Author: Paul Handover

The noblest astronomy affords

Don’t miss the transit of Venus across the Sun.

The full quotation is “This sight…is by far the noblest astronomy affords…” and was reputed to have been made by Sir Edmond Halley of Halley’s Comet fame, see here.  But today’s Post is about Venus.

Venus — Sister to Earth

From the NOAA Science on a Sphere website, we can read this about Venus,

Venus has been referred to as the sister or even twin to Earth by many because of its similar chemical composition, density and size. That, however, is where the similarities end. Venus is not only the hottest planet in the solar system, but also the brightest. Both of these characteristics are the result of the atmosphere that surrounds the planet, which is mainly composed of carbon dioxide and some sulfuric acid. This composition allows for the greenhouse effect to be astronomical causing the planet to have a constant temperature of 864°F. The planet is the brightest because the clouds, composed of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, are highly reflective. The pressure of the atmosphere that surrounds Venus is 90 times that of the atmosphere around Earth, crushing any probes that land on Venus in a matter of hours.

Depending on where you live on Planet Earth you will see the transit on the 5th June, the 6th June or not at all!

Courtesy of Fred Espenak (NASA GSFC), who provides additional transit of Venus data from NASA.

(That additional data referred to above may be found here.)

That transit diagram plus mounds of other interesting stuff is on the Transit of Venus website and on that website this page has the details allowing you to work out what day and time the transit occurs depending on where you are.

To close let me be a little cheeky and reproduce, in full, what appeared on the Science Daily website on the 1st May.

Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2012) — On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun’s surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

In this month’s Physics World, Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, explores the science behind Venus’s transit and gives an account of its fascinating history.

Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years — the last transit was in 2004.

Building on the original theories of Nicolaus Copernicus from 1543, scientists were able to predict and record the transits of both Mercury and Venus in the centuries that followed.

Johannes Kepler successfully predicted that both planets would transit the Sun in 1631, part of which was verified with Mercury’s transit of that year. But the first transit of Venus to actually be viewed was in 1639 — an event that had been predicted by the English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks. He observed the transit in the village of Much Hoole in Lancashire — the only other person to see it being his correspondent, William Crabtree, in Manchester.

Later, in 1716, Edmond Halley proposed using a transit of Venus to predict the precise distance between Earth and the Sun, known as the astronomical unit. As a result, hundreds of expeditions were sent all over the world to observe the 1761 and 1769 transits. A young James Cook took the Endeavour to the island of Tahiti, where he successfully observed the transit at a site that is still called Point Venus.

Pasachoff expects the transit to confirm his team’s theory about the phenomenon called “the black-drop effect” — a strange, dark band linking Venus’s silhouette with the sky outside the Sun that appears for about a minute starting just as Venus first enters the solar disk.

Pasachoff and his colleagues will concentrate on observing Venus’s atmosphere as it appears when Venus is only half onto the solar disk. He also believes that observations of the transit will help astronomers who are looking for extrasolar planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

“Doing so verifies that the techniques for studying events on and around other stars hold true in our own backyard.. In other words, by looking up close at transits in our solar system, we may be able to see subtle effects that can help exoplanet hunters explain what they are seeing when they view distant suns,” Pasachoff writes.

Not content with viewing this year’s transit from Earth, scientists in France will be using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the effect of Venus’s transit very slightly darkening the Moon. Pasachoff and colleagues even hope to use Hubble to watch Venus passing in front of the Sun as seen from Jupiter — an event that will take place on 20 September this year — and will be using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn, to see a transit of Venus from Saturn on 21 December.

“We are fortunate in that we are truly living in a golden period of planetary transits and it is one of which I hope astronomers can take full advantage,” he writes.

Editors note: Looking directly at the sun can cause severe and permanent eye damage. Do not look directly at Venus’ transit of the sun.

For more information see Wikipedia article.

Footnote:

I’m going to republish this in full on Monday, 4th June at the usual Learning from Dogs release time of 0700 UTC so to increase the odds of all my readers who would like to see the Transit having the information in good time!

Civilisations do fail!

Any lessons for today from the Valley of the Pyramids at Tucume in Peru?

The view of Huaca Larga (Photo: Heinz Plege/PromPerú)

Let’s set the scene,

It’s amazing to think that anyone lived here, that this valley was once green. Now it is sun-blasted, scorching hot, and the only life is the circling vultures and the rainbow-colored iguanas, like something out of a desert hallucination, skittering across the rocks.

The reminders of past life rise up around me, however, eroded to look more like drip castles than the pyramids they once were. I am in Túcume, the once-grand capital of the Sican culture, Peru’s mythical Valley of the Pyramids.

I am not far from Chiclayo, and even closer to the city of Lambayeque, where the Royal Tombs of Sipán Museum serves as one of the major tourist attractions on the north coast. Here at Túcume however, there are few visitors.

It is not hard to get to the site. Combis leave regularly from Chiclayo and Lambayeque, dropping passengers in the modern village of Túcume, from which an quick mototaxi ride leads to the ruins. By car or taxi, it is about a 30 minute ride from Chiclayo.

There are two main trails marked out across the desert plain in Túcume. One leads to Cerro Purgatorio, a craggy hill overlooking the 26 pyramids that comprise the site. The trail winds across the scorched valley, between several of the pyramids, before arriving at a staircase leading to different scenic overlooks on the face of Purgatorio.

WikiPedia, too, has a short reference.

Then there’s a long and revealing article on the InkaNatura Travel Site, which I recommend you go to.

So what happened at Túcume to cause the civilisation to fail?  Maybe this 10-minute film gives the answers, but just a note to say that there are some potentially upsetting scenes for the younger or more sensitive among us.

So anyone sufficiently brave to say that history won’t repeat itself.

Wonder which would be the ‘cursed cities’?

Inequality, a rich man speaks!

A personal reflection offered by Nick Hanauer.

Mr. Nick Hanauer

I hadn’t come across Mr. Hanauer before but thanks to some Facebook comments by Patrice Ayme found this YouTube video that is well-worth watching.  That’s an understatement!

The fundamental message that is contained in this short video seems critical, well to me it does, to society (that’s all of us, by the way) understanding why so many things seem to be going so very wrong for so many people.  But let me stop there before it becomes another of my rants!

Who is Nick Hanauer?  Here is a small extract from Nick Hanauer’s website,

Nicolas J Hanauer is a partner with Second Avenue Partners, a Seattle venture capital partnership specializing in early state startups and emerging technology. He has had a hand in such companies as Amazon.com and aQuantive among others.

Hanauer’s career began with a position as executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Pacific Coast Feather Company, a family owned manufacturer of basic bedding. In his time in that role, he helped grow Pacific Coast from several million dollars to more than $300 million in sales. Hanauer subsequently served as the company’s Co-Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer and remains Chief Executive Officer.

In 1988, Hanauer co-founded Museum Quality Framing Company, a company that has emerged the largest of its kind on the west coast with 60 locations. Hanauer was also one of the first investors in Amazon.com in 1995, where he served as a Board Advisor until January of 2000.

In 1996, he founded and served as CEO of internet media company Avenue A Media (later re-named aQuantive, Inc.) and became Chairman of the Board upon the first public offering in 2000. aQuantive was purchased by Microsoft in August of 2007 for 6.4 billion dollars; the largest acquisition in Microsoft history.

Now the video; less than 6 minutes long – do watch it!

As  a one-time entrepreneur back in the 80’s I can vouch for much of what Mr. Hanauer proclaims in his video.  The essence of successful marketing for any business, large and small, is understanding your market. Seeing the customer’s world through the customer’s eyes would be another way of putting that.

In plain language that means carefully and closely understanding what your customers, both actual and prospective, require, objectively and subjectively, and providing it to them profitably.  As the middle-classes (don’t like the term but it will have to do) are often the largest market opportunity, then it does follow that a healthy and vibrant middle-class is going to be best overall for the health and vibrancy of a country.  Indeed, in this very inter-connected world, that really equates to the health and vibrancy of our planet.

Which so easily leads on to a core truth. This one.  If all the Governments democratically elected on this planet truly acknowledged the democratic foundation, as Lincoln so ably put it, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” then those governments would be united in the one most important task facing the people – creating a sustainable way for us to live on the only planet we have!

Apologies, it did turn into a rant!

You may also want to read this TED and inequality: The real story.

Dog goes for a 1,700 km run!

A wonderful news item from the BBC from their China ‘desk’.

Some dog run! All 1,700 kilometres across China

Here’s how it was presented on the BBC News website.

A stray dog has completed a 1700km journey across China after joining a cycle race from Sichuan province to Tibet.

The dog, nicknamed “Xiaosa”, joined the cyclists after one of them gave him food.

He ran with them for 20 days, covering up to 60km a day, and climbing 12 mountains.

Cyclist Xiao Yong started a blog about Xiaosa’s adventures, which had attracted around 40,000 fans by the end of the race.

Yong now hopes to adopt Xiaosa.

Luckily, someone smart grabbed the BBC footage and uploaded it to YouTube thus allowing me to include that below:

I did several Google searches for Xiao Yong’s blog but failed to come across it – never mind, it doesn’t detract from a delightful story this Memorial Day week-end here in America.

Aussie dogs

A rather overdue posting.

Back on April 2nd this year, I posted a piece called I am your dog!  The item was motivated by coming across a personal reflection of the relationship that I had, and still have, with Pharaoh, my German Shepherd dog, back in 2007 when I was still living in England; I met Jean in Mexico Christmas 2007!

Among the many comments was one from Perfect Stranger who writes the fabulous blog Dogs of Doubt.  He said in his comment,

Hi Paul, I do believe this comment belongs on this post … two videos, part of a true story about an Aussie dog, a modern day “Dog on the Tucker Box”, a true blue friend to an entire town who eventually ended up building him a statue … yeah, not “it” but “HIM”.

First video shows you how tough Aussies animals are ,, watch the fight, it’s awesome, I laugh every time I watch it. they say it really happened. 🙂

Second video is the trailer for “Red Dog” – The Pilbara Wanderer!  , hope you get to see the movie

I promised to make that comment a post all on it’s own right – then promptly forgot!  So apologies and here are those two movies.

A lovely week-end interlude

Big thanks to John H. for forwarding this to me.

Sit back and relax.

Nothing more except to wish everyone, wherever you are, a peaceful week-end, above or below the surface of the ocean!

What part of the word ‘change’ are you having trouble with?

Climate change denialists and cloud cuckoo land!

Yesterday, I republished the recent Post from Martin Lack under my title of Playing with fire!  In that Post there was a reference to just one example of the very different climatic world that we all live in.  That reference was to the recent huge devastation of the apple and soft-fruit crops in Northern USA and Canada.

The website Climate Denial Crock of the Week carried the story in a clear and fine fashion.  Let me borrow some of that content,

Canada/US Great Lakes Area Fruit Growers “Wipeout” Due to Extreme Spring. Deniers: “They Need More CO2″

May 18, 2012

The brown centre of an apple blossom indicates a bloom that would not result in an apple being produced following this spring’s unusual weather.

Elsewhere on the blog, we are still hearing that “CO2 is good for Plants”. Meanwhile, here in the reality based community….

Windsor Star, May 5: 

A catastrophic freeze has wiped out about 80 per cent of Ontario’s apple crop and has the fruit industry looking at losses already estimated at more than $100 million.

“This is the worst disaster fruit growers have ever, ever experienced,” Harrow-area orchard owner Keith Wright said Friday. “We’ve been here for generations and I’ve never heard of this happening before.

“This is unheard of … all fruit growing areas in the Great Lakes area, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York State, Ontario, are all basically wiped out.”

Wright lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of apples and peaches Sunday morning when freezing temperatures killed the blossoms.

Warm temperatures caused fruit trees to bloom early and when temperatures plummeted Sunday morning it damaged or wiped out much of the $60-million apple crop and 20 to 30 per cent of Ontario’s $48-million tender fruit crop which includes peaches, cherries, pears, plums and nectarines.

Brian Gilroy, a Georgian Bay-area apple grower who is chairman of the Ontario Apple Growers, said the loss to fruit growers and the economy will easily be more than $100 million. On top of the lost yield or no crop at all, orchard workers and spinoff industries such as juice, packing, storage and farm supplies will be affected.

Gilroy said consumers will find locally grown apples pricey and difficult to find this fall. Some varieties of apples, such as Empire, will be very difficult to find.

Washington State has a good crop but consumers should expect apple prices to jump because all of northeastern North America was affected, he said.

The article goes on to report from the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.  It does not make for pretty reading!

Then in a private email, Martin referred me to this Think Progress article of May 19th,

April 2012: Earth’s 5th Warmest On Record And La Niña Officially Ends, So The Heat Is On.

By Climate Guest Blogger on May 19, 2012 at 3:09 pm

JR: It’s remarkable how warm it was globally in April considering that we were only just coming out of a double dip La Niña. If we don’t triple dip, we’ll set more temperature records soon. Indeed, NOAA models predict a good chance of an El Niño forming in the late summer, which would make it quite likely next year would be the hottest on record. As for April, you’ll note it was hot in the ‘wrong’ places again — over much of the tundra, which is a carbon time bomb

The Think Progress article then draws heavily on an extensive comment from Dr.Jeff Master’s WunderBlog that I am going republish, hopefully in the interests of helping to spread the truth about this planet of ours.

April 2012 was the globe’s 5th warmest April on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NASA rated April 2012 as the 4th warmest April on record. April 2012 global land temperatures were the 2nd warmest on record, and the Northern Hemisphere land surface temperature was 1.74°C (3.13°F) above the 20th century average, marking the warmest April since records began in 1880. Global ocean temperatures were the 11th warmest on record, and April 2012 was the 427th consecutive month with ocean temperatures warmer than the 20th century average. The last time the ocean temperatures were below average was September 1976. The increase in global temperatures relative to average compared to March 2012 (16th warmest March on record) was due, in part, to warming waters in the Eastern Pacific, due to the La Niña event that ended in April. Global satellite-measured temperatures for the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere were 6th or 4th warmest in the 34-year record, according to Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH). April temperatures in the stratosphere were the 1st to 4th coldest on record. We expect cold temperatures there due to the greenhouse effect and to destruction of ozone due to CFC pollution. Northern Hemisphere snow cover during April was 4th smallest in the 46-year record. Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, has a comprehensive post on the notable weather events of April in his April 2012 Global Weather Extremes Summary. Notably, national heat records (for warmest April temperature on record) occurred in the United States (a tie), Germany, Austria, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungry, Croatia, Ukraine, and Slovakia as well as the cities of Moscow and Munich.

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for April 2012. The most notable extremes were the warmth observed across Russia, the United States, Alaska, and parts of the Middle East and eastern Europe. There were no land areas with large-scale cold conditions of note. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) .

La Niña officially ends

According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC), La Niña conditions are no longer present in the equatorial Pacific, where sea surface temperatures were approximately average as of May 13. The threshold for a La Niña is for these temperatures to be 0.5°C below average or cooler. CPC forecasts that neutral conditions will persist though the summer, with a 41% chance of an El Niño event developing in time for the August – September – October peak of hurricane season. El Niño conditions tend to decrease Atlantic hurricane activity, by increasing wind shear over the tropical Atlantic.

Figure 2. Arctic sea ice extent in 2012 (blue line) compared to the average (thick grey line.) The record low year of 2007 (dashed green line) is also shown. Arctic sea ice was near average during April, but has fallen well below average during the first half of May. Image credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

April Arctic sea ice extent near average
Arctic sea ice extent was near average in April 2012, the 17th lowest (18th greatest) extent in the 35-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This was the largest April Arctic sea ice extent since 2001. However, ice in the Arctic is increasingly young, thin ice, which will make it easy for this year’s ice to melt away to near-record low levels this summer, if warmer than average weather occurs in the Arctic.

So to those that still think the jury is out on climate change, let me just repeat the title, “What part of the word change are you having trouble with?”

Playing with fire!

A republication of a powerful essay from Martin Lack.

Martin and I haven’t seen eye-to-eye on everything, as each of us would readily admit.  But there’s no taking away the power contained in many of Martin’s essays over on his Blog Lack of Environment.  Unlike me, Martin has strong academic credentials that he uses well to support his position.

Martin recently published a strong Post called It doesn’t have to be like this and has kindly given written permission for it to be republished on Learning from Dogs.

Tomorrow, I plan to expand on the fruit crop disaster that Martin refers to below.  So here is the essay,

—————

Planet Earth is not just another business!

 

It doesn’t have to be like this

In 1974, the former World Bank economist Herman E Daly published an article on ‘The Economics of the Steady State’, beginning with a quote from the famous scientist Sir Arthur Eddington: “But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” Daly is also on record as having quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (from Letter to the Soviet Leaders [i.e. published in 1974]), who said: “Society must cease to look upon ‘progress’ as something desirable. Eternal ‘progress’ is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is a not a steadily expanding economy but a zero growth economy; a stable economy.”

The essential point of Thomas Malthus’ (1798) ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ was that populations increase faster than the supply of food can be made available to meet their needs. With this in mind, in 1972, Meadows et al predicted that the biophysical limits to growth would be exceeded at some point within 100 years: “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

Recent strange weather in the USA – specifically a very warm March followed by unseasonal frosts in May – has all but wiped out all kinds of fruit crops. This may not have been the industrial collapse envisaged by Meadows et al (that is yet to come), but it is evidence of the way in which anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) – or what some would have us be more precise and call human induced rapid global overheating (HIRGO) – threatens our ability to feed ourselves.

In 1992, the Meadows et al team summarised their revised conclusions as follows:
— 1. Human use of many essential resources and generation of many pollutants have already surpassed rates that are physically sustainable. Without significant reductions in material and energy flows, there will be in the coming decades an uncontrolled decline in per capita food output, energy use and industrial production.
— 2. This decline is not inevitable. To avoid it two changes are necessary. The first is a comprehensive revision of policies and practices that perpetuate growth in material consumption and in population. A second is a rapid, drastic increase in the efficiency with which materials are used.
— 3. A sustainable society is still technically and economically possible. It could be much more desirable than a society that tries to solve its problems by constant expansion. The transition to a sustainable society requires a careful balance between long-term and short term goals, and an emphasis on sufficiency, equity, and quality of life rather than on quantity of output. It requires more than productivity and more than technology; it also requires maturity, compassion, and wisdom.

In general, Meadows et al have been consistently ignored. In 1993, frustrated by the absence of discussion on population growth in international politics, Garrett Hardin pointed out that: “Two centuries of intermittent wrestling with population problems have produced useful insights about the reality and nature of limits… Four centuries of sedation by the delusion of limitlessness have left humanity floundering in a wilderness of rhetoric… From this it must be inferred that someday political conservatism will once again be defined as contented living within limits. The limitless world view will have to be abandoned.”

In this context, the words growth and development should not be confused. As Daly has pointed out:
“the Earth may be developing but it is not growing.”!

In their 30-year update of Limits to Growth, in a section entitled ‘Why Technology and Markets Alone Can’t Avoid Overshoot’, the Meadows et al team pointed out that if we put off dealing with limits to growth we are more likely to come up against several of them simultaneously. With regard to the computer modelling undertaken, they observed that in most cases the simulations ran out of the ‘ability to cope’ when too much industrial output has to be diverted to solving problems; and concluded: “Growth, and especially exponential growth, is so insidious because it shortens the time for effective action. It loads stress on a system faster and faster, until coping mechanisms that have been adequate with slower rates of change finally begin to fail.”

Just because Meadows et al have not yet been proven right does not mean that they were wrong.

In Small is Beautiful (1973), E. F. Schumacher wrote: “The illusion of [mankind’s] unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production… based on the failure to distinguish between income and capital where this distinction matters most… A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital…”

What he meant was:

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation. ― (Herman E. Daly)

Welcome Kylie Dunning

The second fascinating contribution from a guest author.

On Monday I mentioned that I had been approached by two authors who wanted to share their articles with the readers of Learning from Dogs and on that day I published a guest post from Dr. Jane Brackman.  Today, I’m delighted to share with you the thoughts of the second of those authors, Kylie Dunning, who describes herself as a writer who holds a strong passion for Psychology, especially in the field of Forensics.  She is a lover of animals and an avid hiker in her spare time.

Trainer Julio Simuel (left) watches as his student “Walker” gets congratulations from admirers following a graduation ceremony at Nash Correctional Institution last Wednesday.

Here now follows Kylie’s essay,

Psychology of Healing: Dogs and Inmate Rehabilitation

In 1981, Sister Pauline Quinn envisioned  a prison pet partnership program where inmates would train dogs for people with disabilities. Designed to benefit unwanted dogs, the inmates, and the future dog owners, the program was initiated in the Washington state prison for women. The success of the program led to dog training programs in prisons all over the country and has since become part of the material in forensic psychology programs and criminal rehabilitation programs.

Male and female inmates train anywhere from three to fifty dogs at a time for adoption into new families, as service animals, and sometimes for specialized purposes such as bomb-sniffing. There are other benefits. The prisoners who worked as trainers hope to find jobs in animal care as soon as they leave prison. Others, serving longer sentences, are given a sense of purpose and an improved outlook. Psychologically, having a dog to care for serves as a form of therapy and decreases depression, and it brings out good qualities in the inmates, even improving their attitude toward each other.

The Nash Correctional Institution in North Carolina has a program called “New Leash on Life,” in partnership with Southern Siberia Rescue, which pays for all the food and medical treatment for the dogs. Three dogs at a time are trained for eight weeks, then offered for adoption. Jerome Peterson, who has served 19 years for a second-degree murder charge, is one of the trainers. He says that teaching the dogs has taught him compassion and made him a better man. “You have to be patient with the dogs,” he explained. “Some have been abused, and some were left stranded.” He says that though only six of the inmates train the dogs, all 980 of the inmates at the medium-security prison benefit from the program. “A lot of guys wake up mad at the world for no reason,” he said. “When they see the dogs, they get happy — excited. Their whole demeanor just changes.”

Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas, a combined medium- and maximum-security prison, has a population of 2,500 criminals. Their Safe Harbor Prison Dog Program rescues dogs from death row. About 50 of them are trained by about 100 inmates on any given day. So far, about 1,200 dogs of all breeds and ages have found new homes under the program. Inmate Jerry McMullin trains his dogs in 15-minute intervals four times a day, rewarding them with treats he buys for 45 cents a pound at the canteen (out of the dollar a day he earns at his prison job—prisoners aren’t paid for training the dogs). “You don’t want to work with them too long or they stop paying attention. They get bored,” he says. “I use no force or fear, positive reinforcement only.” Inmates like Pete Spencer will go to lengths to help troubled dogs. “I had one who was so physically abused, he had no trust in humans,” Spencer says. “I slept on the floor with him for a month to get his trust and then I taught him commands.”

The inmates can see positive changes from working with dogs. Spencer says of his fellow inmate, “When I first met (McMullin), he was … well, pretty grouchy,” Spencer says. “Now he’s more open and alive and he has a positive outlook.” Other work programs can help prepare inmates for a job after release, but working with dogs may psychologically be a more effective way to rehabilitate them. With prison populations stressing already taxed resources, and the more and more animals in need of homes, the use of dog training programs in prisons is more than a happy accident. It is a creative way of using state resources to do real and lasting change in society.

oooOOOooo

Well what another wonderfully interesting guest post.  Thank you, Kylie.  More please!

Using details in Kylie’s article, it was very easy to find this video, plus the photograph at the head of the article came from the Southern Siberian Rescue website.

Homeless dogs are getting special help from inmates.  The Columbia County Sheriff’s Office has launched their own “New Leash on Life” program that benefits inmates at the Columbia County Jail and the dogs.

The loss of a lovely Uncle

Please indulge me with this purely personal reflection.

My Uncle Peter died in his sleep at 1.30am UK time on Monday, the 21st May, 2012.  He was 91 and had been suffering from declining health for a while.

As my parting gift from across the seas, I just wanted to record the great inspiration that he was to both me and my son, Alex.

Peter was a great gliding fan (sailplane in American speak!).  He must have started gliding not many years after the end of the war in 1945.  Anyway, when I was a young lad, back in the mists of time, my Uncle Peter took me for a glider flight.  That left a memory in me that lay dormant for many years until the late 1970s when a colleague, Roger Davis, introduced me to the Rattlesden Gliding Club and that started a 25-year interest in gliding and later power flying.

My son, Alex, also when he was a young boy was taken up for his first flight in a glider by Uncle Peter and later flew with me many times both in gliders and power aircraft.  Today he is a Senior Captain with a British airline.

So, dear Uncle Peter, what an aviation inspiration you have been for two generations.

Uncle Peter and two generations of pilots.

As it happens, 1.30 am UK time on Monday the 21st was 5.30pm Arizonan time on Sunday the 20th.  At that very moment, well 5.26pm to be precise, Jean and I were watching the solar eclipse and I took the photograph below of what was the partial eclipse here in Payson.

Partial solar eclipse partly hidden by the pine trees.

A tribute to a wonderful family man with a great sense of humour.