Category Archives: Science

I dunno. CAN they?

This is just me griping about media again, like in the last post. This one is about headlines.

I’ve been enjoying my NYT Audio app, but some content is better than others. And today, I’m ticked because earlier this week, I found something that sounded intriguing, headlined “Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?”

Well, that grabbed me. Especially since I’m a longtime (since my teens) fan of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which begins:

So yeah, I wanted to know the answer to the question. Was Heinlein right that “the greatest danger to man was man himself?” And could that challenge be overcome? SPOILER: All that work to build a compatable crew didn’t work out so well in the story.

But would it work better in real life? This NYT Magazine story was heavily hinting that somewhere in its thousands of words, there would be an answer to the question. So, even though it would take 43 minutes and 45 seconds, I thought it would be worth the listen.

It wasn’t. I mean, I was on a long walk, and it was interesting and passed the time. But no answer. Yet I kept expecting it, even when, at the beginning, it went into this long examination of how two people who had applied to be “crew” members felt about being chosen for the experiment. (I put “crew” in quotes because they’re just going to be locked up together here on Earth to see how they deal with it.)

They were excited, by the way. But torn about being away from loved ones for more than a year. There. Now, you can skip the first 30 or 40 minutes. Then, at the very end, one of the two excited folks gets cut from the program and replaced just before the experiment begins. She is devastated.

She goes home, and watches the beginning of the mission on TV, and starts trying to get over her disappointment. Which she gradually starts to do. The last sentence of the story is:

Then she baked a whole-wheat sourdough pizza, and she and Jake ate it, together.

Really. That was it. I think I yelled “WHAT?!?” as I walked down the street. Not a hint of an answer to the question posed in the headline.

Admittedly, the experiment isn’t over. The people went into the biodome thingy back in June, and they have months to go yet. But how about an update? How are they doing? Anybody crack up yet? I searched and found a progress report on the NASA site, and this was the most exciting paragraph in the post:

Over the past 200 days, the crew grew and harvested its first crops grown inside the 1,700-square-foot habitat, including tomatoes, peppers, and leafy greens, participated in a host of simulated “Marswalks” with relevant time delay, tempo, and activities consistent with future Mars mission concepts, and took part in science investigations in biological and physical sciences…”

No word on whether anyone has gone bonkers. Which, I suppose, is something they might not want to report until it’s all over. I get that.

But still. I don’t like it when a headline creates expectations that the story — especially an extremely long story — fails to fulfill.

So don’t do me like that…

The day back in June when the “crew” entered the “ship.” As the story said, “It was not a special hatch with airlocks or anything: It was just a plain white office door.” So it appears to have gotten that right.

Another way to look at our loss of the Garden of Eden

Hey, Michelangelo: I thought they were wearing fig suits when they left the garden…

The Gospel reading at Mass yesterday got me to thinking about ancient agriculture:

“A sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path,
and birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil.
It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep,
and when the sun rose it was scorched,
and it withered for lack of roots.
Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.
But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit,
a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.

Back in those days, it seems, farming was kind of haphazard. Seed was scattered in ways that today would seem quite haphazard. Whenever I read that passage, I think, why didn’t they put the seed IN the ground? Had the dibble not been invented, or what?

Which reminded me of my theory of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

It suddenly hit me as I was reading one of those books about the history of our species, from hunter-gatherer days until now — which as y’all know I frequently mention. I don’t remember whether it was Sapiens, or Guns, Germs and Steel, or what. But it was one in which the idea that the big move to agriculture was a decidedly mixed blessing.

Oh, it afforded advantages to the cultures that embraced it, in a competitive sense. As Jared Diamond stressed, the peoples who moved the earliest, and the most successfully, to food and fiber production dominate the world today. That’s how Pizarro conquered the Incan Empire with a handful of Spanish soldiers. He not only had the guns and the steel, but smallpox had spread ahead of the Conquistadores and had hit the Incas pretty hard just before he arrived. More than that, he had writing — not him personally, but the scribes he had along. He knew how Cortez had taken down the Aztecs, and followed suit. Emperor Atahualpa hadn’t known either the Spanish or the Aztecs existed.

It’s why Maori conquered and wiped out the Moriori — former Maoris whose forebears had moved away and gone back to hunter-gathering — on Chatham Island. You may not have heard about that, though, since the Maoris themselves were eventually dominated by European newcomers.

But that’s not my point. The point is that some of these things I’ve been reading make the argument that the big advantage that farming offered had a steep price. Basically, the farming life sucked compared to hunting and gathering. Before agriculture, people worked less each day, and on the whole ate better. They went about and gathered what they needed, and had plenty of time to chill after that. They didn’t think about the future. They didn’t worry about their land, or the weather over the coming months, or the price of cotton. They weren’t the slaves of the farms they worked day and night to keep going.

I was thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me — that’s what the first chapters of Genesis were about. In the Garden, Adam and Eve could just stroll around naked and eat their meals off the bounty of their property, and life was good. Then they fouled up — they couldn’t obey one simple rule — and got booted out. And then they were cursed with farming, in no uncertain terms:

Cursed is the ground because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you,
and you shall eat the grass of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

Which certainly sounds like a raw deal to me.

And it hit me: The people who composed the story of Adam and Eve — and later wrote it down — were on some level remembering the switch to agriculture, and saw it pretty much as Yuval Noah Harari did, thousands of years before he wrote that “the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.” And they saw it as the ultimate human fall from natural grace.

So did I make some great discovery? No way. This was too obvious, and had been too obvious for ages. Search for “garden of eden hunter-gathering,” and you’ll see this idea all over the place. I liked this summary:

Apparently, the trauma of this transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers had a huge and lasting impact on humanity. We’ve never forgotten it. It’s burned into our consciousness. And, that’s why it’s the subject of the Bible’s foundational story. The Torah tells us that when humans were first created, we lived in the Garden of Eden, where we ate the fruit that God provided for us. We didn’t have to work hard or grow anything on our own. In other words, we were hunter-gatherers….

I don’t know where I was when everybody else was talking about it. All I can say in my own behalf is that I realized it on my own. All the talking that people do about Adam and Eve — usually, unfortunately, in the silly arguments between biblical literalists and those who think a story about the Earth being created in six days means all faith is bunk (both sides seem to have trouble grasping the concept of allegory) — and I’d never heard a reference to this.

And it sort of blew my mind. I love it when I see connections to things I had not previously seen as connected — such as the Bible’s foundational story of life on Earth, and the findings of secular scientists and philosophers in our own age — and this was the Mother of All Connections. It tied everything about the origins of humanity and our world together.

And the most amazing thing is that it appears as though the originators of the Eden story had some memory — consciously or unconsciously — about what had happened to people ages earlier, long before writing, before Abraham, much less before anthropology, archaeology, DNA testing or carbon-14 dating.

I marvel at it…

I’m sort of glad they can’t see us as we are right NOW

When astronaut Bill Anders took this one in 1968, he was only looking back 1.3 seconds…

Hunter Limbaugh posted a link on Facebook that initially caused me to answer facetiously, as is too often my wont. (Don’t blame me; blame the Rabbit Hole!)

The headline was, “What does Earth look like from across the Universe?” Of course, I replied, “I dunno. Like images of broken light, which dance before me like a million eyes?”

But the thing was, it was a good article, and worth reading. Based on the fact that the farther away something is in space, the farther back in time you’re looking when you see it. Because, you know, even though light is known for its celerity, it does observe a speed limit.

Of course, when Steward Brand finally got his picture of Earth from space, the time factor involved was too small to be interesting. But if somebody’s looking at us from as far away as we ourselves have recently gained the ability to look, it gets interesting.

So he calculated what would have been happening on Earth when seen from various cosmic distances. For instance, seen from Sirius, it would be February 2014 and Barack Obama would still be president. Which would be nice. Any time we could go back to before 2016 would be nice in the same way.

But my fave distance was the one that seems most relevant and likely (using “likely” loosely): from “TOI 700, the first stellar system with an Earth-sized exoplanet discovered in its habitable zone.” An excerpt:

On this world, Earth appears as it does just after the end of the year 1920. The very first radio broadcasts from our planet are just arriving in the TOI 700 system, beginning with station 8MK from Detroit, Michigan. The CO2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere have barely crested the 300 parts-per-million level, sitting at 303. The beginning of the transformation of our atmosphere from industrial activity would be detectable from this exoplanet. 85% of Earth’s surface is still wilderness; only 15% has been modified, largely for food production. Earth is definitely inhabited, and the first signatures that a technologically advanced species lives upon it are appearing. A round-trip message would take more than 2 centuries; in a single human lifetime, you’d never live to hear a response to a sent message….

After that, the distances get so great that you’re talking times when Neanderthals walked the Earth, or before any of the Homo species did, or even before there was an Earth to walk on. All of which are a little harder to identify with. I mean, I may be getting old, but I don’t know anybody who was around then.

No, I don’t have any big point to make, beyond the one I made casually in the headline. I just thought it an interesting intellectual exercise, and thought you might, too…

Why is this snake all crinkly?

This guy was in our backyard yesterday. Actually, my wife says he’s out there a lot. It is a considerable understatement to say that she spends a lot more time outdoors than I do, so she would know.

Of course, he might be a she. I have zero idea on that. Fortunately, it’s the official style of this blog to use the inclusive “he” for reptiles. I’m still allowed to do that, right? I don’t want to tick off any feminist snakes or anything.

Beyond that, I’m pretty sure he’s harmless. Sure enough not to kill him, anyway. Of course, how reliable is the opinion of someone who can’t tell the difference between male and female?

If y’all know what it is, tell me. In advance, though, I’m not going to trust the expertise of any of y’all who told me that copperhead was nonvenomous awhile back.

Actually, I might do what I did then, and send it to Rudy Mancke. But not so much to ask him the species. What I want to ask him is, Why is this snake all crinkly? I mean, why is his body all compressed in a sort of sawtooth pattern? Kind of weird-looking. Is he just tense because I’m standing next to him (although he looked like this from a distance)? Is he about to shed his skin or something? Is this some variation on coiling — is he contemplating springing forward dramatically? Or does he not feel well?

I dunno. I dunno much about Nature, as I said in my second post about the copperhead. I really need to learn more. We all do…

Why I like listening to Bishop Barron

I’ve really gotten into the weekly homilies of Bishop Robert Barron lately. For instance, I just now got around to watching his sermon from Sunday, and enjoyed it. That’s the one above.

He was commenting on the foolishness of the notion that faith and science are somehow at war with each other. It’s a foolishness that seems obvious to me — I see no conflict at all. But to millions on our planet today, it seems just as obvious that there is such a conflict, and it is inherently irreconcilable.

Which brings me to something I comment upon frequently in reference to politics. Those folks see things the way they do because they subscribe to the “ones and zeroes” view of the world. Everything, and especially everyone, is either good or bad — all good or all bad — and it is our duty to choose a side and love one tribe and hate the other. Here’s a place where I commented most recently upon it. Here’s a post in which I went into it a bit more fully.

Increasingly in the discordant world in which we live, this goes far beyond politics — to culture, to aesthetics, to worldviews that aren’t really about left vs. right. In a particularly silly version of intersectionality, people are increasingly convinced that if I vote this way, I perceive reality in this way and this way and this way.

Thus they determinedly convert themselves into unthinking automata.

Yet they remain convinced that they are right.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about that. (I did go on and on about it, actually, but then deleted it all as distracting from the point I mean to address). My purpose is to bring up another recent sermon from the bishop that I meant to write about over the holidays, and didn’t get to. But I’m not going to comment on it in detail. I’m just going to urge you to listen to it (embedded below), and let me know what you think about it, and we can go from there if you are so inclined. Here’s a small sample of a couple of the main points, which the bishop included in his daily reflections on the day’s readings during Advent:

Friends, today’s Gospel again tells of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. I’ve always been fascinated by Mary’s “haste” in this story of the Visitation. Upon hearing the message of Gabriel concerning her own pregnancy and that of her cousin, Mary proceeded “in haste” into the hill country of Judah to see Elizabeth.

Why did she go with such speed and purpose? Because she had found her mission, her role in the theo-drama. We are dominated today by the ego-drama in all of its ramifications and implications.

The ego-drama is the play that I’m writing, I’m producing, I’m directing, and I’m starring in. We see this absolutely everywhere in our culture. Freedom of choice reigns supreme; I become the person that I choose to be.

The theo-drama is the great story being told by God, the great play being directed by God. What makes life thrilling is to discover your role in it. This is precisely what has happened to Mary. She has found her role—indeed a climactic role—in the theo-drama, and she wants to conspire with Elizabeth, who has also discovered her role in the same drama. And, like Mary, we have to find our place in God’s story.

There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s an excellent homily. Of course, I may be prejudiced. After we watched it together, I said something about how awesome it was to my wife. She agreed, but added: “Yes, you like Bishop Barron because he says exactly what you already believe.”

And that’s true. Perhaps that suggests I need to work harder at freeing myself of my own ego-drama. In fact, I know I do. Perhaps that’s the essence of what God demands of us. But I wouldn’t want to oversimplify…

The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

This was the best I could do with my phone tonight. That’s Jupiter on the left, Saturn crowding it on the right.

I am no astronomer.

But for whatever reason — maybe it’s that I found myself taking more walks after dark — it became obvious to me that I could see three planets in the sky, and none of them was Venus. And I was impressed — both by the planets, and by myself for actually having a clue what was happening in the sky. Because most of my life, I hadn’t noticed.

Mars was easy, of course. It’s red. Or reddish, anyway. I would see it soon after its rising, in the east southeast (I think; my memory on this isn’t perfect) and watch it climb to the heights. It was in the process of being impressed by this that I wrote this on Oct. 7, the night of the vice presidential debate. For whatever reason, it seemed brighter, or redder, or something that night. Basically, it was really looking very Arean:

Something far more fascinating than this debate tonight: the planet Mars, hanging up there like a reddish jack-o’-lantern above the eastern horizon. As bright as I’ve ever seen it.

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) October 8, 2020

But that’s not all I had been noticing for, I think, some weeks before that. Far off to the right in the path the planets follow, I would see the brightest thing in the sky after the moon. The first night I noticed it, I told myself it was Jupiter, and when I looked it up in the little astronomical app I have on my phone, I was right! Therefore I started taking a proud, proprietorial interest in it, and looked for it each night. There it was, and next to it Saturn.

I became sort of obsessive about it. Each night when I’d start on a late walk, I’d look up and make sure they were still there. And it pleased me that they always were, although as time passed they moved farther and farther to the right each night. (On the rare nights my wife would walk with me so late, I’d point them all out: “There’s Mars! And Jupiter! And a little to the left of it, Saturn!” She was very patient with me, though.)

Then, I read that the brightest gas giants were going to put on a show on the winter solstice, coming so close together — for the first time (at night) in 800 years — that they would appear more or less to be one star. Or so it might appear to the magi looking for it two millennia ago.

I liked the story, especially since it involved my planets with which I had been so pleased in recent months. My planets, which I had so recently noticed — I mean, discovered!

When the show happened tonight, I’ll admit I was a little disappointed that they hadn’t come completely together — there was about a tenth of a degree of darkness between them. Also a tad put out because they had now moved so far to the right that they’d only be visible for an hour or so before setting. And I was especially ticked at myself for not being able to line up the lens on my phone with my binoculars to get a really awesome shot.

But I still thought it was pretty cool.

Did you see it? Thoughts?

NASA has better cameras than I do. They shot this on Dec. 13. Saturn was to the left then.

I got a ruling from Rudy Mancke: It’s a copperhead

We went back and forth on that last post about the snake — here and on social media. We were starting to stagger toward a consensus that these creatures all over my neighborhood are indeed copperheads. But we were far from certain.

And you know, when I’m practically stepping on these things right in the middle of the street, I kind of want to know.

Rudy Mancke

So I stopped fooling around. Last night I wrote to Rudy Mancke himself for a ruling.

I hated to bother him with something so common. On his segments on public radio, people have usually sent him a picture of something rare and interesting. But based on what I’ve been seeing, these snakes are as common as Republicans in my precinct — maybe more so.

But Rudy got right back to me, and I’m very appreciative:

Brad, The photo you sent is of a Copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix), the most common venomous snake in SC. The dark, wide-narrow-wide bands across the body and the copper-colored head are diagnostic. They are found throughout SC. I have seen more of these snakes this year than I normally do. They feed on any animal small enough to eat. During hot weather they are active mostly at night…

I thought that was really nice of him, especially since as he himself mentioned, these critters are, you know, common.

Which brings me to another subject…

Look at us. We’re pretty smart people, generally speaking. We have a lot to say about a lot of things, and we flatter ourselves that what we have to say has value.

But when it comes to something as simple as staying alive while walking down a suburban street — much less in the woods, or tall grass — we are shockingly ignorant. With the exception perhaps of Jim Catoe, who owns some land out in the country that has a crowd of snakes on it, we’re kind of a bunch of dummies.

What’s happened to us, people? Our ancestors used to know the creatures around them, and the names of the trees, and what was edible and what wasn’t (to us, “edible” means packaged for sale in a supermarket, but not on the detergent aisle).

But when confronted by an animal that can kill us — a common animal, in fact the most common venomous snake in SC — we are clueless!

In those books I love — as do Bryan Caskey and Mike Fitts — there are certain things Jack Aubrey assumed any man knew back 200 years ago. And when the smartest person he knows — physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin — asks him something any ship’s boy would know, such as, “When is the dark of the moon?”… Jack hesitates to answer, hoping that Stephen is making a joke by asking such a thing. (But he never is. Stephen’s more like us.)

Personally, I have no idea when the dark of the moon will be. Occasionally when walking with my wife at night, I’ll look up and recognize Jupiter in the sky, and Saturn off to the left of it, and I’ll say so in a vain attempt to be impressive. But she knows I only know that from wondering “What’s that bright thing in the sky?” and looking it up on my phone’s astronomy app. And she’s tired of my mentioning it.

The problem is, if you’re walking at night and holding up your phone to the sky to figure out what that bright thing is, you’re likely to step on a small creature that can kill you.

Sheesh.

Anyway, thanks very much, Rudy!

I think the snake made me forget the rules

The distracting creature.

I kind of lost my head last night. I walked up to two people, and got right in their faces, and none of us had masks on. My wife witnessed this, and said she was really surprised to see me do something so careless.

I blame it on the snake.

We were out walking around the neighborhood, at dusk. There was still enough light to clearly see the snake on the road right in front of us, but I didn’t, until my wife warned me to watch out. Which is weird. My brain must not have been functioning right, because I don’t like snakes at all, and the sight of one, even a photograph, usually sets off alarms. Any such movement — and there’s nothing else on the planet like the movement of a snake — in any corner of my field of vision should have had me on full alert.

It was interesting that we saw it right there, because it was only a few yards from one that had been run over a couple of days earlier. Its flattened carcass had still been in the street when I had walked that way earlier in the day.

But this one was very much alive. And we stopped to observe it and debate its nature. I immediately said “copperhead,” but admittedly I tend to call almost anything that has a visible pattern of those colors a copperhead. My wife said its head lacked the menacing triangular shape we tend to associate with pit vipers. I acknowledged this, but stuck to my standard policy of treating it as a copperhead until proved innocent. Which meant staying away from it.

I assure you, I used the limited zoom feature on my phone to take the above photo, which I thought came out rather well, considering the low light. I still don’t like looking at it.

Anyway, about a block and half past that, with the light further dimming and the shade of trees lowering it further, we saw a blackness in the middle of the road that looked remotely like it could be another snake, curled up. A bigger one.

As we cautiously approached and debated, and I had just about decided it was a clump of foliage of some kind, someone asked what we were looking at. It was a teenaged boy who I think had just rolled a garbage bin out to the street. I told him. And I told him about the snake just up the street — well, the two snakes, counting the dead one. And he seemed interested. And I thought, Maybe this is one of those people who are into snakes, and maybe he knows something…

So I said, “I’ve got a picture. Want to see it?” When he nodded, I walked straight over and showed it to him on my phone. Only when we were looking at it with our heads about a foot apart did I realize we weren’t wearing masks.

Then a woman — possibly his mom — arrived and asked what it was, and I immediately forgot what I’d just realized, and went over the show it to her. Only this time I handed the phone to her rather than standing right next to her. Still, too close, not to mention handing the phone back and forth.

I don’t think either offered any expert advice. I didn’t get a ruling on the type of snake it was.

Do y’all know? I’d send it to Rudy Mancke, but I don’t think anything this common would interest him.

Anyway, I waited until we were about half a block away before expressing to my wife my surprise at myself for having forgotten basic COVID precautions. She said she was pretty amazed, too. I don’t think she had fully realized what an idiot I can be.

I blame it on the snake….

‘Where are all the birds?’

‘We’re after eatin’ all of dem,” he said, without missing a beat.

We were on a carriage ride through the beautiful Killarney National Park on March 19, and our driver was a guy who had no problem playing to tourists’ expectations. He was a burly guy in a cloth cap whose previously broken nose made him look like an ex-boxer — an Irishman who embraced all stereotypes, cracking a steady stream of jokes that prominently featured Guinness, leprechauns and Irish whiskey.

And he did it in such a natural, unstudied way, and seemed to be enjoying himself so, that it was for me a highlight of our trip to Ireland.

As we rode through the park admiring the scenery, the medieval ruins, the miniature deer and other attractions, one of the ladies in our carriages noticed something I had not. She asked the driver, “Where are all the birds?”

He didn’t miss a beat. Looking over his shoulder with a smile, he said “We’re after eatin’ all of dem.”

As I tweeted at the time, I hadn’t kissed the Blarney Stone, but someone had…

My wife later said she would have liked a serious answer to the question. Me, I was delighted because I’m pretty sure that’s the only time during our almost two weeks in the country that I heard someone use that famous Irish construction of “after” followed by a gerund. Word guy that I am, it made my day.

So much for the anecdotal lede.

For those of you still after wanting a serious answer to the question, I’ll be after giving it to ye, soon as I finish me Guinness…

OK, here you go…

It was in The New York Times today, an opinion piece headlined “Three Billion Canaries in the Coal Mine:”

A new study in the journal Science reports that nearly 3 billion North American birds have disappeared since 1970. That’s 29 percent of all birds on this continent. The data are both incontrovertible and shocking. “We were stunned by the result,” Cornell University’s Kenneth V. Rosenberg, the study’s lead author, told The Times.

This is not a report that projects future losses on the basis of current trends. It is not an update on the state of rare birds already in trouble. This study enumerates actual losses of familiar species — ordinary backyard birds like sparrows and swifts, swallows and blue jays. The anecdotal evidence from my own yard, it turns out, is everywhere.

You may have heard of the proverbial canary in the coal mine — caged birds whose sensitivity to lethal gasses served as an early-warning system to coal miners; if the canary died, they knew it was time to flee. This is what ornithologists John W. Fitzpatrick and Peter P. Marra meant when they wrote, in an opinion piece for The Times, that “Birds are indicator species, serving as acutely sensitive barometers of environmental health, and their mass declines signal that the earth’s biological systems are in trouble.”

Unlike the miners of old, we have nowhere safe to flee….

It’s an ominously interesting piece, so I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

And now this picture I took last year of a dead bird on a street in my neighborhood comes in handy:

I was struck by the beauty of this dead bird. Can anyone identify it for me?

Let’s go back to the moon, people

I missed this piece in The Washington Post last week. It’s a good one, in which a couple of rocket scientists advocate that we go back to the moon to establish a base, something that is completely within our power and would imbue NASA, and the nation, with a sense of purpose they — we — have lacked for a long time.

An excerpt:

This plan, which we call Moon Direct, doesn’t take rocket scientists to comprehend (although we both hold that title). And we could accomplish it in just three discrete phases: First, we deliver cargo to the lunar surface and initiate robotic construction. Second, we land crews on the base, complete construction and develop local resources. And third, we establish long-term habitation and exploration.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy booster, which can launch 60 tons to Earth orbit and 10 tons to the moon, could easily handle the first phase. And NASA’s Space Launch System, still in development, might eventually be used along with heavy lift rockets such as Blue Origin’s New Glenn and the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan. (Blue Origin’s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Post.) Rather than spend a fortune and take years to build a Gateway for obscure reasons, we could immediately go straight to the surface of the moon and set up shop.

The key to crew operations, the second phase of building our moon base, is a spacecraft we call the Lunar Excursion Vehicle, which would operate outside our atmosphere and therefore need no heavy heat shields or Earth landing systems. The LEV would fly from Earth’s orbit to the lunar surface and back again. New York to Paris, Paris to New York. Nothing could be simpler. All we would need to do is get to the airport — in this case, low Earth orbit — where the LEV would be “parked” for refueling and used again and again, just like a passenger airplane….

I’m all for it. Ground Control to Major Tom — let’s go!

Read fast! Scientists say we’ve only got two minutes…

Dr. Manhattan in the press conference scene.

On a previous post, our own Norm Ivey proposed a new qualification for public office — “that all government officials must have a scientific background.” Mr. Smith demurred, saying “A background in science does not provide any unique insight into the public good.”

I’m with Mr. Smith. The science boffins are all very well and good within their respective fields. They can help you win a war with a handy gadget from time to time, for instance.

But I don’t see them as having any sort of particular skill at, say, keeping us out of a war in the first place. When it comes to diplomacy and politics, give me someone schooled in the humanities, with a particularly strong grounding in history and highly developed word skills.

Mixing science and politics gets you weird things like the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I was thinking about how silly that device is while watching “Watchmen” while working out one morning this week. Remember the press conference scene in which Dr. Manhattan is asked for a reaction to the fact that the scientists have moved the Clock to “four minutes to midnight?” The super-duper hero is dismissive:

My father was a watchmaker.

He abandoned it when Einstein discovered that time is relative.

I would only agree that a symbolic clock…

…is as nourishing to the intellect…

…as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man.

OK, so that analogy doesn’t really work. Maybe the person who wrote that bit of dialogue was a scientist rather than a wordsmith.

Anyway, what I would say is that the Clock attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. It has NO application to the real world. There’s no way to make use of such information.

You doubt me on this? OK, let’s test it scientifically. Right now the Clock says it’s two minutes to midnight (which is way WORSE than in the movie when everyone is expecting nuclear war, by the way). Now that you know that, wait two minutes. Has nuclear war occurred? No? Wait another two minutes. Test the proposition several times, if you like. You’ll find it’s not scientifically sound….

(And don’t tell me I’m being too literal. I’m just trying to play by the rules of science, which is pretty useless if it’s not literal, measurable, empirical. Which is why it gets itself in trouble when it ventures into metaphor.)

Oh, wait: I see the scientists have tried to improve their odds of being right by enlarging the symbolic meaning of “midnight” to denote global climate change as well as global thermonuclear war. So… since climate change is already happening, they guarantee that they are “right,” in a sense. Which, in a temporal sense, makes for an entirely different dynamic from the nuclear war metaphor.

Sheesh.

To me, it just underlines the silliness of the whole business. At the very least, it lacks precision…

If my DNA helps catch a serial killer, I’m totally fine with that

My DNA results overview page. I do not “shudder” to share this, with you or the cops.

This morning while working out on the elliptical, I started watching a movie on Netflix called “Anon.” It imagines a near-future in which there is no privacy. Apparently, everyone’s brain is wired to record video of every single second of his or her life — sort of like Google Glass without the glasses. And that data is easily shared wirelessly with other people, and is completely available to the police. The police can even access the last experiences of a dead person, which makes finding murderers ridiculously easy.

Also, you can watch TV or movies without a TV — they just stream in your head — and talk to anyone anywhere without a phone. Which, if an accurate prediction of the future, is really bad news for Best Buy. (First showrooming, now this…)

So since the main character (played by Clive Owen) is a homicide cop, a plot twist is needed to make his job interesting. In this case, the plot twist is that he’s on the trail of a serial killer who has managed to hack people’s digital memories, so that everything in the victim’s last moments is seen from the killer’s POV — so you see the victim being shot, but you don’t see the shooter.

I lost interest in it after 39 minutes, and switched over to “Babylon Berlin” for the rest of my workout. It may have been low-tech, but Germany between the wars was never boring.

But it reminded me of something I meant to blog about a week or so ago.

You’ve probably read about how the Golden State Killer was caught more than 40 years after his crimes when investigators tracked him genetically through a consumer DNA service like Ancestry. Basically, they found links to some of his relatives who had voluntarily shared their DNA info on such databases. Then they found him, and made a positive DNA match to something he’d discarded.

Which I thought was awesome.

But of course, this development immediately led to such headlines as:

The Golden State Killer Is Tracked Through a Thicket of DNA, and Experts Shudder

Data on a genealogy site led police to the ‘Golden State Killer’ suspect. Now others worry about a ‘treasure trove of data’

Really? Experts “shudder?” People worry about a “treasure trove of data” that not only can connect you to a 4th cousin, but help cops determine whether he’s a serial killer? Which would be a cool thing to know before you reach out to meet him or trade family information?

Why? That’s utterly absurd.

Sharing DNA info can lead to some pretty painful results for a lot of people. For instance, you can find out that your “Dad” isn’t really your Dad. This can lead to a great deal of family trauma and upend lives.

I’ve been lucky in that regard. My results have been boring. I am related to the people I thought I was related to in precisely the way I thought I was. There could be surprises in results from folks who have not yet been tested, but so far it’s been pretty vanilla. (Extremely vanilla, in terms of ethnicity — so much for those Ancestry ads that tell of all the exciting, exotic backgrounds people have found in their DNA.)

Not that there haven’t been surprises elsewhere on the tree. Some months ago, my daughter was contacted by a guy who was trying to find his birth parents, who thought a cousin of mine might be his father. Sure enough, he shows up on Ancestry as being right behind a couple of my first cousins in terms of his closeness to me. He narrowed it down to one of my cousins. I don’t know whether that cousin knows about it, because I haven’t wanted to pry.

Something like that can be upsetting to those involved, and I’m very sympathetic to that. But that’s just the DNA service working as advertised.

What these “experts” out there are “worrying” and “shuddering” about is the police being able to use these connections to solve crimes.

This does not worry me. If one of my cousins is a serial killer, I’d kind of like the duly constituted authorities to know that, and act upon it.

And I have trouble imagining a scenario in which that is a bad thing — although I’m sure we’ll see a movie soon that shows it to be a frightening thing…

The Amazon rainforest was shaped by people

This is just a by-the-way thing, for people who haven’t picked up on it…

The Washington Post yesterday had this story headlined, “Archaeologists discover 81 ancient settlements in the Amazon.” It said in part:

Fifty years ago, she said, “prominent scholars thought that little of cultural significance had ever happened in a tropical forest. It was supposed to be too highly vegetated, too moist. And the corollary to those views was that people never cut down the forests; they were supposed to have been sort of ‘noble savages,’ ” she said.

“But those views have been overturned,” Piperno continued. “A lot of importance happened in tropical forests, including agricultural origins.”…

Though conservationists often speak of this region as having been a “pristine” landscape, studies by de Souza and others suggest that indigenous people influenced and enriched the rain forest for hundreds of years….

Surprising? Only if you indeed think of the pre-Columbian Americans as “noble savages” who barely touched the land they lived on.

But in fact, researchers have been debunking that view for years.

If you haven’t read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann, you should. That 2005 book, followed six years later by the equally fascinating 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, endeavored to bring us laymen up to date on what modern researchers were learning about this hemisphere before Europeans came to stay.

It’s been several years since I read it, but I remember two main points, new things, that I learned from it:

The American population before 1492 was many times as large as previously estimated. But Europeans, the people who wrote the history, never met these people. That’s because, thanks to inter-tribe trade, European diseases wiped out millions — entire villages, entire cultures — before the newcomers even encountered them. (Europeans would land on a coast, coastal Indians would be infected by their diseases and pass them on to inland tribes they traded with. Thus, European diseases raced well ahead of actual Europeans.) That’s one reason the conquistadores were able to conquer. The Incas, for instance, had been ravaged by disease to the point that their empire was on the verge of collapse before Pizarro arrived.
The Indians had a dramatic effect on the land before the arrival of whites. They were big users of slash-and-burn land management, including in the hallowed Amazon rain forest. In fact, much of the jungle found by white settlers was only a generation or two old, having grown up after the local land managers died off.

I may be misremembering a detail or two, since it’s been awhile since I read it. But I think I have the broad outline right. One of the most dramatic assertions I remember from the book was that the Little Ice Age the planet experienced from the 16th to the 19th centuries was at least in part caused by this sudden drop in human population in the Amazon basin, which allowed the rainforest to surge, taking in more carbon dioxide and lowering global temperatures.

Of course, this debunks one notion many tree-huggers are fond of — that the awful, heedless white man is destroying the planet by killing the rainforest, which the nature-loving folk who went before would never have done. (Or, if it doesn’t debunk it, at least adds layers of complication. Apparently, the Indian methods were more sustainable.) At the same time, it reinforces the idea that what humans do and don’t do affect global climate.

All of which reinforces my long-held belief that life is more complicated than most people give it credit for being.

I know I’ve recommended this book before, but the Post story reminded me of it, so I’m recommending it again. It’s fascinating to learn that things you thought you knew were so, are not…

Is it safe to use my prescription specs with my eclipse glasses?

Stupid Internet! Nobody had this problem the last time we had a total solar eclipse.

We have been drowning in information, much of it useless, about today’s celestial event. We’ve had no end of warnings, all of which should be unnecessary, since anyone who’s spent five minutes on this planet should know not to stare at the sun. But we are a curious species, both in the sense of “strange” and “interested in novelties,” so we need the warnings.

And a lot of those warnings involve not looking at the phenomenon through lenses. You know, “Don’t look at the eclipse through a telescope,” etc.

So… what about my glasses? Can I look through them, with my special eclipse glasses over or under them?

Reasonable inference tells me that it’s safe. After all, there have been SO many warnings about unsafe practices, and anyone with any sense knows that people who need their prescription spectacles to see anything won’t be able to see the eclipse without them. So, you know, telling those millions of people it’s unsafe to do so, if it is, would be one of your very first important safety tips to share.

Still, reasonable surmise doesn’t seem enough where my eyesight is concerned. So I’d like a definite affirmative from an authoritative source: Yes, it’s OK to use your eclipse glasses with your regular glasses.

And surely someone out there has answered that question.

The trouble is, it’s a tricky question to ask clearly on a search engine. You end up repeating “glasses” in a confusing way. I tried being technical and saying, “Is it safe to wear prescription eyeglasses with eclipse glasses?”

But however I search, I only find one web page that seems to answer the question directly. (The second result Google offers in response to that query says, “No, You Can’t Use 3D Movie Glasses As Eclipse Glasses – Here’s Why,” a response so idiotic that it makes me want to slap somebody upside the head.)

But there is that one page, the first result, with the headline “Can I wear eclipse glasses over my regular eyeglasses …”

Yes! Just what I need!

But every time I try to call it up, I get the above error message.

So… can anyone help me out her in the couple of hours we have left? Preferably, by giving me a link to an authoritative source?

If so, it will be appreciated…

Advertise on my blog, or I WILL BLOT OUT THE SUN!

Hank Morgan tied to the stake: Illustration of the eclipse scene in Connecticut Yankee.

I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the Sun, and he shall never shine again; the fruits of the Earth shall rot for lack of light and warmth, and the peoples of the Earth shall famish and die, to the last man!

— Hank’s threat to Arthur’s realm, in Connecticut Yankee

I loved it that Cindi Scoppe cited one of my all-time favorite books in her column today.

Even though we worked together all those years, I don’t recall her ever mentioning Twain’s Connecticut Yankee. In fact, I don’t recall her speaking with interest about any works of fiction. Cindi’s too busy for fiction. She spends her evenings reading bills and legal filings, so she can knowledgeably dissect them in the paper.

I, too, have been thinking a lot about Hank Morgan, what with all this talk about the eclipse.

Ah, to have a gullible 6th century population so that I, too, might be able to control them with my knowledge of the coming moments of midday darkness! Morgan not only saved himself from the stake, but seized control of Arthur’s Britain by claiming credit for the eclipse.

What would I do with such superior knowledge? I suppose I could greatly increase my revenues by saying, “Advertise on my blog, or I will blot out the sun!” (Might as well. Nothing else seems to work. That is, my personal strategy of sitting back and waiting for ads hasn’t worked too well. I suppose there are other avenues.)

Of course, they didn’t have blogs in Arthur’s day. But that wouldn’t have stopped Hank Morgan — in no time at all, he had all the knights of the Round Table talking on telephones and playing baseball (in their armor). If Twain had written it a century later, he’d have made Clarence a webmaster.

I’ve got to go back and read that again. Fortunately, I have it on my iPad…

Check out program about Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark! Now!

Dang! I had meant to tell y’all about this in advance:

Y’all, there’s a program on PBS right now about my old friend and colleague @JoelSartore and his awesome Photo Ark project. Check it out… https://t.co/VSpbV5IXvt

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) July 19, 2017

But it’s on right now! It’s the first of three episodes.

I’ve told y’all about Joel and his amazing project before. He and I worked together at the Wichita paper back in the ’80s, and he’s been a photographer for National Geographic for the past 25 years.

For the last 11 of those years, he’s been working on his magnum opus, the Photo Ark: He has undertaken to photograph every endangered species on the planet. He figures it will take the rest of his life. May he live far more than long enough to accomplish it…

U.S. goes where only Syria and Nicaragua have gone before

So what if the United States, guided by the wisdom of our cheerless leader, has pulled out of the Paris Accord signed by more than 190 other nations?

It’s not like we’re going to be alone! We’ll be joining, um, Syria. And Nicaragua! So, yay us, huh? Now we’ll be pace-setters, too!

President Trump declared that the United States would leave the Paris climate agreement, following months of infighting among Trump’s staff that left the world in suspense. He said he hopes to negotiate a similar deal that is more favorable to the U.S.

This move is one of several Obama-era environmental milestones that Trump has dismantled. And all the while, a new study shows global temperatures might be rising faster than expected.

Leaving the agreement displaces the U.S. from a stance of global leadership and places it alongside just two non-participating countries: Syria, which is in the midst of a civil war, and Nicaragua, who refused to join because the Paris Agreement didn’t go far enough. Even countries such as Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which are among the poorest in the world and were struggling with an Ebola epidemic at the time, have signed on….

And yes, in answer to the question that a Trump supporter asked on the blog earlier today, China and India are taking part in the accord. Not only that, they’re stepping up into the leadership role the United States is forfeiting:

Earlier this week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on a visit to Berlin, stood alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel and said that failing to act on climate change was a “morally criminal act.”

And earlier this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping called the 2015 climate accord in Paris “a hard-won achievement” and urged other signers to stick to their pledges instead of walking away — “as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations.”

In the past, there was skepticism in both countries about Western calls for emissions reductions, which were seen as hypocritical. The strong public comments now underline how far opinion both countries has moved in recent years, and the rhetorical leadership is extremely welcome, experts say….

Oh, and by the way — it’s not just words. China is not only living up to what it’s promised, it’s ahead of schedule in reducing its carbon footprint.

China is, of course, in this and other areas (such as TPP), only too happy to assume the mantle of global leadership that the United States is so eagerly, and so stupidly, laying aside.

An asteroid didn’t destroy Earth today. So we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice…

Some NASA images of the rock that’s missing us today…

I read this today in The Washington Post:

A very large, very peanut-shaped asteroid whizzed past Earth on Wednesday, about 1.1 million miles away. For perspective, that’s about 4.6 times the distance to the moon. That’s razor-edge close compared with the vastness of space, but in our human-relative universe it’s waaaayyy out there….

Since I was sitting there at breakfast reading about it, I sort of knew already that the planet hadn’t been destroyed. But I read on with great satisfaction nevertheless:

Let us, for a moment, consider a scenario in which a 0.8-mile-wide asteroid strikes Earth.

First, the magic number for total apocalypse is 60 miles. That’s how big an asteroid would need to be to wipe out human life.

This asteroid is far from that number, but if it hits, let’s say, Washington, D.C., it’s large enough to destroy everything and everyone from New York City to Raleigh, N.C. (I apologize to the people of Raleigh for dragging you into Washington’s apocalypse.) The thermal radiation radius would be much larger….

I guess that would teach North Carolina not to pass dumb ol’ bathroom bills, huh? I mean, this would be is almost as bad as not getting to host NCAA games.

Now, if you want to see a good guess about what the impact of a 60-miler would look like, check the following video. Then go on and have a nice day…

My DNA is being subjected to a really ‘snazzy test’!

ancestry

Ever since I sent my spit off to Ancestry, I’ve been like a little kid who has sent in his cereal box tops, waiting for my secret decoder ring.

And the time frame involved is reminiscent of the days when I was a little kid — they say it can take 6-8 weeks for delivery!

For their part, Ancestry is making sure I know they haven’t forgotten me, or lost my DNA. I got an email from them today giving me a link to a page letting me track the process. Apparently, they’re working on it now. Surprisingly, this is something that actually takes time. I had figured it would be like when they test my iron level before I give platelets at the Red Cross — zip, and you’re done.

Nope. It’s way more complicated, tracking hundreds of thousands of… what do they call them?… single nucleotide polymorphisms. To put it in technical terms, the lady on this video says my DNA is being subjected to a “pretty complicated and really snazzy test.”

So now I understand.

Anyway, I can hardly wait…

New planet? Whaddya mean, INFERRED? Ain’t it amazing how little scientists KNOW…

An artist’s impression of Planet Nine, which could sit at the edge of our solar system. (R. Hurt/California Institute of Technology)

OK, so now the guy who got Pluto demoted, the author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, says he’s found a new planet. One much farther out (20 times as far as Neptune) and much, much bigger — like, 5 or 10 times as massive as Earth.

Not that anyone has seen this planet, mind you, although the boffins are all looking for it like fun:

Their paper, published in the Astronomical Journal, describes the planet as about five to 10 times as massive as the Earth. But the authors, astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, have not observed the planet directly.

Instead, they have inferred its existence from the motion of recently discovered dwarf planets and other small objects in the outer solar system. Those smaller bodies have orbits that appear to be influenced by the gravity of a hidden planet – a “massive perturber.” The astronomers suggest it might have been flung into deep space long ago by the gravitational force of Jupiter or Saturn.

Telescopes on at least two continents are searching for the object, which on average is 20 times farther away than the eighth planet, Neptune. If “Planet Nine” exists, it’s big. Its estimated mass would make it about two to four times the diameter of the Earth, distinguishing it as the fifth-largest planet after Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. But at such extreme distances, it would reflect so little sunlight that it could evade even the most powerful telescopes…

So, astronomers — the class of people who are always telling us about (much smaller) Earth-like planets in other solar systems, gazillions of times farther away than this — have to infer the existence of a gigantic planet still in the grip of Sol’s gravity? I mean, they’re inferring all that stuff about “Goldilocks” planets, too, but if they have to do it in our own system, how reliable is all that stuff about other star systems?

This kind of uncertainty on the part of experts does not inspire confidence on the part of us ignorant laypeople.

Take another news item from this morning: “It’s official: 2015 ‘smashed’ 2014’s global temperature record. It wasn’t even close.”

Yo! Get it together, scientists!

Now, I realize that one year — or for that matter, two years — does not constitute proof of a trend. But I am reminded that, in the long run, most scientists tell us that we are experiencing climate change, and it’s our fault.

I believe them. But hey, when scientists can’t even tell for sure whether there’s another giant planet in our own solar system, is it surprising that some people don’t? Believe them, I mean.

And yes, I’m doing a classic thing that ignorant people do — I’m combining all scientists, from all disciplines, into one entity. He’s a guy who looks like… well, like the Professor on “Gilligan’s Island.” That guy knew everything about everything…

As for me… I’m just a simple caveman blogger. What do I know?

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