Census of Marine Life

Reading time about 60 seconds

Important in the history of life on Earth are the several extinction events that killed millions of species. The most famous of these resulted in the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. What is little recognized is that Earth is now in the midst of an extinction event of colossal magnitude and Homo sapiens is the cause. Since the Industrial Revolution we have turned up the Earth’s thermostat, fouled its waters, its air and are in the process of overcrowding her with huge numbers of hungry mouths to feed.

Among biologists greatest fears are that millions of species will go extinct before we even know they were here. Most folks have the idea that all the creatures of the Earth have been neatly tagged and identified. Not so. Based on the rate new species are discovered, vast numbers of undiscovered species exist.

A partial remedy for this is the Census of Marine Life begun in 2000. The goal is to discover and catalog as many of the sea’s inhabitants as possible as well as understand their distribution, diversity and abundance. The census ends in 2010.

Why bother? Well some estimates foretell an end to all commercial fisheries by 2050. We already find supermarket freezers filled with fish once considered ‘trash fish’. Not so long ago no one dreamt of eating them. This census will help identify where stocks of fish are and how best to manage them in order to maintain a commercial fishery. Not only that, but it's impossible to rebuild an environment (should we become so wise) if we don’t know what is here.

This is scary stuff to someone looking at this from the perspective of a time when 2-3 billion people populated this planet not 6-7 billion and growing fast, needing electricity, fuel, food, products of manufacture and medical care.

Beyond Understanding?

Reading time about 60 seconds

We’ve all heard of the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the Universe. It is the currently accepted theory as to where everything came from, an infinitesimally small point smaller than an atom, which in a fraction of a fraction of a second expanded to give birth to time and space as we understand it.

Physicists have been able to explain mathematically and with conventional physics what happened after the expansion occurred, but do not know what happened in the instant of the expansion or before it, because conventional mathematics and physics is insufficient to explain it. We do not at this time have the tools to understand what happened.

Is this because we don’t have the tools or because we don’t have the minds to understand? The human mind is the result of billions of years of evolution. All living things on Earth are. Our minds evolved to survive in environments to which it was exposed. One reason we cannot imagine infinity, although we can conceive of it, is because our minds evolved in a finite space. There are always limits to distance, quantities, etc. We evolved in a finite space not an infinite space so there would be no reason to be able to deal with infinity.

By the same token perhaps we do not have the ability to understand the physics of the big bang anymore than we can imagine infinity because we did not evolve with such physics.

To understand these unimaginable events we may have to develop an Artificial Intelligence that can interpret this strange physics in a manner our minds can understand and explain it to us in terms we can understand.

Remember When

Reading time about 35 seconds

I have finally reached the age of retirement. Frankly I never thought I’d make it.

It is interesting to look back at what my grandparents thought of as amazing. The airplane, telephones and TV for instance. They were from French Canada, Quebec to the rest of us and spoke no English when they arrived. They attended night school to learn English and did their best to fit in. Their heavy Quebecoise accent made that hard.

My grandmother was among the first to buy on the installment plan and had one of the first TV sets on her street. I was 10 before I saw it. We lived in Key West, Florida where there was no TV reception yet. I have to admit it was love at first sight. I sat mesmerized before the fuzzy black and white image of Crusader Rabbit and his faithful sidekick Rags the Tiger. Love of television or anything with a screen must be instinctive for kids.

My grandparents knew nothing of computers, color TV, cell phones, iPods or spaceflight. These all came about during my lifetime. I like them told an unimpressed grandchild about all the things we did not have as children.

I can’t even imagine what she in turn will tell her grandchildren about the technologies that did not exist when she was young.

They, like you, will probably be unimpressed.

Higher Education, Higher Costs

OK, it’s been awhile since I was in school, but not so long ago we used clay tablets and rolls of papyrus. Although when I hear what it costs these days to get an education it seems like another century. Well actually it was.

A daughter of mind has taken the Presidents advice and after a few years away went back to school. Unfortunately the Prez forgot to mention how much it costs these days. I remember a time when folks didn’t need to incur a mountain of debt to get an education. I didn’t even know what a student loan was. The private schools were expensive, but if you took the state up on their offer it was really affordable. And community college was free. You just paid for your books.

What got me started on this was how much she paid for an elementary physics textbook. Are you ready? Two hundred and fifty dollars! Of course that price included a book of answers to the problems at the end of each chapter. At that price a tutor should have been included.

If America is to ever again gain the high ground in education and out compete the rest of the world we darn well better make an education affordable.

Remember, many of the ‘Greatest Generation’ went free and that included housing. Those grads helped build America into the powerhouse it once was.

You know, kindergarten through college is free in France. Oh yeah, I forgot they’re Socialists. We can’t have any of that. Can we?

The Deepest Deep

Someone once said that small minds are impressed by big numbers. Well I qualify.

I was just looking at a very impressive big number that had to do with the deepest place on the face of the Earth. The Marianas Trench near the island of Guam.

The bottom of this deep trench in the floor of the Pacific Ocean is under nearly seven miles of water. The measured depth is 35,840 feet. If you dropped Mount Everest, the highest place on Earth, into the Marianas Trench the summit would still be under 6800 feet of water.

As you know water has weight, a square inch one foot high weighs about a half pound. So, for every foot of ocean water the weight on a square inch increases by half a pound. That's the pressure you feel in your ears at the bottom of a pool. Now imagine 35, 840 feet times ½ in pounds of pressure per square inch. That's nearly 18, 000 pounds or nine tons per square inch. That'd hurt your ears. It's like the weight of nine cars on every square inch.

Two men, Picard and Walsh, piloted a submersible called the Triest (see photo) in 1960 to the bottom of the Trench. On the bottom they found some fish and shrimp living happily.

People have not been to the bottom since the descent of Picard and Walsh in 1960.

I guess that's why they say we know less about the oceans than the Moon.

Crosswords Puzzle Me

My wife loves to do the New York Times crossword puzzles and is really good at solving them. Me? I am about as good with crosswords as I am at Scrabble® and I’m pretty bad at that.

I got to wondering who invented this humbling game and how far people take the playing of crosswords.

The crossword puzzle first appeared in 19th century England. In 1913 Arthur Wynne created the first crossword to be published in a newspaper, the Sunday New York World.

Here is a link to the first published crossword puzzle and a link to the solution.

Crossword puzzle solvers even go so far as to have a tournament in Brooklyn, New York. The 33rd Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament will be held in 2010. Grand prize is $5000.

If you’d like to try your hand there are a number of crosswords available online.

Me? I’ll stick to Monopoly®

A beautiful Grind

I ran across a box of old books while cleaning up my hangar. In it I found a really ancient book about telescope making for amateurs. Many years have passed since I bought that now old, outdated book written in a quant, old fashioned manner.

What struck me as I leafed through the slightly moldy pages, stuck together in places from a long forgotten leak in the roof, was how clever were those amateurs who contributed to the book. These guys and gals ground their own mirrors and lenses atop oil drums filled with water and tested their hard won creations with kerosene lamps with a pinhole in the chimney to simulate a star, and a razor blade to provide a sharp edge to cut the light revealing imperfections reflected off a glass surface shaped with finer and finer grades of abrasive.

These wizards of improvisation built mounts for their telescopes out of iron pipe sunk into washtubs filled with cement for steadiness and clock drives to follow the stars with hand filed gears powered by a falling weight. Can you imagine? Not a watt of electricity to be found anywhere.

I have no idea what my point is other than admiration for those amateurs and their determination and imagination.

I’m thinking of trying my hand.

Anybody out there built a telescope?

Hoax or Misunderstanding?

Way back on August 27,2003 the mysterious planet Mars came closer to Earth than it had in nearly 60,000 years, just 56 million kilometers or about 34,000,000 miles.

Since then e-mails have gone out every Aug 27th since saying Mars will appear as large as the full moon. Not so. Mars won't even be visable this August 27th and even if it were it would appear as only a bright yellow to reddish star.

Some say it is a hoax and some say it was just a misunderstanding. Regardless it will not look like the full moon.

Mars will be 35,526,000 miles from Earth on July 27, 2018 its next nearest approach.

Since Mars is only 4226 miles in diameter at its equator and at a close approach is 35,000,000 miles from us and the Earth's moon is 2160 miles in diameter at the equator and about 238,000 miles from Earth, there's no way Mars and the moon can look the same size when Mars is 147 times farther away than the moon.

Too bad though, it would be a great sight.

Cats

I got to wondering who my cat's ancestors are and where they lived, so I did a little research. I found this information in Scientific American's June issue article entitled' The Taming of the Cat'.

Cats are the most popular pet in the world. One out of every three American households has at least one cat. There are over 600 hundred million domestic cats worldwide. If you have to ask why, you don't keep one. But how did cats become domestic and when?

Until recently it was believed the domestication of cats started with the ancient Egyptians 3600 years ago. Genetics and archaeological evidence now suggest a more distant time.

In 2000, Carlos Driscoll, University of Oxford, compared DNA samples of 979 wildcats and domestic cats. Samples of the wildcat Felis sylvestris lybica (Photo), found in Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and the domestic cat were 'virtually indistinguishable', strongly suggesting a Middle Eastern origin for the domestic cat.

Further strengthening the domestic cat's more distant origins are recent archaeological finds of a human and domestic cat buried together on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus dating back 9600 years. This find suggests that cats were living with humans and being carried by people from place to place over nine centuries ago.

But how did the wildcat, F.s. libica, come to live with humans?

Archaeologists digging in Israel discovered the remains of house mice in storage areas for grain dating back at least 10,000 years. It is thought that wildcats were attracted by the mice and perhaps food scraps in garbage dumps near human settlements. Over the years the boldest of the cats survived at a higher rate because of the easier pickings associated with humans. The more domesticated they became the greater their odds for survival. Those of you on a cat's personal staff have experience as to why.

Over the centuries wherever we have gone we have brought our cats with us. The house cat eventually found its way to America about 500 years ago finishing a 10,000 year migration to the New World. One of their descendants can usually be found occupying the most comfortable spot in our house.

We Only Have One Environment

The Obama Department of Interior is doing a great job cleaning up that scandal riddled department, but doesn’t get high marks for doing its job.

Since President Obama picked Ken Salazar to head up Interior, they have been following the Bush administrations’ lead when it comes to protecting endangered species.

Not only has the Obama Department of Interior agreed with the previous administration when it comes to reducing protection for polar bears, now they refuse to protect some 1200 wolves in Montana and Idaho. These two states are gearing up to join Alaska in slaughtering hundreds of wolves at a time when their population has declined due to some as yet undiagnosed disease.

There is that old saying, “The more things change the more they stay the same.”

There is a lot of big money that is afraid protecting the Polar Bear will require them to do more on Climate Change and of course most ranchers don’t like wolves.

Here’s another old saying for you, ‘Money talks, trash walks.’