In for a penny, in for a pound

Aw, hell, here's the turtle. When I was growing up, with Herbert Zim's Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, this was Clemmys marmorata, but recent work shows that it is closer to Emys and the name Actinemys has been resurrected for it. And it really was just crawling across the driveway last week. I stuck him in a bucket, hauled him to school to show my ecology students, and then turned him loose in the creek towards which he was slogging when he was apprehended. And it is a him--check out that tail, and his plastron has a stronger arch than my feet ever have.

I'm pretty pumped to know that these things are around here. They're not doing great these days. For obvious reasons--show me a body of water west of the Sierras that isn't the center of a tourist trap, housing development, or agricultural or industrial outflow and I'll explain the optics of mirages for you.

I really just blog about this stuff to make Darren jealous.

Go, turtle, go.

Dr Vector discovers the universe

I've mentioned here before Abrell & Thompson's wonderful little book, Moses May Have Been an Apache, a collection of bogus and no-so-bogus "Actual Facts" based on their newspaper cartoon of the same name. One of the entries has a surprisingly evocative doodle of an American Indian GI, and reads, "Charlie Medicine Horn discovered Germany in April, 1945."

Ha ha.

But there's something to that. It does not matter to me that I was not the first to stand in front of the Wall at Dinosaur National Monument, or wander through Beijing's Forbidden City, or hike the beaches on the Isle of Wight. The fact that thousands or millions of people have done those things before did not decrease the thrill of personal discovery for me.

Tonight I found the Galilean moons of Jupiter for the first time by myself. Now, people have been looking at them for 397 years, and our robots have sent back enough data on those worlds to keep a generation of planetary scientists very busy. I had even seen them before with my own eyes, through my astronomy professor's telescope in high school. But tonight was the first time that I found them for myself. And I didn't even need a telescope to see them. Some crappy Tasco 7x35 binoculars that I bought back in high school, steadied against a lamp pole, did the job.

It helps if you know where to look, of course. From our viewpoint Jupiter travels along the same track as the sun and the moon (the ecliptic), and it trails the sun by a couple of hours. Go outside right after sunset and look to the south-southwest, about 25 degrees above the horizon (spread the pinky and thumb of one hand as far as you can at arm's length; that's about 25 degrees). Jupiter will be the first 'star' you see, and it will be a lot brighter than any other stars in that part of the sky once they come out. With the naked eye it looks just like a bright star, but even at 7x magnification you can see a tiny crescent. If your eyes are moderately dark-adapted and you steady the binoculars against something, you will see tiny pinpricks of light near the crescent. Those are the Galilean moons. It may help to focus your vision on some other part of the field of view at first, a technique called averted vision, which helps you detect faint objects.


I had a little help from Stellarium, an open-source planetarium program that you can download for free. You can view the sky from any point on Earth (Wikipedia will give you your latitude and longitude if you don't already know them), and the program is a cinch to navigate. Here's a screenshot from Merced at 7:17 Pacific Time this evening, which I punched up earlier today to figure out where to look. You can turn everything on and off: the grids (alt-az and equatorial), atmosphere, constellation names and lines, and in fact the Earth itself if you want to look straight down and see what folks at the antipodes are seeing. Here I have the alt-az grid and the atmosphere on to show what the sky actually looked like at 7:17 tonight, and where Jupiter was located relative to the cardinal directions and the horizon.

In fact, I did not see all four Galilean moons, just two off the left flank of Jupiter. The chart in this month's Sky & Telescope says those two are Callisto (next to Jupiter) and Io (next one over). Ganymede should be farther off to the left but I didn't see it, and Europa is behind Jupiter tonight. Here's what it looked like through the binoculars:


Now, this is not an awesome spectacle of Nature's grandeur. It's a tiny crescent and two pinpricks almost at the limit of vision. What is awesome is not the size or detail of the view, it's that I got it all, standing under a (blessedly dim and yellow) streetlight with a pair of low-end department store binoculars.

I'll bet most of you have at least some lousy binoculars laying around; many of you probably have a nice pair gathering dust in the closet. Why don't you go outside tomorrow night and discover Jupiter's moons for yourself?

UPDATE: Erp. I couldn't actually have seen a crescent Jupiter. No one has, not with their own eyes. Jupiter is so far out that we are practically right next to the Sun compared to it; therefore we only ever see the lighted face. Anything less can only be seen by space probes. So what did I see? Some kind of aberration that my brain interpreted as a crescent. Three possible causes include lens flare in the binoculars, some other kind of visual aberration in the binos, and astigmatism in my eyes (I wasn't wearing glasses at the time). Percival Lowell ain't got nuthin' on me.

Still, after more than a week of almost nightly binocular viewing, the Gallilean moons are still pretty freakin' sweet.

My best friend's nuke

Figure 1. Real nuke.

By now I'm sure my fascination with nukes is obvious. I have to admit, any movie that doesn't have at least one mushroom cloud leaves me feeling disappointed and hungry. I'd give up body parts get to see one go off live.

The next best thing is to cook one up for yourself. Well, not for yourself, but maybe for one of the most popular TV shows on the planet. I haven't done that, but my homeboy Jarrod Davis did. The mushroom cloud on the season premiere of 24 was his creation. He explains how he did it here. You can find the relevant footage everywhere; search on "24 nuke" or the equivalent.

Good job, buddy. Here's hoping that shot gets you another Emmy (the bastard has two of those already).

Figure 2. Jarrod's nuke.

Holy crap, does that cow have implants!?

So my labmate Katie is off to Africa for a semester to jump-start her bovid research. She set up a travel blog, The Red Queen Runneth, to detail her adventures. One of the links is to something called Lurch the Watusi. At first I figured this was another African travel blog. Like 'Dance the Watusi', only 'Lurch the Watusi' to indicate that the traveler was somewhat inexperienced and fumbling. Who knows, I thought, this could be the Redmond O'Hanlon of African travel blogs.

Oooooh no, my friends! [Say out loud in an amazed-but-sarcastic Chandler Bing voice]

This is more like the Dolly Parton of cattle, only male and with horns instead of boobs. Although I dare you to look at the photos and not be reminded of certain surgically enhanced actresses who work in the Los Angeles area.


I am going to abuse the label function to lard this one up with everything that is going through my mind right now.

Currently, it's this: Nine tongues of Bathsheba, those horns are (probably) mostly air! That's because (1) the big horns of most large mammals are hollowed out by the frontal sinuses, and (2) pneumaticity is never far from my mind, figuratively or literally. I never stop thinking about it, and my frontal sinuses are about 5 mm from my frontal lobes.

Same goes for you, ya airhead.

More to come on pneumaticity at a saner hour.

Machine love

I know that humans are not good for the biosphere. I know that giant open-pit mines are hideous scars on the landscape. I know that burning the world's coal reserves over the next century or two is going to have global repercussions that we can't escape.

Still, wrecking the planet doesn't seem so bad when you get to have badass giant machines like this one to do it with. I stole the pictures and the stats from here. Thanks to Katie for the tip.

Oh, the picture above has jack all to do with giant mining machines, I just think it's cool and I hadn't had an opportunity to use it yet. It's a painting by Donato Giancola that I stole from someplace on the web a long time ago.





Specifications:
~ The mover stands 311 feet tall and 705 feet long.
~ It weighs over 45,500 tons
~ Cost $100 million to build
~ Took 5 years to design and manufacture
~ 5 years to assemble.
~ Requires 5 people to operate it.
~ The Bucket Wheel is over 70 feet in diameter with 20 buckets, each of which can hold over 530 cubic feet of material.
~ A 6-foot man can stand up inside one of the buckets.
~ It moves on 12 crawlers (each is 12 feet wide, 8' high and 46 feet long).There are 8 crawlers in front and 4 in back.
It has a maximum speed of 1 mile in 3 hours (1/3 mile/hour).

Dr. Vector, Maker of Worlds

A few weeks ago I found this badass Photoshop tutorial on how to make planets (another similar tutorial is here). Using a shortened version of the programme outlined in the tutorial, I made the icy planet shown above, with its swirling clouds, ocean basins, and ice packs, in about 10 minutes. And I made it from a gory photo of a skinned emu. This post is a step-by-step explanation of how I did it.

Note: this post is NOT intended as a replacement for the tutorials linked above. I took a lot of shortcuts, so this is at best a sort of "planets for dummies". But really I just want to explain how I made this yucky thing (below) into that beautiful planet.

A couple of years ago I got to scrub in and assist on the dissection of an emu. Here is a photo of the skinned right wing (complete with claw) and chest. The neck is out of sight at the bottom of the image, and the sternum forms the contour of the chest on the left side of the picture. This was the 8th planet I attempted, so I had developed a little bit of an eye for interesting textures.

Oh, I did all of this in Photoshop 5.5, which is pretty outdated but still good enough for everything I need to do. You should be able to do the same operations in other programs, and in fact there are several ways to do most of these things even in Photoshop. The first step is to use the circular marquee tool to select the region that is going to become your planet. In this case, I chose the ventrolateral wall of the chest, just forward of and below the wing. Copy that, paste it into a new layer, crop the background, and set it to black.

The step that makes a circular selection into a planet: spherize, and then spherize again (under Filters). Now I've got Planet Carcass. Yuck.

But by inverting the colors, I instantly got the planet. What is that, like 10 steps? Marquee, copy, paste, select background, clear to black, crop, spherize, spherize again, invert. That's it. Nine steps, and I've got a pretty good looking planet. If you want an evenly-lit, no-atmosphere-having rock, you're done.

There are lots of ways to get an atmosphere. My way is fast and easy, but it is admittedly not as sophisticated as the method outlined in the tutorial, nor does it yield the same results. But for my purposes, it's good enough.

The first step is to duplicate the planet layer, and move the new layer, named "Atmosphere", under the planet. I used the Numeric Transform to blow it up to 102%. Then I dropped the contrast and upped the brightness to get a white circle. That's what you see here: the planet sitting on top of a slightly-larger white circle.

Then you fill the white circle with whatever color you want your atmosphere to be (if the atmosphere isn't at least close to the dominant color of the planet, it looks pretty weird). The final step is to apply a Gaussian blur (another filter). You can fiddle with the specifications of the blur to get the atmosphere to stand out farther from the planet or pull it in tighter. I like a tighter atmosphere, because a big atmosphere glow (a) makes the planet look small, and (2) IMHO looks fake.

The final step is the shadow. Again, there are about a zillion ways to do this. Here's how I got mine. I made another layer on top of the planet and atmosphere layers and filled it with black. Then I created a huge-ass brush with very soft edges (low hardness) and just punched a planet-sized hole in the black layer. Then I dragged the shadow layer off center. This is kind of a fun step--you can drag the shadow around and decide which limb of your planet looks best. I liked the blue ocean area at the bottom of my planet, so I dragged the hole in that direction. But we're used to seeing things lit from above, so I flipped the picture over to make the final version shown at the beginning of the post.

That's it. Go make your own!

The umbrella effect as applied to marine mammals

You know the umbrella effect: if you carry an umbrella, it may not rain, but if you don't, it's sure to. Same deal with taking a book when I hop in the car to go literally anywhere; about 95% of the time I don't need it, but any situation in which you're stuck for an hour or two and wish you had a book is by definition unforeseeable, so it's better to have a book along just in case.

Yesterday afternoon we went for a long walk along West Cliff. I almost grabbed my binoculars as we headed out the door. I consciously thought, "Hey, maybe I should take my binoculars." And then my stupid brain said, "Nah!"

Stupid, stupid brain.

Within five minutes of getting out of the car, we saw a pair of sea otters frollicking amongst the kelp. Just far enough out that some binoculars would have been great. Oh, and there was one rock a ways out where some sea lions were having a lay in the sun convention. And then on the way back we saw dolphins. I've never seen dolphins from shore at West Cliff. Finally, as we came around to Lighthouse Point there was another sea otter just about 50 yards from shore. Fortunately, I had a digital camera; unfortunately, it was the lo-rez POS we got for taking pictures of London. Here's my strikingly Nessie-esque photo of the alleged sea otter; you'd be forgiven if you thought it was a dead mime, or a really big bird dookie.


One of these days I'm going to get some of those binoculars with the digital camera built in, and I'm going to wear them everywhere. I don't care how stupid it looks. We can talk about stupid after I get ultrarich from selling my photos of Sasquatch and UFOs. I'll be that one guy who really did have binoculars and a camera ready when that once-in-a-lifetime event happened.

Yeah!

Oh, there were also shitloads of cormorants and pelicans, as always. Hardly worth mentioning. I'm just piling on the tetrapods to hopefully make Darren jealous.