabine Lake?  Green Lake?  Natural Dam Lake?

And, Dear Reader, can you find good photos of Big Lake with, you know, water in it?

_____________

* Is Caddo Lake a natural lake?  Originally, the lake seems to have been formed by an enormous blowdown of trees, probably during a hurricane, well over 400 years ago.  In that sense, it was a natural lake when European explorers first found it, and during all of Texas’s “six flags” historic periods.  Or, what is known as the Great Raft, a log jam, dammed up the Red River near the confluence of the Big Cypress Bayou, in about 1799.  By 1800, Caddo Lake was wet all year-round, and deep enough for shallow boat navigation.  In 1835, Capt. Henry Shreve blew up enough of the logjam that steamboat traffic could get past (the guy after whom Shreveport, Louisiana, is named).  After the Civil War, locals tried to expand boat traffic by completely removing the logjam.  Instead of making traffic easier, this removal led shrinking water levels in the lake, and it destroyed navigation farther up the Red River.  Several efforts to restore higher water levels achieved some success by about 1915.  When oil was discovered under the swamp, pressures came from oil companies to make drilling easier — travel in the mud was difficult.  After the invention of the Hughes drill bit (by Howard Hughes‘s father, the founder of Hughes Tool Co.) to allow drilling through water and mud into oil-bearing rock, a dam was built near where the logjam had been, to raise the level of what is known today as Caddo Lake.  What is seen today is a human-enhanced version of the Caddo Lake known by the Caddo Tribe.  This is all preface to the current Texas water wars.

More:

• The oil rig used for Santa Rita #1, the rig that caused the pollution that killed Big Lake, is on the campus of the University of Texas.
• Caddo Lake could be vital water source in the future (ktbs.com)
• Budget cuts bad for state parks (mysanantonio.com)
• Invasive plant moving into other East Texas lakes (kfdm.com)
• Invasive plant moving into other East Texas lakes (mysanantonio.com)
• Legislature must stop pinching Texas parks’ future (star-telegram.com)
• Lakehills ‘a ghost town’: Medina Lake residents fear fish kill imminent (kens5.com)
• Did Two Day Rain-Even Help Lake Levels? (dfw.cbslocal.com)

What’s in a name? A Texas town by any other name . . . (redux)

. . . would still be a Texas town.

(This is an encore post of a piece that is five years old, and borrowed from a kid who has since graduated from Texas schools on gone on to Princeton; see bottom for additional, updated information.)

But Texas towns have some of the best names of towns in the U.S. Plus, there are a lot of Texas towns, plus 254 Texas counties.

Freckles Cassie at Political Teen Tidbits has a great list:

Need to be cheered up?

Happy, Texas 79042
Pep, Texas 79353
Smiley, Texas 78159
Paradise, Texas 76073
Rainbow, Texas 76077
Sweet Home, Texas 77987
Comfort, Texas 78013
Friendship, Texas 76530

• Click thumbnail map above for a larger map of Texas with many cities named, from Tripinfo.com.

Go see the entire list — and maybe add a few of your favorites in the comments. An ambitious geography teacher could make a couple of great exercises out of those lists. “What’s the shortest distance one would have to drive to visit Paris, Italy, Athens and Santa Fe? How many could you visit in the shortest time?”

Texas counties, all 254 of ‘em, from Geography.com

More, and updated information:

• Geology.com has some great maps of Texas, by county, showing rivers, etc.
• 50 Sure Signs That Texas Is Actually Utopia (buzzfeed.com)
• 5 Reasons California Businesses Should Not Move to Texas (blogs.sfweekly.com)
• Wednesday Wanderer: Texas Wildflowers of Johnson County (handofbelapeck.typepad.com)
• Adaptations of the Australian (!!) song “I’ve Been Everywhere” written by Geoff Mack include U.S. versions (Hank Snow, Johnny Cash and Lynn Anderson, Asleep at the Wheel), and a Texas version by Brian Burns, whose video might be made into some sort of Texas geography exercise . . .

In 90 seconds, National Parks stuff you should see in Washington, D.C.

National Park Service video, and of course, featuring some stunning time-lapse photography.

696

 

Carl Sagan explains how science works: Eratosthenes and the size of the planet

It’s not exactly a hoax.  It started out as just bad reporting of history.

In his search for an easier route from Spain to China, in which he stumbled into the Americas, Christopher Columbus knew with  certainty the Earth is a round ball.  The story that he proved the Earth round, or rather than he laid the foundations for Magellan to prove the Earth round, is only a story, mostly devoid of fact.  Sailors knew something was up just from their having watched things while sailing on the ocean.  One can deduce the ball shape of the planet by watching other ships as they sail away, and sink below the horizon.  Were sailors of a more scientific bent, they could have made much of the fact that the guy in the crow’s nest could see a ship moving away — or an island or a continent — for a time longer than those a few dozen feet below, on the deck of the ship.

Long before that a Greek librarian and polymath, Eratosthenes, figured out that the surface of the Earth is curved, deduced that the planet is basically a ball, and calculated very closely how big the ball is, merely by noting the different shadows cast by the sun at the Spring/Vernal Equinox.  Carl Sagan used this story way back in his famous PBS series, Cosmos.  It’s still interesting, informative and instructive today (surely Texas 9th grade geography teachers use this example all the time, no?  9th grade math teachers?  Say, what?).

You can find this and more Sagan videos at the Carl Sagan Portal on YouTube.

How did he do it?  Wikipedia — as usual — has a good, relatively lay explanation:

Bathtub Art Figure 1:  Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth’s circumference.

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth without leaving Egypt. Eratosthenes knew that, on the summer solstice, at local noon in the Ancient Egyptian city of Swenet (known in Greek as Syene, and in the modern day as Aswan) on the Tropic of Cancer, the sun would appear at the zenith, directly overhead (he had been told that the shadow of someone looking down a deep well would block the reflection of the Sun at noon). Using a gnomon, he measured the sun’s angle of elevation at noon on the solstice in his hometown of Alexandria, and found it to be 1/50th of a circle (7°12′) south of the zenith. Assuming that the Earth was spherical (360°), and that Alexandria was due north of Syene, he concluded that the meridian arc distance from Alexandria to Syene must therefore be 1/50 = 7°12′/360°, and was therefore 1/50 of the total circumference of the Earth. His knowledge of the size of Egypt after many generations of surveying trips for the Pharaonic bookkeepers gave a distance between the cities of 5,000 stadia (about 500 geographical miles or 927.7 km). This distance was corroborated by inquiring about the time that it takes to travel from Syene to Alexandria by camel. He rounded the result to a final value of 700 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of 252,000 stadia. The exact size of the stadion he used is frequently argued. The common Attic stadion was about 185 m,^[9] which would imply a circumference of 46,620 km, which is off the actual circumference by 16.3%; too large an error to be considered as ‘accurate’. However, if we assume that Eratosthenes used the “Egyptian stadion”^[10] of about 157.5 m, his measurement turns out to be 39,690 km, an error of less than 2%.^[11]

Description of Bathtub Art Figure 1:

Syene () is located on the Tropic of Cancer, so that at summer solstice the sun appears at the zenith, directly overhead. In Alexandria () the sun is south of the zenith at the same time. So the circumference of earth can be calculated being times the distance between and .

Erastothenes measured the angle to be 1/50 of a circle and his access to knowledge of the size of Egypt gave a north/south distance between Alexandria and Syene of 5000 stadia. His circumference of the Earth was therefore 250 000 stadia. Certain accepted values of the length of the stadia in use at the time give an error of less than 6% for the true value for the polar circumference.

Tropic of Cancer sign in Western Sahara, placed by trans-Sahara racers, in English and Hungarian Photo: Wikipedia

A fun little exercise, but a remarkable achievement for anyone about 240 years before the birth of of the Biblical Jesus.  Syene, now known as Aswan, is on what we now call the Tropic of Cancer (the “tropics” were named by the Greeks, but I am uncertain whether the line had that name in Eratosthenes’s time).  The date is probably not important, so much as the observation that the sun was vertical at noon on a given date — and then Eratosthenes’s experiment to see whether that were true in Alexandria, and then his understanding of what that might mean and his work to assemble the data to make the calculations.   High school students — heck, junior high school students — should be able to figure all that out today, if they had the basics down.  I suspect that knowing this story would be a spur to students to learn the elements of the mystery and how it was solved, and what it might mean for later navigators of the oceans, land and air, for astronomers, for farmers and for mathematics.

I also like this story because it presents a strange conundrum, a paradox about what people know, and what they may reason from the foundation of what they know.  Our friend and frequent commenter Morgan, whose blog he calls the House of Eratosthenes.  I suspect he thinks himself some latter-day Eratosthenian (“Latter-day Erats?”).  He says as much in his blog FAQ:

I’m just like Eratosthenes peeking into a well here, and I don’t know what it means yet.

It’s an entertaining read and more enlightening that one might think from his forays here, so you probably ought to go read the FAQ and the reasons Morgan misbelieves liberals miss out on Eratosthenes’s wisdom.  Morgan has an explanation of Eratosthenes and his discoveries which I find too brief to be accurate (and I’m not sure why Morgan finds the name “Beta” to be dubious; being a polymath was not a small thing then, or now; second best in everything means one is first in the All-Around, first in the academic centathlon or millathlon — no mean set of feats at all).  I find that funny because, while he makes a pretense and some effort to following Eratosthenes and scientific methods, to me he seems to find science and logic things to run away from, as in our recent discussion where he ends up defending Anthony Watts’s erroneous views because Watts’s critics didn’t link to Watts (see comments in “It’s raining crazy,” and see also Morgan’s own post, which defies explanation).  Eratosthenes would find that funny, too, I hope, but not a demonstration of Eratosthenian logic and calculation.

Does anyone doubt where Carl Sagan would be in the debate between the dozen serious scientists and hundreds of political wankers who deny climate change, and the thousands of scientists and good citizens who recognize that it occurs and think we should get on with saving the future?

(Did James Burke cover Eratosthenes in his brilliant series Connections?  Which episode?)

Tip of the old scrub brush to Fred Clark at Slacktivist, whose compilation posts often overflow with stuff you ought to know or see, and whose post today sent me to Joe at It’s Okay to Be Smart and “Top 10 Reasons We Know The Earth Is Round.”

More:

• Cosmos – Carl Sagan (convexum.wordpress.com)
• Carl Sagan’s “A Pale Blue Dot,” animated (boston.com)
• Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (sphericalchickensinavacuum.wordpress.com)
• The Green Universe: Carl Sagan (sierraclub.typepad.com)
• “Pale blue dot”: Writing that changed the world (lostandfoundbooks.wordpress.com)
• “Five things you thought you knew about Christopher Columbus” (Christian Science Monitor)

Millard Canyon, Utah — not named for Millard Fillmore

Caption from the NPS crew at Canyonlands National Park: View from the Maze: Millard Canyon’s winter mood. We are looking north. Note how the heat from the east to southeast facing cliffs has melted the snow below – even in this ultra-frigid time. Taking a break under a southeast facing cliff is a good way to warm up while on a Canyonlands hike. (GC) (via Facebook)

In a state where they once named the proposed state capital “Fillmore,” and the county in which that town sat, “Millard,” to try to curry favor with President Millard Fillmore for the state’s petition to gain statehood, one might logically think that a spectacular desert canyon not far away called Millard Canyon might also be named in honor of our 13th president.

Location map, Canyonlands National Park, image from Wikipedia

Not so, in this case.  According to John W. van Cott’s Utah Place Names (University of Utah Press, 1990):

MILLARD CANYON (Garfield County) originates at French Springs southeast of Hans Flat. The canyon drains north northeast into the Green River at Queen Anne Bottom. According to Baker, “They learned later that they had misunderstood this name; instead of honoring a president, it was named for an undistinguished `Miller’ who did nothing more than leave this small, mistaken mark on the map” (Baker, Pearl. Robbers Roost Recollections. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1976, p. 33). The name was even misspelled Millard.

Millard Fillmore is off the hook on this one.

Garfield County, Utah, was named after President James Garfield.

So, who was this “Miller” guy?

(Post inspired by image from the Canyonlands NP Facebook site; temperature at the time of the photo was near 0°F.)

More:

• Obama Asked to Make a Momument (foxnews.com)
• Clinging to the Sky (nomadicinspiration.wordpress.com)
• Ashley Korenblat responds to the controversy surrounding the OIA Greater Canyonlands letter (sagebrushcoalition.com)
• Why You Might Want To Consider A Full Frame Fisheye Lens Even If You Have A Crop Sensor Camera (iphotoyou.wordpress.com)