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[Jan. 3rd, 2010|05:50 pm] |
Welcome to the Jurassic Period. You thought we'd never get here, didn't you? This is the classic period of the dinosaurs, and so I'm going to introduce a classic dinosaur that you've probably already heard of. Yes, our first dinosaur in the series! Not a mammal-like non-dinosaur, not a dinosaur-like mammal, not an archosauromorph and not an almost-dinosaur.
We've got ourselves a real straight-up, no fooling around honest to the Good Lord dinosaur!
( Read more... ) |
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[Jan. 3rd, 2010|11:14 am] |
When we have some time to kill, we work on our ongoing Community Solar System Project. The Museum of Science holds the 11-foot diameter sun and the solar system is represented on a 1-to-400 million scale in both size and distance. Mercury and Venus are close enough on the scale to be housed within the museum, but the other planets span out all the way to West Newton. Since the website and the project both seem to be from 1998, they include Pluto as a planet, though there's a little plaque on it now reminding anyone who happens by that the model is out of date and so Pluto is no longer included.
We decided to visit and photograph each planet with our own Eyeball of Size comparison, probably at least 10 years too late.
Here we are at Pluto on December 6th, some 10 miles away from the Sun at the Riverside T stop in West Newton:
And this icy barren globe is even smaller than the pupil of the Eyeball of Size Comparison:
So that was a few weeks ago. We were busy and not in a terrible rush, so only two days ago, on New Year's Day, did we decide to pick up the project and go to Neptune. We had planned to visit them in reverse order from the sun, culminating in a visit to the Planeterium.
Neptune, the 1998 website said, was located at the Square One Mall in Saugus. So imagine our dismay when we arrived there and found no planets whatsoever. Also no planetesimals, no Plutinos, no planetoids, no trans-Neptunian objects of any kind. Not even a planemo.
Desperate and frustrated, I called the Museum of Science to ask where Neptune was. They took me very seriously and transferred me to the Planetarium, where a kind lady who must have been bored and had nothing to do offered to call me back once she got the dirt on the whereabouts of the ice and gas giants. She also agreed that the website was too old and maybe they should update it. In about 5 minutes she called back to tell me that Neptune had been vandalized and was no longer available. Neither is Saturn. Uranus, she said, might still be around but she couldn't reach anyone there so maybe I should try to call there on a non-holiday.
So we'd driven all the way out to Saugus to find Neptune and I couldn't bring myself to leave empty-handed. We were the correct distance from the sun, scale-wise, so we did our best to create a stand-in for Neptune.
Then we photographed it in the spot where we thought Neptune once stood, though our choice of site makes it appear as if Neptune was sucked into a black hole.
Then we had better luck the following day. Uranus was at the library in Jamaica Plain, not as a far of a drive. The librarian told us it was in the basement, in the auditorium- though she said that they no longer referred to the planet as "Uranus" because the pronunciation leads to embarrassment. Instead we're supposed to call it "Urectum".
We headed down there and there was a librarian there with a woman who looked like the secretary from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. They said to us "Are you here for the storytelling?" I just fired out my reflex response without assessing the situation and said "No, we're here to see the planet (being unable to say "we're here to see Uranus" without discomfort)". They didn't know what we were talking about until I pointed at it in the back of the room and explained what the project was. We took our pictures with The Eyeball.
Note how much larger it is than Pluto.
The librarian and storyteller were talking to us as we did our work, telling us about how they booked this storyteller as a special event but nobody was there, and the storyteller had been waiting for nearly two hours for people to show up. She asked if we would like to hear some stories and how could we possibly say no?
"Oh, he's very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude. "
I really enjoyed her Persian folk tale and when it was time to leave, I told her it was a wonderful surprise to have her down there on the way to see Urectum.
So that's all we got so far. Saturn is next, but it's also one of the "Unavailable" planets. I'm thinking I might just have to make a scale model myself and then photograph it at the proper distance from the sun...that was somewhere in Cambridge, I think. |
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[Dec. 29th, 2009|08:24 pm] |
Can I tell you about what I learned today? I was just so charmed and excited and wanted to share.
For Christmas, from Jon's sister I received a book called Darwin's Dogs. It's about Darwin and how much he loved all his dogs. His family owned seven of them over his life. And since he lived a stuffy Victorian life with a stuffy Victorian family, they all wrote letters to one another all the time but they were unable to express any overly sentimental affection to each other. Instead, they all told one another news about what cute thing one dog or another did that morning.
He didn't really care much for cats, though. In the same letter in which he talked about what incredibly darling thing his dog did, he would ask friends that, upon the death of their cat, to please wrap it up and send it in a hamper in order that he may dissect it for his studies. Meanwhile, on the subject of the use of dogs in medical research, he would write that the topic made him so upset that he wouldn't be able to sleep that night after discussing it.
It made me like Darwin even more to learn that he was very, very much a dog person and definitely not a cat person.
But that's not the cool thing I wanted to share:
In the midst of explaining how Darwin's deep interest in dogs and the variation of their breeds and how observing artificial selection in domestic animals led Darwin to developing the theory of natural selection, the author refers to research conducted in the 1950s by Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev with silver foxes. On a farm where silver foxes were raised for fur, he thought that by selecting the most docile of foxes for breeding, he could create a docile, domesticated silver fox that would be more manageable for the farm and fur trade.
Within eight generations, his foxes were distinctly tamer and less fearful of humans, but there were other effects that he wasn't expecting. These effects included a piebald, patchy coat and floppy dog-ears instead of pointy, wolfish ears. They also had rounder, broader snouts instead of pointy, foxy snouts. In short, his tame foxes were looking a lot like dogs.
We all know that in our pets we've selected for characteristics that make dogs lovable, like friendliness, obedience and acting like your coming home from work is the best thing that's ever happened to them. But we didn't always necessarily select the dogs to have floppy ears or spotted multicolored coats and puppyish faces, just like Belyaev didn't select for them. He was only selecting for the trait of tameness, but he got all these side effects.
It's due to gene linkage, meaning that some traits that are passed on are intrinsically linked to others, whether or not they have anything to do with the original trait in question- just as floppy ears don't really have much to do with how friendly a dog is.
Isn't that cool? It means that some things we see in certain dog breeds aren't there because we created them, but are happy accidents. I don't know if Buddy's facial expression was bred into him or not, but it definitely makes me happy that by default his face makes a huge Dumb Dog grin.
I looked up more about this aside from the book and learned that they're still breeding these tame foxes and they're still ending up looking more like dogs than foxes. They're pretty cute, too, even if this particular pair lacks the floppy ears. No biggie, ear orientation can be bred back and forth at will, as the variation in dog ears can attest to.
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