The LA Times carries the LA County Natural History Museum’s announcement of the discovery of the largest fossil bird every found. There was no species name listed in the story, but the fossil skull, discovered in Patagonia, is related to an extinct group of birds known as phorusrhacids – “terror birds.” He has been dated to the Oligocene, 15 million years ago.
I’d like to see one scaled against a moa. This new fellow looks quite a bit more robust than the herbivore moas.
One of the interesting things about living here in Santa Barbara is the fact that occasionally you can see satellite launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, located about 40 miles northwest of us. The US launches satellites from two facilities: Vandenberg, where the launches go south over the Pacific, generally for payloads with polar orbits; and Cape Canaveral, where the launches go east over the Atlantic, generally for payloads that need equatorial orbits.
Under the right conditions, they can be seen for a long way. Probably the most striking view I have had of a Vandenberg launch, was about 10 years ago, actually before we moved here. It was just after dusk and we were attending one of Travis’ Little League baseball games in Palmdale. That’s about 140 miles away from Vandenberg. You could clearly see the flaming exhaust and two distinct stage separations. The game stopped as everyone stared at the big fireworks.
I had almost forgotten about the pictures I’m showing here of a launch that took place almost exactly a year ago. Normally we don’t get any advance warning of these, but this was a unique event, the launch of the very last Titan IV. My employer has employees seconded at the base, and they gave us the heads up. That’s a group of my co-workers on the west porch of our building waiting for the show.
This shot shows pretty much what the view was like to the naked eye. We are facing west and you can see the Titan headed south. You can get some idea of the scale from the tree in the foreground. We were far enough away that there was no sound at all. In towns like Lompoc and Guadalupe that are closer to the base, these guys rattle windows.
We saw later in the news that this launch had a classified payload. Nice euphemism for spy satellite.
This is about the limit of my little point-and-shoot’s telephoto. You can clearly see the flames out of the rear of the first stage.
This was taken after the first stage separation. You can see that the first stage has fallen away, and is no longer firing. Daytime launches don’t put on quite the show that night launches do.
I wish I could say that I took this picture, but must admit I borrowed it from the LA Times. I did witness the launch however, which took place one evening during the summer of last year. Connie and I were walking on the beach and saw it go up. Of course I had no camera with me. It was a spectacular display, and this shot is a good representation of what it looked like.
.. from Central Asia. Click here for a pic of her with a Lammergeier– one with a tale of its own.
I’m probably in the last generation of people who could pick Andy Rooney out of a line-up; he and my two late grandfathers are WWII contemporaries. I’ve known Rooney’s face and his voice all my life, and I’ve always liked him. How could you not like such a gruff old contrarian, eyebrows and all?
Sure, many find him annoying. And for a time (perhaps a whole decade), the network seemed to have him staged as a kind of pet, reduced almost to slapstick. He was too old I guess to seem relevant and too young to be taken seriously.
Now Andy’s back, older than ever and still rumpled-looking in high definition. His new role makes him kind of an elder statesman, and it suits him. I still like him. But what’s this all about?
(Click link and play clip, “Food For Thought”)
I wanted to add some more pictures to the Shamans and Coso Rock Art post below but ran into the usual Blogger content limitations, so I’ll put a little more up in this post. As I mentioned below, it’s theorized that some of the rock art in Little Petroglyph Canyon is there to record what shamans saw during their vision quests. As one walks the length of the canyon, one can see a number of small cleared areas, stone circles if you will, along the sides of the canyon. Here is a picture of one of these above. These could be places where vision quests were conducted. They are often close to their rock art representations. If you look closely in this picture just to the left of center you can see a square geometrical petroglyph, perhaps one of the entoptic vision shapes described by Whitley.
Petroglyphs such as the one above…..
……and the shapes that cover this boulder are representative of what Whitley talks about as the shapes seen in entoptic visions. These are common throughout the area.
There are also a number of anthropomorphs, like this little bowman, who have more than the normal five digits. Apparently the hallucination of extra digits is common during shamanistic trances.
I have posted about the spectacular rock art at Little Petroglyph Canyon up in Inyo County several times now but have so many interesting images from my visit there last year you’ll be seeing more. This shot shows petroglyphs of several shamans from high on the canyon wall. I had to use a telephoto lens to get this level of detail.
The rock art expert who has written the most about shamanism as represented in the rock art of the California desert is David Whitley. His best compendium of this is in his book Art of the Shaman. Whitley’s work is fairly controversial, some of it I disagree with, but I have to give Dave credit for some good ideas. I’ll present some of those here.
Whitley believes these images were made by shamans, healers or religious leaders who were believed to enter the supernatural world by entering a trance. The shaman would go on a vision quest: isolating himself and going through a period of fasting and meditation (and drug use?)until he entered the trance and had a hallucinogenic vision. The shaman would acquire power to accomplish things – heal the sick, make rain, bring game animals, find lost objects – usually as he took the form of an animal spirit helper.
Often during the trances, the shaman would see glowing geometric patterns “in the mind’s eye” in the form of zig-zags, spirals, dots, grids, or nested curves. These shapes are apparently due to the neuropsychology of trances – are hard-wired into all humans – and are seen in the same general forms in all cultures that practiced shamanism. They are called entoptic visions and could be mixed and matched in a bewildering variety. These were seen by the shaman as symbols of power and images he would want to record. Whitley believes that shamans would want to record in rock art the things experienced during trances immediately at the end of the vision quest, so they would not forget the powerful visions they had seen.
The images of shamans above are believed by Whitley to show the shaman portraying himself as he thought he appeared during his trance. The figures are all wearing ritual shirts believed to be skin shirts painted with the patterns of the entoptic visions that the shamans saw during their trances. The largest shaman in the middle has so taken on the characteristics of his spirit familar that he has bird feet instead of human feet. His face is a swirl, and the hook shapes projecting from his head are most likely emblematic of quail topknots used in a headdress. Hard to tell what the implements in his hands are: maybe a bow and some arrows?
This fellow with the quail topknot headdress is so interesting looking that he has taken on a sort of iconic status. The Maturango Museum in the nearby town of Ridgecrest has taken him on as their logo. They have a bronze statue of him just outside the door. It is a nice museum for its small size, and they conduct tours at Little Petroglyph Canyon. Also, I saw this shaman used as part of the decoration of a brass wall clock for sale in a schlocky “Southwestern Art” store in Sedona. I’m sure the copyright ran out long ago.
Carel has a wonderful post on nomenclature up, with perfect visuals as well, of course. Most taxonomy nuts (and Far Side fans) know Gary Larson has a beetle genus named after him. But how about this?
“Australian paleontologist Greg Edgecombe has named many trilobites for musicians, including Avalanchurus lennoni, A. starri, Struszia mccartneyi and S. harrisoni for the Beatles, Mackenziurus johnnyi, M. joeyi, M. deedeei, and M. ceejayi for the Ramones, Aegrotocatellus jaggeri and Perirehaedulus richardsi for members of the Rolling Stones, and Arcticalymene viciousi, A rotteni, A. jonesi, A cooki and A. matlocki for the Sex Pistols.”
Also: discovering a new species in your Utah back yard.
Gail Goodman sent me this story on the anti- Cesar Millan Not to take sides exactly– though I go more in the direction of this article– but I love this, partcularly in view of our recent discussions on dog ancestry:
“Learning from wolves to interact with pet dogs makes about as much sense as, ‘I want to improve my parenting — let’s see how the chimps do it!’ “
Cathy Siepp finds our manners wanting. I have always agreed with the remark made by Stephen Maturin in one of Patrick O’Brian’s sea novels: ” Question and answer has never seemed to me to be a liberal form of conversation”.
Peculiar has blogged our trip to the Manzanos ( go here and scroll up). This post has everything– history, geology, natural history, splendid photos, and humor– a serious “read the whole thing”. Here is a mere taste:
And we had our first snow two nights previous. Here is a dawn shot– again a mere taste.
Update: link fixed for Manzanos. And for more on tazis– another splendid piece of writing– go here.
Union Products, Inc., the company that manufactures plastic pink flamingoes is about to close its doors. Please say it ain’t so!
The New York Times has this article on extinct dwarf water buffalo that were found on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. An interesting analogue to the pygmy mammoth that was found out here in the California Channel Islands.