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  • Black Fish

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

    In a way I didn’t want to watch it.  Black Fish.  I knew from the trailer that it would make me mad and sad in equal measure.  But we watched it tonight anyhow.

    It made me hang my head in shame as a member of the human race.  Tilikum, the raked male who pulled a SeaWorld trainer to her death in 2010, had been taken from Puget Sound as a youngster.  These are animals that never leave their mother’s side, remaining in pods that are like small aquatic nations with differing cultures and language.

    It screams slavery.  Families broken up, individuals bought and sold for their ability to entertain or, in Tilikum’s case, provide consistent semen for artificial insemination.  Animals who might swim 100 miles in a day in the wild are confined for life in concrete pools, and shut away at night in even smaller pens with no lights and no access to the sky.

    In the wild males like Tilikum are kept at the margins of the pods, ruled by the mothers with matriarchal dominance.  In captivity, unable to escape, Tilikum suffered repeated attacks by the females, especially at night when shut up with them in the smaller pen.

    By the end I was crying and wanting to hold someone accountable.  This is an outrage.  It’s not the only one and it may not be the worst one, but it is unconscionable and wrong.  The orca brain has an extended organ within it, a larger element than similar organs in humans.  A neuroscientist who studied orcas under magnetic resonance imaging and in autopsies said their brain just shouts emotion.  They are very social animals who appear to have taken life together a level beyond what we can understand.  And we put them in pens so we can sell plush toys?


    Great Work Science Sierra Club

  • Asleep

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

    Another implication of the fallow season had escaped me, at least at the level Jim Gilbert describes in a recent phenology column in the Star-Tribune:

    “Hibernation is a winterless life chosen by reptiles, amphibians, insects and some mammals. During the winter untold millions of animals — including toads, frogs, salamanders, snapping turtles, garter snakes, bats, woodchucks and mosquito larvae — are hibernating across Minnesota.”

    We often miss the warm period lives of these creatures because many of them are small, secretive and prefer to remain well away from humans.  Their winter lives, in the millions, untold millions Gilbert says, never massed together in my mind.

    (this wonderful piece by Travis Demillo.)

    Walking in our woods right now there are thousands of salamanders, toads, frogs, garter snakes, woodchucks, various insects, ground squirrels and gophers in a state of suspended animation, dreaming small animal dreams until the weather becomes more suitable for their life again next year.  It gives the woods a haunted, Snow White sort of atmosphere with so many of its active and vibrant lifeforms stilled to the point of coma.  And by intention.  Well, evolutionarily adapted intention that is.

    Here’s a lifted glass to their long night, a safe sleep and a welcome return.

     


    Great Wheel Our Land and Home Science Weather +Climate

  • Vikings fan who vowed not to shave beard until Super Bowl win dies

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                          Samhain Moon

    Ever since I read about this guy, I’ve been trying think of a pledge that makes sense to me. Until the Democrats control the House of Representatives?  Until carbon emissions begin trending down?  Until I get a book published?  Until another human walks on the moon?  Or, for the first time, Mars?  Nothing compelling yet.

    The full Darwin.  That’s what I’m after now in terms of beard. Read a good bit about Darwin in the Modern and Post Modern class.  He’s a hero, a bona fide saint of the skeptic, the daring thinker, the honest man.  Looking like Darwin, at least at the beard level, seemed like a worthy goal.

    Progress so far.IMAG1089


    Science

  • A Riff on Rain That Got Away From Me

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                    Harvest Moon

    Rain.  Creates a hole up in the burrow and sleep, slowdown sort of feeling.  We went out for a small lunch, took a nap.  Business meeting in the morning, partly dividing up money from the recent stock surge.

    The soil here in the Great Anoka Sand Plain (a former river bank for the Mississippi as it detoured around the Grantsburg Lobe of the Wisconsin Glaciation) allows rain water a clear path to aquifers beneath it, including one from which we get our water.  Not great for gardening unless there happened to be a peat bog atop the sand like the Fields Truck Farm that surrounds our development.

    So, there’s a trade off.  Good water resources for tillable soil.  The small crop vegetable grower and orchadist, however, can amend the soil with organic matter and top soil. We’ve done that.

    The aquifer from which we get our water, the Franconian Ironton-Galesville, (see pic) underlies much of eastern Minnesota, much of Wisconsin, some of Michigan, Illinois and Indiana is hydrologically connected to Lake Superior as you can see by the map on the right.

    In case you think the olden days have no impact now, you might consider aquifers.  The Franconian Ironton-Galesville aquifer came into existence during the middle Cambrian period of the Paleozoic Era, beginning some 540 million years ago and continuing to about 485 million years ago.  The water in this aquifer circulates around and among the area under all these states, providing the water from municipal wells throughout the region get the bulk of their water.

    Here’s another matter to consider.  Water cycles up and down, into the earth then up to the sky and back to the earth, sometimes ending up in aquifers and sometimes in lakes and oceans and rivers and streams and ponds and lakes.  This material from the Coon Creek Watershed District interests me.

    “The ultimate source feeding groundwater is precipitation. Actual
    aquifer recharge rates are not well quantified within the watershed
    which leads to uncertainty in assessing sustainable withdraws.
    Over appropriation is the result of removing water at a rate and or
    volume faster than the aquifer can supply. In cases where a water
    source takes 100 of years to recharge, appropriations are an
    irreversible withdrawal.”
    An important thing to note here is that in cases of drought, as now, there is no recharge possible.  That means that any climate change induced reductions in rain fall directly impact our long term capacity to draw our water needs from these ancient sources of water supply.

     


    Anoka County Great Work Science Sierra Club Weather +Climate

  • Man Picks Raspberries, Spacecraft Sails Through Interstellar Space

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                        Harvest Moon

    “We have been cautious because we’re dealing with one of the most important milestones in the history of exploration,” said Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone.

     

    This morning while I waded through the raspberry canes, scratching my hands as I plucked red-purple and golden white fruit, putting them in the small basket I use for such work, Voyager 1 sailed on through interstellar space, out beyond the solar wind.

    A professor from Iowa University asked reflexively if it was the equivalent of landing on the moon, maybe not he thought, but it’s still ‘Star-Trek’ stuff.  No question in my mind.  It’s beyond the equivalent; it triumphs.  Since those same raspberry picking hands held number 2 lead pencils in the first weeks of elementary school, space has been on my mind.

    In 1957 Sputnik pushed us all into the Space Age.  And things moved pretty fast.  The dog. Yuri Gagarin. John Glenn.  Neil Armstrong’s one small step certainly a highlight, an enormous imaginative leap.  A man.  Up there on the Hiroshima Moon.  How about that?

    Enough landings that few recall the last person to set foot on the moon. Harrison Schmitt, who followed Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 off the landing craft.  Cernan, by the way, was the last to set foot off the moon.  This was in 1972.  All that moon walking in three brief years, 1969-1972.

    Yet.  5 years later Voyager 1 and 2 launch.  Now 33 years later Voyager 1 has reached a point where its messages home take 17 hours to arrive.  17 hours at the speed of light.  Three times as far away as Pluto.  Remember Pluto?  In the cold of space, beyond the barrier where the chill of the universe presses hard enough to push back the solar wind, Voyager 1 now travels.  A piece of us.  Put together by hands like mine picking raspberries.

    Kate’s former brother-in-law, now retired, worked as an engineer on Voyager 1.  He had has career, resigned.  But his work continued on, becoming in the process a signifier for persistence, for the turtle outpacing the hare.  The hare quit in 1972, satisfied with space-going trucking delivering supplies and few passengers to a space station doing, what?

    All hail rocket science.  A tip of the raspberry bucket to the little spacecraft as it carries human will physically where the mind has gone for so long.


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