Get Off Greta’s Back

This could have easily been titled “Do Something! Switch 2 Electric Boogaloo” to highlight the importance of the climate movement, or it could have been about the impeachment inquiry of President I-Hate-Everyone-and-Everything-that-Fails-to-Make-Me-Richer, but I don’t want to even take the time to dunk on his undoubtedly orange ass considering that there is someone much more important who, as it happens, already dunked on Donald and many, many other world leaders in the most condemning way. I speak of the superheroic 16 year old who comes from the land of the ice and snow from the midnight sun where the moraines flow far too quickly: Greta Thunberg.

Greta has been truly amazing as an advocate for addressing climate change and requesting action from historically inactive political institutions. Just last year, she started a weekly solo protest at her native Sweden’s parliament, and through an incredibly innovative and empassioned push in her community, and by expanding that community to become international through social media, it has grown to become a massive movement helmed by her righteous fury. As you’ve assuredly heard by now, Thunberg literally helped helm a zero-emissions sailboat across the Atlantic to arrive in America, but she didn’t just come here to pal around with President Obama. Oh no, Greta’s got some things to say to the world’s leader who is also unfortunately a leader in carbon output. The USA is the second largest producer of carbon dioxide behind only China, but “president” Xi Jinping is a little too busy killing muslims and democracy to worry about how his country is also kiling the planet. Besides being a traditional take charge nation on lofty challenges, the United States has the headquarters for the United Nations, and Miss Thunberg had the honor to be invited to speak to the respected delegates from those nations. She did not mince words; she did not hold back; she did not play pretty politics. Greta Thunberg did exactly what she has always done in her work to raise awarenesas and demand action on climate change: she called the people in charge out. Teenage girls are often experts at throwing shade, and damn did Greta tell it like it is as she shamed leaders and ambassadors from around the world for failing to take the early steps to counteract climate change:

That is powerful and correct. I am not happy that it had to happen, but I am happy that Greta Thunberg was strong enough to take that awesome opportunity and deliver a damning statement to adults who have been behaving childishly on the most important crisis of all time.

I declared her superheroic earlier, and I mean it. Greta could lift Mjolnir and maybe that’s what she needs to knock some sense into the too many conservative politicians from all over the Earth who maliciously attacked her because they don’t like the facts of the hard truth she refuses to let them forget. To steal some of her thunder, I shouldn’t have to write this, yet I must state what should have been obvious:

DON’T FUCKING ATTACK A 16 YEAR OLD!

There is no excuse for the reprehensible statements made by older men and women who should know better than to attempt to bolster their political position in opposition to accepting climate change – a stance which is proven wrong by science – by bashing a teenager. This happened before with the Parkland students who spoke out after their school suffered a shooting (which, incidentally is the youth-led protest that inspired Greta to take action on her own), and much of the garbage words thrown at them were dispensed by the same people who now attempt to trash Thunberg. Setting aside the science that makes it clear that the climate’s fever is rising, it is never okay for an adult to condescend a child because he disagrees with her. Simply because Greta is speaking more like a grown up than anyone else in the room does not give you the right to slander her in an attempt to advance your own political agenda.

Thunberg and many of her peers may be too young to take office, but she made it clear that all of them and the younger generation who can vote and run for office will be watching, and if all of us don’t like what we see from our world leaders, we will find people who will act on climate change immediately. I encourage you, no matter how young or old you are, to join Thunberg in calling for action. If you are old eniugh to vote, then do so! Voting is the most effective tool you have to create real change i, how the world is run; don’t let your civic power go to waste. If you really think there is a lack of anyone worth voting for, then find someone who you can vote for and get them in the race, or run yourself! If you are too young to vote, you can still make your voice heard by going to marches and events. I never thought that I would say this, but making signs with memes on them calling for action on mitigating global warming is an excellent use of your time, as is spreading the word on how inportant the battle for the planet’s health is to you. You’d be surprised by how many people will listen to you, even if they are screaming obscenities at your efforts and even your own state of mind. To quote the late, great Steve Irwin, “You know you’ve got them if they’re biting you.”

Thanks for reading and watching! I hope you will work to stop warming in any way you can. We’ll all need to do our best to save this home we all share.

Alex

Look to the Heavens

I was raised Catholic, and although I have grown to heavily scrutinize the very existence of God and essentially abandon my faith,  I still hold an inherent admiration for the holy teachings I was brought up with. Perhaps it’s akin to Stockholm Syndrome, a side effect of 18 years in Catholic school classrooms, or maybe a higher power really is up there looking out for me….

Nah.

I think it’s probably the weird nostalgia many of us hold for the world we first knew and grew within. Nowadays, I hold my years of Catholic schooling in high regard, not for what I was indoctrinated with regarding religion, but rather for offering me a good private school education in a city that is still struggling to make its public schooling better. While it is certainly not true that public school is inferior everywhere, that is unfortunately the case in cities like Toledo, Ohio. After all, one of the Glass City’s most revered residents is former NASA flight director Gene Kranz who graduated from Central Catholic High School, the largest catholic school in the Toledo area. I’ve written about Kranz before as I’m a fan of space exploration and lauding people from my home state, and in this case hometown, but mainly because he’s just a cool dude. You know you’re a cool dude if Ed Harris plays you in a movie.

Cool as he is, this post isn’t about Kranz, but remember him for later. The subject that I do wish to discuss today is the 1917 Code of Canon Law, a.k.a. the Pio-Benedictine Code. You know the one! Okay, well, maybe you don’t. It’s not something that comes up in casual conversation, after all. I’ll wager that most practicing Catholics are unaware of it, as well as most, if not all Catholic canon laws. Now that I think about it, it might be a good idea to further illustrate just what these things are.

The Catholic Church, like other large religious organizations, is comprised of a governing body of bishops who work to establish rules of faith that make it clear for other bishops, priests, and Church leaders how they should properly practice Catholicism and encourage their parish patrons to do the same. To compare to the United States political system, the this group serves as the Legislative branch, similar to Congress, while the Pope is the chief executor, like the President.

This legislative process is done with the codification of canon law, or collection of rules, history, and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church organized into a more easily referenced document, or in this case, extensive series of documents. The Pio-Benedictine Code that was initially urged by Pope Pius X and completed under the tenure of Pope Benedict XV, was the first comprehensive codification ratified by the Catholic Church. Completed in less than 2000 years! Therein, of course, lies the necessity to compile a coherent set of rules for the sake of easier study and understanding. The Church existed for millennia, and in an increasingly globalizing world, especially one embroiled in the greatest conflict in human history in 1917 (until its sequel World War decades later), it was all the more important that the Catholic Church lay down its policies and procedures as clearly as it could. Thus, Pope Pius X’s early 1900s wish to better organize and get the Church’s shit together on record became all the more important in the midst of the Great War we now call World War I.

Now, by no means am I going to get into the nitty-gritty of the Pio-Benedictine Code, especially considering I don’t know much about it. Even in a scholarly career spanning from Kindergarten through a fifth year of undergraduate education all at Catholic institutions, I did not often encounter the legal layout of the Church. Nevertheless, I needed to explain the basic idea behind the 1917 Code for the sake of presenting one of the more interesting pieces of it. Within the extensive Code is a decree that establishes that any “newly discovered territory” would fall under the authority of the diocese from which the exploratory party – whether intended to be such or not – set out from. In other words, if a group ventures to some new land, then the diocese (the Catholic district overseen by a designated bishop) from which the group leaves from assumes jurisdiction of the new land.

Following this logic, it is possible for a diocese to obtain an annex territory that is far, far away from it. For example, let’s pretend a boat that leaves Dublin sails around the world and discovers a new island in the South Pacific. This means that a bishop in Ireland now serves as the Catholic authority over the newly established island of Vanauthree. It’s a weird circumstance to be sure, and honestly, even back in 1917, not one that seemed likely to occur. Most of the world we know today was known a century ago. To quote another Ed Harris movie, it was almost like young Truman Burbank’s teacher discouraging his desire to sail the world in The Truman Show:

Truman: “I want to be an explorer, like the great Magellan!”

Teacher: “Oh, you’re too late! There’s nothing left to explore!”

This is comical in the context, yet it is not entirely true. Before I explain why though, I wish to pose a question. Whether you are a Catholic theologian or never even picked up a Bible beyond wondering why the amenities in your hotel are so strange, I want you to think for a moment about where the largest diocese is. Not in terms of population as that is an ever shifting metric, but rather where is the biggest diocese in terms of area?

What did you come up with? London? Well, they’ve kind of got this Church of England thing going on so that seems less likely. Paris? Sure, they’ve got a long history of Catholicism and an impressive, though currently under construction cathedral, but that’s not it. Rome? Did you really think Rome? Who is the bishop there? The Pope?!… Oh yeah, no you’re right, he is. That’s actually not a bad guess as it encompasses the entirety of a separate city-state in Vatican City, but alas, still not the biggest.

Okay, I’ll give a hint: it’s in the United States. Of course, right?! The New World would have it in the large, young, superpower in…. Washington D.C.? Nope. New York City! No again. What about Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or Chicago, or Boston, or St. Louis? St. Louis is named after a Catholic saint who was king of France!…and who died of dysentery in the Crusades – gross. Yep, the guy shit himself to death in the Holy Land. Cool. Oh, and none of those are it.

Now how about trying this one on for largest area size: Orlando. Yeah, that Orlando! The world theme park capital in the Sunshine State claims the title of biggest area Catholic diocese, and it’s not even close. Of course, Florida, the state that looks like America’s penis, does have some big cities, but I would have sooner expected Miami, or even Jacksonville to sport a bigger area diocese. Again though, it’s not even close, and Orlando will likely never be matched by any other diocese. You see, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orlando is fairly young as it was created on June 18, 1968. By that point, a lot of central Florida was developed or in development and the population was growing. Again, I’m not looking at that particular metric here, but it is an indicator of how the Church would want to encompass as many people as possible in the greater Orlando area. Thus the new diocese contained the land that Walt Disney had begun building his second theme park on, the land that future parks SeaWorld Orlando and Universal Studios would someday inhabit, and Cape Canaveral, known during that time as Cape Kennedy for late-president John F. Kennedy. Also named after JFK was the pride of Cape Canaveral – no, not the crusie ship port, although that is also important – the Kennedy Space Center.

Just a few months after the establishment of the Diocese of Orlando, the Kennedy Space Center, which had taken over launch duties from adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, launched the first manned Apollo mission into space when it sent Apollo 8 up, up, and away on December 21, 1968. That’s the mission that snapped the famous Earthrise photograph.

Imagine spending Christmas in space orbiting the Moon. That’s cool!

Just a few months and few Apollo missions later, and the crew of Apollo 11 took off from the Kennedy Space Center and landed on the Moon! And who was the flight director for these historic missions? Yep, Gene Kranz!

It’s all come full circle now, or should I say, completed its orbit? Now you might be thinking that I’ve become excitedly distracted and gone off on a space tangent, but this is actually where I was steering toward the whole time. I didn’t just bring up Kranz and the Apollo missions for nothing. Remember the new territory rule of the Pio-Benedictine Code, where a newly discovered territory is brought into the diocese from which its discoverers departed? About 13 months after the Diocese of Orlando was first formed, it had three men blast off from Brevard County and two of them walked around on the Moon. How’s that for discovering some new land? Sure, everybody has taken a gander at the Moon before, and many have discovered some fascinating information about it, yet no one ever walked there and fulfilled the role of serving as an on-the-ground explorer until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got dropped for a few hours by Michael Collins.

You want to know how you obtain the largest area diocese? That’s how you obtain the largest area diocese! If you take into account the 1917 discovery rule, then the Diocese of Orlando is a whopping 14,657,051 square miles (37,961,590 km^²)!

As I stated earlier, it seems unlikely that this record for size will ever be broken, but not due to the lack of new exploration. In fact, with future landings on Mars not too far off, and possibly someday other celestial objects like asteroids also being in the mix to have humans waltz around on, it is probable that diocese size will continue to expand. However, considering that the launches we have done for decades and continue to plan for are based out of the Kennedy Space Center, it is most likely that it will be the Diocese of Orlando that continues to grow!

Thanks for reading! If you are interested in where I first saw this story, then check out this post from uCatholic. Enjoy the rest of your week and discover your way back next week for more fun!

Yours in Lunacy,

Alex

You Can Rescue the Rainforest

The first time I was taught about mankind’s destructive abilities was through an example of deforestation. I suspect that many like myself were introduced to our capacity to damage the natural world we live in through the same example. Now we find a more globally prominent example of this in action with the current crisis in the world’s largest rainforest: the Amazon. Today, I hope to help highlight what exactly is going on in the Amazon, and what we can do to help.

I often turn to trusted sources who are able to teach what can be difficult and complex information in a manner that allows us to better understand what is being presented, not mention, also have a skill at doing so in an entertaining format. I will utilize some of these sources, like Dr. Joe Hanson and MinuteEarth today, but mostly as a tag along to another favorite in Hank Green. Green presented a pair of excellent videos regarding the Amazon fires recently, and I would like to share them here now to emphasize one critical piece of information that must be understood:

As Hank Green said so well, the Amazon is not burning, it is being burned. This is due to the actions and allowances of Brazilian “president” (more truly an autocrat) Jair Bolsonaro. As a result, we now have a global catastrophe on our hands that is deeply troubling.

Green more recently released an addendum video that corrected an incorrect and often reported statistic that he originally stated too. Here he explains an abridged version of the carbon cycle and how it relates to these fires:

For more information, here are all of Green’s attached articles and videos, including those presented by Dr. Hanson and MinuteEarth:

BBC “Brazil deforestation row: Space research head Galvao out”

The Guardian “Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable ‘tipping point'”

Dr. Joe Hanson Twitter feed

MinuteEarth “Which Came First – The Rain or the Rainforest?”

AGU Evidence that deforestation affects the onset of the rainy season in Rondonia, Brazil

The Economist “Deathwatch for the Amazon”

The Intercept “In Bolsonaro’s Brazil, a Showdown over Amazon Rainforest”

WWF “Five Things You Can Do To Help The Amazon Rainforest”

Fortunately, there are actions that we casual citizens the world over can take to help out. The previous article from the World Wildlife Fund has some tips, as do these pieces from The Conservation and Rainforest Alliance. Please check them out and do what you can to raise your voice, make your voice heard, and the back up your words by practicing what you preach. Only together, working as one world with a common global mission to end the destructive practice of deforestation and larger, related issues like climate change, can we make an impact to stand up to the myopic, money-hungry dictators and actually preserve and establish better natural habitat and living for those in and nearby it. We all depend on the Amazon, and none of us, not even those who live nowhere near it, can afford to let it continue to be burned.

Thanks for reading and watching. I hope you will return next week for more information which will hopefully be more inherently joyful.

Alex

Let Me See You Backward Step

July has been a crazy time at work, and with searing heat and humidity, there’s been a lot to drive us all mad in the office. Many of my coworkers have been throwing their arms up and gleefully declaring that all of our problems, hardships, and miscues must be due to the current state of the planet Mercury being in retrograde. Now I know that they are doing this in a mocking fashion for fun as it is a meme-worthy moment of pop culture akin in ridiculousness to the push to “storm” Area 51, but it bothers me enough that I want to set a few things straight. (For that matter, why would anyone want to trespass on a guarded military base whose biggest declassified former secrets have been interesting, yet not extraterrestrial test flight aircraft? Not to mention, that when the facility gained popularity in fiction, the government undoubtedly moved anything still in development to other other bases in anticipation of people attempting to break in and see what’s behind those closed doors. There are no shortage of military bases dedicated to development of new technology across the America west, almost all of which, like Area 51, are in the middle of the fucking desert for two main reasons: 1) If anything crashes and/or blows up, there aren’t any civilians around to get hurt; and 2) No civilians can just wander up to the gates inadvertently or intentionally without being noticed first. Please, let the joke die on the internet and do not rush ill-prepared into the Nevada desert toward potential injury or arrest. Besides, having been in a car across the length of Nevada, I can say that’s most of what it has to offer is the same general scrubby desertscape. There are some highlights to be sure, but if you want to see some really scenery, then jaunt over to the east or west in Utah and California where your eyes will truly be welcomed to the American West!)

Now that I’ve gotten my anti-Area 51 rush rant out of the way, let’s talk about Mercury using astronomy, not astrology. Specifically, let’s talk using another excellent report from Vox that does well to explain what retrograde actually is while it slams the notion of being too self-obsessed:

Boom! Sick burn on astrology and ancient sentiment that we are the center of everything all at once. Hopefully, that video helped to clear the clutter of “explanations” of what Mercury retrograde means by actually explaining what Mercury retrograde means. One thing it did not mention is where the term retrograde comes from, and not surprisingly it’s Latin. Retrogradus means “backward step” and obviously applies to the optical illusion of a celestial body reversing its orbit.

As our planetary neighbors and us are constantly spinning, retrograde happens all of the time, and if you have the right tools, you can see it for yourself. Check out charts of astronomical events and their peak dates of observation on sites like this. If you really know your stuff, then you probably already are aware of the US Naval Observatory site, but if you’re not, then check it out! You can enter in the town or observation hotspot nearest you to determine what will be in view at a particular time.

Thanks for reading and watching. I hope you’ll take a backwards step back here again next week for the next State of the Season.

Before I go, I’d like to send an appreciative shout out to the life of Chris Kraft, the man behind Mission Control and major player in NASA for decades. Kraft died today at the age of 95. He will be missed.

Thanks for making that rough road to the stars a little smoother, Director,

Alex

We Came in Peace For All Mankind

It’s difficult to decide where to begin, but let’s go back 4.51 billion years ago just to be safe. That’s when the only permanent satellite not made by man that orbits the Earth first started to swing around us. This almost certainly occurred as the result of a couple planets getting close in the early solar system: one called Theia, and the other now known as our home, the Earth, but in those days it was going as Gaia. Theia really felt the flow from Gaia – probably mostly gravitational, but maybe there was more there, for the two planets crashed into each other, and it may have been more in the Dave Matthews sense than simple celestial colliding as what was born out of our planet’s tryst with Theia was a smaller combination of circling debris that became our bright ball in the night sky: the Moon. That’s right, the lunar orbiter that we named all others both bigger and smaller after, has been by our side almost since the beginning when our world was young and embracing its edginess as Gaia. Life arrived on the planet at least 3.7 billion years ago and it took some time to work its way onto land, yet it’s safe to assume that the Moon had an impact from the get-go considering all it influences today with tides, breeding periods, and much more. What we know for sure is that the first humans who did well to record their history we interested in that glowing orb in orbit around us, and this interest only grew over time. Many creation myths incorporate the Moon as an opposite but equal partner to the Sun. Astronomers took notes of its features and phases, and our Moon remained as fascinating as, if not more interesting than the Earth’s fellow planets and the collections of stars the shone in the sky. Modern-day scientists compiled this knowledge and sought out more, as they were inspired by the research of Galileo Galilei and the musings of Jules Verne.

Suffice it to say, the Moon has been of great interest to humans from the start. Fast forward to the 1960s, and we were going lunar looney thanks to the Space Race, but also the pursuit of advancement of scientific understanding at the urging of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to do the tough stuff because it’s tough. In his famous speech where he declared our choice to go to the Moon before the end of the decade, JFK called upon the best the USA could offer to fulfill the greatest achievement ever undertaken by man. Thanks to the efforts of so many scientists, mathematicians, engineers, pilots, and so many more, NASA rose to the occasion and made the dream a reality.

Through the efforts and sacrifice of those astronauts and engineers who came before them, the Apollo 11 trio of Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins were primed to be the first men to make a moonshot mission more than just an aspiration. In anticipation of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch tomorrow, and of the first lunar landing anniversary on Saturday, let’s look back at how exactly Apollo 11 happened.

In preparation for the lunar module landing, Buzz Aldrin and mission commander Neil Armstrong trained to pilot the module in a state of the art piece of machinery developed to simulate the Moon’s unique gravity.

That cool as a cucumber reaction to the crash emphasized the nature of Armstrong and so many other astronauts who were test pilots, and highlighted why he was chosen to be the man in charge on the first Moon landing mission. It also served as good training for that mission too….

Fortunately, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins all were professionals and master pilots, and the mission ended a major success! The Moon landing was the biggest televised event in history and reached a global audience on a never before seen scale. When the astronauts returned to Earth, they were first sent to quarantine, before being celebrated the world over.

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, died in 2012, but Aldrin and Collins are still alive today. They undoubtedly will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of their successful 1969 lunar mission, as well numerous museums, planetariums, science centers, and towns across America and the world. We still have much to learn about our universe and our place in it, and so much more to do here on Earth. Many of the missions yet to come in space exploration and our efforts to make Earth a better home for all may seem to be impossible to accomplish, but remember that if we can put men on the Moon, then we can do anything.

Thanks for reading and watching! I hope you will revel in mankind’s greatest achievement’s anniversary in your own way with friends and family and maybe some new friends you’ll make in Houston, Cape Canaveral, Wapakoneta, or wherever you choose to celebrate. Until then, feel free to catch up on the original footage of the Moon landing from NASA and CBS. Be sure to orbit back around here next week for more fun.

Let’s get loony,

Alex

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, REmix!

Happy Earth Day! This environmental observance first occurred back in 1970 and continues to be a day to focus on making our world a better place by treating the world a little better. Today I’ve done something a little differently; instead of offering a piece on the history of this day, I have provided a list of  individual level actions you can easily do in your daily life that can help save the Earth! Even though most of the significant damage, and by extension repair to the planet is done by countries and corporations that are way, way bigger than the average family, you and yours can chip in your part, and that’s not nothing. In fact, collectively, we still can yield positive results, and can help encourage change from bigger groups by setting an example. Thanks for any of these actions that you already take, and thanks in advance for the new ones you’ll undertake! You are an amazing Earth-saving citizen!

Water is the most important resource in the world. Everybody – animals, plants, and people – depend on clean, freshwater to survive. We need to do our part to ensure that the water we are lucky enough to have stays clean so that it can be a health habitat for fish, frogs, and others and a steady source of drinking water for us. Here are some things you can do to help the waterways around you:

• Keep waterways clean from trash and pollutants. Don’t leave garbage laying around, and never dump any chemicals into or around water.

• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Reclaim, but also prevent trash from entering into the ecosystem in the first place. Be responsible when you play outside and make sure that what you bring into nature, especially a water habitat, you bring back with you and properly dispose of.

• Terracycle applicable items at the Terracycle dropoff receptacles. Places like universities, zoos, and some parks usually have a Terracycle program. Check out this link to learn more about this amazing program that reclaims some of the packaging we used to have to just throw away.

• Use less water where you can. Turn off the faucet, take shorter showers; install water saving appliances and low-flow toilets in your house.

• Download the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch App to make responsible and healthy seafood eating decisions. Learn more at this link.

• Report to your local Department of Natural Resources (DNR) if you see someone fishing in an area where they are not supposed to, or during a time when they are not permitted.

• Plant native plants around your home and avoid using lawn fertilizers; the runoff into our waterways can spur the growth of harmful algal blooms.

• Set some rain barrels beside your house to collect rainwater from your roof. You can then use this water in your garden both outdoors and indoors. This will reduce your tap water consumption and save you a little money in the long run!

• Use biodegradable items and natural cleaning agents.

What is your favorite food? What is your favorite drink? Anybody a fan of chocolate? Coffee? Did you ever think about where we get these favorite foodstuffs from? All of these and more grow in tropical rainforests, though they often look quite different from what we have in our homes. Here are some actions you can take to help save the world’s rainforests while you’re pushing a cart around the grocery store:

• Buy Fair Trade Certified products. They are sourced sustainably and help provide a stable livelihood for people who live and work in areas with rainforest habitat.

  • Common products include food items like coffee and chocolate, as well as some clothing and accessories.

  • “Fair Trade encourages environmentally sustainable farming methods such as organic and shade cultivation, ensuring that farmers use methods that benefit the earth and maintain community health.”

• Buy Rainforest Alliance Certified products. These products have been certified for their “environmental, social, and economic stability”.

• Buy Certified Sustainable Palm Oil products. Many palm forests are cleared without restraint for cheaper, easier access to palm oil. This can destroy critical habitat for numerous species, especially orangutans.

  • Download the “Sustainable Palm Oil Shopping” app through Cheyenne Mountain Zoo to learn what products are made with sustainable palm oil. This app allows you to scan the barcode of items as you shop, making it easy to make good choices for the health of rainforest and their animals. Be sure to consider all items; palm oil is not limited to just food products!

  • Palm oil is also found in makeup, lipstick, shampoo, detergent, and soap.

Finally, there are some more general actions you can make when you visit some Earth-connecting places you probably already love:

• Report animal and plant species you see in the wild to citizen science sites. Some great sites are iNaturalist (all wildlife); eBird (birds); HerpMapper (reptiles and amphibians) .

• Volunteer time and/or money to your local parks, zoo, aquarium, natural history museum. Beyond being fun places to spend time at for entertainment and education, these institutions are nonprofits or government run and are always in need of help to operate. Not to mention, all of these are frequently involved in conservation and outreach programs in your area and around the world aimed at saving wild spaces and their inhabitants everywhere through preservation, restoration, and education.

Thanks for reading! and thanks for doing your part to save this pale blue dot we call home! Be sure to spread the word on these small and easily doable goals to maximize our efforts to make this planet the best it can be!

Be sure to revolve back here again next week for the State of the Season!

 

Furry, Feathery Flyers

Two brothers. On a beach. And then a meteor hit!

Well, maybe not the last part, although a similar circumstance will come back up again later… earlier- uh, you’ll see what I mean.

Anyway, at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, 115 years ago today, along a stretch of beach on present-day Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, two Ohio bicycle makers made history when they piloted the first heavier-than-air vehicle through a successful sustained flight. The pair of Buckeye brothers were Orville and Wilbur Wright, and with the help of their bicycle shop employee/mechanic/inventor Charlie Taylor, they constructed a number of early airplanes and began to take to the skies. This amazing invention gave rise to an incredible method of transportation which has since evolved so much that it is routine to ride on an enormous machine that flies through the air. It is probably harder for us to imagine a world where we do not have aircraft zipping through the skies than revel in the fantastic one we actually live in, and harder still to imagine getting through airport security in the United States with our shoes on the entire time.

Thanks to the Wright Brothers and the countless amazing aviators and engineers since their historic flights, we are able to take for granted the prospect of boarding a vehicle and flying to anywhere else in the world within a day – as long as there’s no long layovers between connections.

As impressive as the Wright Brother’s first flight was, it was far from the first flight on Earth. That honor belongs to animals, specifically early insects. With airplanes and other vehicles, it is common to look to nature for inspiration in order to design the ideal craft to move yourself along the wind, water, or land. After all, nature has already tried out a number of methods and builds that natural selection has honed over the millennia for each intended purpose, including flight. Fittingly, today it has been announced that once again, we learn that Nature was at its old (and I mean really old) game, working on the process of flight in vertebrates a little bit earlier than we previously anticipated.

A scientific report published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution describes the discovery of what appear to be feathers on some pterosaur fossils recently excavated in China. The purpose of these “feathers” could have been similar to those of birds, using them for adjusting body temperature, accentuating sense of touch, sexual attraction of mates, display of territory, and, most obviously, flight.

It is important to note that pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, but rather closely related flying reptiles that existed during the same time, and dropped out of existence at the same time. Remember that aforementioned meteor? Pterosaurs saw the end of their multi-million year run in the same mass extinction event that phased out the dinosaurs: the K-T Extinction. K-T is the abbreviation for Cretaceous-Tertiary (C was already taken by the earlier Carboniferous era), and it marks the mass extinction that occurred on Earth 66 million years ago. Pterosaurs had a lot in common with the dinos, but probably wished they didn’t share the same fate, yet they did. They also share a common ancestor, and along this lineage is probably the real first flight from a vertebrate, and it may have sported some furry, feathery filaments that aided it in soaring through the sky.

For more information on this new finding, read this BBC summary of the report, and to learn a bit about the general history and diversity of pterosaurs, check out this brief video from the American Museum of Natural History in New York:

Thanks for reading and watching! Flap your way on back here next week for some Christmas fun!

Fly on my sweet pterosaur,

Alex

Next Stop: Space!

We’re still roughly a month away from Mach 1 Day, the celebration of Chuck Yeager’s historic first supersonic flight on October 14, 1947, but this is too important of a date in the annals of aviation to pass up on until then. September 17th is also a major day for introducing not one, but two of the most important aircraft ever flown, and yes, they both broke the sound barrier. In fact, to put it lightly, they each fucking shattered it!

In the mid-1950s, the United States was cruising through the air with numerous supersonic planes and had already surpassed Mach 1, Mach 2, and Mach 3. Of course, when it comes to the field of aviation, there’s truly nowhere to go but up, and you always can go up farther. The US wanted to hit hypersonic speeds, otherwise known as speeds of Mach 5-7, and they wanted to do it for one big reason, the biggest of all in fact: space.

In 1954, the US military sought to commission a hypersonic aircraft that could land on its own. After a four company competition which included Bell Aviation, the creator of the Bell X-1 that Yeager flew in 1947, the winner was announced. No design (and price) blew away the Air Force and NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics that would in October 1958 be transferred into the new government agency known as NASA), but they were most favorable toward North American Aviation’s mock-up and ordered three to be built. Another company, Reaction Motors, was tasked to construct the rocket-powered engines for the aircraft.

The North American X-15 was tested out a bit after its construction, and it was formally unveiled on September 17, 1959, ushering in an exciting era of extreme aerial speed. All black with a unique design (see above) to help manage the craft’s aerodynamics at hypersonic speeds, the X-15, like other rocketplanes, was flown up attached to the undercarriage of a larger mothership – in this case a B-52 Stratofortress – then dropped to open up its rocket thrust.

The X-15 had twelve total pilots, including Neil Armstrong, future first man on the Moon, and Scott Crossfield who was the first man to fly beyond Mach 2. But for as impressive as Crossfield’s Mach achievement was, it was nothing compared to those of Major Robert White. White was a test pilot in the United States Air Force who made the first flights beyond Mach 4 and Mach 5, but he was not even close to calling it there. On November 9, 1961, Major Robert White became the first person to push past Mach 6. Yeah, Mach 6! He flew the X-15 to 4093 miles per hour (6590 km/hr)!

But wait, there’s more! Two years later, in both July and August of 1963, Joseph A. Walker topped the X-15’s altitude mark by flying it beyond 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level. This mark is referred to as the Karman Line, and it marks the boundary of Earth and Space. That’s right, Walker flew a plane into Outer Space. He holds the distinction of being the the seven American to travel to Space and was granted the title of astronaut for having left the confines of Earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, as was the case with too many test pilots, Walker died three years later in a midair collision during another test flight.

The X-15 was a remarkable plane that was the world’s first spaceplane, and still holds the record for altitude achieved by a plane, as well as speed, which it officially maxed out with William Knight’s 1967 flight that reached Mach 6.72, or 4520 mph (7274 km/h)! We’ll focus on Knight’s tenure as a pilot here, and not drift into his later years as politician in California who wrote the infamous Proposition 22 that banned gay marriage in the state and was openly defied by Knight’s own son David who married his partner in San Francisco in 2004.

The amazing X-15 was slated to be the first step in hypersonic space flight with a winged plane. Projects like Dyna-Soar were to carry on it’s legacy and take it to even higher heights. However, NASA and the USAF would shift their focus to rockets like the Mercury Redstone to reach the realm of Outer Space. They would come back to a winged vehicle that could operate in Space and land itself though. More familiar than the X-15 was the spacecraft that probably what most people think of when they hear the word “spaceplane”.

Once again, on September 17th, this time in 1976, another winged wonder was rolled out. With the primary goal of operating in Space and returning on its own power to Earth, the space shuttle made its debut with prototypical craft Enterprise. Originally supposed to bear the name Constitution, the power of fandom intervened, and then-President Gerald Ford was inundated with letters from Trekkies requesting the name be changed to Enterprise. Ford liked the name, and he requested NASA change it. Thus the Star Trek fans were appeased, and more importantly, the world’s first space shuttle was displayed. Though Enterprise never went into orbit, its following fellow craft did from 1981-2011, rocketing along a road that was first paved by the likes of fast craft like the X-15.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about the X-15, then check out this piece from HistoryNet. I found it quite interesting and educational. If you express any interest in my writings, then please send me your feedback, or suggestions for the future at monotrememadness@gmail.com. Be sure to zip back here next week for more high-flying fun!

I’m a Rocketman! ROCKETMAN!

Alex

P.S. Congrats to Holly Ridings, the new chief flight director at NASA who is the first female to hold the position!

The Eagle Has Launched

Today marks the anniversary of the launch of the world’s first lunar mission that put men on the Moon. Apollo 11 took off on July 16, 1969, en route to making history for the likes of Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They actually landed on the big, reflectively bright ball in the sky four days later on the 20th, and completed their return back to the Earth another four days later on the 24th when they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and was picked up by the USS Hornet.

The flight of Apollo 11 was without a doubt incredible. The historic importance was obvious to all involved, and in spite of the immense pressure on everyone in NASA, the entire mission was almost perfectly planned and executed. The bigger headline will always justifiably be that man walked on the Moon, but it is worth noting just how smoothly this whole shindig ran – or rather flew and gravitated – along. According to NASA’s website synopsis of the lunar mission, “on July 17, a three-second burn of the SPS [Service Propulsion System – the main engine of the Command Module] was made to perform the second of four scheduled midcourse corrections programmed for the flight. The launch had been so successful that the other three were not needed.” See what I mean? Smooth sailing to the Sea of Tranquility.

Beyond the easy ride the astronauts had on their way to the Moon there was one adjustment made well before the launch. The original primary crew lineup that was announced for Apollo 11 featured Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as Commander and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) respectively – roles that both of them filled on the actual mission. However, the role of Command Module Pilot (CMP), or the guy who stays behind to pilot the craft that picks up the pair on the lunar surface once they complete their mission, was not originally Michael Collins. Well, it was in a previous mission that was planned to feature him as the CMP, but then Collins had to have surgery , so another astronaut, who was serving as Collins’ backup, was promoted to the main man in the main Module, for that earlier mission, Apollo 8. That CMP who flew on Apollo 8, was Jim Lovell, the man who later would be the Commander of the star-crossed Apollo 13. Lovell was continuing his role of understudy turned star for the Apollo 11 mission when the crew list was first put out on November 20, 1967. Nevertheless, 20 months later it was a recovered Collins who was flying the Command Module to pick up Armstrong and Aldrin from the Moon. As is fairly common for NASA missions, there was plenty of flipping around on the crews before they every even entered orbit.

As you enjoy this Friday July 20th, look up at the night sky and reflect upon the amazing achievement that so many helped our species earn. Give your shout out to the still up-and-at-’em Buzz Aldrin, and your respects to his mission commander and first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong. Yet don’t forget the other guys (and gals! You go real-life Hidden Figures ladies and your fellow females!), especially the also-still-cruising Michael Collins, the CMP who made sure that the entire crew made it back to Earth together; and Jim Lovell, who despite being on two Apollo flights into lunar orbit (Apollo 8 and 13) never landed on the Moon. Nonetheless, Lovell, like so many of the  less-recognized members of that era’s NASA team, was an invaluable contributor to the cause of space exploration.

But hey, it’s not all that bad! At least Lovell got to be portrayed by Tom Hanks!

Thanks for reading! If you ever have any questions or suggestion for me, then please pass them along to me at monotrememadness@gmail.com. Be sure to get a gravity assist to swing you back here next week for some more information on the Apollo 11 mission.

 

The Cousteau Clan

Underwater wildlife, action shots, and sweeping score: that intro knows how to grab you! Fortunately, the ensuing content does not disappoint. In fact, the many recorded adventures of the Cousteau family remain timeless and stand alongside the highest quality nature documentaries today.

Speaking of today, this day specifically is the 108th birthday of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Cousteau’s extensive list of accomplishments highlight how the man lived his life to the max – essentially cramming the equivalent of 87 lifetimes into his 87 years on Earth. Best known as an ocean conservationist, nature filmmaker, and the co-inventor of the Aqua-lung (the first SCUBA device as we know it today), Jacques Cousteau was a truly incredible man. A personal hero of mine since I was a kid, he is the reason I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up. Of course, Cousteau’s influence stretches across so many involved in so much as the man did so much and shared his discoveries with the rest of the world so well. Cousteau, and especially his wife, Simone, knew how to harbor help on funding their expeditions, which they filmed and showed to the rest of the world to show us all another world we’d previously only seen the surface of. Separate, but deeply connected to us, the Cousteaus provided us the necessary glimpse into the waterways we take for granted so that we can recognize how urgently and greatly we must work to save them.

For a fuller look at Jacques Cousteau’s grand life, swim over to this SciShow segment from last year:

There is so much that has been said about Jacques Cousteau, including by me. If you want more of that, then hop in your time machine and take yourself back to my grade school living wax museum project where I stood in a hot gym in a thick, purple wetsuit while clinging my plush movie official Jaws great white shark. As much as I love the man, I’ve covered his life fairly extensively so far in my own. However, there is one aspect of Jacques Cousteau’s life that I want to emphasize as it is easily the most important, yet is often glossed over by most casual biographies. The most important thing for Monsieur Cousteau was the other Monsieur Cousteau – his son, Philippe.

Jacques Cousteau had four children in his life, two with Simone, and later two with his second wife, Francine. His sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe grew up practically underwater, and they helped their father on his many odysseys from the beginning.  While Jean-Michel has since followed in his father’s finstrokes in managing a number of conservation projects and films (including convincing then-U.S. President George W. Bush to create what was at the time the largest protected space in the world,) he and his famous father were never quite on the same wavelength. Disagreements on how to keep the Cousteau ship sailing – well, organization running, but a sailing ship is literally part of that – not to mention a lawsuit over the use of the Cousteau name at a resort of Jean-Michel’s making led to some rough moments in their relationship.

Such was not the case with Jacques and his younger son, Philippe. Philippe (an early contender for the look of “World’s Most Interesting Man”) was so attached to his father when he was a child that he would be right behind Jacques when working and wading into the water even before he could swim! Like older brother, Jean-Michel, Philippe’s interests went beyond the water, and he became trained as a pilot, a skill which would prove extremely handy for the pair when as they worked together to make films. The means to travel and explore were expanded by Philippe’s adept aviation skills, yet flying would be his doom as well. On a flight check in Portugal in 1979, the plane Philippe was flying malfunctioned and crashed. He was 38 years old.

But the legacy lived on. Philippe stated that he perceived the Cousteau expeditions not simply as adventures for the sake of the fantastic, but as a means to bring the watery side of the world to the millions who could not see it as the Cousteaus were lucky enough to. This mission that he served as an integral member of (he was the chief cinematographer on most of the films) went on long after his death. It is continued today by his brother, and by his own children, Alexandra and Philippe Jr.

Here is a clip from a BBC documentary where Philippe Jr. visits the remnants Conshelf Station that served as an extensive experiment to see if humans could live a submarine lifestyle, as well as studying the effects of longer-term time spent underwater. While the research and brave exploration were the intent of the structures and their experiment, the letter that Philippe Jr. reads shows the love that a father had for his son.

Thanks for reading and watching. I hope you made the most of your World Oceans Day (June 8), but whether you are an active ocean conservationist like the Cousteaus, of if you’ve never heard of World Oceans Day until now, I encourage you to respect all our waterways and treat everyday as a day for the water around you, for as Jacques and his sons and grandchildren have shown, it’s an amazing, yet fragile watery world we live in, and it’s worth saving. Minimize your plastic consumption, hug your children often, and float back here next week for more.

Alex