Pollyanna with birthdays and more

Pollyanna  is making her way through the week of birthdays in the family, three in six days, one per generation.  The ages reached were
 21

Joey

50

Hadass

and 81

Saba

 and she is enjoying herself. She herself is pushing 100, but book heroines age very slowly.
Today Pollyanna wants to show you a new aspect of solar system beauty, Comet Hale-Bopp that came near the Earth in 1997, discovered independently by Hale and Bopp in 1995.

Comet Hale-Bopp, C1995 O1, sports two tails here, a blue ion tail and a white dust tail. 

Both tails are formed by material ejected from the nucleus, which is mostly water ice and dust. The ice is heated by the comet's approach to the sun, and it sublimates, going directly from a solid to a gas, bypassing the liquid form. As the material from the nucleus is ejected it forms a gigantic cloud around the nucleus which we see as the coma. It then separates into the blue ion gas tail, and the dust tail.
There is a tragic story connected to Comet Hale-Bopp.  The  mass suicide of 39 members of a cult knows as Heaven's Gate was linked to the comet.  They believed that there was a spacecraft in the wake of the comet that was going to whisk them away from the Earth.  It is a pathetic story.  It also brought out of the woodwork all kinds of  UFO buffs who swear that the US government is hiding information about alien contacts.  ET call home!!
WHITNEY HOUSTON R.I.P.
Last week Titan mentioned the passing of Whitney Houston briefly.  We would like to add a few comments and links.  She had a turbulent life, but she left a legacy.  We append a biography and embed a video of her signature song I Will Always Love You.



It is sad that her life may have ended because of drug abuse.  We append a list of her YouTube instances and invite you to listen again to that golden voice.  Lord rest her.  I often wonder why so many stars, not only in music, but in sports, film, theater, whatever, die young, burned out and exploited to death.  Think of Marilyn Monroe for a moment.   David Zirin touches on it in his comments on her death.
MEDICAL PROGRESS IN AFGHANISTAN
We are glad to see that medical services in Afghanistan are showing some improvement as as reported by Justin Forsyth of Save the Children.  Nonetheless, terrible things are happening to children in that sad country including recruitment as  fighters and suicide bombers. 

In addition, girls are used as payment for misdeeds of elders and protection of family honor.  The ghastly custom of baad is described in detail in a New York Times report.

Andrea Bruce for The New York Times

Shakila, 10, was abducted and held for about a year as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as "baad."

FORCED EVICTION PREVENTED
Pollyanna is glad to share with you the news that a forced eviction

Amnesty's Makmid Kamara received a distress call from activists in Port Harcourt @Amnesty International

in a neighborhood in Port Harcourt, Nigeria was stopped at least temporarily because of an Urgent Action taken by Amnesty International.  It shows that there is a point in protesting human rights violations.  Read the details.

DEGRADATION OF WOMEN IN JUDAISM 
Pollyanna as usual has a rant about abuse of women, in this case how Orthodox Jews treat women, be  it the back of the bus, the prohibition to sing in public, the isolation of women in the public sphere or the attribution of impurity to the female persona per se.  Yossi Sarid points out to us that the extremism that we see today is not an aberration, but the true nature of Jewish Orthodoxy.  Read and raise your voice in disgust.

WOMEN IN THE MEDIA
Pollyanna is pleased to call your attention to a new Web site that links up the sites concerned with the presentation and status of women in mass media.

BOOZE AND INSPIRATION
We are told in a study reported in Science News that a shot of alcohol can be helpful to our scientific and artistic endeavors.  Getting a buzz from booze  may boost creativity.  Men who drank themselves tipsy solved more problems demanding verbal resourcefulness in less time than sober guys did, a new study finds. This is a real result reported in a real scientific journal Consciousness and Cognition..  The result is most interesting, but was known in ancient times, as seen in the worship of Bacchus, the God of Wine.

Reni, Drinking Bacchus 1623

We quote a from a  history of alcoholic beverages:
"Alcoholic beverages date back to the very early part of man's history. Many archaeologists believe that wines made from grapes have existed for more than 10,000 years and that drinks such as mead and beer have existed for even longer. Throughout its history, alcohol has been used socially for many diverse purposes, such as calming feuds, giving courage in battle, sealing pacts, celebrating festivals, and seducing lovers. Historians speculate that prehistoric nomads may have made beer from grain and water before learning to make bread. The Celts, Ancient Greeks, the Norse, Egyptians, and Babylonians all have records of production and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Alcohol was included in the Egyptian burial provisions for the journey to the afterlife."
With regard to seduction via alcohol, Robert Benchley strongly recommended the "fuddle-duddle" method with the caveat that the seducer should remain sober enough to perform.  The great American poet Ogden Nash wrote "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" while Shakespeare warns "Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things . . . nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance."  Macbeth 2. 3
Bacchus (vd. The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.) himself managed quite well with Ariadne

Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-3: Titian’s masterpiece has been endlessly drawn upon by artists down the centuries

 and we may be sure that wine played a role.  We refer you to a compendium of quotes about alcohol which you might find edifying.  We like the idea that, as stated above, prehistoric nomads may have made beer from grain and water before learning to make bread.   Priorities indeed!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GALILEO!!
Galileo Galilei (born February 15, 1564-died Jan. 8, 1642)

Galileo

was an Italian scientist who supported Copernicanism, the idea that earth orbits the sun. Galileo defended his views in "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems." For doing so, he was tried by the Roman Inquisition, found "suspect of heresy" and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. His findings changed our world view for all time.   Our intellectual debt to him is enormous.  For our book review we refer you to Dava Sobol's Galileo's Daughter , reviewed in the New York Times by Alan Lightman(link is problematic) and also by Laura Sorensen at a literary Web site . It is worthy of note that books dealing with the motion of the Earth were removed from the Index of the Catholic Church in 1822, a true salute to modernism.
SCIENTIFIC FRAUD
Bob Park calls our attention to the issue of scientific fraud.  On Sunday, February 12, the CBS series 60 Minutes reminded us of the largely unfulfilled promise of television to expose the foolishness and fraud that diminishes our brief lives. If you did not see Sunday's program I urge you to obtain a copy. Much earlier, many of us had followed with growing wonder the news on television as Dr. Anil Potti reported amazing progress in tailoring chemotherapy to a patient's own genetic makeup, with remarkable results. However, as the science community often tells the public, it's not a discovery until it's been independently confirmed. The willingness of researchers to open their findings to the entire scientific community is what gives science its success and credibility. In this case, it could not be confirmed and may be one of the biggest medical research frauds of all time. Unfortunately, it was not the first time that Duke University had fallen victim to foolish and fraudulent science.  The broadcast is  excerpted here.
BE A VALENTINE...
This week we had Valentine's Day which is one of the ways corporations get their hands into our pockets.  We link you to  an article from The Nation dealing with love and economics by Samhita Mukhopadhyay who is the Executive Editor of Feministing.com and the author of Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life.   Hadass was born on Valentine's Day and my suggestion to name her Valentina was brutally vetoed.  Pollyanna agrees with the veto retroactively.  In Saudi Arabia, celebrating the day can get you into big trouble with the religious police.  The King of Saudi Arabia appears to model himself himself on Gilbert and Sullivan's  Mikado with firm legislation against flirting.  Our friends at XKCD found the holiday difficult to resolve this year.

Certainly we do not think much of a relationship that depends on buying things for one another.  
Whatever we may think of these manufactured "Days" be it Mother's, Father's, Valentine or whatever, they are no worse than the various nationalistic "Days" that are cooked up to make us patriotic.  Nationalism is best described by a quote attributed to (but not confirmed) Jules Renard" A nation is defined by a false history and hatred of its neighbors."  He is also credited with the statement that a cold in the head causes less distress than an idea, which is alas true.
THE NATION
We are regular readers of the The Nation and find it very relevant.  We received this about the history of the struggle against racism in our email and would like to share it with you.
The Nation's editors -- starting with its abolitionist founders -- have always provided space for those persistent and too-often lonely voices inveighing against the evils of racial injustice. In this archival slide show, we present a small sampling of articles highlighting issues of race and civil rights from The Nation's past 147 years with original contributions by Martin Luther King, Jr, Langston Hughes, Howard Zinn, James Baldwin and many others.
 FILM: THE LADY
A film entitled The Lady has been released.  It is a biotopic dealing with the life of Aung Sung Suu Kyi of Burma.  The film has had mixed reviews, both down  and up.  It is not yet available on DVD, but I hope that will happen soon.
OUR LIGHTER VEIN
If any of you have wondered why both Pollyanna and Titan try to end their blogs with something humorous, here is a good reason, again from  Jules Renard:
"We are in the world to laugh. In purgatory or in hell we shall no longer be able to do so. And in heaven it would not be proper."  If there is a Heaven and we are there, we certainly intend to laugh.  Of course, we are told that in Britain it is not considered proper to tell jokes on Wednesday, because by Sunday the Brits will have caught on and laugh in church, which is inappropriate...

Then we have Twitter which is sometimes to the point and sometimes a showcase for group idiocy.  XKCD gives us an example about how a panic can spread via Twitter; (click on image to enlarge)

This bit from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is only funny up to a point.  Anyone who has seen kids (vid. our grandkids for example) with video games can appreciate where the limit lies. Click on image to enlarge.

Pollyanna with groundhog and Super Bowl

Pollyanna says hi and that she is very glad to be back with you.  She, Titan and YandA are all sniffling and coughing with terminal colds, but we are all responsible and will not give you poor sufferers what the NFL calls a bye week.  We are gearing up to stay awake on Sunday night to watch the New England Patriots and the New York Giants battle in Super Bowl XLVI.  We can hear you squares and snobs yawning and we suspect that the Y of YandA will opt out, but we will hang in.  Pollyanna even has a prediction, but we shall see.

Pollyanna predicts Giants 35-31

Titan and I will try to persuade her to support the Patriots because Mr. Kraft is such a classy guy and even supports football for high schools in Israel.  BTW, grandson Arad (#20) is a corner back for the Kfar Saba Hawks.

 
GROUNDHOG DAY
Pollyanna also wants to wish you all a Happy Groundhog Day, and to tell you that at 7:25 a.m. Thursday morning EST, amidst mostly cloudy skies, and temperatures in the low 30s (~-0 C), Groundhog Phil saw his shadow in the little town of Punxsutawney, PA.

Famed weather prognosticating groundhog Punxsutawney Phil prepares to make his annual weather prediction on Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, on the 126th Groundhog Day, February 2, 2012. Phil saw his shadow, signaling six more weeks of winter.

Source: Reuters

According to folklore, Phil’s sighting of his own shadow means there will be 6 more weeks of winter. Had Phil not seen his shadow, it would have meant “there will be an early spring.”  For more details on rodent meteorology, read on.
We must confess that when we worked as forecasters or taught meteorology at University, we did not make much use of Phil and his prognosticating ability.  Maybe we were overlooking something important.  BTW, Groundhog Day was an excellent  film.
IN MEMORIAM   We share the grief of the people of Egypt for the victims of the football violence.  The senseless football riots that took the lives of 74 people in Port Said last Wednesday have led into a continuation of the violence.  BBC reports  that at least four more people have been killed and that thousands are gathering in Tahrir Square.  The actions taken by the government in the wake of the incidents appear to be woefully inadequate.  We have heard calls for as much as the resignation of Tantawi himself and his military junta.
OUR FEMINIST RANT
Before we move on to the glad stuff that we all love, Pollyanna wants to let fly on some issues involving women and girls.  In this area, as in matters of the environment, she is as political as brother Titan. 
First we want to deal with the painful issue of child marriage.  Every year, all over the world, 10 million girls are forcibly married before the age of 18, many as young as 12 years old. That is more than 25,000 girls a day. “I knew that there was an institution of child marriage,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. “But I was devastated to discover how widely it occurs, and on such a huge scale.”  Tutu is a member of an organization called The Elders, which has announced an ambitious goal to stop this abuse of girls “in one generation.”   The Elders are mounting a campaign and we wish to express our support and to call for yours.  Please click on this link and become involved.

Girls in Rajasthan, India, where no child marriages have taken place, say villagers, since they learned of the dangers. Photo: Graham Crouch/The Elders

The other issue involves R., an employee of PM Natanyahu's office who was reportedly stalked and sexually harassed by her boss.  The case is being referred to the  Civil Service Commission for disciplinary action instead of to the police.  The lady refuses to testify, most probably out of fear for her future.  The women whose testimony sent former President Katzav to seven years in prison are essentially unemployable.

It is sad that even in the presumably enlightened countries of the West, women can still be subject to degradation and abuse.  What is even more outrageous is the large number of women who regard this as acceptable.  This is not only a question of religious women who accept the idea that they must not be too visible lest men become overly aroused sexually by their presence, but even in secular circles.   A well known female Israeli media person,  Ayala Hasson, 

Ayala Hasson speaking at a media conference recently.
Photo by: Nir Keidar

saw nothing wrong with the transfer of an attractive woman from her position because her boss became obsessed with her.  Hasson added the "solution" had been to transfer the woman "very quietly, what might be called the supportive environment moved the 'candy' out of reach." This has raised a storm of criticism from women's rights groups and rightly so.
A BIT OF POLITICS
If any of the readers in Israel is a member of the Meretz party, Pollyanna calls upon you to cast your vote for Zahava Galon as Chair of the Party.  The party was founded by a woman, Shulamit Aloni, who recruited Zahava long ago.  In the meantime, the party has gone downhill under the leadership of a series of male politicians.  If it is to be restored to a position of leadership in the country, it requires the hand of a strong and talented woman at the helm.  Zahava Galon is the right person at the right time. The elections will be held online on Tuesday, February 7.

Zahava Galon

LUCRETIA: A FEMINIST VIEW
Our Texan friends, Ray and Jane are going to see Britten's Rape of Lucretia in Houston this weekend.  We wish them a good time.  They will also see Verdi's  La Traviata and will return home with the realization of what Hadass told us long ago, to wit, the soprano comes to a bad end.  Of course, in opera buffa, she gets the tenor, for good or ill and now we shall remain PC silent.

Lucretia, Rembrandt, Metropolitan, New York

This got Pollyanna ranting again about how male culture can contextualize rape, which of course is among the crimes that can have no context.  We learned in history class that the rape of Lucretia is what triggered the rebellion of the citizens of Rome, brought down the Tarquin  monarchy and led to the founding of the republic.  Who gets lost in this story?  Of course, the female victim Lucretia, who is raped by Sextus Tarquinus, the Crown Prince,  and kills herself against the wishes of her loving husband.  All through the history of literature, the hero of the story is Lucius Junius Brutus, who up to now has avoided complicity with the rule of Tarquinius Superbus by pretending, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, to be a useless playboy, but now snatches the dagger from her breast and swears by her blood to be avenged on the Tarquinii.   Lucretia's body, with its gaping wound, is shown to the public and the citizens of Rome unite to throw off the tyrant's yoke.   Pollyanna agrees totally with Germaine Greer  who makes this strong feminist case in her review of the 2001 staging of Britten's opera at the Snape Aldeburgh festival and in London.

DO PLANETS WEAR OUT?
In 2008 the long sought-for planet, expected to be orbiting the nearby star Fomalhaut, was thought to have been found in two Hubble Space Telescope images taken two years apart.  Everything fit including the observed motion.  Now the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is far more sensitive  in the infra red, failed to find it, which indicates that planet Fomalhaut b does not really exist.  Hubble apparently observed a clot of dust bright enough to be mistaken for a planet.  For the chagrin of the astronomical community and details of the findings or non-findings, we refer you to Phil Plait and his Bad Astronomy blog.

 

This image is pretty damning for the existence of Fomalhaut b. It’s the Spitzer infrared observations of the star, with the star’s light carefully removed. On the left is the actual image, and on the right they artificially added a point of light calculated to be equal to what the planet would emit, in the same position the planet should be — that’s what Arrow 1 is pointing at. It should be one of the brightest things in the image (Arrow 2 points to an unrelated bright spot). And while it’s obvious on the right, nothing can be seen on the left, in the real image. In other words, the planet isn’t seen.  We wuz robbed!!   
STARBURSTS AND HUGE GALAXIES.  
A recent study has shown that in the early days of the universe, frenetic star birthing was eventually throttled by loss of matter into huge black holes and the creation of huge galaxies, much younger and nearby.  The results hint in a tantalizing manner at interaction with the elusive entity known as dark matter.  As Alice said "curiouser and curiouser.

"Starbursting" galaxies can be seen by the APEX telescope, overlaid with an image from Spitzer

LITTLE ICE AGE 

University of Colorado, Boulder Professor Gifford Miller collects dead plant samples from beneath a Baffin Island ice cap. Miller led a new study, to be published in in Geophysical Research Letters, which indicates the Little Ice Age began roughly A.D. 1275 and was triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism that cooled the atmosphere. (Credit: Gifford Miller, University of Colorado)

The Earth was considerably colder than it was before or after an era that began after the Middle Ages and ended in the 19th century.  The question of dating the onset and finding the cause has been more difficult. During the cool spell, advancing glaciers in mountain valleys in northern Europe destroyed towns. Famous paintings from the period depict people ice-skating on the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, places that were ice-free before and after the Little Ice Age. There is evidence also that the Little Ice Age affected places far from Europe, including South America and China.

Pieter Breughel the Elder, 1565, Winter Scene with Skaters, Brussels Museum

Now  new research by an international group led by Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado, Boulder US appears to have resolved the issue.  The data pinpoint the start to a narrow period in the late 13th century and are consistent with the cooling of the Earth being associated with anomalous volcanism that inserted aerosols into the atmosphere that block solar radiation.  Computer simulations  show sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. Without mixing taking place, the water that flowed back to the Arctic was colder, helping sustain large areas of sea ice and creating a self-sustaining feedback loop long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided.
The collapse and extinction of the Norwegian colonies in Greenland, discussed in detail by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, is certainly associated with the cooling.  We should note, however, that the Inuit who had arrived in Greenland well after the Norse, adjusted and survived.  The so-called civilized Europeans failed to make the transition and died out.  Food for thought.

GENIUS KID
Aidan Dwyer is a thirteen year old who figured out a way to use Fibonacci numbers to design improved  solar panel exposure techniques.  We recommend this video.  It is most impressive.





BOOK REVIEW
We have been a bit remiss in our book reviews and will try to do better.  Now Pollyanna wants to mark the 50th anniversary of a book that made a huge difference for girl readers, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.  It is the first sci-fi with a girl as protagonist and constituted a major breakthrough,  It is reviewed in the New York Times by Pamela Paul who also addresses the question of what puts girls off science fiction and indeed science.   Pollyanna wishes to give Meg Murry a warm hug from one girl book heroine  to another.  “Part of what made it seem so liberating to so many girls is that it allowed those with an analytic mind and an interest in the pursuit of science to read about a subject that at the time was not perceived of as a suitable course of study for girls,” said Leonard Marcus, author of a biography of L’Engle, “Searching for Madeleine,” to be published this fall. “At the same time, at its core it’s about a girl’s love for her father, and that emotional level transcends the genre aspect of the book.”

RECURSION

Pollyanna found Hofdstater's book Godel, Escher, Bach to be fascinating and has long wondered about what levels of self-recursion are possible. She would have liked to have shown us an example taken from HO model building as given to us by XKCD.  Unfortunately the cartoon is too large to reproduce in the blog with proper resolution, so we shall  give you the link:

http://xkcd.com/878/

 

DEADLY SIN
Sloth is our favorite deadly sin (OK, our second favorite), with gluttony a distant third. We are, therefore, full of empathy for Wally in the latest Dilbert cartoon.

Finally, Pollyanna allows herself a wee dram of cynicism:

IN PRAISE OF IGNORANCE

``Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world, because it is acquired without effort and keeps the mind from melancholy.''-Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600.

Pollyanna is here despite SOPA & PIPA

Pollyanna is back, cheerful as ever, independent of whether there is much to be glad about.  Still we will give you some relief from brother Titan's rants.  She is pleased that a movie actress has taken her name and is helping to make her famous.  Thank you, Pollyanna Woodward--you give her an idea what to anticipate when she grows up.

 IN MEMORIAM
Steve Rawlings, a well known British astrophysicist and Oxford professor,

died this week in circumstances that led to suspicion being directed against his long time colleague and collaborator the Oxford mathematician Devinder Sivia at whose home he was found dead.  In the meantime, the evidence against Prof. Sivia has been found to be flimsy and he has been released from custody.  Prof. Rawlings played a major role in the design and planning of the Square Kilometre Array – a next-generation radio telescope that will be built in Australia or Southern Africa – and played a prominent role in the redevelopment of the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station in Cornwall as a radio-astronomy facility.  The world astrophysics community is in deep shock.
We also note the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Robert F. Scott and his party at the South Pole where they found that Roald Amundsen and his group had arrived earlier.  Scott and his companions perished en route back to the coast of Antarctica.

Happier times in Antarctica: British explorer Robert Falcon Scott stands alone in the glittering white wilderness, months before he began his final push to the South Pole, in an image taken by expedition photographer Herbert Ponting.
CREDIT: © 2011 Richard Kossow.

View full size image

 Pollyanna wants to be a bit didactic today and give you a scale picture to show you the relative sizes of solar system objects, this time Earth, Titan and our Moon.

Earth, Titan, and Earth's Moon compared

Titan may be larger than the planet Mercury--and (the dwarf planet) Pluto-- but it is still considerably smaller than the Earth. Despite Titan's  diminutive size, its atmosphere is dense enough that the barometric pressure at Titan's surface is one-and-a-half times greater than that of the Earth's at sea level.

 She also would like to point a finger at crackpot "science" blather and to show how careful we must all be in making statements that can be picked up by UFO nuts and posted on the Web as fact.  In this case, atmospheric chemistry of Titan has been twisted to show that "life has been discovered" there.  Indeed, there are hydrocarbons in the atmosphere and oceans of Titan, derivatives of methane, and you could speculate that if there were life there it would have to metabolize methane as an energy source. (The field of psychoceramics deals with cracked pots...)

Pollyanna is very sensitive to environmental matters and is delighted to learn that President Obama is standing up to Big Oil and denying permission to lay a pipeline from Alberta across the United States.    Read more.

Protesters marching in Washington against the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, 11/06/11. (photo: Daniel Lippman/MCT)

As you all know, Pollyanna is very happy to see women advancing to greater equality in all areas.  She is delighted to tell you about the election of the first Native American openly lesbian woman

In a special election, Susan Allen won a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

to the legislature of our native state of Minnesota.  Another woman won election to the state Senate, thus enhancing the representation of women in Minnesota state politics.

In Israel, Pollyanna commends the Israel Medical Association for refusing to take part in a conference on gynecology at which women speakers were banned.  Please join her in thanking our doctors.
The argument that religious leaders would walk out if women spoke is specious and unacceptable. We have nothing against religion per se but when organized and established religion starts to push its views on society as a whole, as we are seeing now in Israel, in every aspect of life, we cannot but agree with James Madison the author of the First Amendment, in which establishment of religion is forbidden, and the fourth president of the United States:
 "What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not." –James Madison-"A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785

We would like to share with you a video that Yosefa brought to our attention.  It is a discussion by Riccardo Muti of the art of conducting.  It is lovely and amusing as well



In the past week we have seen the 39th anniversary of the death of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the legal holiday of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King.  In synagogue, we read as the weekly portion the opening chapters of the book of Exodus. Last Saturday, we gave a sermon connecting the prophetic mission of Moses and Aaron in the Bible with the 20th century mission of Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King who stood side by side in two  titanic struggles, for the civil rights of the African-American population of the US and in particular in the South and against the war in Vietnam.  Pollyanna and I have written up an expanded version of the sermon and it is available on Googledocs for those who read Hebrew.  For the Hebrew-challenged, we recommend the Web site of Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia who discusses the conjunction of these dates every year.  We also refer you to a posting by Bradley Burston who writes about the dreams of Dr. King and what we can all learn from his life and mission.

ASTRONOMY
Pollyanna would like to share with you an interview with the scientist Tom Statler from Ohio University who specializes in galactic astronomy.

Recently the greatest cluster of galaxies ever seen was discovered and dubbed El Giordo, the fat one.

STARS BRIGHT: A composite image shows El Gordo in X-ray light from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, along with optical data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in red, green, and blue. (Photo: NASA, ESO)

 On the same day at the same conference another group announced the observation of the farthest, i.e. the oldest  galaxy cluster ever seen.

The composite image, taken in visible and near-infrared light, reveals the location of five tiny galaxies clustered together 13.1 billion light-years away. The circles pinpoint the galaxies.
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, M. Trenti (University of Colorado, Boulder, and Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK), L. Bradley (STScI), and the BoRG team

View full size ima

Both announcements were made at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin TX on January 10.  We are living in a very exciting time for galactic astronomy and Pollyanna is very glad about it
Apropos astronomy, it is worthy of note that a major international debate is going on over the leap second.  The leap year, needed to account for the slight inaccuracy of the year as a measure of the period of revolution of the Earth around the Sun (yes, you Copernicus skeptics, that is what happens) which involves adding a day every four years except for end of century years (x000) that do not divide by 400, is easily accepted, unless you are apprenticed to a pirate.  The leap second is added every few years to keep the rotation of the Earth in synch with atomic clocks and vice versa.  The US would like to abolish it, other countries want to keep it, but I doubt if anyone will go to war and you will not really need to reset your watch when the next event comes up on June 30.  Stay tuned.

WALKING THROUGH DOORS can make you forget things.  A recent Scientific American article explains why we forget things when we go from one room to the other.

Turn the handle and leave the past behind. Image: iStock/Robert Vautour

We are reminded of the elderly lady who complained about her memory problems to her vicar who told her that she should be thinking about the hereafter.  She replied that indeed that is what she does, i.e. goes from one room to another and then asks herself, "what am I here after?"

Recently, whenever we are online with Skype, a mysterious person named Faustina has tried several times to contact us.  We have consistently declined since contact attempts by women have always turned out to be either harassment or pathetic attempts at enticement.  We tried to look her up and in light of what we found, apparently she only had good intentions.  She had been granted the  Cook's Tour of Hell and just wanted to warn us.

The Apostle of Divine Mercy
St. Maria Faustina Kowalska
of the
Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy

Alas, she lacks the poetic talent of Dante Alighieri.

We were thinking of skipping this week as a protest against SOPA.  Instead we will let XKCD express our opinion.

As we have told you, Gene Weingarten who used to be the funny man of the Washington Post has moved on to the world of comics.  It has not really been a step up as you can see from this:

Pollyanna and the New Year

Mary Pickford as Pollyanna

Pollyanna is taking her turn to wish all of you a very Happy New Year.  Let us hope that 2012 will be a better year than its predecessor which was marked by disasters both natural and man made.  The natural disaster of earthquake plus tsunami in Japan was exacerbated by human failures such as the inability to prevent the radiation catastrophe at  the Fukashima nuclear power plant.

This week we present nature's version of the Death Star from Star Wars, the Kronian moon Mimas.  It apparently was hit hard in the past by an asteroid or comet and came near to disintegration.

Size: Sub-spherical, 418 x 392 x 382 kilometers - 7th largest moon of Saturn
Orbital radius: 185,520 kilometers - 3.08 Saturn radii - within the E ring
Orbital period: 0.9424 days - about 1/17 of Titan’s
Discovery: 1789 by William Herschel

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Cassini Image

Mimas is the first of Saturn's medium-sized moons, lying outside the main ring system but within the tenuous E ring. Its surface is completely saturated with craters, indicating that it has not changed much in billions of years. The largest crater, Herschel, is named for Mimas’ discoverer. All of the other craters are named after characters from the Keith Baines translation of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur legends of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The life of William Herschel is also a fascinating story, about which you can read here. 

The mythological Mimas was a giant who was killed by Mars in the war between the Titans and the gods of Olympus. Even after his death, Mimas' legs -- which were serpents -- hissed vengeance and sought to attack his killer.  
Mimas was named by John Herschel, the son of discoverer William Herschel, who explained his choice of names for the first seven of Saturn's moons to be discovered by writing, "As Saturn devoured his children, his family could not be assembled round him, so that the choice lay among his brothers and sisters, the Titans and Titanesses."

POLLYANNA RANTS 
Normally Pollyanna deals with things to be glad about or otherwise worthy of note and leaves ranting about human rights, social justice and political malfeasance to her brother Titan.  There is, however, one notable exception to this rule and that is matters connected to the abuse, rights violations and marginalization of women and girls.  Unfortunately these constitute a far too common phenomenon and Pollyanna does not contain her anger when she discusses such matters.  Today she is calling your attention to a blog posting on Women's Media Center concerning the way women, who were instrumental in starting the social protest and Occupy movement have been pushed to the side as the revolt developed.  While women do indeed start movements, anything that seems successful becomes a guy thing.  This goes back to the French Revolution and even before.  Robin Morgan puts things in focus, loud and clear.

Mexico city collective, from Occuprint.org

MURPHY GOES TO THE BEACH
As Titan told you last week, we have added a new canine member to our menage.  We took him to the beach for the first time.  Since he is half Labrador and half Australian Cattle Dog, we expected  him to take to the sea.  We are in the aftermath of a fairly major storm and the surf is still quite heavy.  In fact, Murphy was totally spooked by the waves rolling in and wanted no part of them.  He did get in a good run and expended some of his great supply of energy.  Indeed Murphy is a mixed breed dog, what some would call a mutt, but there are several good reasons to love mutts.   Here he is looking over his domain.

The beach is a great place

Friday we took him to the vet to be registered and weighed him while there. 34.4 kg is a lot of dog  especially when he indulges in puppyish behavior or has to be hoisted into the car.

IN MEMORIAM
Yaffa Yarkoni (1925-2012) died this week.

She was a famous Israeli singer whose voice is associated with the heroic period in the history of Israel.  She was famous for going to all places to entertain the troops even at the front.  To many she will always be associated with her signature song Bab el Wad, about the narrow valley on the road to Jerusalem where the convoys to the besieged city encountered ambushes during the 1948 war.  Despite her intense patriotism or more likely to our mind because of it, she parted company with the military establishment in 2002 and strongly criticized the brutal actions of the Army in the West Bank in the wake of the second Intifada.  Because of this many of her admirers turned against her, but she stuck by her guns.  We append an obituary from the New York Times.

BACK TO SCIENCE

GRAIL ORBIT SUCCESSFUL 
No we are not talking about the Holy Grail but rather about a pair of spacecraft called Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory that achieved orbit about the Moon and will be used for the most detailed study ever of our nearest neighbor in Space.  Read more.

MEET BONNIE
While browsing through the JPL pages for Mimas images I came across a profile of my friend,  Bonnie Buratti whom we visited a few weeks ago in Pasadena.  She is profiled as one of the Senior Scientists of JPL and has some good advice for anyone, particularly young women, who might be contemplating a career in space science.

SPEEDERS CITED
As any young driver knows, his/her parents disapprove of speeding.  The same seems  to hold for neutrinos who have received many citations for exceeding their speed limit, the speed of light.  Now it seems that their  parent pions are getting into the act and are casting doubt on the reported result.  As more and more evidence against the speeding neutrinos piles up, we can hope to have the matter resolved, certainly when the replication experiments report in.  It will be a relief for everyone, including the OPERA people to have the doubts about Special Relativity allayed.

STINGRAY NEBULA

Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the nebula (Credit: M. Bobrowsky and NASA)

One of the most exciting discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope was the death of a star and the birth of a planetary nebula, in this case the Stingray Nebula , named because of its shape.  This is a poorly understood process in astrophysics and the observation of the rapid evolution of the system
as observed by Hubble  was a great piece of good fortune for science.  IKCD gives it a unique perspective.


TRIVIA, NONSENSE AND A BIT OF SUBSTANCE
The Mother Nature Network has come up with a list of the most most anticipated space launches of 2012.  Many of them are trivial billionaires' games, others are nonsensical efforts  involving a huge investment of public resources in manned spaceflight which achieves nothing of significance and finally we have the wonderful robotic missions  that truly advance the cause of science and expand human knowledge and understanding of our universe.  The manned flights, such as the ISS, which does nothing and consumes much, are of the genus "Panem et Circensus", literally "bread and circuses",which was the formula for the control of the  population in Rome by the regime in power (a term invented by Juvenal )*.  We are told that unless we have  some clown in space wasting  both money  and time we would not have funding for the real science done by robots such as Cassini, Voyager, Pioneer and the others.
 
*(The full quote is:  The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things - bread and circuses!
        Juvenal, Satires
        Roman poet & satirist (55 AD - 127 AD))

Gene Weingarten was rather gross and unfunny to us this week, so we are giving you a pair of cartoons  from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.  The first  will enhance your knowledge of history and the other a comment on our species, homo sapiens.

Pollyanna is back from California

Our message to all of you

 Pollyanna is  back from her trip to California with YandA and Titan.  We all had a great time, but now we have to get back to the serious stuff of life.  Why?  Because the sky is high or kacha or whatever.  Here is a Hannuka treat from Saturn.

The huge storm churning through the atmosphere in Saturn's northern hemisphere overtakes itself as it encircles the planet in this true-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
› Full image and caption

Over the past year, a great disquiet has swept across the face of Saturn. The normally serene countenance of this giant planet was pierced last December by the sudden eruption of a bright, discrete, and powerful convecting storm that over the course of two months grew and spread to become a planet-encircling colossus, a wide kaleidoscopic band of commingled waves, vortices, and eddies, all in continuous swirling motion .... a mesmerizing display of snaking, sensuous, churning, turning, chaotic, roiling atmospheric  turmoil.
Outbursts like this are not new to Saturn and, in fact, are known for their episodic behavior. The largest of these appear every 20 to 30 years in the northern hemisphere and spread completely around the planet. But this one is different. With a 200-day interval of intense, hissing convection, it holds the record as the longest-lasting Saturn-encircling storm ever. And it has become the largest by far ever observed on the planet by an interplanetary spacecraft, giving us an unparalleled opportunity to study in great depth the subtle changes on the planet that preceded the storm's formation and the mechanisms involved in its development.

Some of you might be interested to know that the Pollyanna movie from 1960 is now available on DVD.

This week saw the deaths of three famous people, two of whom will be missed.
IN MEMORIAM

Vaclav Havel,(1936-2011) the former president of Czechoslovakia and later of the Czech Republic  died this week at age 75.  He was a man of incredible courage and integrity who led the "Velvet Revolution" and brought his country into the family of democratic nations.  Of all the obituaries I found that of the Guardian to be the best and I link you to it along with an appreciation from Amnesty International.

IN MEMORIAM

Justin Lane for The New York Times

Christopher Hitchens in Washington, D.C., in 1999.

Christopher Hitchens who died this week at age 62 was a journalist and writer,  a beacon for liberal causes and one of the world's most articulate atheists.  In an age when fundamentalist religion and mass superstitions are taking over from rationality, his voice was a call for clear thinking and logic.  We are appending an obituary from the New York Times.

IN OBLIVIUM
The world is rid of the noxious presence of Kim Jong Il.  He will be succeeded by his equally odious son and the misery of the people of North Korea will continue.  We were told that war needed to be waged in Iraq to liberate the people from Saddam Hussein, indeed an evil dictator.  It was rank hypocrisy to go after him while Kim developed nuclear weapons and persecuted his subjects.  Read a profile of this monster.  Andy Borowitz has news of a possible alternative candidate to succeed Kim Jong Il.

VERY SLOW MUSIC

Composer, John Cage rehearses his 12-hour composition "Empty Words" in Hartford, Conn., in 1981. (Anonymous - ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The composer John Cage (1912-1992) is famous for many beautiful pieces including 4:33 in which a pianist sits in front of a piano and plays nothing for that time.  He has come up with another rebuke to the noise and bustle of modern life with a piece that has been  playing for 10 years and will be finished in 2640.  It is called “Organ²/ASLSP(As SLow aS Possible),” and it requires a bit of patience.  
HIGGS BOSON MAYBE
The Large Hadron Collider is giving tantalizing hints that the discovery of the Higgs Boson, which gives particles mass, may be around the corner.  This is most exciting and provides much food for thought.  It has been dubbed the "God particle" and if found will add a piece to the Standard Model puzzle.  If it is found not to exist, it will mean that physics has deeper subtlety than imagined so far.  Stay tuned as the reports come out and verification becomes closer.  Indeed some of the press accounts may have jumped the gun and we would do well to wait until the 5 sigma level is reached. 
DEAD SEA SCROLL AUTHORS may be identified by new research being conducted in Israel on the textiles used to wrap the scrolls.  The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration,  some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colors. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.  This may help understanding of how the scrolls made their way to Qumran,shown in this picture.

First excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s, the site of Qumran in Israel is mired in controversy. De Vaux believed that it was a monastic settlement used by the Essenes and that the Dead Sea Scrolls were composed here. More recent archaeological work has cast doubt on this idea. The new textile research may help resolve the debate.
CREDIT: Joseph Calev | | Shutterstock

View full size image

NEWLY DISCOVERED PLANETS
While we were in San Francisco at the meeting of the AGU, NASA came up with the announcement of a Goldilocks planet (temperature appropriate for the existence of liquid water) named Kepler 22b orbiting a solar-similar star just around the corner, 600 light years away.  It is doubtful that the planet could support life as we know it, but it is exciting that planets like the Earth are around in the universe.  In addition to Kepler 22b, we now are told about planets Kepler 22e and 22f that are also of great interest since they are comparable to the Earth in size although far too hot to contain liquid water.  While at JPL  (see YandA blog), we heard a lot of talk about the subject of Astrobiology.  I could not but remember what my friend Yuri said about this field, that it is interesting because it has no subject matter.  That is not quite fair today since much good laboratory work is being done on finding out what kind of environments might support life somewhere.  The search goes on and although we shall never visit these places, it is fun to know that they are there.

Pollyanna shares with XKCD the confusion of priorities in the modern world.


ATHEISM VS THEISM IN SANTA MONICA 
While in Santa Monica (where Tom Lehrer likes to spend Hannuka) last week we came upon the atheist answer to the Nativity Scenes usually seen along Ocean Avenue.  We reported on it in the YandA blog, but here is a more detailed discussion of the issue.  The result of the lottery by the city government would tend to show that God has a soft spot for his atheist children.

YandA photograph

BOOK REVIEW
Our book review for this blog is by Helen Brown writing in the Telegraph who  reads A More Perfect Heaven, Dava Sobel's new book about Copernicus (273pp, Bloomsbury).  It appears to be well worth a read as has been our experience with all her other writing, such as Longitude and Galileo's Daughter.  It is an open secret that we are harboring in our midst many crypto-adherents of  Claudius Ptolemaeus .

A DIET IS IN ORDER 
The four of us, Pollyanna, Titan and YandA all came back from Calfornia with some added weight and are trying to do something about it.  A consultation on the subject with Gene Weingarten yielded some not very useful advice.