Month: June 2008

Most of you probably remember the Sturm und Drang a couple of years ago when the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto from the status of a true planet. Steve even commented on a resolution introduced in the California legislature (you can always count on them!) condemning the demotion as it would cause “psychological harm to some Californians who question their place in the universe and worry about the instability of universal constants.”

Well recently the IAU has come up with a new term for “small, nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune”: plutoids. Naming a new class of dwarf planets after Pluto ought to make everyone feel better, don’t you think?

Nah. Some critics of the IAU remain unappeased: “It’s just some people in a smoke-filled room who dreamed it up,” ……… “Plutoids or haemorrhoids, whatever they call it. This is irrelevant.”

Personally, I was never that concerned about the IAU’s decision in 2006 as it brought the structure of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets, back in line with reality.

Eurasian collared dove. This bird was new to me, but the species is apparently spreading throughout the continental US at a very fast pace. Steve and I were discussing them a few weeks back, and he said that these doves had gone from absent to the most common bird in Magdalena in the space of ten years. Accustomed as I am to mourning doves, these guys make a very undove-like squawk at times.

Introduced in the Assembly, AB 2233 adds a section to the State Vehicle Code that states:

A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while holding a live animal in his or her arm or arms, or upon his or her lap.

Inglewood man recovering after he’s bitten by rattlesnake he picked up.

The man was bitten twice at Edward Vincent Park by a snake he thought was harmless

I’ve always found this story interesting and my recollection was that the preponderance of evidence indicated that he had been poisoned. But a new analysis of clippings of his hair done by Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics has evidence that points in the other direction:

“They conducted a detailed analysis of hairs taken from Napoleon’s head at four times in his life — as a boy in Corsica, during his exile on the island of Elba, the day he died on St. Helena, at age 51, and the day afterward — and discovered that the arsenic levels underwent no significant rises.

Casting a wide net, the scientists also studied hairs from his son, Napoleon II, and his wife, Empress Josephine. Here, too, they found that the arsenic levels were similar and uniformly high.

The big surprise was that the old levels were roughly 100 times the readings that the scientists obtained for comparison from the hairs of living people.
“The concentrations of arsenic in the hair taken from Napoleon after his death were much higher,” the scientists wrote. But the levels were “quite comparable with that found not only in the hair of the emperor in other periods of his life, but also in those of his son and first wife.”

The results, they added, “undoubtedly reveal a chronic exposure that we believe can be simply attributed to environmental factors, unfortunately no longer easily identifiable, or habits involving food and therapeutics.”

So he had high levels of arsenic in his system, but so did everyone else. All sorts of things we know are toxic now (like mercury !) were used as medicines or in industrial processes back then.

I’ll have to qualify my opening sentence to say that I’ve never been that interested in Napoleon as an individual, but find the era of the Napoleonic Wars fascinating. Read too many C.S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian and Bernard Cornwell novels, I guess.

To the consternation of some suburbanites. I must admit I have never seen one. Spooky picture, huh?

According to the Telegraph.

Read any books written by your neighbors?

I just finished “A Year Without ‘Made in China’: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy” by Sara Bongiorni, a freelance journalist who also lives in Baton Rouge. The book was a gift from another neighbor, who I believe bought it from the author in a local signing.

Bongiorni’s book details her personal quest, shared by default by her husband and their two small children, to eschew any purchase stamped “Made In China.” For a year. Ouch!

It isn’t long before the worm turns on what seems like an attractive and not-impossible idea. Within a month, it’s clear to all that virtually every readily-purchased and affordable consumer good is manufactured in the People’s Republic. Eleven long months to go…

Along the way we learn about the many unexpected dilemmas and near-emergencies that must arise from such a project. The result is an ongoing negotiation of amendments to the embargo that make clear just how closely our lives have melded with the ways and means of the next world superpower.

It’s a good read, funny and fast. Prepare to be hammered with a reminder how bourgeoisie you’ve become.

Considering the size of our town and the percentage of residents with some association to LSU (Bongioni’s husband teaches), it’s not surprising that I recognize some of the local personalities and places, however veiled by the author. One named outright in the acknowledgements is my friend, also a freelance writer and former LSU staffer, Renee Bacher.

Renee and her family are traipsing across Europe just now, learning the value of the US dollar. She just sent me the link to her blog, here, and I recommend it to you. A section from today’s update:

We spend three nights in Helsinki, jammed into the chestnut sized room with our three children. On the first night, I think that Benny is going to blow. The fight is with Hannah, over a coveted pillow that belongs to Laura (of course, inflatable ones I have brought along for each of us are inadequate replacements during this fight. It is in the next fight, my fight with Hannah, that we fight over these).

My main concern is that the way-too-kind Finnish cousin and her boyfriend (who I can’t believe is not leaving her over us) will hear the ruckus, from their pea sized room next door. Okay, that’s not exactly true. My main concern is that they will see that Ed and I are complete failures as parents.

But worse still is my concern that my inconsiderate, bickering children will confirm the stereotype that all American children are spoiled brats. Here Laura and Oscar have graciously surrendered 9/10 of their apartment to us along with 100% of their privacy, but neither Hannah nor Ben is willing to surrender one stinking pillow for the common good.

I saw this offbeat op-ed in today’s LA Times that calls for the banning of mylar balloons in California as they can short out power lines and cause black-outs. The author, a state senator who introduced a bill to this effect, says Southern California Edison claims there were 470 black-outs in its service area caused by these metallic balloons last year.

Sounds like a typical California nanny-state measure, but maybe the facts really are on the banners’ side.

The op-ed struck a chord with me however, as we found the carcasses of hundreds of balloons (mylar and other) on our recent survey in the Imperial Valley. I started calling the project area the “balloon graveyard”. You can see two proud crew members with a bumble-bee balloon above.

I just stumbled across this article that came out a couple of weeks ago, describing a statistical modeling study using genomic evidence that attempts to map how our species spread from Africa to populate the rest of the world. I’m really surprised this hasn’t gotten more play in the press.

What I found most interesting (from my parochial point of view) was what it had to say about the peopling of the New World:

“The team also found that North and South America were colonized independently by at least two different waves of migration from different parts of Asia, although both waves appear to have arrived via the Bering Strait. This conclusion contradicts the conventional view, which postulates just one migratory wave out of Asia.”

These results, if true, add more fuel to the ferment that Paleoindian studies is in and could conceivably support the coastal migration hypothesis we have discussed often here. I’ll just restate the opinion I expressed in a post last fall:

“I believe it is starting to appear that the paradigm we have been using for he last 50 years or so, of a single overland migration across Beringia about 14,000 BP, is impossibly simplistic. I think future research will likely show that (as Valerius Geist believes) there were many attempts to colonize the Americas from Asia over a long period of time, both overland and down the coast in boats. We aren’t recognizing or haven’t found the inland sites and sites along the coast have been drowned by the Holocene rise in sea level.

There is all sorts of evidence that currently doesn’t fit together very well. Mitochondrial DNA evidence from Native Americans seems to indicate a single migration of a small number of individuals. But the morphology of the earliest Paleoindian skeletons we have is distinctly different from modern Native Americans. A recent review of all the radiocarbon dates from all the Paleoindian sites in Alaska shows that the oldest sites there are younger than the oldest good dates from further south in North America. That doesn’t seem to fit with a Beringian migration. Time and more research will tell. I think we’ll see that Clovis was the latest and most successful colonizing attempt.”