Hey, we're almost famous!

My wife just ran across this YouTube video from last year's foray to Ken Ham's Kook House. The young guy is Derek Rogers, who got kicked out of the place (well, sort of: he got hassled by Security as we were walking through the exit hall anyway) for wearing an atheist bus T-shirt, then for expressing an opinion on the KHKH in the hearing of some tender Christian ears. PZ Myers is to Derek's right; we are right of PZ. Theo manages to make a few intelligent remarks while I lurk in the background grinning foolishly.

Orion's High in the Southwest Sky

....as the song says. Except last week, when we were in Buenos Aires on vacation (short version: we got a cheap opportunity to spend a week in an exotic-sounding place, so we took it). And one clear night it occurred to me to have a look at the southern stars. Which was kind of hard, being in a big city with tall buildings and light pollution, but I managed to find Orion pretty quickly -- only somewhat higher in the sky than I'm used to and upside down. And of course Orion is closely followed to the southeast by his hunting dog, Canis Major, with the star Sirius -- the brightest star in the sky, and easily visible even through the city's sky glow.

So far, these are still things visible from southern Ontario where I've lived my whole life, just shifted to an unfamiliar angle (Buenos Aires is at 35 degrees south latitude). But continuing a little further south from Sirius I found another bright star: Canopus, or Alpha Carinae. At -52 degrees declination, it is never visible from home.

We spent a while mucking with Google Sky and trying to find a spot with a good southern horizon to check out the circumpolar stars, but never managed to identify anything. Unlike the case in the northern sky, there aren't a lot of bright stars around the south celestial pole, and it's too hard to make out constellations when you can't see a big swath of sky all at once. So we contented ourselves with having "bagged" Canopus.

Back home, I went for a walk about 9pm the other night -- and there was Orion back where he usually is, half-way up the sky, and with his sword hanging below his belt. And for some reason, more than any amount of exotic architecture, foreign money, or a different language, that made me realize that I'd been to a far-off land.

One Small Step....

If I've done this right, this post will appear at 20 July at 20:17 UTC -- 40 years to the moment from when a manned spacecraft from Earth first touched down on the surface of another world.

I was 12 years old and my family was on vacation, camping at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, right up by the continental divide. We had been into town for something -- I don't recall what, maybe a restaurant dinner; I don't even recall which town -- and on our return in the evening, stopped at a little country store to pick up whatever. I stayed in the car while my parents went inside.

A few moments later my Dad re-emerged, beckoning frantically at me to come inside. In the store, I found a crowd of people gathered around a dutch door at the back that gave into the owner's living quarters. The upper half was open, and everyone was watching a small black-and-white TV perched on the kitchen counter. On that screen was Neil Armstrong taking his first few steps on the moon. Not that I could see much: by the time the low-bandwidth lunar signal had been received, converted to broadcast format (by pointing a TV camera at the slow-scan monitor in Mission Control!), been broadcast by the networks, filtered through the local weather (as I recall it was raining, maybe even thundering) and made its way to the rabbit ears of this little receiver way up in the Rockies, all that was left was a bunch of monochrome blobs that moved every so often.



Back at camp, I fell asleep in our tent trailer that night listening to the radio coverage. Before turning in I made a last visit to the washroom. At our altitude it was pretty cold for July; but the weather had cleared and the sky was crystal clear as only a high mountain sky, far from any city, can be. The moon was full and dazzlingly bright in my memory.

And a 12 year old boy looked up and realized: that's not just a light in the sky. It's a world -- and there is a man walking on it!

Winnie the Pooh

Mike links to Trish relating the story of the origin of Winnie-the-Pooh. While the bear was named after the city of Winnipeg, he (she?) actually came from White River, Ontario, which we passed through a few years back, in the course of circumnavigating Lake Superior. In the Museum there stands this wood carving of Winnipeg the bear and his owner, Lt. Harry Colebourn:

Confessions of an Arachnophobe

I admit it: I'm not fond of arachnids (or indeed, "bugs" in general). And the degree of my aversion is roughly proportional to the size of the bug. However, that doesn't keep me from appreciating these animals scientifically, for their role in the ecosystem, and even for their occasional bizarre beauty -- like this gal(?) we found hanging from the vent on the side of our trailer, in central Iowa a few weeks ago.

Dorsal view:

Lateral View:

I apologize for the fuzziness of the photos. I don't own a macro lens, so these were taken with a telephoto, then cropped and blown up in GIMP (the real size of the body is maybe 10mm). For much better images, see the BugGuide site, which (along with hints from Spiderzrule) allowed me to identify this as Micrathena sagittata.

Genus Micrathena belongs to the orb-weaving spiders, which are ubiquitous. The bite is not considered dangerous.

When I first saw this critter I was quite startled -- it's easily the most bizarre spider I've ever seen outside of a zoo. I thought bugs like this only existed in the tropics. Turns out, no: it's fairly widely distributed in the central and eastern US.

Would you like a little woo in your tea?

Stooging around Superior, Wisconsin on a cloudy rain-spittin' day, we stop in at a little book/coffee shop for our afternoon cuppa. The tea was good -- hot, in a little personal pot -- and we even stocked up on a favorite brand not available in Ottawa.

Having finished my tea, I began my mandatory perusal of the bookshelves (hey, there are way worse OCDs to have). As usual, I looked for the Science and/or Philosophy sections.

The closest they had was a "Spirituality" shelf, hawking among other authors and titles: newage guru Deepak Chopra, demonstrated psychic fraud Sylvia Browne, and The Secret. On the plus side (albeit bizarrely classified) was Forty Days And Forty Nights, Matthew Chapman's account of the Kitzmiller Intelligent Design trial. But altogether, a wee bit disappointing.

Also on the plus side, they had an anti-censorship display of books which have been banned, somewhere, sometime; appropriately wrapped in chains or enclosed in little jail cells.