Decorative Arts, Spectral
Still in operation, NASA's SOHO (Solar and Heliophysical Observatory) spacecraft orbits the sun (not the Earth)
in step with the Earth, by slowly orbiting around the First Lagrangian Point (L1), where the combined gravity of the Earth and Sun keep SOHO in an orbit locked to the Earth-Sun line. The L1 point is approximately 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth (about four times the distance of the Moon), in the direction of the Sun. There, SOHO enjoys an uninterrupted view of our daylight star. (source)
One of the instruments on board is the Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer (CDS), which was designed to study the atmosphere of the sun spectroscopically,* i.e., to look at characteristic wavelengths in the light put out by the corona, from which one can deduce quite a bit about the physical processes going on there.
On 26 March 2002 the CDS took a "quiet-sun" spectrum of the corona (meaning there were no particular disturbances, solar flares, or coronal discharges going on, just a normal, quiescent (such as it is) solar atmosphere. Below is the spectrum (shown one half above the other). The spectrum was taken in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV), so this red is dramatic false coloring. There are quite a few spectral lines visible, demonstrating the range and resolution of the CDS.
Evidently I am not the only one who thinks this spectrum is quite beautiful. It seems that the designers of this natatorium also thought so.
According to the SOHO page where I found this photograph, the mosaic is 20 meters long and constructed out of some 50,000 Italian glass tiles.
I want one.
———-
* Here is the official description of the CDS. It's like scientific pornography for us experimentalists. Just let the words flow over you:
CDS consists of a Wolter II grazing incidence telescope which has a focus at a slit assembly which lies beyond a scan mirror. Light stops define two telescope apertures which feed, simultaneously into two spectrometers beyond the slit assembly. One portion of the beam hits a grating in grazing incidence and the spectrum is dispersed onto four 1-D detectors placed around the Rowland circle. This is the grazing incidence spectrometer or GIS. The other portion is fed through to a twin grating in normal incidence and the resulting spectrum is viewed by a 2-D detector system. This is the normal incidence spectrometer or NIS.
The GIS grating is spherical. The system is astigmatic, i.e. there is no spatial focus. Thus, one would use "pinhole" or square slits and build up images by rastering in two directions over the Sun's surface. The rastering is performed by rotating the scan mirror (E-W rastering; i.e. by presenting different portions of the Sun to the slit) and by scanning the slit (N-S rastering). The four detectors sit at specified, fixed locations around the Rowland circle and thus detect the EUV spectrum in four fixed wavelength ranges.
The NIS gratings are toroidal, resulting in a stigmatic system. Thus, we may use long, thin slits and can image, spatially along the slits. Images of the slit are dispersed on the NIS detector producing an image, effectively, of wavelength against a spatial dimension. As a result, one can produce rastered images very quickly by rastering in only one dimension with the scan mirror. Since the NIS spectrum is dispersed by two gratings, slightly angled with respect to one another, two spectral ranges are viewed on the one 2-D detector.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Music & Art
Beard of the Week LXX: "Disproving" Darwin
This week's beard belongs to birthday boy Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), born 200 years ago on 12 February 1809. This photograph (which I have cropped) was taken in 1882 by the photographic company of Ernest Edwards, London.*
Many people call Darwin's great idea, common descent through evolution by means of natural selection, the greatest scientific discovery ever. Maybe. It's certainly big. My hesitation is merely a reflection of my feeling that it's really difficult to prioritize the great ideas and discoveries of science and math into a hierarchy that would assign the top position to one idea alone. No doubt it's the over cautious precision of my inner scientist asserting itself.
Almost since the pages of Origin of Species were first sewn into a book there has been a cottage industry of trying to "disprove Darwin". So strongly associated is his name with the big idea that "Darwin" and "Darwinism" serve as effigies for those who revile the idea so much that they expend considerable energy looking for anything that might weaken the authority of the idea so that it can be toppled from its scientific pantheon.
Unfortunately for their efforts, they sorely misunderstand how science works and, therefore, how futile their efforts are. Detractors seem to believe they are operating under junior debating-society rules where locating any hint of a logical inconsistency in the "theory", or any modern deviation from what they think is Darwinian orthodoxy, is certain to be a fatal blow to the hated "theory". Alas, they hope to disprove Darwin but can only disapprove and look silly and naive.
The biggest impediment to tearing down the edifice of "Darwinism", of course, is reality. Scientists believe that reality has a separate, objective existence that affords no special place to humans. One corollary to this is that objective reality is what it is regardless of our most fervent desires, regardless of our prayers to a supernatural deity to change it, regardless of the stories we tell ourselves over and over about how we would like it to be. Deny reality for your own psychological benefit as needs must, but you will not alter reality by doing so.†
But, suppose there are chinks in the armor of "Darwinism"–isn't that fatal? Well, no. Great ideas that flow into the vast river of science stay if they are useful ideas. Depending on utility they may change, grow, even evolve over time, but they're frequently treated as the same idea. Creators do not have veto power over how their scientific ideas are used, nor how they are changed or updated, although they continue to get the credit for great ideas. The way we understand and describe gravity is nothing recognizable to Newton, but he continues to get credit as the discoverer of "universal gravitation".
But aren't wrong theories, those that have been "disproven" by logical errors or deviations from precise descriptions of reality, immediately discarded as useless? Oh no, far from it. See the aforementioned Newtonian theory of gravity for but one ready example.‡
This is the trade-off: a somewhat inaccurate (or "wrong") but productive theory is of far more use to science than a correct but sterile idea. By "productive" I refer to ideas that lead one to new ideas, new experiments, and new understandings. Compare that notion with what some would have you believe is the undeniable perfection of revealed truth from a divine creator: it is an investigative dead end, it leads to no new ideas whatsoever, it affords no solution beyond the parental disclaimer, "because".
"Why" is the path science follows, not "because". I believe that "why" is the more interesting and the more valuable path to follow, at least when it comes to understanding how the universe works. One may feel free to disagree on its value and utility, of course, but denying its reality is futile.
———-
* The photograph is part of the wonderful collection of "Portraits of Scientists and Inventors" from the Smithsonian Institution, which we have sampled here before and undoubtedly will again and again, photographs they have contributed to the Flickr Commons Project. (The Flickr page; the persistent URL)
† This is probably the source of the calm, know-it-all demeanor that atheists tend to exhibit, and that so inflames those who would consign us prematurely to the flames of hell: all the evidence we see about how the world really operates fails to suggest that a creator-deity exists–not to mention a personal-coach-deity–and no amount of wishful thinking can change reality.
‡ Sometime we'll talk about the contingent nature of scientific "truth" and how uncomfortable that idea is for those with an absolutist predilection.
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science, Reflections
The Cubby House & "A Returning Appetite"
I"m very excited. Jay Neal, my fiction-writing alter-ego, has had his first radio-drama experience–sort of–and it's pretty cool.
Near the beginning of the year I got an email from a new friend named Jack, who had the following to say:
I am one of the creators from the podcast "The Cubby House". The Cubby House is a bear themed podcast based in Melbourne, Australia. I am seeking to add more variety to the show and I would be thrilled if you could allow us to use your prose in the podcast.
Here's the home page of "The Cubby House". In the adorable masthead photograph, Jack is the middle one of the three (and the youngest, also apparently single as I write this.)
Jack was thrilled; I was thrilled. As he tells the story a friend had sent him a reading of my early story "A Returning Appetite", which I once described this way:
Battered by the lingering memory of a failed relationship, the narrator has little taste for his routine meal at a local restaurant, when his anxieties and fantasies are stimulated by his noticing the bear of his dreams, who is eating there as well.
The story turns out to have a very welcome, very happy ending, by the way. This is the story that Jack Fritscher once described as "like Woody Allen on pork chops", which is odd but sort of makes sense once you know what happens in the story. It correctly implies that the narrator (who, by the way, is unnamed in the story) is somewhat neurotic.
The story was beautifully read by yet another cute young cub who goes by the name of Thaneross; he's currently in Toronto. I particularly enjoyed his reading because it was different from the way I would have read it, but it made good sense the way he read it. It's a real treat to hear an interpretation that's different from the one I hear in my head when I'm writing. I learn a lot from listening to what someone else finds in the story that motivates the words. It was like hearing the story for the first time–it seemed all fresh and new. I enjoyed the way the emotions played tag in the narrator's head and the way Thaneross brought that out. Sure, I wrote it and I knew what was happening but it still seemed spontaneous since I got to sit back for a change and just listen to it. I cried tears of joy for the narrator at the end.
I also felt a certain pride that the podcast came with this message:
*Warning: This story is for adult listeners only. It contains coarse language, adult themes, sexual references and sex scenes. Listener discretion is advised*
What good is being a suburban pornographer if there's no shock left in the possibility of "coarse language, adult themes, sexual references and sex scenes"? Woo hoo!
The podcast, dated 5 February 2009, and called "11 – Sleeping Cookie, Returning Appetite", can be found in the archives at The Cubby House and listened to there; the program lasts a little over 19 minutes. They also provide this direct link to the mp3 file. The Cubby House blog has a posting that announces the podcast: ""It's so lonely being lonely" – A special Cubby House is now live."
Not only is this my first ever podcast story, it appears to be the first time that The Cubby House has presented a narrative like this. I'm really pleased with the result, and really pleased that I could contribute.
So, to Thaneross and Jack, and Cookie and Ryan, let me say a big thank you. It was good for me–I hope it was good for you.
Repulsive Forces
I just saw today the table of contents for the February 2009 issue of Physics Today. In the "Search and Discover" section one finds an article with this title:
Casimir forces between solids can be repulsive
It's past my bedtime so this seemed much funnier than it will tomorrow morning. Now I can giggle myself to sleep thinking about Casimir forces and how yucky they are.
(Don't make me come over there and point out that "repulsive", meaning "tending to repel", in this instance means repelling as the north poles of two magnets might repel each other.)
Beard of the Week LXIX: Accordion Virtuosi
This week's beard–not to mention the accordion–belong to virtuoso Swiss accordionist Hans Hassler. Mere hours ago I knew nothing about Mr. Hassler, but thanks to the serendipity of free association with google images,* I now know more.
Here is a thumbnail biography (source):
Hans Hassler was born in Switzerland in 1945. He studied accordion with Mogens Ellegaard in Copenhagen, and later learned to play clarinet, piano, and guitar. Hassler has performed musical styles ranging from opera to Dixieland. He used to perform in Zurcher Kammerorchester, and also recorded with the avant-jazz group Habarigani and — most notably — Mathias Ruegg's Vienna Art Orchestra and Swiss Art Orchestra. Hassler played in Ivano Torre Quintetto, Beat Follmi, and with Gebhard Ullmann during the mid- to late '90s
Sources disagree on whether he's from Chur, Switzerland, or Graubunden (Grisons),† but as those two places are within about 10 km of each other (and also of Davos, which has been much in the news lately because of the World Economic Forum held there annually), I'm not going to fret over the detail. They're all in the mountain valleys of eastern Switzerland, looking very romantic from this distance.
It seems there was some excitement last year because Mr. Hassler finally had recorded a solo album, "Sehr Schnee – Sehr Wald, Sehr" ("Very snow – Very Forest, Very"). (Released by Intakt, who provide a very nice biography of Hassler, in German; translated by google here.) The album evidently exhibits the same eclecticism that has characterized Hassler's career:
Hans Hassler is the true Swiss king of accordion. Born 1945 in Graubunden the musician has kept us in suspense for over 30 years with his zigzag through different scenes: Swiss folk music, jazz, film music, free improvisation or classical interpretation.
Elusive in his stylistics yet unmistakably committed to his own way, Hans Hassler inspires us with his terrifically playful musical sense, with profound humour and startling border crossings. His outside appearance, his waggishness, his virtuosity and his outrageous spectrum from Landler to jazz make any performance of his a great experience. [source]
Without really trying very hard I found that he often plays with other artists on their recordings, for instance, Gebhard Ullmann and Andreas Vollenweider. He's apparently well known in some circles, particularly jazz, for his avoidance of pigeon-holing, stylistically speaking, as well as his notable virtuosity–and his notable beard, of course!
On the nature of Hassler's playing, I enjoyed this excerpt by Stuart Broomer from his review of "Sehr Schnee – Sehr Wald, Sehr" (source):
To say that Hans Hassler plays the accordion, even that he freely improvises on it, does not describe precisely or perhaps in any real sense what the words “play” and “accordion” might mean in this context. Yes, he plays the accordion, in the sense that anyone might play the instrument, but he also plays with the listener, with the putative heritage of the accordion and with whatever expectations the listener might have of the instrument, while rekindling his own associations and memories through the instrument. In this sense Hassler is a meta-accordionist, not simply playing the instrument but playing with any identity that we might impose on it or construct around it. At times here the accordion is literally a thing that makes sounds, thus we get the accelerated panting of the bellows or the clicking of the buttons and keys with notes unarticulated. At other times we get the sheer and sudden power of the accordion as a lap-top imitation of a cathedral organ, as in the 1’14” of “Accordplosion.” But it is also the accordion as instrument of sentiment and farce and object of derision.
You may have noticed already in this space that I have a particular fascination for the accordion, and those who play it. I didn't mention in last week's BoW entry that the film "Music from the Inside Out" had a fantastic segment where the Philadelphia Orchestra was on tour and were all called by a colleague to the lobby of a hall to listen to a fabulous accordion player rendering part of Vivaldi's "Four Season", solo, of course. It was a beautiful and telling segment, perhaps reason enough in itself to see the movie.
Then last year, thanks to a pointer by Chris, we enjoyed hearing the Trondheim Akkordion Ensemble playing the Toccata from Widor's Organ Symphony #5. And have I told the story of the recital we went to in Rome when we visited in 2001 that featured a young Albanian accordion virtuoso who was so fabulous? Well, perhaps another time.
———
*You see, I was originally looking for an image of German composer Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1612), just to see if he had a beard. He does, btw. I had thought to write about the eventful recital we played a week ago, for which Isaac performed the lovely "Fantasy on Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La" by Hassler. But accordions rule, so I'll write later about the recital.
†For what it's worth, search engines find 10 to 100 times the instances of "Hassler accordion chur" over "Hassler accordion graubunden", but I have to admit that I'm not even clear on whether "Graubunden" is a town or region name, and it's rather beside my point, which is why it's in this footnote.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art
Sigurdardóttir May Become Iceland's New PM
Here is an interesting piece of news, cheering to those of us interested in gay & lesbian upward mobility world-wide:
The current Minister for Social Affairs, Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir of the Social Democrats, said she is prepared to assume the position of prime minister as long as she senses that her position is backed by sufficient trust.
Foreign Minister and chairwoman of the Social Democrats Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir proposed that Sigurdardóttir replace Geir H. Haarde, chairman of the Independence Party, as prime minister yesterday, Fréttabladid reports.
[…]
If Sigurdardóttir does become prime minister, she will be the first woman to serve as prime minister in the country’s history and also the first openly gay prime minister in the world.["Sigurdardóttir Ready to Become Iceland's PM", Iceland Review Online, 27 January 2009. Original photo caption: "Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir speaking at parliament. Photo by Páll Kjartansson.".]
I found it reassuring that the news of Sigurdardóttir's potential firsts only were mentioned in the final paragraph of the story.
(via Towleroad)
Beard of the Week LXVIII: Being in the Art
This week's beard belongs to filmmaker Daniel Anker. Here's a convenient biographical sketch (from the 2007 Florida Film Festival, also the source of the photo):
Filmmaker Daniel Anker has been a producer/director of independent feature documentaries for more than a decade. His credits include Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, for which he received an Oscar nomination and an Emmy Award, and Music from the Inside Out, which had a successful theatrical release and was named one of the best films of the year by International Documentary Association. His film Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust has been shown at more than 70 film festivals worldwide and will be released theatrically in the fall. Anker has also produced numerous PBS programs, including the Peabody Award-winning Marsalis on Music. Among his new projects is The Moral Lens, a film about legendary director Sidney Lumet.
We know Mr. Anker a bit better now because we watched his film Music from the Inside Out a week ago, and we enjoyed it very much. It is a well put together documentary featuring members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. (Here is the distributor's page about the film, which has more information, nicely organized; here is the film's official website, all done in that horrible Flash style so that nothing's linkable, but clicking "about the film" and then "music" will get you to a list of all the music played in the film–it's a good selection.)
The marketing for the film leads us to believe that the subject of the film is the question, "What is music?" Well, that's maybe good marketing but it's hardly what the film is really about. Some of the musicians take a stab at answering the question–none very well–but it's hardly central to the film.
In fact it's not a simple film "about" a subject really, but through the interviews and observations, juxtaposed with all the episodes of musicians making music in different venues, the theme that I think emerges is "what is it like to be a musician", a deep question with no simple answer. Being a musician is a complex, life-time commitment, although one can make simple observations like "musicians are people who like to make music". This film goes well beyond that simple and superficial analysis, largely in a nonverbal way, by showing, and I think it largely succeeded in giving a very good impression of what it is like to be a musician.
The concert master (i.e., the principle first violinist) of the Philadelphia Orchestra, David Kim, featured prominently. That was not surprising because he was articulate and had fascinating stories to tell.* The stories largely concerned his mother's great desire for him to become a famous violinist, and his own thwarted quest to be a touring soloist. I'd like to have dinner with Mr. Kim sometime, maybe even play that Schubert Quintet with him.
Speaking of the music, there was a great deal of it in this film. All of the musical pieces were performances by the musicians that were both part of the film and also some of the soundtrack underscoring. It worked well and the music was generally treated sensitively–I hate hearing familiar pieces of classical music mangled, truncated, or spliced randomly to provide soundtrack fodder–with two small exceptions.
At the end of the film the last movement of Brahms' First Symphony was used as the underscoring for the closing credits. I knew, just knew that they would fade out the music right in the middle of the coda, and they did, but I didn't really like it. Sure, the credits had ended but the music hadn't!
The other instance I found a bit jarring was the segment that used the Schubert C Major Quintet (2 violins, viola, 2 'cellos) for the underscoring, but also as a centerpiece featuring Kim playing with colleagues. Cuts were inevitable, but the segments of the music were not used in the order that they appear in the work, and that bothered me.
But please, those are tiny criticisms of a really very good film, a film about music and music making that I think will be very accessible even to classical neophytes, even to people who aren't so sure they like classical music. Although it's the Philadelphia Orchestra, and although "classical" music is what is heard most commonly† throughout the film, it is music making itself, regardless of the music, that is the subject, and that should reach a very wide audience.
One of the featured musicians, Judy Geist,‡ who was the principle viola at the time, is also an artist, a painter, and the connection between art, and color, and music was explored a bit. I didn't find that exploration terribly profound, but I was very moved by Ms. Giest's comment near the end of the film about how music is a performance art:
You're using living people as part of this sculpture of sound. There I am, playing in this mesh of sound, within the rhythm. In fact, all of us–we are in the art.
———-
* Before this became a BoW entry I was intending to write about Kim's stories and make my case that they were interesting–that he was interesting–because he dramatized events, meaning he created a dramatic narrative, a story, rather than simply relating the events in an expository fashion. I felt there was a lesson in there about story-telling, but I haven't pulled it out yet.
†There's also bluegrass and jazz, but my point is not to say "see, it's not all classical!"
‡ Alas, I couldn't find much internet presence for Ms. Geist at all, which irritated me because the few glimpses I got of her art left me wanting to see more.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art
Carol on Media Bias
When Republicans are in power, the media explain their bias and deference toward conservatives by saying they are what's going on, they are in power, and a lot of them have a certain reverence for the office and power. But when Democrats are in power, they explain their hostility to Democrats and continuing preference for conservative guests on their shows and excessive quotations from detractors of the Democrats and liberals as their willingness to stand up to power and hold them accountable. See, it has nothing at all to do with a bias toward conservatives and Republicans.
[Avedon Carol, "Baby steps", The Sideshow, 24 January 2009.]
Solvency Through Good Health II
Last year, on 8 October 2008, I posted a blog article called "Solvency Through Good Health", in which I suggested that, for a number of reasons, implementing a nation, single-payer health plan in the US now would be good for America and be a good economic stimulus plan, since it would provide much-needed services throughout the economy and particularly to people in the most urgent need. Should I point out that I proposed this idea a month before our national election and before the "economic crisis" developed to quite the proportions it now exhibits?
Happily, it has come to my attention (via The Sideshow) that the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association has released a study supporting this idea: "Single Payer IS Economic Stimulus: NNOC/CNA" (bigchin, Daily Kos, 14 January 2009).
Science & Religion: Compatible?
These two excerpts are from a longish book review by Jerry A. Coyne, of two books, Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, by Karl W. Giberson; and Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller. The piece is called "Seeing and Believing" (The New Republic, post date 4 February 2009 but read on 23 January 2009). His topic is the fundamental irreconcilability of science and religion.
Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature. There was a time when God was a part of science. Newton thought that his research on physics helped clarify God's celestial plan. So did Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised our current scheme for organizing species. But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea "God did it" has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the Mechanique Celeste. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon taunted him, "Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace answered, famously and brusquely: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la," "I have had no need of that hypothesis." And scientists have not needed it since.
[…]
In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species. Since no such facts have ever appeared, we continue to accept evolution as true. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer. There is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations. Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God's existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it. And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is, as Giberson asserts, good, loving, and just? If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will.
In: All, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
Dowland, 1995–2009
I"m sad to report that Dowland, our first-arrived greyhound, died peacefully in his sleep early Tuesday morning, 20 January 2009. As Isaac wrote to some friends
He was 13 years, 7 months and 3 days in this world, and was with us for 10 years, 7 months & 7 days. We miss him already, but we are glad that he died peacefully at home, in his own room.
His favorite room in the house was our library. With its south-facing windows, winter sun streamed in during the mornings; that was Dowland's comfort spot, and the place where he died. The photograph was taken on the occasion of his 13th birthday, 17 June 2008.
Dowland, whose track name was "Don't Point", came to us directly from his kennel in Florida, not long after his last winning race on 4 June 1997. Looking at this racing record I see that he only ran at three tracks: Melbourne, Fagler, and Mardi Gras. I was also interested to see that he won the first race he ever ran, finishing 503 meters in 31.53 seconds. His winning time in his last win was 31.07 seconds, even though he was 2.5 kg heavier. In his career he ran a total of 130 races, winning 15.
In his pedigree there are a few ancestors of note: His paternal grandsire ("Dutch Bahama") and maternal great-grandsire ("Downing") both appear to have been racers of some distinction.
With a track name like "Don't Point", you can see why we changed his name when he came to us: would we call him "Don't" for short? Hardly. Anyway, we had decided to try to find a name with an initial 'D' sound, and we thought and thought until the obvious stuck us and we named him for one of our favorite composers, John Dowland (1563 – 1626). Why obvious? For some years we'd thought of John Dowland's big hit, Lacrimae Antiquae (sometimes sung with the words "Flowe My Teares"), to be "our song".
Dowland was quite good natured and pretty easy to get along with; he was never unabashedly cheerful, but rarely sullen. His only serious neurosis, the bane of existence really, was stairs.
Like all greyhounds newly arrived from the track, he'd never seen stairs and had to be taught to use them. It was a learning experience he hated passionately. Perhaps the experience traumatized him because he never used the stairs as easily or unselfconsciously as all of our other greyhounds. It was always a trial and the only thing that got him to the top sometimes was his loyalty to us and the cookie awaiting him at the top. As he aged stairs seemed to loom ever larger as a hurdle to the point that two steps at the back door became a major nuisance he had to face whenever bathroom needs called. In his last few months he lived solely in his first-floor domain and seemed more content for it.
He had a noble aspect and handsome coloring, with ears that were uincharacteristically erect. His eyes always sparkled with alert curiosity. Technically his color was "red brindle", but his brindling was so slight–a few dark areas and one or two indistinct stripes–that he looked more red with fur slightly soiled, as though he'd crawled under a truck with a leaky oil pan.
Those who know greyhounds know how little sound they typically make. I think it was three months or more after he arrived before we even heard him bark, something that he very rarely did unless he got excited during a game of "rabbit".* There were two dogs in the neighborhood who sometimes warranted barks, too, when encountered on walks, otherwise he was a friend to all.
Despite his silent demeanor, I had become accustomed in the last few months to hearing the sound of his increasingly heavy-footed walking downstairs as he moved from one of his favored sleeping spots to the other one.
Tonight the house seems unnaturally quiet.
—–
* A game we invented for him in which he tried to catch a small stuffed toy tied to a cord that Isaac swung around his head. It was called "rabbit" regardless of the toy tied to the string–we always thought of it as a substitute for the mechanical rabbit that greyhounds chase during races. When the rabbit would land in the grass, Dowland would often try to scare it out by barking at it.
Beard of the Week LXVII: The Age of the Sun
This week's majestic beard belongs to Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin* (1824 – 1907) or, simply, Lord Kelvin as he's known to us in the physical sciences. This is the same "Kelvin" as in the SI unit "Kelvins", the degrees of the absolute thermodynamic temperature scale.
The photograph was taken c. 1900 by T. & R. Annan & Sons. I love the title given the photograph by the National Galleries of Scotland: "Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin, 1824 – 1907. Scientist, resting on a binnacle and holding a marine azimuth mirror".
A binnacle, Wikipedia tells me, is a box on the deck of a ship that holds navigational instruments ready for easy reference. One reason Kelvin might be leaning on one is suggested by this bit from the article on "binnacle"
In 1854 a new type of binnacle was patented by John Gray of Liverpool which directly incorporated adjustable correcting magnets on screws or rack and pinions. This was improved again when Lord Kelvin patented in the 1880s another system of compass and which incorporated two compensating magnets.
Kelvin also patented the "marine azimuth mirror" (see the description of "azimuth mirror" from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History), so the photograph has narrative intent. It seems that Kelvin was an active and successful inventor.
I like this understated biography of Kelvin from the National Galleries of Scotland website (link in first footnote), where it accompanies the photograph:
A child prodigy, William Thomson went to university at the age of eleven. At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy in Glasgow where he set up the first physics laboratory in Great Britain and proved an inspiring teacher. He primarily researched thermodynamics and electricity. On the practical side he was involved in the laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable. He was also the partner of a Glasgow firm that made measuring instruments from his own patents.
"He primarily researched thermodynamics and electricity" is a bit of an understatement! Around the time this photograph was taken (c. 1900), Kelvin was pretty much the scientific authority in the world, the great voice of science, the scientist whose opinion on every matter scientific was virtually unassailable.
That unassailability was a huge problem for (at least) Charles Darwin and his theory of common descent by means of natural selection. The crux of the problem was the answer to this question: how old is the Earth?
These days we are quite accustomed to the idea that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. At the beginning of the 19th century is was very commonly believed that the Earth was only several thousand years old: Bishop Usher's calculated date of creation, 23 October 4004 BC, was seen at the time as a scholarly refinement of what everyone already pretty much knew to be true.
Perhaps the big idea growth during the 1800s was the dawning realization of the great antiquity of the Earth. This was accompanied by the realization that fossils might actually be animal remains of some sort; the emergence of geology as a science; and the concept of "uniformitarianism" (an interesting article on the topic), so central to geology, that geological processes in the past, even the deep past, were probably very much like geological processes in action today, so that the geological history of the Earth–and of fossil remains!–could be made sense of.†
Throughout the 19th century discovery after discovery seemed to demand an ever-older Earth. I can imagine that an element of the scientific zeitgeist that precipitated Darwin's ideas on natural selection as a mechanism for evolution was this growing realization that the Earth might be very, very, very old and that something so remarkably slow as he knew natural selection would be, might be possible. In fact, his ideas went further out on the intellectual limb: he realized that it was necessary that the Earth be much, much older than was currently thought.
In fact, he staked his reputation on the great antiquity of the Earth. This was the critical prediction of his theory, really: the Earth must be vastly older than people thought at the time or else his theory of common descent by natural selection was wrong. It was a bold, seemingly foolhardy claim that he seemed certain to lose.
He was right, of course, but things looked grim at the time and his reasoning was not vindicated by physics until well after his death.
The biggest roadblock to widespread acceptance of the idea of an Earth old enough to allow evolution of humankind through natural selection was none other than Lord Kelvin.
Calculating the age of the Earth looked at the time to be a very challenging problem. But, if there was one thing Kelvin knew, it was that the Earth could not be older than the Sun, and he believed he could calculate the age of the Sun. He was the master of physics, particularly thermodynamics, so all he had to do was add up the sources of energy that contributed to the energy we saw coming from the Sun and figure out how long it might have been going on.
But what were the sources of the Sun's heat? Kelvin quickly concluded that it could not be any sort of chemical burning, like coal in a fireplace. There simply could not be enough coal. To keep this long story short, Kelvin finally settled on two leading possibilities. One was the energy that came from gravitation contraction of the primordial matter that formed the sun, in which case the sun heated up a great deal originally and then spent eons radiating away its heat. The other possibility that might contribute was the gravitational energy of meteors falling into the sun. (Here's an interesting and brief exposition of the arguments: S. Gavin, J. Conn, and S. P. Karrer, "The Age of the Sun: Kelvin vs. Darwin".)
Kelvin published his thoughts in an interesting, and very readable paper, called "On the Age of the Sun’s Heat" , Macmillan's Magazine, volume 5 (March 5, 1862), pp. 288-293. (html version; pdf version) In the conclusion to that paper Kelvin wrote:
It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years. As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation.
What an irritant for Darwin! That was not nearly enough time!
These days it is a clichéd joke to say of something that "it violates no known laws of physics", but that's the punchline for this entire controversy. Kelvin, naturally, had to search for sources of the Sun's heat that violated no known laws of physics as they were known at the time, but there were new laws of physics lurking in the wings.
Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Kelvin published his paper in 1862. Radioactivity was only discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896. The radioactive decay of elements was not recognized for some time as a possible source of solar energy, but as understanding advanced it was realized that the transmutation of one element into another through radioactive decay involved a loss of mass–the materials before and after could be weighed.
The next domino fell in 1906, a year before Kelvin's death, when Einstein published his famous equation, 
, a consequence of his special theory of relativity. Understanding dawned that the loss of mass was related to a release of energy through the radioactive decay.
Our modern knowledge that the sun is powered by nuclear fusion through a process that releases enormous amounts of energy via fusion cycles (interesting, mildly technical paper on its discovery and elucidation) that consume hydrogen atoms to create helium atoms, and then consume those products to produce some heavier elements, was still decades in the future (generally credited to Hans Bethe's paper published in 1939).
But the message was clear: here was a possible new source of energy for the sun that Kelvin knew nothing about but that could vastly increase the likely age of the Sun.
To finish this part of the story, here is an excerpt from John Gribbin's The Birth of Time : How Astronomers Measured the Age of the Universe. (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1999. 237 pages.), a fascinating page-turner of a popular science book. (Book note forthcoming.)
If the whole Sun were just slightly radioactive, it could produce the kind of energy that we see emerging from it in the form of heat and light. In 1903, Pierre Curie and his colleague Albert Laborde actually measured the amount of heat released by a gram of radium, and found that it produced enough energy in one hour to raise the temperature of 1.3 grams of water from 0°C to its boiling point. Radium generated enough heat to melt its own weight of ice in an hour–every hour. In July that year, the English astronomer William Wilson pointed out that in that case, if there were just 3.6 grams of radium distributed in each cubic metre of the sun's volume it would generate enough heat to explain all of the energy being radiated from the Sun's surface today. It was only later appreciated, as we shall see, that the "enormous energies" referred to by Chamberlin are only unlocked in a tiny region at the heart of the sun, where they produce all of the heat required to sustain the vast bulk of material above them.
The important point, though, is that radioactivity clearly provided a potential source of energy sufficient to explain the energy output of the Sun. In 1903, nobody knew where the energy released by radium (and other radioactive substances) was coming from; but in 1905, another hint at the origin of the energy released in powering both the Sun and radioactive decay came when Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which led to the most famous equation in science,
Even without knowing how a star like the Sun might do the trick of converting mass into energy, you can use Einstein's equation to calculate how much mass has to be used up in this way every second to keep the Sun shining. Overall, about 5 million tonnes of mass have to be converted into pure energy each second to keep the sun shining. This sounds enormous, and it is, by everyday standards–roughly the equivalent of turning five million large elephants into pure energy every second. But the Sun is so big that it scarcely notices this mass loss. If it has indeed been shining for 4.5 billion years, as the radiometric dating of meteorite samples implies, and if it has been losing mass at this furious rate for all that time, then its overall mass has only diminished by about 4 percent since the Solar System formed.
By 1913, Rutherford was commenting that "at the enormous temperatures of the sun, it appears possible that a process of transformation may take place in ordinary elements analogous to that observed in the well-known radio-elements," and added, "the time during which the sun may continue to emit heat at the present rate may be much longer than the value computed from ordinary dynamical data [the Kelvin-Helmholtz timescale]." [pp. 36–38]
Kelvin was not always right.
———-
* I've taken this image from the Flickr Commons set uploaded by the National Galleries of Scotland, and cropped it some from the original: Source and National Galleries page.
† The history of these ideas in the context of geology as an emerging science is very ably traced in Simon Winchester's The Map that Changed the World : William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (my book note).
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science
A Murmuration
For a couple of months I kept track of a Language Log article about "talking" starlings (Mark Liberman, "Vocal mimicry on the web", Language Log, 1 November 2008), not so much for all the interesting scholarship on vocal mimicry contained therein, but because of the amusing video that reminded me of something, a tiny missed opportunity for a bit of scientific didacticism.
First, the video. It's called "Talking Starling — Spooky", and it is a bit spooky. Watch and listen.
That starlings murmur like this, spooking and odd though it seems, apparently is something that has been observed long enough in folk history for it to provide "a murmuration of starlings" as a collective phrase. (But far be it from me to usurp the work of the Language Loggers; I mean no linguification.)
I have not personally known this since forever, however; I only learned about starling vocalizations when I was reading the very entertaining and informative "Despicable Species", by Janet Lembke last summer. I wrote about the book here and in a book note.
At the time I praised the scienticity of the book–I still think highly of it–but there was one little bit in the book that bothered me a little at the time, but that I chose not to criticize, to avoid giving the criticism more weight than it deserved.
In her chapter on starlings, Lembke mentioned this phenomenon of starling's vocalizations that sound rather like human mutterings, very much like human speech that one can't quite make out. Lembke told an amusing story suggesting that starlings learned to murmur from sitting on telephone wires and hearing the faint conversations emanating from the wires, which sounds they mimicked.
It's a lovely poetic, folk conceit, but it's a poor and unlikely scientific explanation, since it is not the sound of speech that is being transmitted along the wires. What is carried on the wires is electrical impulses that originated in a microphone and can cause a speaker to recreate the original sounds that stimulated the microphone in the speakers handset. These electrical impulses in the telephone wires would not sound at all like speech unless one were listening with an induction coil and a small speaker. It seems unlikely that starlings have the technology.
Still, I thought the story was amusing and charming. I also thought Ms. Lembke presented the story with a little literary wink between the lines to let us know that she didn't really believe it either.
But maybe she didn't wink; maybe she did believe it. To be honest, I couldn't tell for sure but, since I had very positive feelings about the book otherwise, I just didn't mention it.
But now I will, simply because the video is amusing and somewhat spooky, and it reminded me of Ms. Lembke's charming story about murmuring starlings.
[added a few hours later:] Isaac tells me that in certain quarters a gathering of religious–probably Benedictine–is known as "a murmur of monks". He explains that this is likely because there is but one absolute injunction in the Rule of Benedict: "No murmuring!"
In: All, Books, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Sharpton on California's Proposition 8
It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when the they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being delegated into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.
There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people’s bedrooms and claim that God sent you.
–Al Sharpton in remarks at the Tabernacle Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 11 January 2009
[quoted in Matt Schafer, "Sharpton decries churches pushing Prop. 8", Southern Voice, 12 January 2009.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Faaabulosity
Screaming Women! Jagged Lines!
As I've mentioned, we've been enjoying watching (on DVD) Simon Schama's BBC-produced series "Power of Art". The last episode was about Mark Rothko and his commission for the Seagram murals (June 6, 1958 in this chronology). I still tend towards thinking Rothko overrated but I was happy to hear more about him and his work from a very appreciative viewpoint; I may change my view someday.
But what caught my ear for this little posting was something at the end of the episode about Picasso and "Guernica". (Yes, you might notice that watching that episode provided the inspiration for this week's Beard of the Week.)
"Guernica" is Picasso's masterpiece, a painting of tremendous size (12 by 26 feet) and scope that only seems to accumulate visual power and emotional depth as it ages. (For a short introduction, this from PBS; for a more in-depth introduction, rent the third disk in Schama's series.)
A tapestry reproduction of the painting hangs in the UN, in the hallway outside the security council room. It's a popular spot for holding press conferences.
In fact, it was the spot chosen for Colin Powell's press conference on 5 February 2003 following his disingenuous presentation to the security council about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (official State Department transcript).
For this occasion–and this occasion only–the tapestry was completely covered by a plain blue curtain. That's the fact. Interpretations range from it was merely to provide a neutral background for television cameras (never been necessary in any previous or later press conferences) to it was another maneuver on the part of the Bush administration to lower the aggressive, war-mongering tone. (For some discussion: David Coher, "Hidden Treasures: What's so controversial about Picasso's Guernica?", Slate, 8 February 2003.) Naturally I side with the latter camp.
Regardless of the reasons, I enjoyed Shama's retelling of the event enough to make this transcription and share it with you.
Here's the old thing, comfortably settled in Madrid, and just when you think it's a magnificent relic–what can it possibly have to say to us in our video-saturated, digitally enhanced age?–something comes along to awaken from these old black-and-white characters the tempestuous force of their original creation.
In February, 2003, the American delegation to the United Nations decided to make its pessimistic case for the likelihood of armed intervention in Iraq.
Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council was to be followed by a press conference. And then, at the last minute, someone noticed something inconvenient about the location: there was a tapestry reproduction of "Guernica" hanging on the wall.
Oh, dear. Screaming women. Burning houses. Dead babies. Jagged lines!
"Cover it up," said the TV people, "it's too distracting."
So "Guernica" was shrouded by a big blue drape.
The news handlers could have said, "Hold on a minute! We could show the painting. After all, this is what tyrants do: death — suffering — misery!"
But they didn't.
However you massaged it, there was something about the way that damned picture would look on the news that would upset people. Much better to cover it up.
It was, I suppose, the ultimate backhand compliment to the power of art: You're the mightiest country in the world, you can throw your armies around, get rid of dictators, but — hey! — don't tangle with a masterpiece.
[Simon Schama, "Simon Schama's Power of Art: Picasso", BBC, 2006.]
For me I think it's the ambiguity in his use of "tyrants" that really gives this segment its tanginess. Well, that and the bit about "jagged lines"!
In: All, Music & Art, Reflections
Beard of the Week LXVI: Cubism
This week's beard belongs to art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), seen here in a portrait painted by Pablo Picasso in 1910. The painting is currently in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow.
When I was much younger I could get quite excited about modern art and the avant garde. Now it seems more like youthful indiscretion and I'm not sure what I saw in it all (although I don't think I ever had positive feelings about serialism in music). It's not so much that I think it was all "ugly" ("beauty", as such, has not that much to do with my personal aesthetic theories) as in a number of cases I'm not sure it was worth the effort of getting excited,* although I still have soft spots and friendly feelings of familiarity with earlier modernists I became acquainted with at the time.
I think now that one of the things that disenchanted me the most was cubism. I remember being thrilled at the idea that cubist painters were trying to look at reality in a new way, that all those apparent facets in their paintings were meant as different planes of the subject so that in a single, flat painting it was as though we were looking at many sides of the subject simultaneously. What a cool idea!
However, the more I looked, the less I saw. And now, in my advancing old age, cubist paintings don't look multi-faceted or multi-sided; they look more like badly designed jigsaw puzzles, bunches of gratuitous, geometric lines slashing across the image plane with the goal of obfuscating more than revealing. They still seem kind of pretty sometimes, kind of silly at other times, but mostly an exploitation of a gimmick instead of a revelation of seeing. Alas.
It turns out that there are interesting facets to M. Bollard's life even if the facets in the Picasso portrait are not so interesting. The photograph is documentation that he did, indeed, have a beard. (Here is an interesting short discussion of the Picasso portrait.)
Vollard was certainly a central figure in the birth of modernism. He opened his art gallery in Paris, Rue Laffitte, in 1893. Among the artists he represented were Cézanne, Gauguin, Maillol, Picasso, Renoir, Rouault, Rousseau, and Van Gogh.
There is also mystery surrounding Vollard's life–or rather, his death! A fascinating article by David D’Arcy, called "The Mysterious Mr. Slomovic" (artnet, undated; accessed 12 January 2009) describes a shady character from Yugoslavia (as it was then)–one Erich Slomovic–who, following Vollard's death in a car crash that some apparently think may well have been murder, somehow ended up with a good part of Vollard's collection.
Once Vollard dies in a car crash in 1939, the dispersal of his art holdings becomes complicated. Vollard’s estate was split between his brother, Lucien Vollard, and Madelaine De Galea, Ambroise Vollard’s longtime mistress and fellow reunionnaise — both were born in the remote Ile de la Réunion, a French colony in the Indian Ocean. But hundreds of works from Vollard’s inventory also ended up in the hands of Erich Slomovic, a young Croatian Jew who had come to Paris in the mid-1930s and befriended the aging dealer.
Complicated! Perhaps there are more interesting facets to the portrait of M. Vollard than I had realized.
———-
* This was more than evident to me last year when I saw the Whitney Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, and laughed in deprecating manner at all the cutting-edge modern art.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art
Who Knows Your Car Best?
Here are two tips from a list of ten to help us get along with our cars better:
2) Learn your service schedule. The people who built your car know it best.
8) Listen for any strange sounds or vibrations. You know your vehicle better than anyone.
[Trevor Traina, "Easy Ways to Get More from Your Car", Huffington Post, 12 January 2009.]
So, who really knows best, the people who built my car or me?
Is it any wonder that this reads to me like vacuous, cliched writing that really doesn't have anything to say that I need to listen to?
In: All, Feeling Peevish, Writing
Why I'll Never Be Voted…
…best gay blog: I couldn't care less about the Golden Globe Awards. I didn't even know they were happening and I'm not very clear on what they are, nor do I care. Sorry–not.
But I do know some show tunes. Does that count?
In: Faaabulosity, Personal Notebook
Perigee Moon
This just in from Spaceweather.com:
FULL MOON ALERT! This weekend's full Moon is the biggest and brightest of 2009. It's a "perigee Moon" as much as 50,000 km closer to Earth than other full Moons we'll see later this year. Perigee moonlight shining through icy winter air can produce beautiful halos, coronas, moondogs and other atmospheric optics phenomena. Sample photos are featured on today's [9 December 2009, if you need to access the archives] edition of Spaceweather.com.
This moon's size and brilliance will rival the perigee moon of last December, which was just about the same distance away. Science@NASA has more information: "Biggest Full Moon of the Year: Take 2".
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
I Didn't Vote for a Tie
Now, when we fight Warren in California, we are going to hear, ‘Oh, yeah, but Obama picked him for the inaugural.’ He doesn’t deserve that honor. And I don’t want to hear that the other clergyman at the inaugural, Reverend [Joseph] Lowery, supports gay rights. I didn’t vote for a tie in the election.
[Barney Frank, quoted in Jim Burroway, "Barney Frank on Rick Warren, Obama, and the 'Gay Agenda'", Box Turtle Bulletin, 7 January 2009.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Faaabulosity