Isebrand

John James Audubon (April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851)

It was British appetite for Audubon's work that catapulted his career forward. He couldn't find a U.S. publisher.

The Saint-Domingue-born (French-citizen) Audubon was an illegal immigrant—sent to America by his father, with a fake passport.

Audubon was born Jean Rabin. The French colony of Saint-Domingue gained independence in 1804 as the sovereign nation of Haiti following an insurrection by self-liberated slaves.

Audubon's paintings are iconic Americana. Working in America, including frontier regions, as an ornithologist and naturalist, he identified 25 new species of birds. His wife Lucy (Bakewell) Audubon was the family's main breadwinner until, at the age of 41, Audubon found interest in his naturalist artwork among British audiences. His most famous work is a massive color-plate book The Birds of America.

Audubon was born on this day in 1785. He died in Manhattan on January 27, 1851, aged 65.

Image: The snowy owl, in John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, 1827–38, (c) The British Library Board. 

January 31st, 1822: George Stephenson's patent application, the dawn of the modern railroad and a global transportation revolution.

January 31st, 1822: The dawn of the modern railroad and a global transportation revolution. 195 years ago today, George Stephenson (1781–1848) submitted his original patent application for the engine that powered the first locomotive railway in history.

Document signed, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, January 31, 1822 — click the image below to enlarge it. It reads:

To the Kings most Excellent Majesty, The humble petition of George Stephenson…Sheweth that your petitioner hath invented certain improvements in steam engines which invention he believes will be of general benefit and advantage; That your petitioner is the true and first inventor thereof, and that the same hath not been made or used by any other person or persons whatsoever to his knowledge or belief; Your petitioner therefore most humbly prays your Majesty will be graciously pleased to grant unto your petitioner, his executors, administrators and assigns, your Majesty's Royal Letters Patent under the great seal of Great Britain for the sole use, benefit and advantage of his said invention within England, Wales and the town of Berwick upon Tweed, for the term of 14 years, according to the statute in that case made and provided. And your petitioner will ever pray etc. George Stephenson.

As British historian and broadcaster Peter Snow summarized:

Seven years later, the ‘Rocket’ locomotive Stephenson designed with his son Robert began carrying passengers on the world’s first inter-city line between Liverpool and Manchester.... There was not a mile of passenger railway in the world before Stephenson, and yet by the end of the 19th century there were half a million miles of track.

The Wikipedia entry on Stephenson notes: "His rail gauge of 4 feet 8 1⁄2 inches (1,435 mm), sometimes called 'Stephenson gauge', is the standard gauge by name and by convention for most of the world's railways."

Image from the The Raab Collection, LLC.

The Fatal Apollo 1 Fire — January 27, 1967

Fifty years ago today, the three-man crew of the Apollo 1 mission were killed when a fire broke out inside their Command Module during a launch rehearsal test at Cape Canaveral (then named Cape Kennedy Air Force Station), Launch Complex 34, on January 27, 1967. The astronauts were unable to open the hatch from inside. 

The Apollo 1 crew members were (pictured above left to right)

U.S.A.F. Lt. Colonel Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom
U.S.A.F. Lt. Colonel Edward H. White, II
U.S.N. Lt. Commander Roger B. Chaffee

Apollo 1 would have been Chaffee's first space flight, White's second, and Grissom's third.

The Command Module had been mated to (connected atop of) the towering Saturn IB launch vehicle on January 6. The scheduled launch date was February 21, and the January 27 test was a crucial one to see if the spacecraft would operate with internal electrical power.

A description of the moments of the fire is available on the Apollo 1 Wikipedia page; my summary chronology is below.

6:31:04.7 EST, Grissom exclaims
c. 6:31:06.2 EST, Chaffee reports fire
c. 6:31:13 EST, start of final, garbled transmission, perhaps White, 5.0 sec. long
6:31:19 EST, intense cabin pressure ruptures Command Module's inner wall

The review board determined that there had been a momentary power failure at 6:30:55 EST, but a single ignition source was never identified. (See full report.)

The launch complex was used for a final time on October 11, 1968—for the first manned Apollo launch, that of Apollo 7—and later decommissioned. NASA razed most of it, but the launch pedestal remains. A memorial plaque is affixed to it.

Image: NASA photograph of January 17, 1967; photographer unknown.

"There They Go Again"—bad reporting and plenty of ignorance and apathy

Meet the late Mr. A. Pavlov, a "pro-Russian separatist" according to the media, but he was really a Russian citizen who went to Ukraine to fight Ukrainians. Yet he becomes a "pro-Russian separatist" because "most media coverage of Ukraine still comes through Moscow bureaus."

Check out "There They Go Again: International Media Enables Russian Aggression in Ukraine", Peter Dickinson's 21 October 2016 article at atlanticcouncil.org.

Journalism, especially investigative and local investigative journalism, is dying everywhere. And the world is becoming stupider and more easily manipulated by large media operations because of it.

But, let's just say all the free nations of the world, following the BBC model, decided non-governmental but mostly or totally taxpayer-funded corporations would be charted to conduct such laudable work using more robust resources the taxes/fees facilitated.

Would anybody watch it, read it, listen to it?

Few will in a world where the vast majority of people would rather watch reality TV, care nothing at all about politics unless it is sufficiently entertaining (e.g., appalling, funny, bizarre), and—especially in the U.S.A.—have the geography skills and civic engagement of a tuber.

This situation is thanks mostly to two things.

First, the appalling low priority America's educational system puts on geography and civics (and history).

Second, the widespread cynicism about politics, which is the result in large part of antiquated and opaque party systems, political cronyism, rank partisanship (e.g., everything from ad hominem rhetoric to gerrymandering) and the chumminess of political, corporate, and media elites in the U.S. and globally. Younger would-be voters seen enough of this to be totally turned off by politics, somewhat understandably.

To a lesser extent, these things turns them off of global affairs, too, though I belief the educational system and media fragmentation are more to blame for that.

Moral Maze on "Policing Offense" — When does personal opinion become morally unacceptable?

(Michael Buerk)

The BBC Radio 4 series and podcast Moral Maze, a panel discussion program recorded live on the morality of current issues and timely topics, has been hosted since its first broadcast in 1990 by Michael Buerk, whose introductory remarks for each episode are nearly always a tour de force. Their shortened, variant version is posted on each episode's webpage, too.

The July 13, 2016 episode is "Policing Offense", when does personal opinion become morally unacceptable? I've edited Buerk's opening remarks and their published version on the webpage:

As the politics of offence, identity and rights become ever more toxic, they become equally hard to navigate, and the price of transgression is ever higher. We've had laws against "hate speech" for many years now, but are we too keen to create whole new categories of "-isms" to which we can take offence?

If morality rests on the ability to distinguish between groups and make judgments about their lifestyles, how do you distinguish between a legitimate verdict and an unjustifiable prejudice?

Why is it acceptable to say "It's good that the President is black" but not to say "It's good that the next President will be white"? Ditto women. Why is the insult "stale, male and pale" OK, but it wouldn't be if you changed gender and race?

Just when you'd learned to call the sexually ambiguous or at least transient "transgender", you're told the concept of gender is unacceptably binary and hence insulting.

There are exploding tripwires of social acceptability everywhere, with a new vocabulary of perceived offensiveness: "micro-aggression", so-called "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" to protect students from ideas they don't agree with.

It only seems to work one way. Black or brown people can't be racist about whites. Women, if that's not too binary of a description, can't be sexist about men.

Is all this a good thing, stigmatizing and policing prejudice? Is this about defending the powerless against the powerful, or are we stifling debate, making the political personal, limiting people's rights to say what they think, and making identity more important than ideas?

Where do we draw the line between policing the basic principles of equal rights and mutual respect with a capacity to judge people by what lies in their heart? When does personal opinion become morally unacceptable?

Listen to the episode (streaming) or download it as an MP3 here. It's also available on iTunes.

Along with Buerk as chair, the program features four panelists and a series of witnesses. Regular panelists as the time of this writing are Claire Fox, Giles Fraser, Kenan Malik, Anne McElvoy, Michael Portillo, Melanie Phillips, and Matthew Taylor.

 (Moral Maze live broadcast, 1994.)

Besides chairing Moral Maze, and co-hosting the ITV program Britain's Secret Treasures, Buerk is best known as the journalist whose October 23, 1984 report on the Ethiopia famine inspired Band Aide and Live Aide.

Ben Carson can believe a lot

Famed neurosurgeon, author, and Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson feels under attack from the media and liberals. He blames this in part on being a black American who doesn't hold to socially liberal or economically progressive views. The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart notes that Carson's critics are reacting to bigoted and incendiary comments that the candidate's made.

In April 2013, Carson linked gays to pedophiles and “people who believe in bestiality.” His attempted explanation to NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell led to a ridiculous “That’s not an orange. …That’s a banana” analogy that still makes no sense. In October 2013, he famously said, “You know, Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”

And:

 “the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”

This is the same Ben Carson who said, as pointed out by astronomer and author Phil Plait:

“I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary.” The Adversary is a nickname for the devil; it’s the actual translation of the word “Satan.”
.....
He also dismissed the Big Bang, calling it a “fairy tale.”

Carson proves that to be a brain surgeon you don't exactly have to be a rocket scientist. Or any kind of scientist, frankly. You have to have a certain degree or quality of native intelligence and aptitude (including the highly admirable ability to concentrate for long periods of time), be extremely knowledgeable about various and highly technical specialist fields, and have far above average eye-hand coordination.

Carson has all of these things, and other skills and strengths besides. But surgeons are not by definition scientists...or for that matter economic, foreign, or energy policy experts. That's partially how it's possible for Carson to believe a half-dozen idiotic things every day between breakfast and lunch, including that somehow the Theory of Evolution is not true, that it is wrong despite its formal status alongside the Germ Theory of Disease (which he undoubtedly knows something about though probably less than an infectious disease specialist does), the Theories of Special and General Relativity, and the Theory of Plate Tectonics.

Carson clearly has the intelligence to author books, win numerous awards and distinctions including the Presidential Medal of Freedom he was honored with in 2008 for accomplishments in his field, to navigate political debates and interviews (with mixed results), and to fund-raise and organize as he did for hospitals and medical research—skills likely helping his political campaign, too.

But none of that exempts him from simultaneously being gullible and misinformed about a host of matters vital to the republic's governance, as well as certain matters key to a proper understanding of observable reality.

And none of his intelligence or skills, as Jonathan Capehart notes, exempt him from holding incendiary and ignorant ideas and spouting them—even as he does so in his slow, soft-spoken, modulated way (almost like he's drowsy), which is in part the reason for his popularity; it is admittedly a change, probably welcomed by many voters, for a politician to not be thundering and podium-pounding all of the time or pronouncing in affected gravitas—a specialty of Carson's fellow candidate Sen. Ted Cruz. But ignorant and incendiary comments aren't less ignorant and incendiary just because they're given in bassoon tones instead of trumpeted flourishes.

The Carrington Event, August 28–September 2, 1859. The most recent significant solar storm to hit the Earth, but it will happen again

On the 28th of August 1859, telegraph lines in North America went dead, currents coursing through the lines melted metal components.

On September 1, 1859, English astronomer Richard Carrington saw sunspots through his telescope, from which “two patches of intensely bright and white light” shot outward.

Though not fully understood at the time, Carrington had become the first person to view a solar flare, what's now called a coronal mass ejection or CME. A solar storm was hitting the Earth. It came in two disruptive waves.

That evening, telegraph lines were again disrupted, this time more profoundly and at locations worldwide. Chemical-marked papers in telegraph offices combusted suddenly and many telegraph operators received electrical shocks from equipment.

In North America, auroras shone so as far south as Cuba and so red and brightly that in the Carolinas birds began to sing thinking it was dawn and in Boston people could read by the light. 

On the July 23, 2012 a "Carrington-class" Solar Superstorm (CEM/Solar EMP) just barely missed the Earth. NASA didn't share the information publicly about the near-miss until April 2014.

What are the chances another solar storm like the one causing the Carrington Event will impact us in the next ten years? Here's the best guess so far:

In February 2014, physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc. published a paper in Space Weather entitled "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events." In it, he analyzed records of solar storms going back 50+ years. By extrapolating the frequency of ordinary storms to the extreme, he calculated the odds that a Carrington-class storm would hit Earth in the next ten years. The answer: 12%.

What would be the effect on our highly technology-driven society? It's hard to say, but in July of 2014, researcher Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado said that if the July 2012 CME had hit Earth, "we would still be picking up the pieces."

The Death of the Middle-Class Artist — America is ignoring the humanities to death

In his New Republic review "Creative Destruction", William Giraldi, novelist, critic, and editor for AGNI literary journal, offers an arresting overview of Scott Timberg's new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

If you care about art and the humanities in America, brace yourself.

From the 1950s–1970s, there was for artists in America:

institutional support, low rents, a humming population in urban universities, an inviolable sense of a shared culture.... When Robert Lowell was reconfiguring American poetry in 1950s Boston, “a life of genteel poverty was still possible.”

No more. Considering a career related to the arts or humanities? Best to be a trust fund kid or marry rich.

Giraldi summarizes:

When everyone’s an artist and no one spends money on art, art is stripped of any economic traction and serious artists can’t earn a living. Couple that with a population that overwhelmingly doesn't mind if art and artists go extinct and you have, ladies and gentlemen, what can be fairly called a crisis.

Giraldi notes that "whole throngs of onetime stable middle-class artists have been pummeled into a class where they feel the fangs of hunger."

The concept of the starving artist isn't recent. But that doesn't mean it's not a problem; that doesn't mean it's not a problem that it was less of a problem 30 or 40 years ago—before the decline of the middle class as a whole, before Reaganomics and globalization.

It's not all economics though. 

There’s the long-standing and nationwide dedication to anti-intellectualism.... There’s the winner-take-all social credo that kills regard for any place other than first.... (Timberg calls it “blockbuster culture.”) There’s the [pull of] the more practical interests of science, business, and technology. There’s the widespread caricature of artists as eccentric idlers or unstrung cranks, romantic boobs, or sexed-up wastrels we might be better off without.

But, it's probably mostly economics, especially in our Internet age.

There are the Hobbesian market forces, the consumer-propelled capitalism so sweet for behemoth corporations who are its lungs and spleen but not so sweet for those artists who need to maintain their integrity outside the corporate sway. 
.....
But there remains this egregiously democratizing effect of the Internet: We believe that most online content is ours for the taking. The model of the online marketplace might be the chief obstacle preventing most middle-class writers and musicians from earning a living with their work, but it’s about time we, the users, come around to the moral side of the argument: We should purchase what we read and hear on our computers.

I used to think we might be entering a new era of art and scholarship patronage.

Given the extraordinary explosion of wealth among the top 1%, especially among the overlord class of the top 1% of the 1%, I used to harbor a feeble phantom hope that maybe America would enjoy a mini-renaissance, a flood of new funds filling the coffers artists, historians, documentarians, and artistic and cultural institutions and projects. After all, Charles and David Koch alone, who are known to give to the arts, are worth more than $100 billion. Just 10% of that is $10 billion for the arts and humanities.

Of course, I knew better. As I said, it was a feeble hope, not an expectation.

Giraldi notes that "at the hub of this mess is how we as a nation perceive our artists and stewards of culture"—specifically our reasoning that the market dictates the worth of all things. Giraldi describes this reasoning as our "bamboozled, depleted mentation", and we permit ourselves to follow it.

Giraldi's endorsement:

If you believe that the life of your mind is inseparable from the health of your life, that serious art and artists are an essential component to human nourishment, then you have an obligation, to yourself and your children and us all, to read Timberg’s book, and the minute you’re finished, to do something about the scourge it sets before you.

Boys in dangerous new toys: 8th of September 1914, the first military air combat kill; the late teens and 20-year-olds who created aerial combat

In a span of just four years, 1914–1918, all of the basic principles of military aviation combat, all still relevant today to some degree, were set. The context was the bloody trial-and-error aerial combat of the First World War, and the fliers were often only 18, 19, or 20 years old.

This period began only 11 years after the Wright Brothers' flight.

The airplanes of the First World War were rickety affairs made mostly of linen stretched over wooden frames. They were difficult to fly. Half of all the pilot deaths of the war occurred during take-off. Many early models did not have brakes; they simply slowed to a stop upon landing on the grass runways.

(Click on any image in this post to view it enlarged in a seperate browswer window.)

At first during the war, airplanes were used only for reconnaissance. They had no weaponry. Opposing pilots sometimes waved in greeting upon encountering each other in the the sky even as their respective nations' armies clashed murderously below them the ground.

The first recorded instance of an aircraft bringing down an enemy aircraft was when an Austro-Hungarian Albatros B.II reconnaissance airplane was deliberately rammed by a Russian Morane-Saulnier G on September 8, 1914. Both planes crashed.

In time, pilots started to shoot at each other from their open-seat cockpits with shotguns or pistols. Eventually, not surprisingly, a machine gun was tried.

Ground-based anti-aircraft weapons and techniques improved, too.

Pilots were not allowed parachutes; it was thought they'd encourage pilots to bailout instead of finishing their missions. Airplanes damaged or set alight by enemy fire or mechanical trouble in the air became diving death traps.

British pilots' average life expectancy was only 18 hours of flying time at one point during the war when the Germans possessed a particularly superior model of plane, the Albatross, and Germans began referring to the pilots of the Britain's Royal Flying Corps (RFC) as kaltes Fleisch, "cold meat."

During April 1917, RFC aviators' life expectancy was at its worst during the war: only 11 hours flying time.

Starting in 1917, pilots started to focus more on group formations of airplanes and formation tactics. Aerial warfare became less about pilots operating as lone airborne hunters, less about their individual pilot heroics (and a certain degree of recklessness) and more about dog fights between groups of opposing pilots. These fights were often of breath-taking complexity.

But one reality remained throughout: bringing down an opposing aviator generally meant maneuvering to get very close to his airplane. The technique of RFC pilot Albert Ball, but rendered obsolete in the formation flying tactics of later 1917 and 1918, was to spot his target, drop out of the sun, position himself only about 15 feet behind and beneath it, and fire his plane's machine gun upward—directly into the German plane's cockpit.

Josha Levine, writer, actor, historian, and author of Fighter Heroes of WWI:

"Dog fights were a very common occurrence in the First World War, but they never really ever happened again, because by the Second World War...airplanes were simply too quick. And one airplane only had another in its sights for a split second at a time.... If you watch a science fiction movie,... Star Wars for example, and watch the X-fighters take on the TIE fighters, you'll notice that what they're really having is a First World War dog fight. And yet that never really happened again after 1918."

I recommend the Channel 4 program Fighting the Red Baron (2010), which offers a humanizing look at the military aviators of WWI. (See a promo video here.) Some of the British and German aces (i.e, five or more air victories) mentioned in Fighting the Red Baron  are show here, from top to bottom:

Albert Ball, VC, DSO & Two Bars, MC; Royal Flying Corps (RFC); killed in action aged 20.

Cecil Arthur Lewis, MC; Royal Flying Corps (RFC); he survived the war and went on to co-found the BBC; died in 1997 at the age of 98.

Arthur Rhys-Davids, DSO, MC & Bar; Royal Flying Corps (RFC); killed in action aged 20.

Werner Voss; Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte; killed in action aged 19.

Manfred von Richthofen, "the Red Baron"; Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte; killed in action aged 25. (Pictured at left.) Richthofen scored more aerial kills than any other ace of the First World War: 80. Canadian flier Captain Roy Brown was credited with shooting him down.

A List of the Top Aces of the First World War

Top photo: a formation of recreated Fokker DR-1s at a 2005 airshow (via The Vintage Aviator Ltd of New Zealand).

Lemmings don't commit mass suicide—inconveniently for Disney docu "White Wilderness"

Lemmings don't commit mass suicide. Some types, including the Norway lemming (whose habitat includes much of Scandinavia a nearby area of Russia) engage in rather regular mass migrations, due to a sudden population increase about every 3 or 4 years, during which many lemmings may accidentally drown if they attempt to swim (yes, they can swim) across a body of water that's too large.

I'm not sure if this mass drowning occurs because of misjudgement at the level of each individual, a migratory lead sub-group or individual, or some combination of those, or for some other reason altogether.

the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, [included] staged footage [showing] lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration.^[12] A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.^[13][14]

via en.wikipedia.org

There are many species of lemmings, including eight species of collared lemmings that are said numerous places online without citiation to be the only North American rodents that turn white in winter.

Image: "Lemmings in Migration", Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 11, 1877 (via the blog, The Scorpion and the Frog); click the image to view it at full size in a seperate browser window.