Category: Musings

Man’s first orbit around Planet Earth.

A wonderful tribute to Yuri Gagarin and all his team.

When I recently wrote of it being 41 years since Swigert on board Apollo 13 transmitted “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” I also included a closing reflection as follows,

Finally, this Post is published, not only on the 41st anniversary of that memorable Apollo Flight but the day after the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight of a human into space, the 12th April, 1961.

Coincidentally, our favourite documentary film website, Top Documentary Films, featured on April 14th the new film First Orbit.  We watched the film that night.  It was a most unusual format for a film, yet a most haunting experience.  Watching the credits, it then became clear that the film was a co-operative venture made especially for the 50th anniversary of that remarkable, historic flight.

Of course, had I previously been aware of the venture and this remarkable film then it would have been promoted on Learning from Dogs in good time before the anniversary date.  However, better late than never!

Indeed, there is a dedicated website in recognition of this First Orbit.  Here’s the background to the film,

April 12th 1961 – Yuri Gagarin is about to see what no other person has seen in the history of humanity – the Earth from space. In the next 108 minutes he’ll see more than most people do in a lifetime. What sights awaited the first cosmonaut silently gliding over the world below? What was it like to view the oceans and continents sailing by from such a height?

In a unique collaboration with the European Space Agency, and the Expedition 26/27 crew of theInternational Space Station, we have created a new film of what Gagarin first witnessed fifty years ago.

By matching the orbital path of the Space Station, as closely as possible, to that of Gagarin’s Vostok 1spaceship and filming the same vistas of the Earth through the new giant cupola window, astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and documentary film maker Christopher Riley, have captured a new digital high definition view of the Earth below, half a century after Gagarin first witnessed it.

Weaving these new views together with historic, recordings of Gagarin from the time, (subtitled in Englsih) and an original score by composer Philip Sheppard, we have created a spellbinding film to share with people around the world on this historic anniversary.

The music in the film is most beautiful, quite moving.  Here’s the background to the music from the First Orbit website,

The music in our film is all composed by Philip Sheppard and comes from his album Cloud Songs.

First Orbit’s producer Christopher Riley first worked with Philip in 2006 on the Sundance Award winning feature documentary film ‘In the Shadow of the Moon‘ and since then Philip had been working on a new suite of music inspired by spaceflight.

“We’d been working with some of these tracks on another project” says Chris, “and we suddenly realised how perfectly they could compliment ‘First Orbit’ as well. We contacted Philip to ask his permission to use them, only to find that his entire Cloud Song album was already in orbit onboard the International Space Station!”

“NASA astronaut Cady Coleman, had them on her iPod” says Philip. “Her husband Josh Simpson is a friend of mine and they’d listened to a lot of my music together before she left, so I made up a playlist for her!”

Quite by coincidence Cady had been listening to the music in ‘First Orbit’ at one end of the Space Station whilst European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli was shooting for the film at the other end, without either of them knowing the connection!

Back on Earth Chris and the film’s editor Stephen Slater took Philip’s tracks from Cloud Song and weaved them together with Paolo’s new views of the Earth to create the different moods of the film; from the first views of snowy Siberia to the darkness of night over the Pacific Ocean and the homecoming over Africa, as Gagarin starts to re-enter the atmosphere.

The result is a mesmerising combination of imagary and music which we hope convey the spectrum of emotions which no doubt went through Yuri’s mind as he gazed down upon the Earth.

Finally, here’s the film. It’s an hour and thirty-nine minutes and, as I said, an unconventional film experience.  But if any part of you either remembers the event or wonders what it was like, those 50 years ago, then find somewhere out of reach of interruptions and watch the film.

Week-end pause continues

As was mentioned yesterday, taking things really easy this week-end.

Here’s a poem for today.

A wet trotter!

FOUR FEET

I have done mostly what men do,
And pushed it out of my mind;
But I can’t forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind.

Day after day, the whole day through–
Wherever my road inclined–
Four-Feet said, ‘I am coming with you!’
And trotted along behind.

Now I must go by some other round–
Which I shall never find–
Some where that does not carry the sound
Of Four-Feet trotting behind.

— Rudyard Kipling —

Week-end pause

Please forgive me but this week-end I am taking things easy.  Jean and I want to savour the beautiful weather here in Payson and just enjoy the special life  up here at 5,000 feet in Arizona.

Here’s something to reflect upon; another one tomorrow.  Normal service returns on Monday 😉

“A Native American Elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, ‘the one I feed the most.'” –  —  George Bernard Shaw

Keep feeding your good Dog!

Socrates and self-confidence

A presentation by Alain de Botton.

On April 12th, I introduced to you, dear reader, the philosopher, Alain de Botton. I promised that I would soon give you more.

On Top Documentary Films, there are links to all six parts of a series on philosophy presented by this popular British philosopher  featuring six thinkers who have influenced history, and their ideas about the pursuit of the happy life.

The first part is about Socrates; Socrates and self-confidence.  But before linking to that specific programme, a little about this enigmatic man, Socrates, who lived about 2,500 years ago (469–399 B.C.E).  Here’s an extract from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.), an enigma, an inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how philosophy itself was to be conceived. All our information about him is second-hand and most of it vigorously disputed, but his trial and death at the hands of the Athenian democracy is nevertheless the founding myth of the academic discipline of philosophy, and his influence has been felt far beyond philosophy itself, and in every age. Because his life is widely considered paradigmatic for the philosophic life and, more generally, for how anyone ought to live, Socrates has been encumbered with the admiration and emulation normally reserved for founders of religious sects—Jesus or Buddha—strange for someone who tried so hard to make others do their own thinking, and for someone convicted and executed on the charge of irreverence toward the gods. Certainly he was impressive, so impressive that many others were moved to write about him, all of whom found him strange by the conventions of fifth-century Athens: in his appearance, personality, and behavior, as well as in his views and methods.

Full entry may be read here, and very interesting it is, by the way.

Anyway, back to the programme from Alain de Botton.  The part on Socrates is introduced thus,

Why do so many people go along with the crowd and fail to stand up for what they truly believe? Partly because they are too easily swayed by other people’s opinions and partly because they don’t know when to have confidence in their own.

You can either watch the video by clicking here, or view it as three sections from YouTube, as follows.

Gondolas for New York?

Can we really make sense of the science of climate change?

Those that come to this Blog on a regular basis, and many thanks to you, by the way, will know that, overall, I take the stance that climate change, global warming, etc., etc. is real.  At the very least to me it is reasonably described by the saying that most pilots are familiar with, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt.”  In other words, if something is worrying you don’t hesitate to get your ‘arse’ on the ground.

The planet’s climate systems are incredibly complex and like processes and systems much less complex than the earth’s atmosphere getting to real hard evidence is challenging.  Please accept that my personal position is unchanged; for me there are sufficient signs to suggest that climatic changes may be more likely, than less likely, to substantially harm humankind’s existence on Planet Earth within the next generation.

However, Dan Gomez, my very good Californian friend of 40-plus years, is much more sceptical.  I respect his intellect greatly and, therefore, respect his opinions.  Dan recently sent me a number of documents that raise valid questions.  Over time I want to share these with you and invite anyone who wishes to comment on Learning for Dogs to do so, or even better submit a guest post.

But before going to the first of Dan’s documents, let me share something that was reported by BBC News recently.  It’s this.

New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea level rise in different regions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 2007 that sea levels would rise at least 28cm (1ft) by the year 2100.

But this is a global average; and now a Dutch team has made what appears to be the first attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations.

Other researchers say the IPCC’s figure is likely to be a huge under-estimate.

Whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be regional differences.

That IPCC report may be accessed here and the main website of the IPCC is here.  But even the BBC’s report shows that scientists are still learning more, as time goes on.

Ocean currents and differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater are among the factors that mean sea level currently varies by up a metre across the oceans – this does not include short-term changes due to tides or winds.

So if currents change with global warming, which is expected – and if regions such as the Arctic Ocean become less saline as ice sheets discharge their contents into the sea – the regional patterns of peaks and troughs will also change.

“Everybody will still have the impact, and in many places they will get the average rise,” said Roderik van der Wal from the University of Utrecht, one of the team presenting their regional projections at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting in Vienna.

“But places like New York are going to have a larger contribution than the average – 20% more in this case – and Reykjavik will be better off.”

The news item also contains some fascinating evidence of the influence of gravity from the mass of the polar ice caps.  Read the full article here.

Gondola's for hire in a few year's time?

Now on to one of Dan’s documents.  It is from the website detailing the history of plant fossils of West Virginia.  The document refers to the climate of the carboniferous period.  Here’s how it starts.

West Virginia today is mostly an erosional plateau carved up into steep ridges and narrow valleys, but 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous Period, it was part of a vast equatorial coastal swamp extending many hundreds of miles and barely rising above sea level. This steamy, tropical quagmire served as the nursery for Earth’s first primitive forests, comprised of giant lycopods, ferns, and seed ferns.

North America was located along Earth’s equator then, courtesy of the forces of continental drift. The hot and humid climate of the Middle Carboniferous Period was accompanied by an explosion of terrestrial plant life. However by the Late Carboniferous Period Earth’s climate had become increasingly cooler and drier. By the beginning of the Permian Period average global temperatures declined by about 10° C.

Interestingly, the last half of the Carboniferous Period witnessed periods of significant ice cap formation over polar landmasses– particularly in the southern hemisphere. Alternating cool and warm periods during the ensuing Carboniferous Ice Age coincided with cycles of glacier expansion and retreat. Coastlines fluctuated, caused by a combination of both local basin subsidence and worldwide sea level changes. In West Virginia a complex system of meandering river deltas supported vast coal swamps that left repeating stratigraphic levels of peat bogs that later became coal, separated by layers of fluvial rocks like sandstone and shale when the deltas were building, and marine rocks like black shales and limestones when rising seas drowned coastlands. Accumulations of several thousand feet of these sediments over millions of years caused heat and pressure which transformed the soft sediments into rock and the peat layers into the 100 or so coal seams which today comprise the Great Bituminous Coalfields of the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe.

One needs to read the full article to properly understand this period of history of the planet.  But it includes revealing diagrams like this one.

Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time

Here’s how it concludes.

What will our climate be like in the future? That is the question scientists are asking and seeking answers to currently. The causes of “global warming” and climate change are today being popularly described in terms of human activities. However, climate change is something that happens constantly on its own. If humans are in fact altering Earth’s climate with our cars, electrical powerplants, and factories these changes must be larger than the natural climate variability in order to be measurable. So far the signal of a discernible human contribution to global climate change has not emerged from this natural variability or background noise.

Understanding Earth’s geologic and climate past is important for understanding why our present Earth is the way it is, and what Earth may look like in the future. The geologic information locked up in the rocks and coal seams of the Carboniferous Period are like a history book waiting to be opened. What we know so far, is merely an introduction. It falls on the next generation of geologists, climatologists, biologists, and curious others to continue the exploration and discovery of Earth’s dynamic history– a fascinating and surprising tale, written in stone.

 

Truth fears no questions.  ~Unknown

Mogollon culture in Payson, AZ

In fact, within a few steps of our front door.

The son of one of our neighbours called us round last Thursday to show us the skeletal remains he recently found in their front garden together with a most beautiful pot.  Here are a few pictures.

Discovery site
Mogollon culture pot?
Ancient and modern!

On the website Desert USA there is a section dealing with the culture of the Prehistoric Desert Peoples including the peoples of The Mogollon.  Here’s an extract.

In addition to wild edible and utilitarian plants, the mountain flanks and desert basins harbored a thriving community of game, including bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer, white-tail deer, antelope, beaver, badger, blacktail jackrabbits, desert cottontails, turkeys and various other species. Rock exposures served as quarries for the raw materials for making projectile points and tools. Clay exposures provided the raw material for making ceramic vessels and figurines.

Even as the Mogollon people gradually adopted village life and farming, they would continue to count on the ranges and basins to supplement their larder and provide essential material resources. They would never be able to rely on corn, beans, squash and other crops to the exclusion of wild plant foods because the Mogollon region held relatively few areas suitable for agriculture. Most of them occurred along lower mountain river valleys, along the few desert river basins and near a few desert playas. Even those areas which were suitable experienced erratic rainfall year in and year out.

The article includes the following photograph which shows how close the resemblance of the pot found next door to the one in the article.

All very fascinating. Indeed, when one reflects that European descendants have only been in the area for about 500 years and Payson considers it’s founding year as recent as 1882 it really isn’t that long ago, in historical terms, that the land around here will have borne the footprints of peoples very different to us today.

Maybe on still, dark nights, their memories are very close to us.

All in the meaning, postscript!

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

On the 28th March I wrote what I thought was a concluding piece on the subject of ‘meaning’.  I used some of the most amazing details about the universe to highlight the fact that, in the end, if our civilisation doesn’t get it’s collective act together then from the perspective of the universe it is all pretty irrelevant.  In that piece I quoted from Prof. Brian Cox, “Everything we are, everything that’s ever been and everything that will ever be was all forged in the same moment of creation 13.7bn years ago from an unimaginably hot and dense volume of matter less than the size of an atom.”

Now, in fairness, Prof. Cox did allude to scientists exploring the notion of what might have happened before the Big Bang.  Anyway, a couple of nights ago we watched a BBC Horizon programme, now on YouTube, that looked much more closely into this fascinating topic.  The link came to us from the website Top Documentary Films that set out the introduction to the BBC programme.

They are the biggest questions that science can possibly ask: where did everything in our universe come from? How did it all begin? For nearly a hundred years, we thought we had the answer: a big bang some 14 billion years ago.

But now some scientists believe that was not really the beginning. Our universe may have had a life before this violent moment of creation.

Horizon takes the ultimate trip into the unknown, to explore a dizzying world of cosmic bounces, rips and multiple universes, and finds out what happened before the big bang.

Neil Turok, Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, working with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, has proposed a radical new answer to cosmology’s deepest question: What banged?

Answer: Instead of the universe inexplicably springing into existence from a mysteriousinitial singularity, the Big Bang was a collision between two universes like ours existing as parallel membranes floating in a higher-dimensional space that we’re not aware of.

One bang is followed by another, in a potentially endless series of cosmic cycles, each one spelling the end of a universe and the beginning of a new one. Not one bang, but many.

Sir Roger Penrose has changed his mind about the Big Bang. He now imagines an eternal cycle of expanding universes where matter becomes energy and back again in the birth of new universes and so on and so on.

Here’s that programme.  Enjoy!

The day after April 1st!

When it all gets real close and personal.

I have been a great fan of the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, and read his Blog as often as I can.  Recently, the focus has been on Ireland.

A few days ago, before the announcement by the Irish premier and finance minister as to their vision for the future of Ireland’s banks, Robert penned a post that started as follows:

The unbelievable truth about Ireland and its banks
Ireland’s central bank and new government will confirm on Thursday that the hole in the country’s banks is even wider, deeper and darker than seemed to be the case last November, when those bust banks forced the country to go with a begging bowl to the eurozone’s rescue funds and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for 67.5bn euros (£59bn) of rescue loans.

That article then led me to Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor, who also writes a Blog.  He wrote on the 30th March,

A short summary of the Euro snafu that’s about to happen:

1) Tomorrow Ireland publishes the results of bank stress tests. It has to find – or the EU has to find – another E18-25bn to shore up its failing banks.

etc., etc.

Again, while the article is interesting, the whole point of this Post was one comment made to that Paul Mason piece.  Here it is,

At 00:47am on 31st Mar 2011, tawse57 wrote:

I am bored with all these posts about the economy now. Can we go back to cheese and crackers and the mysterious case of Paul Mason’s mobo contacts?

I was just talking with a 35 year old young man who is married and has a young child.

His wife, quite rightly, does not wish to move away from the place where she was born and brought up – Cornwall.

But he tells me that, despite almost saving £100,000 by putting in every hour they could in working and saving, that they stand no chance of ever owning their own home.

He says the house that he rents have asking prices of about £450,000 despite most of them just sitting on the market for years because no one, no one local anyhow, can afford them. What does sell goes to rich Londoners.

He is destined to pay out most of his wages in private landlord rents. He can’t get into a Council house or a Housing Association property because they either no longer exist or the waiting lists are measured in decades.

He is not prepared to have such a millstone of stress, worry and financial drain around his neck. It would kill him. I don’t blame him.

His story is one of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the UK today.

I mention this as the bank stress tests are directly connected with the massive credit bubble, much of it a housing bubble of liar loans, that brought the global economy to its knees, bankrupted banks and still threatens to bankrupt nations.

All of us on here know this. We are an enlightened bunch.

But I think it is worth remembering that the affects of the global credit binge are still directly affecting so many in this country.

The UK is almost alone in the World in not yet seeing a massive housing crash. The Government and the Bank of England have gone out of their way stop it happening in order to protect the banks who so stupidly, but also so greedily, loaned so many liar loans on bricks and mortar not in other countries but here in the UK.

Those UK banks that keep threatening to leave our shores are up to their eyeballs in global liar loans. You name a country in trouble and you can bet your bottom dollar, which might be the only thing most of us have left soon, that British banks are at the heart of it all.

It is long overdue that this giant house of cards came crashing down. It is long over-due that, as a Society, we cut out the cancer of dirty banks and dirty bankers from our lives and from these shores.

They are leeches on the souls of Men. Gosh, I am getting poetic in my anger. It must be that teaspoon of Jack Daniels I put in my midnight cocoa.

So what if the banks fail their stress tests today, next week or next year. It won’t make a squat of difference to that couple in Cornwall. It won’t make a squat of difference to most of us.

The worst thing that can happen is, as Alistair Darling so panicked, that the ATM machines run empty. Well, what would happen then? Would the sky fall in? Would us polite British all sit at home and do nothing.

Or would we take our cue from the Egyptians, the Tunisians and all the rest?

Perhaps what this country needs most of all is for another even bigger banking crisis? If it happens I think I would feel safer being one of the masses instead of one of the banking elite.

I do hope the banks fail the stress tests. I do hope it brings about another crisis. I do hope that, this time, the People say enough is enough and that this rotting cancer within Humanity is lanced with a fiery lancie thingy.

I could murder a bit of cheese on a nice cracker now.

Whoever you are tawse57, I like your style.  Very powerful words.

“It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself.”

~Thomas Jefferson (third President of the United States from 1801 to 1809)

Joseph Campbell interlude

Just ran out of time!

My apologies but events yesterday conspired to get in the way of me offering a more thoughtful article for today.  So I hope you will be happy with another video of Joseph Campbell.

For those wanting to explore more, this is the link to the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

Sciences becomes magic.

Only a mystical view can speak to the soul.

 

The Helix nebula

(More on the Helix nebula here.)

I have referred yesterday to the series on the BBC hosted by Professor Brian Cox called Wonders of the Universe.  Well we managed to watch the last episode last night, entitled Messengers.  Like the other three episodes, it was breath-taking.

In this last episode, Prof. Cox speaks of the universe still expanding with the outer edge, if edge is the appropriate word, being about 8.7 billion light years away.  Thus the age of the Universe is about that; 8.7 billion light years.  Note: NASA has a piece that suggests that this figure may not be confirmed.  But let’s not worry too much about the precise value.  But we will take a short detour to understand a little more about the ‘light year’.

From here.

So to measure really long distances, people use a unit called alight year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or:

186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year

A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles (9,460,800,000,000 kilometers). That’s a long way!

That is a single light-year. Now reflect on the outer edge of the universe being, say, 8,700,000,000 multiplied by 5,865,696,000,000 miles away.  Don’t know about your mind, but my mind has no ‘feel’ for that distance whatsoever.

OK, next proposition put forward by Prof. Cox.  That is that scientists believe that ‘The Big Bang’ was the instant that the universe erupted, if that’s an appropriate word, from a single point, smaller than the size of a grain of sand.

That has no rational meaning whatsoever. Now my mind just goes into la, la land!  But at the level of magic, mysticism, the spiritual, then one does experience the deep meaning of the creation.  Our creation.  For we are part of the universe and the universe is part of us.

Just like the rose.  Trying to describe it cuts nothing compared to closing one’s eyes and simply breathing in the perfume.

Here is that last episode, in four parts from YouTube. Watch and prepared to be transformed.