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The Discovery of the Holy Lance
On June 15th, 1098, the army of the First Crusade discovered the Holy Lance – the very spear that had pierced Christ’s side on the cross - in the city of Antioch.
Early in June 1098 the army of the First Crusade, heading south through Syria on its way to wrest Jerusalem from the Saracens, captured the city of Antioch, but was promptly shut in the city and besieged by a powerful Turkish and Arab force. Food quickly ran out, morale plummeted and the crusaders were nearing desperation when the situation was saved by a miraculous discovery. A scruffy Provençal peasant named Peter Bartholomew, with a reputation as a drinker and womaniser, demanded to see the Count of Provençe, one of the principal crusading leaders. When given an audience by the count, and the Bishop of Le Puy, he explained that St Andrew had a appeared to him in a vision and had told him where the Holy Lance was – the very spear that had pierced Christ’s side on the cross – could be found in the cathedral of St Peter in Antioch. The bishop viewed the story with a cynical eye, but Count Raymond was impressed and a mood of excited expectation began to spread through the hard-pressed crusaders in the city. On June 15th, Count Raymond and others went with Peter Bartholomew to the cathedral. Workmen dug down into the floor where Peter indicated. They found nothing and Count Raymond walked away in disappointment, but then Peter himself who was wearing only a shirt, jumped down into the trench and triumphantly produced a piece of iron which everyone immediately hailed as the sacred lance-head itself.
As Sir Steven Runciman, the historian of the Crusades, remarked: ‘It is useless now to judge what really happened.’ Raymond of Aguilers, a reputable historian who was one of Count Raymond’s chaplains, observed what took place and reported that he had seen the iron in the ground before Peter Bartholomew began brandishing it. Whether Peter somehow salved the dig, or whether he had the diviner’s gift for sensing the precious of buried metal and knew there was something buried beneath the floor – whatever it really was – is impossible to say. In any case, the excitement in the city was intense as word of the find spread and even Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy and other sceptics kept their doubts to themselves for the moment because of the evident boost to the crusaders’ morale. This was so transformed that on June 28th, following further instructions issued through Peter Bartholomew by St Andrew, who guaranteed victory in another vision, the crusaders sailed out from Antioch. They were led by their best soldier, the Norman warrior Bohemond of Taranto, with the Holy Lance carried by Raymond of Aguilers. Desperately weak from hunger, they were in an exalted mood and some cried out that they could see celestial cavalrymen on white horses riding to help them, bearing white banners and led by St George. In berserk frenzy, they sent the besieging Saracens packing and slaughtered many of them in flight.
The victory saved the crusade and the lance was kept by Count Raymond, who treated it with great reverence. It was a useful addition to his armoury in his running power struggle with Prince Bohemond, but Peter Bartholomew did not inspire confidence. Doubts about the genuineness of the relic reached such a peak that eventually in April 1099, Peter demanded an ordeal by fire. On Good Friday April 8th, he walked through a narrow passage between two massive piles of blazing wood, wearing only a tunic and carrying the lance. He was hideously burned, and died in agony on the 20th, and few in the crusading army outside the Provençal ranks put much faith in the lance’s authenticity any longer. It was kept at Constantinople for a time, and later at St Peter’s in Rome. It was to play a major role in medieval European legends, however, in close association with the supremely sacred relic of Christ’s redeeming blood, the Holy Grail – the chalice of the Last Supper. The two relics appear together in many stories of the quests of King Arthur’s knights of the Round Table.
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We all know that feeling of outrage, of sorrow, or regret that we feel every time we hear news of another child murdered, abused, raped, trafficked, bullied online or in school. No country or community is immune to the violence that is committed against children every day.
It's the feeling that became almost overwhelming as we saw children die attempting to flee war in Syria, heard yet another story of a gang rape, a mass kidnapping, another school shooting.
It's that shared feeling of sorrow, anger, regret that finally brought us to target 16.2 and other associated targets, of the new UN Sustainable Development Goals, a promise to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children. It's why we are creating a Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, to make sure that we keep that commitment to children.
Violence against children is preventable. It does not have to be a fact of life. But for 1 billion children around the world--1 in 2--that's exactly what it is. Every day, in every country - rich and poor - millions of children are victims of violence in their homes, schools, and communities. In fragile states, and those experiencing conflict, the danger to children becomes much greater.
There are currently over 230 million children living in conflict-affected areas. Meanwhile, in many Latin American and Caribbean cities, a hyper concentration of violence has given the region the largest share of child homicides in the world - with homicide being a leading cause of death for 10-19 year olds.
Violence takes many forms: neglect, physical and emotional abuse, sexual abuse, rape, trafficking, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, child marriage, honor killing, not to mention the many violent ways in which children die during conflict. For the survivors, the consequences of violence can be serious and long-lasting.
Violence against children is a serious and costly global issue, impairing children physically, mentally, and developmentally for years to come. What's even worse, it significantly undermines the financial investments we're making in areas like health and education that should be improving children's lives. Physical, psychological and sexual violence against children are estimated by some to cost as much as $7 trillion per year globally, or 8 per cent of global GDP.
Because of its links to other issues that can harm children - such as separation from families; HIV; smoking, alcohol and drug abuse; school dropout; early pregnancy; lack of girls' empowerment; gender-based violence, and crime - dealing with it effectively will generate wider, positive outcomes across a broad range of sectors.
While ending violence against children is first and foremost an ethical imperative, it is also a smart, cost-saving investment. According to a recent EU study, every Euro invested in preventing violence against a child produces a social return of €87, or almost 100 USD. With 1 billion children experiencing violence, we can't afford to not invest in solutions.
There is a frustrating lack of financial investment in children's safety - we have solutions for ending violence that are proven and cost effective, but many policy makers are neither advocating for them, nor taking them to scale. Organizations like the World Health Organization, UNICEF and Center for Disease Control have all shown evidence prevention and early intervention works. Yet as of now, this continues to be a largely underfunded area.
End Violence is a new global partnership with the express purpose of facilitating the action that is needed by bringing together global policymakers and child protection experts to work to accelerate progress on this critical issue. Ending violence against children is an ambitious goal, but it is an achievable one.
End Violence is committed to making sure that every child has a chance to grow up safe, happy and healthy in an environment free from violence and fear. Very soon, End Violence will present committed policy makers with a set of strategies for reducing violence in the lives of children in all settings. Developed by the World Health Organization and several partners, this package will contain evidence-based, complementary strategies with measurable outcomes that are proven or deemed highly likely to prevent violence against children and help reduce its consequences. These will include promoting parenting skills and empowering families economically, improving the emotional development of children as well as their access to health care. Also included will be recommendations to advocate for laws and social norms that protect children, as well as challenging the gender stereotypes that can normalize violence.
We know that preventing violence won't just make life better for children around the world, it will be critical to making progress for children in all areas - including ending poverty, providing access to education and promoting gender equality.
Together we can prevent violence against children - 1 billion of the world's children are crying out for it. If we don't act now, who will?
End Violence is currently running a consultation process to guide how the Global Partnership will work for children around the world and people from all walks of life with an interest in ending violence against children are invited to take part and give their input on how End Violence should move forward. To take part in the consultation process you can visit the End Violence website at www.end-violence.org/consultation
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Pi can be found in the design of the pyramids at Giza
It's Pi Day, a celebration of the mathematical ratio that man has been trying to unlock for millennia. But why are we driven to find the answers behind it?
As we're all taught at school, pi represents the number you get when you divide the distance around a circle (its circumference) by the distance across (the diameter).
With just a string and a ruler you can quickly measure that pi must be just over three-and-an-eighth (3.125). With more precise measurements, you may be able to narrow it down to 3.14.
However, if you ask a typical maths nerd, you'll get an earful of pi - 3.14159265 and so on. A surprising number of students have memorised 50 or even 100 digits after the decimal point.
The rough ratio of pi 3.14 gives us the date for Pi Day. March 14, or 3/14 in American dating style, makes sense for a celebration of this famous constant.
Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi. Pi Day celebrants, usually children with an enthusiastic teacher and a varying degree of personal interest in the subject, learn about pi, circles, and, if they're lucky, eat baked pies of various sorts.
Some classes offer prizes for memorising the most digits of pi, or for creating interesting mnemonic devices. Count the letters in each word of this classic poem:
Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
In mystic force and magic spelling.
Pi, more commonly known by the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet, is the most widely-known mathematical constant in the world. Even long after people forget their school lessons, they still recognise the symbol.
Aliens/hoaxers also need pi
Pi conjures a sense of mystery, so the symbol makes regular appearances in popular culture - it's the secret code in both Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain and the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Net.
And while pi is a number, its importance goes far beyond simple geometry. Pi represents a deep universal mystery - how is it that something this basic, this fundamental to maths and science, could turn out to be so incredibly difficult to pin down?
In fact, it's literally impossible to know what pi is, because its digits rattle off into infinity.
While there are many infinitely long numbers in maths, pi is the only one in which an infinitely simple idea - the circle - unfolds into an infinitely complex value. This paradox drives many people to distraction.
One of the most endearing and enduring qualities of humans is that we're so often sure that we can find the answer to any problem if we just try hard enough. For 3,500 years, humankind has attempted to solve the puzzle of pi, also called "squaring the circle", calculating the exact ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. However, no matter how hard anyone tries, they find only a new approximation.
In ancient Greece, the great mathematician Archimedes worked tirelessly to discover the ratio, uncovering only a few digits of accuracy. When he tried to stop a Roman soldier from blundering over his work by shouting "do not touch my circles" he was unceremoniously murdered.
Pi is in art
By the time Ludolf van Ceulen died in 1610, he had spent many years of his life tediously calculating pi, resulting in only 35 accurate digits. And in 1873, William Shanks announced he had found 707 digits over years of hand-cramping work; unfortunately, he had made a mistake after the 527th place. The following digits were all wrong.
The most recent attempt, by a Japanese computer scientist in 2002, found 1.24 trillion digits of pi. To put all this in perspective, even an astrophysicist, attempting to measure galaxies, would never need more than 10 or 15 digits of precision. But pi beckons us on further. Some mathematicians believe that if we could only find some pattern in pi, even some hint that there were more fours than sevens, it could lead to a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the universe.
The late physicist Carl Sagan, in his novel Contact, imagined a time when Earth scientists were sufficiently able to unravel enough of pi to find encoded messages from our creators-messages that would allow our primitive race to leap into a greater universal awareness. After all, if you were going to hide a long numeric message in the very fabric of our reality, pi would be a natural place to do it.
Nevertheless, pi continues to frustrate. In the late 19th Century, it was categorically proven that pi was infinitely long and could not be solved with any finite number of equations. That hasn't stopped modern-day circle-squarers, who continue to claim that mathematicians are wrong and that pi is really just 3 or 3.25 or some other finite-but-erroneous answer.
Pi Day is a time to honour not just a number and our fascination with it, but also the essential truth that there are some things we simply cannot know. We can only get close to knowing.
We have pi in our eyes
Pi shows up everywhere. In mathematics, pi appears in many fundamental equations that have nothing to do with circles. In science, pi is inextricable from measuring everything from ocean waves to economic statistics.
Pi is found in the very measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza. And if you divide the length of a river from source to mouth across a gently sloping plane by its direct length "as the crow flies", you'll find pi.
Pi also appears where you least expect it. Religious scholars point to the Old Testament which, when describing the measurements of Solomon's Temple, implies that pi is only three. In the transcripts of the famed OJ Simpson trial, you can find arguments between the judge and an FBI agent about the actual value of pi.
For a time, Givenchy offered a men's cologne emblazoned only with the symbol. Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska wrote a poem about pi, and pop star Kate Bush sang 100 digits of pi on her album Aerial.
In this age of high-tech precision instruments, where we assure ourselves that perfection is attainable, pi is an ever-present, sometimes grating reminder that there are puzzles that can be solved and there are mysteries that, perhaps, can not.
David Blatner is the author of The Joy of Pi.
Below is a selection of your comments.
Funny about Carl Sagan expecting to find encoded messages in Pi. It's an infinite series, which means that any message you want to find will be there somewhere.
Magnus B, London UK
I understand why today was mentioned, but are we going to get special days for the other equally important constants? 0, 1, "i" and "e" are just as fundamental (although "i" isn't really on show in every day life as much as the others)
Nic Brough, London, UK
Don't forget the movie Pi either.
Garnet Hoyes, Korat, Thailand
Pi also works in deadlines for projects: take your estimated target deadline period, multiply it by pi, and you end up with the time you will need to actually finish the project.
Erik, Leuven, Belgium
Sir, I send a rhyme excelling
In sacred truth and rigid spelling
Numerical sprites elucidate
For me the lexicon's full weight
Count the letters in the words for pi to 20 decimal places easily remembered.
Tuppennyblue, Worcester, UK
Why not have pi day on the 22nd July? Every schoolchild of my age knows that pi is best approximated by 22/7.
John Gillham, Malvern Worcestershire
My old maths teacher used to hold the world record for reciting pi, and once spent a lesson reciting the first thousand for "Children in Need" whilst we all checked a huge list of random numbers to spot if he made any errors. Well, it was better than a real maths lesson.
The value and usage of pi is only theoretical as it's impossible to create a perfect circle. There will be always some miniscule anomaly in its shape - even if you go right down to atomic level.
Kenny Laing, Grantham, UK
Every time we ask our computer to generate a random number (which might show up, for example, as a random letter or word, or as random movements in a game) we are using pi. A computer on its own cannot create a truly random number so it uses the apparently random sequence of digits in pi to produce a very good approximation of randomness.
Tony Palmer, Watford, UK
"Squaring the circle" has nothing to do with working our the value of pi - it refers to the problem of constructing a square from a circle, where the square is to have the same area as the circle.
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Senior British Treasury officials have said that this was the consequence of rich Britons maneuvering to avoid paying the higher tax rates. The Treasury data does not reveal exactly how much of the drop in revenue occurred in the new, high tax bracket (the data covered all self-assessment reporting for that period); no one doubts where the drop in taxes occurred.
The Liberal Democrats, junior partners with David Cameron’s Conservative Party, had insisted on government support for the higher tax rate as a way of demonstrating that the rich were paying their “fair share.” Industrial organizations, however, have urged the government to refrain from this sort of higher tax rates on the wealthy because it will drive Britain’s most productive citizens out of the country (at least for tax purposes).
During the decades of Labour Party rule, British citizens with high incomes, such as rock stars, often assumed a domicile with lower tax rates such as Monaco or Switzerland, which meant that the British Treasury received little or no revenue when a lower tax rate might have persuaded these self-imposed exiles to pay taxes to their homeland.
The British veterinarian-writer “James Herriot” (or Alf Wight) ironically, was a member of the Conservative Party and a supporter of low tax policies. When his books began to sell, Wight was stunned to learn of the near confiscatory rates on high incomes above a certain level. He was not a rich man, but rather a late bloomer as a writer who had worked hard as a country vet for decades. Wight did not elect the non-British domicile route, though advised to by friends and solicitors. Wight preferred to stay in the Yorkshire village of Thirsk, even though at that time the highest tax rate was 83 percent. He was obviously the rare bird, and part of his motivation appears to have been bringing tourist dollars to his fellow villagers at Thirsk and the other part his modest lifestyle which required little money.
For every Alf Wight there must be dozens or hundreds of Britons such as Ringo Starr (pictured above) who has domiciled in Monaco and splits his time between Surrey, California, and Monaco. The Beatles famously recorded the song “Taxman” (written by Beatle George Harrison) when they discovered that the huge record sales they produced were swooped up by the government:
Let me tell you how it will be,
Here’s one for you, nineteen for me,
‘Cause I’m the taxman.
The pure economics of progressively higher income tax rates on government revenue are not theoretical. Professor Alfred Laffler worked out the “Laffler Curve” more than 30 years ago and it has invariably proven an accurate predictor of the effect of changes in tax rates upon revenue. Dr. Laffler noted that if the tax rate on income was 0 percent, then no revenue would be raised because whatever the income of a tax base, none would be taxed. The other side of the curve was just as valid. If the tax rate on income was 100 percent, then no revenue would be raised because no one would produce taxable income. As a consequence, much like any other Bell Curve, there is a point of maximizing revenue which lies somewhere between 0 percent and 100 percent and this tax rate is probably not near the confiscatory levels which “tax fairness” advocates usually demand.
The same principle applies to capital gains taxes. Although there is a compelling policy argument in favor of abolishing the capital gains tax entirely, because any such tax reduces the rationalization of investments within an economy to the intelligent use, the impact upon capital gains tax rates and revenue is well documented. When capital gains tax rates are too high, then people simply do not sell securities or real estate — the gain from that transaction would be scooped away by the taxing authorities. On the other hand, a reduction of the capital gains tax rate produces much more activity, as people buy and sell assets without the inhibition of higher rates. The much greater number of transactions, even with a lower tax per transaction, produces more revenue.
So the drop in the British government's revenue for January 2012 should not be shocking to anyone. Indeed, anything but a drop in revenue would be the real surprise.
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Wisdom is justified, true happiness.
Knowledge is often described as "justified, true belief". This means, if you hold a belief, and it is true, that is not enough to call it knowledge. It must also be a justified belief. Meaning, there must be a good rational reason for the belief that is somehow causally linked to the external fact. So, a person could hold a belief for foolish reasons, that happens to turn out to be true by chance, but this is not knowledge.
On the other side of the coin, the belief being justified is also not reason enough to call it knowledge if it is not also true. Sometimes we have a good reason to believe something, but the evidence on hand simply points in a direction that isn't true. No matter how justified, if the belief isn't actually true, then it isn't really knowledge.
Now for wisdom...
Wisdom can be described as "justified, true happiness". This means that there are no distraught sages (ultimately wise folks). If a person is wise, you will know their wisdom by its fruit, which is happiness. While all sages are happy, not all happy people are sages. A person could be a 'happy fool'. In other words, they may be happy for ignorant, naive, shallow, or unrelated reasons. This is why I say that the happiness must be justified. A sage is happy because the sage understands the true way to happiness and reasons for happiness. The happiness must also be true happiness. In other words, it must be a deep enduring contentment and joy that transcends external circumstance, and not be a happiness based on shallow transitory pleasures.
So, if someone appears to be typically grouchy, mean-spirited, sad, upset, angry, bitter, or erratic in their happiness - then it is reasonable to question the wisdom of their ways. Beware the path they have chosen, unless you too wish to be similarly unhappy. True Happiness and relief from suffering is, after all, is the ultimate purpose of spiritual practice.
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The basic path for exploiting an overflow-related vulnerability is to find a crash (often by fuzzing), evaluate the crash and whether it presents an attack path, and then build something to exploit it.
Sometimes where one looks can involve knowledge of the architecture, such as when Charlie Miller noted that iOS 4.3 has a section of memory which will run unsigned code. In the case of all his Apple attacks, I believe the source was closed. SQL injection weaknesses are similar -- you're starting with a crib knowing where a good place to look is.
While it is simplest to identify and correct a bug via source after finding a crash, the work to setup the environment can be without value if one's goal is simply to write a working exploit. Often, the relevant space of a program will involve looking at less than 1 KB of machine code.
From my perspective, open source allows one to view bugs being added as they happen and say, "Hey, that bit of source looks insane." Beyond that, the work for exploiting closed-source and open-source work is often the same. As for reverse engineering, that's rare unless you're trying to alter or recreate an application rather than launch an exploit from it.
I wouldn't underestimate the ability of hacker groups to dedicate a lot of computing resources to a task. Warez groups have been known throughout the history of the Internet to muster substantial storage and bandwidth resources. It might be naive to think hacker groups don't muster the same scale of CPU power.
Finally, most people who do this for a long enough time keep a discovered exploit or two up their sleeves rather than releasing it.
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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - As unwelcome as they are, higher gasoline prices do come with a plus side - fewer deaths from car accidents, says a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
An analysis of yearly vehicle deaths compared to gas prices found death rates drop significantly as people slow down and drive less. If gas remains at $4 a gallon or higher for a year or more, traffic deaths could drop by more than 1,000 per month nationwide, said Michael Morrisey, Ph.D., director of UAB's Lister Hill Center for Health Policy and a co-author on the new findings.
"It is remarkable to think that a percent change in gas prices can equal lives saved, which is what our data show," Morrisey said. "For every 10 percent rise in gas prices, fatalities are reduced by 2.3 percent. The effects are even more dramatic for teen drivers."
The early results were presented in June at a health economist meeting in North Carolina. A coauthor on report is David Grabowski, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School.
The research included death rates and gas-price changes from 1985 through 2006, and the calculated percent reduction in fatalities can be extrapolated to 2008 and beyond, Morrisey said.
The results come after earlier research by the coauthors found lower gas prices have the opposite effect by wiping away many of lifesaving outcomes from the enactment of mandatory seatbelt laws, lower blood alcohol limits and graduated drivers licenses for youth.
The UAB-Harvard findings did show the more restrictive graduated license programs helped reduce traffic deaths by 24 percent among drivers aged 15 to 17.
The research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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Lithium Batteries Take to the Road
Source Newsroom: IEEE Spectrum Magazine
Newswise — Although the lithium-ion cells you see in laptops and mobile phones pack twice as much energy per pound as the next-best kind, they haven't found their way into hybrid cars because they're worryingly prone to fires. A123, a Watertown, Mass. startup, believes it has solved the problem with a lithium-ion design using a special formulation for the battery's cathode, or positive plate.
On August 9, General Motors announced that it would use A123's batteries to turn the Chevrolet Volt, now a concept car, into what is known as a plug-in hybrid. The plug-in constitutes a kind of automotive holy grail because it would give priority to the electric part of the gasoline-electric hybrid. A plug-in would go considerable distances on battery power alone, usually gaining its charge straight from a wall socket and relying on the gasoline engine only as a range extender. Automakers around the world are hot on the trail of the energy-dense batteries such cars would require.
The safety problem that has stood in the way of lithium-ion batteries became notorious last year when laptops using such batteries were shown spouting flames in video clips that circulated on the Internet. Millions of lithium-ion batteries had to be recalled, even though no one was hurt. If masses of such batteries had been crammed into automobiles, however, the fires would likely have resulted in the deaths of the passengers.
The fires seem to begin when a small manufacturing defect, perhaps compounded by overcharging, causes oxygen to separate from the compound making up the cathode, a heat-releasing process known as oxidation. As the cell overheats, it can prime oxidation in neighboring cells, a process known as thermal runaway.
A123 overcomes the problem by making its cathodes out of iron phosphate, which bonds to the oxygen far more powerfully than does the cobalt dioxide found in conventional lithium-ion batteries. Its cells are thus far less subject to oxidation, and thus less prone to thermal runaway. The coompany has minimized iron phosphate's problem of a relatively low operating voltage with a nanopatterning design that improves conductivity in the cathode.
The company's batteries are already in use in other applications demanding a combination of power and safety. The company recently introduced them into a new line of 36-volt power tools, twice as powerful as their predecessors.
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Changizi discovered that our ability to see in color is actually designed to allow us to detect subtle changes in the emotional states of our peers.
A fluctuation in oxygenated blood could signal anything from embarrassmentthrough red cheeksto going “white with fear.”
“Our ability to see subtle changes in color gives us the ability to read the minds and sense the emotions of those around us,” Changizi says. “We essentially have external sensing equipment for reading emotions, much like the Star Trek empath character [which had the psychic ability to sense the emotions of others].”
Changizi then turned his sights on object recognition by studying why letters across written languages share similar shapes. He discovered that our ancestors likely created their alphabets to mimic shapes that naturally occurred in their environment, exactly the shapes our visual systems have evolved to be great at processing.
“The letter Y, for example, is found on the corners of objects, and the letter T is found when a contour of an object is occluded by another object,” says Changizi. “And similar shapes are found throughout the alphabets of other languages.”
During the two years he’s been a faculty member in the Department of Cognitive Science, which Changizi says he joined because of its diversity of expertise in fields ranging from psychology and logic to artificial intelligence and neuroscience, he’s uncovered two more visual system superpowers.
He argues that our ability to anticipate the future is evident in everything we do, whether it’s catching a football or maneuvering through a crowded room full of people.
It takes our brain nearly one-tenth of a second to translate the light that hits our retina into a visual perception of the world around us. While a neural delay of that magnitude may seem minuscule, imagine trying to catch a ball or wade through a store full of people while always perceiving the very recent (one-tenth of a second prior) past.
While many scientists hypothesized that optical illusions occur because they exploit the limitations of our visual processing, Changizi argues they occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don’t match reality.
“We experience countless illusions in our lifetime. The most famous being geometrical illusionsthose with converging lines and a vanishing point we often see in Psychology 101 classes or in entertaining optical illusion books,” he says.
The Hering illusion, for example, looks like a bike wheel spoke with two vertical lines drawn on either side of the center vanishing point. Although the lines are straight, they seem to bow out away from the vanishing point. The optical illusion occurs because the human brain is predicting the way the underlying scene would project in the next moment if the individual were moving in the direction of the vanishing point. “Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit our superpower ability to foresee the near future,” says Changizi.
Changizi uncovered the final of the four superpowers in a paper published last summer. He claims the eyes have evolved to face forward in order to allow for “X-ray vision,” or the human ability to see through the clutter in the world.
Most animalsfish, insects, reptiles, birds, rabbits, and horses, for exampleexist in non-cluttered environments like fields or plains, and they have eyes located on either side of their head, allowing for panoramic vision.
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Spring allergy seasons continue to start earlier each year (it was February in 2012), and pollen counts continue to go up. It’s not a fluke; scientists say the effects of climate change are making allergy seasons worse. Research presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in November 2012 suggests that by 2040, pollen counts are expected to double.
“I do think that the allergy seasons seem to be longer. When winter is shorter and less severe, it means there will be pollens and molds present for a longer period of time,” says Dr. Stacey Gray, an allergy expert at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.
Grass, weeds and trees release microscopic pollen into the air each spring, summer and fall. Inhaling pollen can trigger a reaction of the immune system. It’s known as hay fever. Symptoms vary, but commonly include a runny nose, sneezing, itching and burning or watery eyes. If you have asthma or chronic obstructive lung disease, pollen can increase your risk for flare-ups.
Other floating pollutants in the air can cause allergic reactions, as well, such as mold spores and dust mite droppings, although mites aren’t a seasonal problem, and mold can be a year-round problem in warm climates.
You can find out what you are allergic to by having allergy testing. This is done in a doctor’s office, using either a blood test or a skin test. The skin test involves pricking the surface of the skin and exposing it to allergens. Redness and swelling at a test spot on the skin indicates an allergic reaction.
The medical fix
Once you know which allergen you’re dealing with, you can develop a treatment strategy with your doctor. This usually involves medications.
Antihistamines counteract a protein called histamine, which is released by tissue cells deep inside the skin during an allergic reaction. Over-the-counter (OTC) examples are chlorpheniramine (Chlor-Trimeton) and diphenhydramine (Benadryl).
“Antihistamines like Benadryl are an old standby, but there are several newer nonprescription medications that work well without causing drowsiness, which is one of the main side effects of Benadryl,” says Gray. These include fexofenadine (Allegra), loratidine (Claritin) and cetirizine (Zyrtec). Cetirizine can sometimes still cause some drowsiness for some patients. By prescription, there are now topical nasal antihistamine sprays – azelastine (Astelin) and olopatadine (Patanase) – which can help with sneezing and runny nose.
Corticosteroid nasal sprays are steroids similar to hormones your adrenal glands produce. They reduce inflammation and help reduce nasal congestion, runny nose and nasal itching. These are available by prescription, such as mometasone furoate (Nasonex) and fluticasone propionate (Flonase), and can be used long term.
Nonsteroidal nasal sprays that contain cromolyn sodium (NasalCrom) are available OTC. These target the root cause of symptoms by keeping allergens from reaching cells that release histamine. They can be used long term. However, Gray says the sprays are often not quite as effective as nasal steroid sprays.
Since allergy seasons appear to be worsening, Gray suggests starting medications early, before the allergy season starts.
“For instance, start using a nasal steroid spray a few weeks before the spring allergies begin,” she says.
Fighting allergies with medicine alone may not be enough, says Gray. She recommends minimizing allergens in the house and in the work environment.
“Make sure the air conditioning and heating filters and vents are all clean,” she stresses.
During peak pollen season, close your windows and consider wearing a mask for outdoor yard duties. Better yet, avoid going outside when pollen levels are highest. Gray also recommends using nasal saline irrigations.
“They’re especially helpful to clean the nose after an exposure to an allergen like working in the yard,” she says.
Remember, too, that certain irritants in the environment can make allergy symptoms worse, like exposure to cigarette smoke and pollution. Gray suggests avoiding such exposure if possible.
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Esch is a family name represented among European and North American Mennonites. John Horsch lists Oesch among the names of Swiss Mennonite refugees in the Palatinate after 1664, who later came to Pennsylvania. Christian Neff's Mennonitisches Adressbuch of 1936 lists an Oesch family in the Augsburg Mennonite Church and three Esch families in the Ernstweiler Mennonite Church. Franz Crous' list of Mennonites (1940) in South Germany has four families bearing the name Esch and ten the name Oesch. The family has been prominent in the Luxembourg congregation; Joseph Oesch, who was serving as bishop in 1953, died on July 15, 1954.
C.Z. Mast reports in 1942 that there were one hundred families bearing the name Esch, most of whom were farmers in Lancaster County, Pa. The immigrant ancestor of this family, Jacob Esch, landed in Philadelphia in 1751. Among his sons was Jacob Eash, Amish bishop who died in 1850. The family history of Jacob Eash (1934) names 2,946 of his descendants, many of whom were Amish, living principally in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Iowa.
Near the time that Jacob Esch, Sr. came to North America, James Esch also emigrated from Europe to Eastern Pennsylvania. Among his descendants were Christian D. Esch, Mennonite bishop and missionary doctor to India, and Menno Esch, Mennonite bishop at Mio, Michigan.
Daniel Kauffman reports that John Oesch (1792-1850) was a native of Bavaria, who settled in Waterloo County, Ontario, where he was ordained as preacher in 1829 and as bishop five years later. In 1953 ten ordained men in various Mennonite conferences bore the name Esch or one of its variants.
Crous, Franz. "Mennonitenfamilien in Zahlen." Mennonitische Geschichtesblätter 5 (1940): 26-45.
Eash, L.T. Descendants of Bishop Jacob Eash. Middlebury, IN, 1934.
Horsch, John. Mennonites in Europe. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1942: 385-387.
Kauffman, Daniel, ed., Mennonite Cyclopedic Dictionary. Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1937: 87-88.
Mast, C.Z. Annals of the Conestoga Valley. Elverson, PA, 1942.
Neff, Christian. Mennonitisches Adressbuch. Karlsruhe: Heinrich Schneider, 1936.
See also H.S. Bender, ed., "Palatinate Mennonite Census Lists." Mennonite Quarterly Review 14 (1940): 5-40, 67-89, 170-186; 15 (1941): 46-63.
Cite This Article
Gingerich, Melvin. "Esch (Eash, Esh, Oesch, Ash) family." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1956. Web. 30 Jun 2016. http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Esch_(Eash,_Esh,_Oesch,_Ash)_family&oldid=119484.
Gingerich, Melvin. (1956). Esch (Eash, Esh, Oesch, Ash) family. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 30 June 2016, from http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Esch_(Eash,_Esh,_Oesch,_Ash)_family&oldid=119484.
©1996-2016 by the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. All rights reserved.
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For more info, contact:
Ali K. Kamrani
Associate Professor / UGRD Advisor
Office Assistant II
Undergraduate Program Overview
Nature of the Work
Industrial engineers determine the most effective ways for an organization to use the basic factors of production - people, machines, materials, information, and energy - to make or process a product or produce a service. They are the bridge between management goals and operational performance. They are more concerned with increasing productivity through the management of people, methods of business organization, and technology than are engineers in other specialties, who generally work more with products or processes.
To solve organizational, production, and related problems most efficiently, industrial engineers
- study the product and its requirements
- use mathematical methods to meet product requirements
- design manufacturing and information systems
- develop management control systems for financial planning and cost analysis
- design production planning and control systems to coordinate activities and control product quality
- design or improve systems for the physical distribution of goods and services
- determine which plant location has the best combination of raw materials availability, transportation, and costs
- develop wage and salary administration systems and job evaluation programs
Many industrial engineers move into management positions because the work is closely related.
Industrial engineers held about 220,130 jobs in 2012 in U.S.. Because their skills can be used in almost any type of organization, industrial engineers are more widely distributed among manufacturing industries than other engineers. These skills can be readily applied outside manufacturing as well. Some work in engineering and management services, utilities, and business services; others work for government agencies or as independent consultants.
Employment of industrial engineers is expected to grow about as fast as the average for all occupations through the year 2006, making for favorable opportunities. Industrial growth, more complex business operations, and the greater use of automation in factories and in offices underlie the projected employment growth. Because the main function of an industrial engineer is to make a higher quality product as efficiently as possible, their services should be in demand in the manufacturing sector as firms seek to reduce costs and increase productivity through scientific management and safety engineering. Most job openings, however, will result from the need to replace industrial engineers who transfer to other occupations or leave the labor force.
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| 0.938729 | 457 | 2.9375 | 3 |
History of United States Dog Tracks
In the late 1800's, American farmers imported greyhounds to help curb the multiplying jackrabbit population. Because of the greyhound's speed and natural instincts, they became the focus of popular neighborhood competitions. These informal matches were the first organized greyhound racing events.
On 1919, the first greyhound track was opened in Emeryville, California.
Today, Greyhound racing is the sixth largest spectator sport in America. It is legal in 20 states including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Nevada and South Dakota do not offer live greyhound racing, but allow wagering on simulcasts.
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| 0.913861 | 165 | 3.0625 | 3 |
What is Collateral?
The term collateral describes pledged assets that a borrower commits as security against a debt to secure the repayment of the loan. The most common example can be seen through a home buyer who pledges their house as collateral in case they default on the loan. In the event of default, the lender will assume the collateral as their own and sell it off to satisfy repayment of the loan that was originally issued. Foreclosure is a very common example of this concept in action; the bank will seize the home of a delinquent borrower and sell the home through auction or through other channels in an attempt to repay the original loan that was given to the borrower.
The securities market contains many structured products which are backed by collateral. Mortgage backed securities, Asset backed securities, corporate bonds, REITs, and leveraged loans are just a few examples.
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Explore this Section
A star is born - inaugural lecture
A leading astrophysicist at Keele University will question whether we are alone in the Universe when he delivers the latest lecture in the University’s series of professorial Inaugural Lectures for 2011 – 2012 on Tuesday, 17 April, 2012. Professor Robin Jeffries, Astrophysics at Keele, will be speaking on “A star is born”.
The Sun dominates our solar system and supplies the energy required for life-on-Earth. The age and fate of the Sun are now well understood, but its formation and the necessary conditions for the formation of our solar system and an environment suitable for carbon-based life are much less clear. In this lecture Professor Jeffries will outline the basic steps in the formation of a star like the Sun and discuss what recent observations tell us about such a star's early life and how unusual (or common) our solar system is. He will explore whether the properties of our Sun and solar system tell us anything about their early history and where in the Galaxy and in what environment they were born. Professor Jeffries will conclude by speculating on what all this means in our quest to determine whether other planets like Earth exist and whether we are alone in the Universe.
Rob Jeffries is an astrophysicist specialising in observational studies of the early lives of stars like the Sun and those of lower masses. He started his career at Birmingham University where, after completing a PhD in X-ray astronomy (in 1991), he became a PPARC-funded postdoctoral research associate on the ROSAT X-ray telescope project. He branched out into optical and infrared astronomy when it became apparent that many of the bright X-ray sources had no counterpart at visible wavelengths and many of these turned out to be the young stars that have formed most of his work since.
Professor Jeffries came to Keele as a lecturer in 1995, was promoted to a readership in 2001 and to a chair in 2010. He has won a number of large research grants from PPARC (now STFC), much competitively sought-after time on the world's largest telescopes, and is the first author of 40 peer-reviewed academic journal papers. His current research surrounds the early lives of stars like the Sun and the evolution of their circumstellar environments. He is a member of the steering group for the largest ever spectroscopic survey of stars, to be carried out over the next 5 years with the European Southern Observatory's "Very Large Telescope". He also has a sustained interest in public understanding of physics and astrophysics, organising many "adult education" courses at Keele and visiting many local schools with a portable planetarium.
Keele's programme of Inaugural Lectures are given by newly established professors within the University and aim to give an illuminating account of the speaker's own subject specialism. The lectures, which start at 6 pm in the Westminster Theatre, are chaired by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Nick Foskett. Admission is free; no ticket is required.
The other lectures in the series are:
Tuesday, 8 May, 2012, Professor Carole Thornley, Management, "Why are the low-paid always with us?";
Monday, 11 June, 2012, Professor Andy Hassell, Medicine, "The patient with arthritis, the medical student and the rheumatologist: influencing tomorrow's doctors".
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General History of Indian Key
Biography of Jacob Housman
By Jerry Wilkinson
Much has been written about John
Jacob Housman and there appear to be many contradictions when studied thoroughly.
The following is not intended to be a complete history of Housman and is
fragmentary, but contains some of the facts available through genuine research.
Much of the data on Jacob Housman from 1830 to 1840 is covered in the web
page General History of Indian Key with additional information here.
Jacob Housman was the son of Abraham
P., and Mary Mersereau Housman of Staten Island, New York. He had brothers
Abraham and George and sisters Lania, Nancy Ann, Elizabeth, Mary, Matilda
and Caroline. The Housman family were of Dutch origin (Huysman) and Abraham
was probably an oyster man which was the primary industry of Staten Island
in the 1800's.
The author believes that much of the legend
of Housman's beginnings began with a Pensacola Gazette article,
four and a half years after the Indian Key raid, and the opinion of E.
Z. C. Judson written on March 29, 1845, "Indian Key was settled in about
1830 by Captain Housman, who commenced business on his own account in the
following manner. He was entrusted with the command of a small schooner
at an early age, by his father, who owned the vessel. She was employed
in the coasting and packet business along the shores of Staten and Long
Islands, also up the North River. The young captain, however, was too much
of a sailor to keep fresh water, and one day took it into his head to make
a 'West Indie' trip without asking his father's permission, making said
experiment in his father's vessel. The young captain never reached his
destination, for running off his course he struck the Florida Reef. This
injured his little craft so much that he was obliged to put into Key West
for repairs, during which time he got such an insight into the 'wrecking'
business that he concluded to became a wrecker himself. . . ,"
To read the entire article and it is lengthy Click
Supposedly the ship that Housman
took was the WILLIAM HENRY. According to data from the National
Archives, the WILLIAM HENRY's certificate of enrollment was issued
at Charleston, S.C. on July 1825 and the certificate of Registry at St.
Augustine, Florida on December 6, 1825. The previous managing owner was
William Barker. She was a two masted schooner, 46 and 76/95 tons, 56 feet
in length, 19 feet in breadth, 6 feet depth and built in 1821 at Havershaw,
New York. Jacob Housman was shown as the sole owner from January 24, 1825
to April 9, 1827 when the vessel was lost. For your information, a certificate
of enrollment restricts a vessel to coastwise trade only whereas that of
registry permits either foreign or coastwise trade. To date, I have been
unable to prove that his father, Abraham, ever owned the WILLIAM HENRY.
The National Archives also stated
that it could locate no reference of charges of Jacob stealing his father's
boat in the early 1820's. This alone does not mean that it did not occur,
or it was some other ship. This would be an interesting summer project
for someone living in the New York area to research the names of ships
that Abraham P. Housman owned in the early 1820's. The Charleston Courier
on July 27, 1822 shows the port departure under the charge of a Captain
Housman, a sloop, the WILLIAM HENRY. The purpose, or destination
was not indicated.
We know that Housman was in the Keys
in 1825 via the records of the adjudication of the cargo of the French
brig REVENGE in Key West.
National Archives Records also record
ownership by Jacob Housman in the ships BRILLANT, FAIR AMERICAN, JOHN
DENISON, KEY WEST, MARTHA JANE, MOBILE, SARAH ISABELLA, SYLPH, THISTLE
STATES. It is interesting to note from these records that Jacob sold
the SARAH ISABELLA to his father Abraham Housman - September 25,
1828, who sold it to his son George on February 5, 1830, who sold it back
to Jacob's brother, George, on March 7, 1831.
Now to the property of Indian Key,
Monroe County Deed Record books indicate that Silas Fletcher sold to Thomas
Gibson all his right, title and interest to Indian Key on November 13,
1828 for $2500. Richmond County, N. Y. Records of Deeds also show that
Abraham purchased property from a Silas Fletcher on December 28, 1830 in
New York. Congress later declared that neither Silas Fletcher, Jacob Housman
nor anyone else owned Indian Key in the 1800s. However, Indian Key property
was sold back and forth until finally in 1908 the U.S. Government issued
a legal land patent deed to W.W. Dewhurst for $68. Some other significant
recorded transactions are as follows:
The first recorded Indian Key property
sold to Jacob Housman was on November 19, 1830 for $30 and was the property
of William Johnson consisting of a one story building with two rooms and
Thomas and Ann Gibson in turn sold
to Jacob Housman a two-story house, a store, 9-pin alley, billiard room
and table, outhouse and kitchen for $5,000 on July 5, 1831. One might conclude
that Housman was serious about Indian Key around this time, if not before.
Jacob and Ann Housman sold
to Charles Howe a lot and house for $580 each on April 23, 1835.
Joseph Prince sold to Jacob
Housman all his rights and titles to Indian Key including all buildings
and improvements for $5,000 on November 3, 1835.
Much is written about Housman's adjudicated
misdeeds as a wrecker. However, it must be remembered that it was a rough-and-tumble
occupation in which to be involved. In reviewing the Admiralty court records,
there were many cases found in his favor. His large participation in the
industry, as well as the nature of the industry, would have necessitated
considerable court action. It can be argued that there may have been many
irregularities that were never reported and that he was worse than the
records indicate. Who knows?
There is little doubt that
Housman was the political and economic force for the development of the
small island. Had the island been larger and a source of at least brackish
water it would have been a force to be reckoned with. One must remember
that both it and Key West were developing almost together, Key West having
a slight head start, size, military, deep water port, etc. As small
as Indian Key is, had Housman been able to maintain his on-site militia
and prevented the massacre, history could have been significantly different.
Jacob Housman mortgaged
Indian Key and buildings thereon (except those belonging to Charles Howe)
to Smith Mowry, Jr. of Charleston, S.C. for $8,583 on March 19,1840. On
the same date Jacob mortgaged the same property to Joseph Lawton of Charleston
for $5,726.62 at 10% interest. This was about four and a half months before
the August 7, 1840 attack. It is also three days after Housman's proposition
was presented by a Mr. Dowling "...to the Governor and Legislative Council
of Florida and to the President and national Congress of the United States,
to catch or kill all the Indians of South Florida, for $200 each."
One can wonder what he
had done with his mini fortune in those days and why the mortgages were
necessary. It does appear that he had lost his fortunes in the latter days
of his life. Read on.
After the attack, Jacob and Ann sailed
to Key West and eventually auctioned off some of his remaining property.
In early May 1841, while at sea he died.
Six days later, Jacob G. Pierce
filed for damages in Key West for the collision of Housman's ship KEY
WEST with the LEANDER on April 30, 1841 which was the day before
his death. On May 30, 1841 with Mrs. Housman as the respondent, Judge Marvin
found in favor of Pierce ordering, " ..recover of the said sloop KEY
WEST, her tackle, apparel and furniture or their owners the sum
of $65 for the damages sustained by the Brig LEANDER ...as well
as his costs and charges in their behalf expended..." The collision occurred
the day before Housman fell to his death. Was there a connection? Not much
is written about Housman's activities while in Key West.
One reference that
I found of Mr. Housman being interred on Indian Key was that by Henry Perrine
Jr. in his "Return Visit to Indian Key In 1876." He wrote, "Near Housman's
epitaph stood the charred trunk or stump of a palm tree . . . ." Nothing
of the nature of the epitaph was revealed by Henry Jr.
Another reference is
by J. B. Holder in his writing of Along the Florida Reef during his voyage
of 1860: ". . . Near by was an ambitious looking slab, covering
a brick tomb. . . . " This is the only reference I have found of it being
a brick tomb.
A newspaperman in the Florida
Times Union on May 22, 1892 wrote the following: "...Any one who visits
Indian Key will see upon the beach a ponderous slab of the purest marble;
its size is about four feet wide by seven feet in length; it lies on the
beach - it "lieth" in more ways than one, for it is a standing falsehood.
The inscription is something like this: (he quotes). The stone does not
tell the truth, because the body of Captain Houseman [sic] does not lie
beneath; in fact the stone remains on the beach where it was landed, just
above the high water mark, years and years ago..."
This was 51 years after
Housman's demise and a lot of activity had taken place on Indian Key during
that time. The great hurricane of 1846 washed away the Key West graveyard
so there is no way to ascertain if there was a burial plot there. Anyway,
the broken marble epitaph was taken to Miami by the Historical Association
of South Florida in 1952 and now is at Lignum Vitae Key.
There was another unresolved court
case at the death of Mr. Housman. This involved the case of Housman versus
Cussans, November 19, 1839, Docket 64 of Superior Court. Housman sued for
costs, " •.. of supplies, repairs and other necessities to be able to sail
upon the high seas..." in a contract with Richard W. Cussans for the sloops
The case was still not settled at his death and Mrs. Housman petitioned
to be substituted which was granted. She won, but the settlement was reduced
by 10 percent for overpricing, but increased by eight percent for interest
owed. Cussans appealed and lost.
Housman left no legal last
will and testament and Judge L. W. Smith in Key West on January 20, 1842
revoked Elizabeth Ann Housman claim as the executrix to Jacob's will. The
following letter of administration was found in Richmond County, N.Y. 1787
- 1865, file number 448, book 2, page 150, June 29, 1841, May 13, 1843:
"Jacob Housman of schooner Sylph at Key West or Indian Key off the
Florida Coast. Administrator: Father, Abraham P. Housman. Widow: Eliza
Housman at Key West. No children." The only item listed as part of his
estate was the schooner SYLPH valued at $1,500.00. One should note
that the vessel KEY WEST registration continued in the ownership
of Jacob Housman until June 4, 1842. His father, Abraham, pursued the probate
action vigorously for years and eventually lost. His primary efforts seemed
to be directly at reimbursement for the militia expenses since it became
fairly obvious that Jacob did not have title to the land and his buildings
that were burned by the Indians.
After the raid and Housman's demise on
May 1, 1841, Indian Key, except for the Howe property, was sold at public
auction to Mowery and Lawton of Charleston, S.C. for $355 on January 15,
Mrs. Ann Housman remarried later
in 1841. The following data is included in the Monroe County Court House
records 11-64, "Crawford Thompson, Esqr. of Sheffield, England and Mrs.
Elisabeth Ann Housman of Indian Key, Dade County, at present of Monroe
County, Florida were married on December 14, 1841 at Key West by Alfred
E. Ford, Minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church."
There is some evidence that
Jacob Housman had a home also on Lignum Vitae Key. Henry Perrine Jr. wrote
during his "Return to Indian Key in 1876" that while a Captain Bethel was
escorting him around: "We did not stay long (on Lower Matecumbe) as the
captain wanted me to go over to Lignum Vitae Key, the island where Capt.
J. Housman had very extensive improvements, to show me his watermelon patch
and pineapples. The only trace of Housman's former occupancy was a portion
of the wall and chimney of a kitchen." Rudy Atmus photographed the site
There is a lot written about Indian
Key and Jacob Housman. Some of it involves the operation of the U. S. Navy
in the area. Much of the Housman claim against the U.S. government involves
support provided to the Navy from about 1836 up to the raid. Additional
claims were for the formation and maintenance of Company B, 10th Florida
Militia (included in this web site) for the defense of Indian Key. In Senate
Report 484 of the 29th Congress on August 8, 1846 is shown, "The extent
of the indemnity claimed is $144,630 . . . ."
Later in House Report 798 - 30th
Congress - 1st Session - June 25, 1848 Committee of Claims Report said
in part, " . . . What right had Housman to this property? He had no title
from Spain previous to the Florida Treaty . . . .we notice a remarkable
fact, that some $15,000 or $20,000 of this claim is for the burning of
cisterns cut in solid rock of the island . . . Housman had no real right
there whatever." This ended the claim of the Housman heirs who received
nothing from their pursuit.
A great juvenile novel, now out of
print, about Jacob Housman and Indian Key, and fairly factual, is The
Rumskudgeon by Kaye Carter available in our local libraries.
Some of this information is repeated
in other chapters.
tour to a list of ships owned by Housman
Return to Indian
Key Home page
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Ever since Linnaeus sorted all known living things into families, genera, and species--in other words, ever since the eighteenth century--rabbits have been classified as rodents. The classification seemed only natural. Like mice, rats, guinea pigs, and other rodents, rabbits have large, gnawing incisors. But early last year a zoologist found genetic evidence that rabbits may in fact be more closely related to primates, including humans, than to rodents.
Dan Graur of Tel Aviv University bases his surprising claim on a study of genetic mutations, which produce changes in the amino acid sequence of the protein a gene codes for, and which are assumed to accumulate at a fairly steady rate. Thus the more amino acid differences you find in the same protein taken from two different animal species, the more time must have elapsed since the two diverged from a common ancestor.
Graur compared amino acid sequences in 91 proteins from humans, monkeys, rats, rabbits, and other mammals. He found that, on average, the proteins from rabbits differed from the same proteins in rats by almost 13 percent, while proteins from rabbits and primates differed by less than 10 percent. Although it’s difficult to assign an exact timescale to the relationships among the groups of mammals, Graur’s results imply that rabbits and primates separated only after their common lineage had diverged from that of rats and mice. Thus rodents, Graur thinks, may not be a natural grouping at all, Linnaeus notwithstanding. Most people have assumed that all rodents evolved relatively recently, along with the other mammals, says Graur. I think that the order is going to be fragmented into many different lineages.
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Are cows getting smarter? Every year, several cows make a break for freedom from barns in Bonneville County to go a-wandering. Resistance is futile. What was different this spring was the feistiness of a 1,000-pound black Angus. "We’ve been raising cows for 20 years," said the owner, "and never had anything like this happen before." The escapee rammed a police car and held off ropers — injuring the hand of one — for four hours, reports the Idaho Statesman. A second cow that had joined in the breakout voluntarily turned up back at the ranch the next morning. But both could decide to take off again: They escaped "by nudging open a sliding barn door."
Five bison hanging out at Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park suddenly toppled over like trees crashing to the ground, says the National Park Service. The animals, found on March 10, were felled by a rare combination: Toxic gases escaping from the earth, which were trapped close to the ground by dense, cold air. The bison were found lying on their sides, their legs sticking straight out in front of them, which indicates they died fast. Lethal gas attacks have happened before at Yellowstone. In one case 105 years ago, seven bears dropped dead in a place aptly called Death Gulch, in the upper Lamar Valley. Gas vents have never killed humans, says a park geologist; we scram when the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide wafts our way.
Coloradans expect more snow to fall in March than any other month, slowing runoff from the mountains and filling depleted reservoirs later in the spring. Not this year. March temperatures zoomed into the 70s, sending skiers into shorts, and fruit trees into bloom. In Crested Butte, the hot days melted snowdrifts so that what was once hidden popped into view. It wasn’t pretty: "Copious amounts of dog poop are emerging with the spring thaw, spreading a distinctive unsavory aroma," said the Crested Butte News. To deal with the unwelcome discovery, the town is talking about creating yet another festival, this one a PooFest to scoop the poop.
Leapfrogging development, otherwise known as sprawl, is creating its own jargon, says Dolores Hayden, Yale professor of architecture, urbanism and American studies who shared sprawl-speak with a capacity crowd at the University of New Mexico. Did you know that "putting parsley around the pig" is how developers add a dash of landscaping to spruce up a new subdivision? That a "boomburg" is a fast-growing suburb and a "zoomburg" is one that’s booming even faster? Then there’s "ballpork" for a sports stadium that’s financed with public money for the benefit of a privately owned team and "litter on a stick" signifying billboards. Hayden is clear about what constitutes sprawl, reports the Albuquerque Tribune: It incorporates low-density, scattered, car-dependent development "organized around unsustainable growth."
The town of Aliso Viejo in south Orange County, Calif., was fighting the good fight against non-biodegradable polystyrene cups, but it came up with a wacky reason for banning the white foam containers: "dangerous" dihydrogen monoxide, which is another way of saying water. A city staffer apparently swallowed whole an Internet Web site that linked Styrofoam to the not-so-scary compound. The hoax gave the petroleum industry an opening to cry "junk science," and caused the town to delay its ban on allowing Styrofoam at city-permitted events, reports the Los Angeles Times. "We dream about instances like this when our opponents do something foolish," said a spokesman from the American Plastics Council. Hoax or not, says the manager of Aliso Viejo, "If you get Styrofoam in the water and it breaks apart, it’s virtually impossible to clean up."
How embarrassing: Only a few hours after Republican legislator Joe Thompson attended a ceremony in Albuquerque to celebrate tough new laws against drunk driving, he was arrested for driving drunk. Thompson, the House minority whip, registered 0.12 on breath-alcohol tests, reports the Albuquerque Tribune. The legal limit in New Mexico is 0.08.
Betsy Marston is editor of Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. Tips of Western oddities are always appreciated and often shared in the column, Heard around the West.
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River Conon History
Thanks to Andrew Graham-Stewart for permission to reprint this chapter from his book "The Salmon Rivers of the North Highlands and the Outer Hebrides" which provides a fascinating account of the River Conon's history:
Lower Strathconon, now an open and serene landscape of rolling farm and parkland, used to have a very different appearance. Before it was drained in the 18th and 19th centuries, most of this terrain was bleak marsh and bog; the latter played a critical part in one of the most decisive battles of the clan era.
In 1491 the MacKenzie army of some 800 men were heavily outnumbered by over 2000 MacDonalds at the Battle of the Park (Blar na Pairc) near Contin. The MacKenzies, who were on home territory, cunningly lured the Macdonalds into a quagmire; as they wallowed and floundered in the peat, thousands of arrows rained down on them, before the MacKenzie line moved in to finish the slaughter. A few MacDonalds managed to flee towards the River Conon. As the river was in spate, they asked an old woman the location of the ford. Intentionally she misled them, and they attempted to cross at the wrong point; many were drowned, and those who desperately clung to the bank had their hands severed by the sickles of the old lady and her associates. No more than 200 MacDonalds survived to return to the Western Isles, and they never threatened the MacKenzies again.
The Conon system, by far the largest north of the Great Glen, drains 400 square miles of Ross-shire’s high mountains and moorland. Bordered in broad-brush terms by the Beauly to the south, the Ewe to the west and the Carron to the north, it is supplied by a fan-like formation of four main tributaries, each between 20 and 30 miles long; they are in clock-wise order the Orrin, the Meig, the Bran and the Blackwater. The Conon itself has a course of some 12 miles from the Conon Falls, initially Highland in character before flowing through the rich pastures and arable fields to its mouth at the southern end of the Cromarty Firth by Dingwall.
The Conon was a very important source of wealth for the MacKenzies. An apocryphal story that another strain of MacKenzies (of Conan Estate) lost their netting rights in a gambling episode in the 1700s has no basis in fact. The estuary salmon netting was highly lucrative, and remained so over the centuries; the Cromarty Firth, completely protected from the open sea, is an ideal netting location. By the 19th century there was a profusion of nets up and down the firth, supplemented by in-river nets and cruives (fixed salmon traps). Between 1828 and 1837 a long legal battle was waged by Cromarty Estate against the use of stake nets by two other proprietors with land adjoining the firth. In 1838 the court found in favour of the Estate, with the estuary defined as extending as far the mouth of the firth at the Sutors, inside which the use of fixed engine nets was prohibited. This was reconfirmed by the Byelaw of 1865.
By the latter part of the 19th century, as salmon angling became more valuable, the cruives at Brahan on the lower Conon became extremely contentious. Those fish not trapped in the boxes were netted below and escapement above was thought to be minimal. In 1890 a consortium of river proprietors, wishing to maximise escapement, leased the Brahan cruives and net fishing. For the next few years there was no exploitation at this location, allowing stocks the opportunity to recover. However on the face of it the main beneficiaries were the net and coble operators in the firth. The district’s netting catch increased steadily from 8,000 in 1892 to 27,200 in 1895. In the latter year the total for the rods including the neighbouring Alness amounted to only 800.
Evidently the intensity and productivity of the nets dismayed the river proprietors, and by 1901 the cruives were functioning again. According to Calderwood (1909), as well as the cruives, "27 shots (ie nets) are fished here in three and a quarter miles of water" and "it will be readily understood that a very complete control over all ascending fish can be exercised and, except during floods or the weekly close times, fish have a poor chance of reaching the upper waters". The efficiency of the nets was beginning to have a marked impact on stocks, as in 1907 their catch was reduced to little more than 4,000; this included "150 clean fish at the first sweep" on opening day (February 11).
Within a decade the decline in stocks was "serious", threatening the viability of rod-fishings, and the river proprietors decided to act. Sir John Stirling and Lord Roberts amongst others joined forces with the Sellar family (who had the Findhorn Bay nets) and the Lovats on the Beauly to form the Moray Firth Salmon Fishing Company in 1920. They bought up most of the area’s coastal nets including those in the Conon estuary and firth, so that they could be properly regulated and operated to achieve a balance; once stocks built up after a period of little if any netting effort, the company would reactivate their operations to exploit the better numbers. This was the pattern for four decades or so before it adopted a more business-like approach. As salmon stocks started to dwindle in the 1980s, so once again the company reduced the intensity of its operations; between 1977 and 1986 its annual average catch within the firth was 502 salmon and 1478 grilse. The company’s rights in the Cromarty Firth were acquired and mothballed by the Atlantic Salmon Conservation Trust in 1991.
In terms of angling the Conon was historically very much a spring fishery, with fresh fish in the lower reaches from opening day (February 11); incidentally there seems to be some confusion as to when and by whose authority the opening moved to January 26. The main runs of salmon were in March and April. Prior to 1939 the lower Brahan beat (above the tidal stretch) would typically catch 150 by the end of March, and 300 by the end of April; between 1898 and 1900, before the nets were brought under some control, Brahan Castle averaged only 96 up to the end of April. Up until the 1940s Fairburn Estate, with the right bank for some four miles upstream from the mouth of the Orrin, hardly fished after the end of June, and thus in most years no more than three grilse were recorded!
The Blackwater tributary, which joins the left bank of the Conon from the northwest some five miles up from the mouth, was also a superb spring fishery; the short Middle beat (below Rogie Falls) could easily produce 500 fish by the end of June.
The system was first tapped for electricity in the 1920s when a small power station was built to harness the potential of the Falls of Conon. Then between 1946 and 1961 the whole of the catchment was exploited in the most ambitious and comprehensive hydro-electric scheme in the north. In three separate stages- the Fannich Scheme, the Glascarnoch-Luichart-Torr Achilty Scheme and the Orrin Scheme- the Conon catchment was transformed with seven main dams, 20 miles of tunnels, 15 miles of aqueducts and seven power stations.
Thereafter the character of the system was fundamentally altered. Both the Conon and the Blackwater used to be wilder and less predictable in the spring. There were major floods in 1892 and 1922. There were also four big damaging floods between 1962 and 1989- after the harnessing of the system- before lessons were learned. In the 1962 flood the Marybank to Moy Bridge road was beneath 16 feet of water. The main stem of the Conon now carries far more water on an annual basis than previously, as it receives great volumes from outwith its own catchment- the headwaters of the Carron, the Blackwater and the Orrin. Since 1989 there have been no further floods, as more water is released on a regular basis from Loch Luichart, and consequently there is enough spare capacity to hold back flood waters when required.
As the scheme developed, the Hydro-Board bought all the salmon fishing rights (including the valuable Brahan Castle fishings, held for generations by the Seaforth family)- with one notable exception: the late Sir John Stirling refused to sell the Fairburn beats, despite the threat of compulsory purchase, as he believed that in due course the fishings would actually improve downstream of the dams.
During the 1950s the Hydro-Board put into place an extensive programme of works designed to mitigate for the loss of spawning grounds and natural flows. This "compensation package" included numerous fish-lifts within dams, a large capacity hatchery and guaranteed compensation flows (the Conon no longer becomes unfishably low in summer). New fish-ladders were installed- most notably at the Conon Falls; prior to this the falls had never been surmountable, although their blasting had been considered on several occasions since the late 19th century. With these falls circumvented, salmon had access for the first time ever to the River Bran (the largest tributary) and a vast area of virgin spawning territory. There were considerable teething problems with the downstream migration of smolts, but these have now been resolved and the Bran is already making a considerable contribution to the system's smolt-producing capacity.
The Blackwater was also radically affected by the Hydro scheme. Its headwaters were dammed and piped across to the Conon. Most of the spawning burns and habitat were lost, and consequently the two dams were constructed without fish-passes. By way of further compensation a large fish trap was built on the Upper Blackwater; this was designed to capture the entire run of adult salmon returning to the Blackwater, and these fish are indeed trapped each year as broodstock for the hatchery.
Whilst the importance of the Blackwater as a fishery has greatly diminished, it is still a vital nursery area; in fact two thirds of the River Conon's annual rod catch is now landed below the junction with the Blackwater. It is probably fair to say that the tributaries have borne the brunt of the effects of the Hydro schemes. The Meig, which flows from the west parallel to the Bran and joins the Conon below the falls, and the Orrin are no longer so accessible to adult salmon.
The Orrin, the lowest tributary (two miles up from the mouth), was another excellent spring fishery; the Falls pool was, by virtue of a separate royal charter to Fairburn Estate, extensively netted and in some years it yielded 1000 salmon, with fish taken as early as opening day. The Orrin was impounded prior to the 1959 season; that year the nets took 87 and the rods three, and the following year they had one and one respectively. The reason for this dramatic decline was the amount of dirt and silt being washed downstream from the works above. The tributary was then restocked, but the outbreak of UDN in 1967 meant that it was the early 1970s before adult numbers recovered, with the net taking an average of 111 salmon and 239 grilse between 1973 and 1982. Fish began to use the four Borland passes in the dam; however the smolts could not get down, and modifications were carried out- now some smolts are descending. Netting ceased in 1988, and these days there is hardly a fish in the Orrin before July.
The Conon system's run patterns have changed substantially. The spring runs are a faint shadow of their former selves, but the grilse runs are generally excellent. Whilst the Hydro regime has contributed to the demise of the system’s spring run, other factors have contributed, including UDN and marine mortality. There are indications that numbers of multi sea-winter salmon are beginning to recover, as a result of restocking programmes. Thus the Brahan beats’ 2004 spring catch was over 70, compared to an average of 39 for the previous three years.
Salmon in the high teens of pounds used to be caught by rods in good numbers. Fish between 20 lb and 30 lb were landed on a regular basis. Heavier examples are not unknown. One spring in the early 1920s the Stirling family's German tutor, a salmon angling novice who had never caught a fish, was struggling to put out a line on the Muirton Falls Pool (now submerged at Torr Achilty dam). Somehow he managed a reasonably long cast, and hooked a fish. Realising that this was the salmon of a lifetime, old Forbes the gillie seized the rod without ceremony and 45 minutes later a cock springer of 48 lb was on the bank. In the early 1900s a baggot was caught by a rod on the Brahan water. Before it was released, it was laid out on the sand, so that its outline could be recorded. From the measurements its weight was later estimated at over 60 lb.
By any standards the magnitude of the current stocking policy is impressive. In the last ten years an average of 2,600,000 ova per annum (an astonishing figure) have been handled by the hatchery. The river board's approach is as follows: "By distributing the juvenile salmon in large numbers and at an early stage of development over the suitable nursery, they are exposed to natural selection for as long as possible in freshwater. The resulting smolts are of indigenous stock, have lived in the wild for two or three years and are well adapted to the habitat that produced them". In the last decade close to 100 miles of previously inaccessible juvenile habitat have been brought into use; this includes half a mile of a specially created “nursery channel” (completed in early 2004), with optimal habitat to support a high density of fish, adjacent to the lower river. Each year over 700 holes are dug by hand in the headwaters to create artificial redds. These continuing efforts have ensured that the Conon system remains a significant fishery, as these figures for the average annual rod catch for the main river and the Blackwater confirm:
It is fair to stress that these numbers could not have been achieved without the immense assistance of Scottish Hydro Electric, which has been freely provided on every level for four decades. The harnessing of the Conon is a fait accompli; that said, the company does everything within its power to promote salmon regeneration.
In the 1980s Hydro Electric sold off their salmon fishing rights; the company was really not set up to be riparian owners. The prolific Brahan fishings, purchased by Peter Whitfield in 1985, were successfully syndicated; consistently they now enjoy over 50% of the system's rod catch, and their annual average (1991-2000) was 986, dropping to 690 for the period 2001 to 2004.
On the netting front the Conon Board spent over £250,000 on buy-outs in the 1980s. All that remain are three bag-net operators outside the Firth and five sweep-net operators inside the Firth. Their take is approximately 500 fish a year; they have an incentive to restrict their netting to six weeks from mid-June, as the board then allows a 90% rebate on their rates.
The Conon is afflicted with a formidable and diverse array of predators. Seals have always been a problem, as Grimble noted; "their depredations are very serious". Today the population in the Cromarty Firth is close to 400, a considerable gauntlet for salmon to run, and they make frequent raids into the Conon, as far upstream as Torr Achilty dam, some seven miles inland. In 2001 a 25 lb fish was landed with no less than four large seal bites. Recently a lady angler, on the Green Bank Pool of the Lower Brahan beat, had played out a salmon and was bringing it towards the net, when it was seized and removed by a seal.
Considerable populations of pike exist in the lower Conon. There are frequent encounters with pike in the 12 lb to 14 lb class. It seems likely that the pike emanated from Loch Luichart, where in the early 1960s the Hydro Board netted a 32 lb specimen. The Bran tributary holds considerable numbers of perch. Mink are steadily establishing themselves, especially on the Blackwater. Perhaps the most unusual alien species discovered to date is a cobra; in 1999 one was found, newly expired, in bushes on Moy Island.
Recently there was an unusual case of attempted unsanctioned human predation. In 2001 a local poacher was apprehended in a wet-suit, carrying a spear gun, by the Russian pool on the Brahan water. At his subsequent appearance at Dingwall Sheriff Court, he pleaded "not guilty" and stated that he was "shooting eels in the burn to feed a sick otter". The magistrate then asked, against a background of considerable mirth, why a wetsuit was necessary in the burn. The defendant replied that the unfortunate otter was on the other side of the river, and so it was going to be necessary for him to swim across with the eels. Rarely has a court of law collapsed so uncontrollably.
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The Quest for the Secret Nile
by Guy Yeoman
Chaucer Press: £20
The manuscript for this book, The Quest for the Secret Nile, was at a late stage of completion when the author, Guy Yeoman, died in 1998. It is by far the best explanation ever published on the sources of the Nile and goes a long way to finally disproving the erroneously accepted theory that John Hanning Speke “discovered” Lake Victoria in 1858 and that the lake itself is the source of the Nile . It is not. However, it is one of the two great reservoirs, the other being Lake Albert .
The Nile ’s headwater is a huge complicated network of lakes, rivers, swamps, mountains and vast savannah plains and was, before European explorers entered this part of Africa , home to many separate kingdoms and cultures. Only recently have outsiders penetrated these lands which, despite the ravages caused by the Arab slave trade, managed to maintain a relative prosperity. The ecological balance ensured a constant source of water for the Nile and the political balance of power protected the inhabitants against starvation. This region recently, however, has suffered through wars, genocide and political depredation, resulting in great poverty and starvation. In the last years of the author’s life he visited the remote regions harbouring the Nile ’s headwaters and the message in this, his final book, is very clear: without adequate protection for these sources there is a real possibility that the Nile could simply dry up. In a sensitively thoughtful introduction the author’s son, Paddy Yeoman, warns “There is a widespread belief that, in a world where water may become more important than oil, Africa will be the continent and the Nile the river of this new century. It was my father’s hope that his account of the discovery of the Nile sources would capture the interest of the present generation and play its part in making a case for the protection of this unique landscape on which the Nile depends for its survival.”
The Nile is the longest river in the world: 6,741 kilometres or 4,187 miles. It is a river which represents the cradle of civilisation and whose movements still dominate the landscape of Egypt . But where did all this water come from? The riddle had obsessed the Ancient Greeks, and Herodotus himself is said to have followed the course of the river upstream in the 5 th century and quoted a story that the Nile rose from two great equatorial lakes which, in turn, were fed by waters from two snow capped mountains.
Were these mountains and lakes myth or reality? “In the course of the centuries Roman legionnaires, Portuguese Jesuits, adventurous Scots and erudite Frenchmen all tried to solve the riddle, only to be defeated by the terrain or lured along a wrong branch of the headwaters. The enigma would remain unsolved until the mid-nineteenth century.” Thus, following the discovery of two snow-capped mountains on the equator (Mount Kilimanjaro in 1848 and Mount Kenya in 1849) the Royal Geographical Society determined that Britain should have the glory of finding the actual source. They chose Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, two officers in the Indian Army, to lead the quest and in 1857 the two men set out from Zanzibar . Assembling a caravan of over 200 porters and an escort of Baluchi soldiers, their journey is a gruesome story of sickness, desertions, arguments and impositions by petty chiefs. Nevertheless after 225 tortuous days, stopping only briefly in Kazeh (now Tabora), the two men staggered to a hill from which they saw Lake Tanganyika . They were the first Europeans to see the lake, but they had no idea what part, if any, the lake played in the geography of the Nile . Exploring the northern end of the lake in dug-out canoes, they noticed that the head of the lake was walled in by a circle of forested mountains and that the substantial Ruzizi river flowed into and not out of the lake. Speke also incorrectly calculated that the lake surface was only 1800 feet above sea level – much too low for it to be a possible contender for the Nile . Disappointed, Burton and Speke headed back to Kazeh where, left to regain his health, Burton mistakenly allowed Speke to lead his own small expedition north and changed history. On 3 rd August 1858 Speke reached the summit of Isamiro hill, near present day Mwanza, and saw the vast waters of the Nyanza which he christened Lake Victoria in honour of his queen. Returning to Kazeh he jubilantly claimed that he had discovered the lake and the source of the White Nile . The sardonic Burton denounced Speke’s claim with ridicule.
But was Speke right? And were Speke’s claim that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile accurate? Despite eventual acceptance by the Royal Geographical Society and a second commission for Speke (this time with James Augustus Grant) to verify his “discovery”, the dramatic story that followed is recounted with flair by Guy Yeoman: Speke’s first sighting of Rippon Falls; Baker’s discovery of Lake Albert; Speke’s suspected suicide; Livingstone’s final fruitless journey to Lake Tanganyika; and finally Stanley’s two missions: one to find Livingstone, and the other to confirm Speke’s claim, and journey to the mouth of the Congo river.
Curiously, although Yeoman discounts Speke’s enthusiastic claim that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile , he gives him full credit for speculating correctly in Karagwe on his second journey that the “bold sky-scraping volcanic cones” he glimpsed 50 miles to the west in unknown Rwanda were in fact the great turning point of the central African watershed. This is in fact exactly what they were. With detailed explanatory maps and photographs Yeoman explains that anyone who wants to see the ultimate Nile and Congo springs can, by climbing these steep, densely vegetated volcanic cones, find Speke’s words confirmed. “Standing on one of the highest summits, say Muhabura, 15,540 ft. to the east, or Karisimbi, 14,786 ft. to the west or Sabinyo, 12,035 ft. high (the summit of Sabinyo marks the point where the modern borders of Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo [Zaire]) meet, the traveller can observe how the waters shed along the southern flanks of the Virunga barrier, across the western Rift Valley, flow towards Lake Kivuu and the Congo system, whereas to the east, west and north they flow down to the Nile. Here, however, the dramatic landscape must be studied carefully, for we are at the sources of not one Nile but of two. They are the progenitors of two great and distinct water systems that, only after many hundreds of miles – comprising the Bantu-Hamitic heart of the continent – at last come together in Lake Albert to form the White Nile of the Sudan and Egypt .”
This then finally is the answer to the riddle of the Nile , which has puzzled and obsessed geographers for centuries. Although Guy Yeoman stated that “the enigma would remain unsolved until the mid-nineteenth century” he is being too generous in his admission. It wasn’t solved and certainly never fully explained. The lesser of the two systems that Yeoman talks about is the Semliki river of the western Rift Valley eventually draining into the southern end of Lake Albert . The major headwater is however the Kagera Nile – the main feeder river of Lake Victoria . Both systems are complicated, but in a final chapter, entitled “The Nile Springs” Yeoman, having travelled most of the water systems before he died, gives a detailed illustrated description of the water system and mountains that are the true sources of the Nile .
This beautifully produced book is well worth reading. If nothing else, it is a fitting epitaph to an extraordinary man – explorer, mountaineer, photographer and geographer – who in his final years worked tirelessly against the deforestation and the environmental devastation of much of Africa – an ecological disaster made worse by the ravages or war.
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Victims want harsher bullying policies
Bullying is an ongoing problem nationwide, and Haywood County is no exception.
Bullying can take many forms and happens at most grade levels, but the result is always the same. Children who are bullied are at high risk for poor academic performance, mental disorders, substance abuse and suicide.
According to Stopbullying.org, a small number of bullied children might retaliate through extremely violent measures.
“In 12 of 15 school shooting cases in the 1990s, the shooters had a history of being bullied,” according to the advocacy website.
Some parents and students in Haywood don’t feel like the schools’ policies against bullying are strict enough, including Pisgah student Kristian Buckner, mother of three Joy Stepp and Central Haywood senior Charles Flesch, who have recently shared how they’ve been affected by bullying.
Bill Nolte, associate superintendent for Haywood County Schools, said the school system didn’t have a specific policy against bullying because everything that can be considered bullying is included in the school’s student conduct policy.
Nolte said the school system did several things to teach students about good behavior whether it’s through DARE classes or discussions in health class about good character traits and behavior.
“But there’s a big gap between knowledge and behavior,” he said. “… We’ll always have bullies — there’s adult bullies — the way to address it is for people not to accept it.”
Stepp said her ninth-grader, who is autistic, is constantly bullied at school.
“The boys are calling him gay and queer and when he goes to his teacher, nobody will do anything,” she said.
Her youngest son, who is in sixth grade, got hit by another child on the school bus. In retaliation, her son called the child a name and received one day of in-school suspension. She said the child who hit her son was not punished.
“Something needs to be done,” Stepp said. “It’s not just my kids that this is happening to.”
Buckner recently shared a blog on The Mountaineer’s website about the ongoing bullying issues her friends have experienced. She, too, has been a victim of bullying, but she hasn’t let it break her.
“But recently the problem with bullying has arisen more and more among my peers,” she said. “It wasn't just when we were younger that we were bullied. Kids become more harsh, finding the weakest point in a character and stabbing it with a dull knife.”
Flesch was a victim of bullying his freshman year at Pisgah.
“I went to the guidance office plenty of times and nothing was done about it,” he said. “One staff member told me ‘this is the Bible belt and people are going to judge you.’ That’s not comforting – it kind of broke me a little bit.”
Flesch said he couldn’t even concentrate in class because of people talking about him and his grades suffered because of the constant bullying. He described one incident in which a student in auto mechanics class threw a bolt at his head.
“I try not to worry about it — some people can’t handle it, but I have a better head on my shoulders and I’ve never wanted to hurt myself,” he said. “I’ve told myself ‘you are better than them’ and will be better in life.”
Flesch said he was a little nervous about transferring to Central, but said bullying hasn’t been an issue there. He said the staff and principal were easy to talk to and the 100 students were more like a big family.
Nolte said the school system couldn’t legally tell the parent of a victim what punishment was given to the other child involved and vice versa. He said too often he receives calls from parents claiming their child has been bullied for some time. He pointed out it was important for students and parents to come forth with bullying information as soon as it happens so the school can take action.
“I’m sure the fear (of retaliation) is real, but schools can only act when someone tells them there’s a problem,” Nolte said. “If we don’t have the information, we can’t issue discipline outside of policy.”
He urges students to alert the administration to issues as soon as they happen so faculty can act accordingly. Stopbullying.org said it is important for adults to step in immediately if they witness bullying because it “sends the message that it is not acceptable.”
Cyber bullying is harder for schools to monitor because it often happens outside of school. Nolte said if cyber bullying occurs in conjunction with the school day — the school can treat it as if it happened in the school hallway. However, the school has less power if it occurs outside of school hours.
“What we typically do is if we see that and it looks like a criminal violation, we give it to law enforcement but if not, our arms, figuratively, don’t reach that far,” he said.
If someone is being bullied through email or social media websites like Facebook or Twitter, Stopbulling.org says not to respond, keep evidence of the harassing messages and block the person immediately.
Cyber bullying should be reported to law enforcement if it involves criminal activity, including threats of violence, child pornography or sending sexually explicit messages or photos, taking a photo or video of someone in a place where he or she would expect privacy, stalking and hate crimes.
According to North Carolina state law, a school employee, student or volunteer who has witnessed or has reliable information that someone has been subject to any act of bullying shall report the incident to the appropriate school official.
Any person who violates the state’s cyber-bullying law this section shall be charged with a Class 1 misdemeanor if the defendant is 18 or charged with a Class 2 misdemeanor if the defendant is under 18.
Getting tough on bullying
Flesch said the school system needed to be stricter on bullying by having harsher policies in place.
“There should be zero tolerance. We have a zero tolerance dress code, why not a zero tolerance bullying policy?” he said. “It’s taking away from other kids’ learning and education.”
Haywood County high-school student Dan Lewis suggested starting an “Anti-bullying League,” asking students to sign a petition saying they won’t bully.
Buckner said since many of the students who bully are athletes, “it would be a good idea if there was a program that would stop it at the source.”
If students continue bullying after signing the petition, then there could be serious consequences such as not being able to play in a game or losing their spot on the team.
“We can tell kids not to bully all we want but unless we take serious actions and apply serious consequences for the bullies, it won't stop,” Buckner said.
Nolte said the punishment for bullying could range from detention to suspension depending on the offense. Someone “constantly pestering” someone would have a lighter punishment than if a student hits another student, he said.
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SpaceX's biggest test will happen Monday with its first geostationary transfer mission. The updated Falcon 9 rocket will launch a commercial satellite into geostationary transfer orbit at 80,000 kilometers, or 49,709.7 miles from the surface of the Earth. SES-8 is a telecommunications satellite and marks SpaceX's first commercial mission.
Early tests of the Falcon 9, including a static fire of the rocket's nine engines last week, have been successful leading up to Monday's launch. The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SES-8 satellite will launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 5:37 p.m. EST, and the live stream begins at 5 p.m. EST. The telecommunications satellite was ordered by SES World Skies and was manufactured by Orbital Sciences Corp. According to SES, "The high performance beams will support rapidly growing markets in South Asia and Indo-China, as well as provide expansion capacity for DTH, VSAT and government applications."
The revamped Falcon 9 rocket had its first test in September, launching the Canadian Space Agency’s Cassiope satellite into low-Earth orbit. The rocket is equipped with new Merlin 1D engines, which offer a 56 percent increase in thrust over the Merlin 1C. The Falcon 9 is capable of carrying a 10,692 payload into GTO.
Continue Reading Below
SpaceX already has a partnership with NASA, and the launch could lead to more commercial launches in the future. The SES-8 launch could also be the start of a very busy winter for Elon Musk's company. The Thaicom-6 television satellite, the second commercial launch, has an expected launch date of Dec. 12, although that could be pushed back to 2014, reports NASASpaceflight.com. SpaceX's next resupply mission, its third for NASA, to the International Space Station was initially scheduled for Dec. 9 but was pushed back to Feb. 22, 2014. The company's Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft recently passed a NASA safety review, an important step leading up to the launch of humans into low-Earth orbit.
The SpaceX SES-8 launch live stream can be viewed below, beginning at 5 p.m. EST, 2 p.m. PST.
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The nations around Palestine in the ancient Near East have left stone monuments depicting the life of the people and their garments. From Palestine we have few such monuments. Cloth disintegrates, and thus the identification of cloth and clothing is a difficult task. Fortunately, the nations that did leave stone monuments occasionally depicted people from the region of Palestine and Syria. The clothing of the surrounding nations is instructive but not necessarily normative. Yet some significant archaeological evidence does exist, including an ivory carving from Megiddo, from about the thirteenth century BCE, depicting a victory celebration (see J. B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East in Pictures , no. 332). This carving not only displays actual Palestinian dress but also exhibits the Middle Eastern cultural attitude toward clothing itself. From the court there are the king, wearing an ankle‐length robe (decorated around the neck and on the lower fringe), a knee‐length cloak, and a togalike shawl over one shoulder (decorated similar to a garment worn by the officer in the chariot; thus, this garment may be related to the king's position as head of the military); a prince or priest, wearing a decorated head covering (servants had to cover their heads in the presence of their masters; before the king even the naked prisoners have their heads covered), a decorated cloak that covers his arms to the wrists, a cassock‐type garment that comes to just above the knees, and an embroidered long robe reaching almost to the ground; a musician, with a plain cassock and a lightly decorated long robe; and palace servants wearing a single long robe that reaches to the ankles and to the elbows. Related to the military are a military officer in a chariot wearing an elbow‐length cloak, something covering his arms, and protection over his thighs; a lower‐ranking officer with headgear and short kilt; an armed soldier with headgear; and naked prisoners. The higher‐ranking people wore more clothes; nakedness meant humiliation. Men of dignity cover the entire body, even the legs; the shame of uncovering the legs is described, for example, in 2 Samuel 10.4–5 and Isaiah 47.2.
The earliest form of clothing in the Middle East as elsewhere was apparently leaves. Tribes in the southern highlands of Ethiopia still wear leaves for working in streams and fields. Such clothing is indicated in Genesis 3.7.
Before the development of metals, hair could only be plucked from animals. In spite of this, goat‐hair tents were constructed and felt was pounded out for caps and other uses. Some wool was plucked during the Bronze Age for clothing, but with the coming of the Iron Age shears were invented, which greatly assisted the development of woolen cloth.
Flax, and later cotton, were grown and manufactured into clothing.
The spinning wheel has never reached the Middle East. Spinning was and in some isolated areas still is done by a simple hand‐held spindle. The wool/cotton is first “carded” to make the fibers parallel. It is then formed into long, continuous strips of fibers. These strips are then loosely wound onto a U‐shaped bent stick. The spinner's hand slips through the lower part of the U and the loosely wound strips of fibers extend out of the top of the hand. The second piece of equipment is a thin dowel about 35 cm (14 in) in length, with a wooden or stone crosspiece/weight near the top. The spinner twists the end of the strip of loose fibers into a length of thread, attaches it to the lower end of the weighted spindle, and then hooks the developing thread into a metal catch on the upper end. With a deft flip of the spindle the weighted stick is set spinning and gradually feeds the loose fibers from the other hand into the thread as it forms. The spindle drops as the thread forms. In the meantime the spindle loses speed. The spinner then grasps the spindle, unhooks the thread from the metal catch at the upper end of the spindle, winds up the newly formed thread onto the lower end of that same spindle, again hooks the thread into the metal catch at the upper end of the spindle, and once more twirls the spindle between the thumb and forefinger, releasing it to spin suspended in air like a top, and starts again to feed the fibers into the twist as new thread is formed. The evenness and thickness of the thread formed is related to the style and skill of the spinner. After months of spinning the family will have enough thread to approach the village weaver for the making of a piece of cloth.
Both the vertical loom and the simpler horizontal loom seem to have been used, the latter probably being more prevalent. Four cubits seems to have been a standard width (cf. Exod. 26.1–2, 7–8). Cloth could be made in long pieces for curtains and hangings, or a single garment could be woven entirely on the loom. Thus a seamless robe (see John 19.23) could come from the loom needing only to be trimmed and finished.
Cloth was made more beautiful and attractive in a variety of ways. Patterns in the weave itself were possible. Dyeing was extensively used. Indigo on white wool produced blue, and on yellow wool, green. Madder or kermes created reds. The Tyrian purple was famous for royal robes. The robes seen in the Megiddo ivory described above demonstrate extensive use of embroidery.
Dress in different ages was inevitably influenced by the wide variety of cultures that dealt with or ruled Palestine. Furthermore, specialized clothing existed for special classes and occasions. There were garments for kings, priests, and prisoners, as well as for mourners.
The dress of men was made up of a loincloth, a shirt/robe, and a cloak. Footwear, belt, and headdress completed their attire. Women wore various types of headcovering and in certain periods veils to cover the face.
The loincloth could be cloth or leather and was common to the military (note the soldier in the Megiddo ivory). The shirt/robe was the standard indoor dress for all classes of people; all of the people around the throne in the Megiddo ivory are wearing them. The outer, heavier cloak was the basic garment of the poor; it was doubled for a blanket at night. Thus, the law demanded that such a cloak be returned before nightfall to anyone who had left such a garment in pledge for a debt (Exod. 22.26; Deut. 24.10–13; cf. Amos 2.8). A belt or sash was essential to hold in the loose‐fitting robe, both to protect the garment and to allow for freedom of movement. If in danger of being soiled by menial tasks, a worker would “gird up his loins,” taking the lower edge of the robe and tucking it into the belt.
Women traditionally covered their heads. Such a standard was demanded by the rabbis of the first century CE, because the hair was considered a critical part of a woman's beauty, which should not be on display to the common eye. Paul urges Corinthian women to be sensitive to the cultural traditions of the community and not give unnecessary offense (cf. 1 Cor. 11.2–16).
Across the centuries sandals have been the traditional foot covering. Lack of any such covering gradually became a sign of servanthood; hus the prodigal son was given sandals (Luke 15.22).
See also Fringes.
Kenneth E. Bailey
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The Assembly Hall09265_000_008
On a beautiful spring day, Kennidy and Keiton B., ages 11 and 9, of Bountiful, Utah, visited the Assembly Hall on Temple Square. Let’s go along with them to learn more about this historic building.
The Assembly Hall is made with the same granite that was used to build the Salt Lake Temple. While the granite for the temple was polished to look as perfect as possible, the granite for the hall was left rough. That is why the Assembly Hall is a darker color than the temple.
Inside the Assembly Hall, long wooden benches stretch across the main floor and the balcony. Through the years, the hall has been used for general conference overflow, stake conferences, lectures, and concerts.
Keiton and Kennidy look at the Seagull Monument outside of the Assembly Hall. Watch a video on friend.lds.org to hear Kennidy and Keiton tell you the story of the monument. “The story reminds me that Heavenly Father answers our prayers,” Keiton said.
Keiton and Kennidy walk up to the big wooden doors of the Assembly Hall. The early members of the Church met here for church services and general conference when the weather was too cold for them to meet in the large, drafty Tabernacle.
A sego lily is painted in the center of the ceiling. The early pioneers in Utah used the lily’s bulbs for food.
Sister missionaries told Kennidy and Keiton about the Assembly Hall. Here, Keiton knocks on a pillar. All of the pillars look like marble, but they are actually made from pinewood. The pioneers painted the wood to look like marble.
The Nauvoo Bell stands next to the Assembly Hall. The bell hung in the original Nauvoo Temple. When the pioneers left Nauvoo, they pulled the bell in a wagon to Salt Lake. Today, a recording of the bell rings every hour. “I think it is cool that the bell did all of these things so long ago, and now we hear it too,” Kennidy said. “It reminds us of the religious freedom we have.”
Beautiful walkways with trees and flowers surround the Assembly Hall. Kennidy and Keiton take a stroll to look at the outside of the building.
Photographs by Christina Smith
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Butterflies add active beauty to any outdoor space. Invite these "flying flowers" into your garden by offering water, sun, shelter, and host and nectar plants.
"It's a great garden theme for kids," says Tim Pollak, outdoor floriculturist for the Chicago Botanic Garden. "The whole metamorphosis (physical transformation) is wonderful to observe."
Essential Garden Elements
Support the entire life cycle by providing the essential elements for each stage of a butterfly's life. Adult butterflies lay their eggs on host plants, where the egg remains until the larva, or caterpillar, hatches and feeds on the plant. The caterpillar will then need a sheltered area, such as one with trees, shrubs, or a woodpile, where it can safely form a pupa, or chrysalis. At last it will emerge as a vibrant butterfly, when it will feed on a variety of nectar plants.
Shelter continues to be important to protect this delicate creature from wind. Water, whether supplied naturally or artificially, provides the butterfly with essential nutrients. Sun is critical to support both the growth of host and nectar plants, and to warm the butterfly, helping it fly. Pollak suggests providing a rotation of nectar plants, with three to four in bloom at a time, between April and October.
If you do not have room for one or more of these elements in your garden, find out which are available in other natural areas within 100 feet, and supplement them with resources in your own garden.
Enjoy the Show
"A relaxing part of gardening is being able to plant something and watch the activity that results from it," says Pollak, who notes that hummingbirds are often attracted to butterfly gardens as well.
Butterflies must land before they can use their proboscis (strawlike structure) to drink nectar. They prefer flat plants with widespread petals. Hummingbirds prefer to hover over plants and often select tubular flowers. Both require a selection of freshly blooming plants and prefer masses of flowers to single blooms.
Butterfly watching is at its height in May and June. However, the amount of time spent in each stage of life varies between species from weeks to months, and can fluctuate with changing weather patterns in a given year. To attract a specific species, time the availability of essential elements in your garden with its life cycle.
Butterflies can often be enjoyed at the Garden, especially in the English Oak Meadow and English Walled Garden.
Children and adults delight in the Butterflies & Blooms exhibition on the Learning Campus. There, they can step inside a 2,800-square-foot white mesh enclosure to see up to 500 butterflies native to South America, Asia, North America, Africa, and Illinois. The "Blooms" portion of the exhibition features nectar plants.
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| 0.941214 | 594 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Description: Look for this woodland-nesting flycatcher in the McDonald Woods or Barbara Brown Nature Reserve.
In summer, seek the shelter of the trees' shade in McDonald Woods at the Garden. Have a seat on one of the benches and listen for the pewee, a bird much more easily heard than seen. Even on a warm summer day, the Eastern Wood-Pewee sings his melancholy refrain.
Pee-a-wee. Pee-er. Pee-a-wee.
This denizen of Illinois native woodlands belongs to the flycatcher family, many of which sit on a snag, then sally out to snatch an insect full of protein.
The pewee sports gray-olive upper parts and pale gray underparts, with two whitish wing bars. Males and females look alike; young of the year have buffy wing bars. If you get a really close look, you'll notice the adult pewee has a dark upper mandible and dull yellow-orange at the base of the lower mandible.
This bird spends winter in Central and South America, where it can get plenty of insects to eat. It returns to the Chicago Botanic Garden and northern Illinois sometime in May to raise a family. The female builds a well-camouflaged nest of grass, plant, fibers, and lichens bound with spider webs on a horizontal branch of a deciduous tree.
If you're lucky in July and August, you might see the wood-pewee teaching its young to snatch flies, bees, wasps, and butterflies from the air. In September, family groups begin migrating southward.
The Eastern Wood-Pewee's numbers are declining, possibly due to habitat loss both on breeding and wintering grounds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology considers this bird a species of conservation concern.
Restoration of the pewee's open woodland habitat — which is being done at McDonald Woods at the Garden — can help keep the pewee from further decline.
Birds have been finding their niches long before MySpace was invented. For example, different flycatcher species feed at different levels in the forest canopy, so they won't have to share eating space. The Eastern Wood-Pewee feeds lower than the Great Crested Flycatcher, another bird that has nested at the Garden. The pewee feeds higher in the canopy than the Least Flycatcher, which migrates through the Garden in spring and fall.
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What’s the News: Making stem cells without using embryos can be a difficult process, and scientists have had to cope with numerous failures. But a new discovery may help them home in on what’s missing from their biochemical recipes.
With only seven northern white rhinos left in the world, creating eggs and sperm from stem cells offers the possibility of salvaging some of the species.
What’s the News: In an effort to help preserve endangered rhinos and primates, biologists have converted skin cells taken from the animals into pluripotent stem cells, which can grow into nearly anything, given the right conditions. They might even grow into egg and sperm cells, eventually, the researchers think, suggesting a cell biological route to conservation.
Mouse embyronic stem cells
What’s the News: Reprogrammed stem cells—cells taken from an adult and turned back into stem cells—can be rejected by the body, at least in mice, suggests a new Nature study. Donated tissues and organs are often attacked by a patient’s immune system, since reprogrammed stem cells can be made from a patient’s own skin, researchers had hoped these cells offered a way to avoid such rejection by letting patients, in essence, donate tissue to themselves. But the new finding may be a significant setback to what is a promising line of treatment.
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| 0.944801 | 280 | 3.359375 | 3 |
|Title:||Make print a function|
|Last-Modified:||2007-10-12 13:25:27 -0700 (Fri, 12 Oct 2007)|
|Author:||Georg Brandl <georg at python.org>|
The title says it all -- this PEP proposes a new print() builtin that replaces the print statement and suggests a specific signature for the new function.
The print statement has long appeared on lists of dubious language features that are to be removed in Python 3000, such as Guido's "Python Regrets" presentation . As such, the objective of this PEP is not new, though it might become much disputed among Python developers.
The following arguments for a print() function are distilled from a python-3000 message by Guido himself :
The signature for print(), taken from various mailings and recently posted on the python-3000 list is:
def print(*args, sep=' ', end='\n', file=None)
A call like:
print(a, b, c, file=sys.stderr)
will be equivalent to today's:
print >>sys.stderr, a, b, c
while the optional sep and end arguments specify what is printed between and after the arguments, respectively.
The softspace feature (a semi-secret attribute on files currently used to tell print whether to insert a space before the first item) will be removed. Therefore, there will not be a direct translation for today's:
print "a", print
which will not print a space between the "a" and the newline.
The changes proposed in this PEP will render most of today's print statements invalid. Only those which incidentally feature parentheses around all of their arguments will continue to be valid Python syntax in version 3.0, and of those, only the ones printing a single parenthesized value will continue to do the same thing. For example, in 2.x:
>>> print ("Hello") Hello >>> print ("Hello", "world") ('Hello', 'world')
whereas in 3.0:
>>> print ("Hello") Hello >>> print ("Hello", "world") Hello world
Luckily, as it is a statement in Python 2, print can be detected and replaced reliably and non-ambiguously by an automated tool, so there should be no major porting problems (provided someone writes the mentioned tool).
The proposed changes were implemented in the Python 3000 branch in the Subversion revisions 53685 to 53704. Most of the legacy code in the library has been converted too, but it is an ongoing effort to catch every print statement that may be left in the distribution.
|||Replacement for print in Python 3.0 (Guido van Rossum) http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-September/056154.html|
|||print() parameters in py3k (Guido van Rossum) http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2006-November/004485.html|
This document has been placed in the public domain.
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| 0.785195 | 657 | 2.9375 | 3 |
EPA plays numerous roles in brain function and has been scientifically proven to regulate mood. As research continues to grow it is becoming evident that omega-3 fatty acids, especially EPA play a significant role in emotional and mental health.
Supportive but not conclusive research shows that consumption of EPA and DHA omega-3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.
- Pure concentration of EPA (1,000 mg) from fish oil specifically designed to maximize the therapeutic benefits of EPA.
- Pharmaceutical grade fish oil concentrate.
- Cold-water fish including sardines and anchovies provide a rich source of EPA.
- Contains no artificial color or flavor, wheat, soy, gluten, sodium, sugar, lactose, yeast, nut products or preservatives.
- Contains no trans fatty acids.
- Purity tested for pesticides, herbicides, PCBs, and dioxins, as well as heavy metals such as mercury.
- This fish oil was processed using molecular distillation to ensure purity.
- Countries with high fish consumption have improved mental functioning, including mood. EPA has been identified as the brain-boosting fatty acid.
- Omega 3 Mood is scientifically formulated to boost healthy brain function, emotional, and mental health, and to regulate mood.
- Clinical research has found that EPA helps regulate mood without harmful side effects.
- 1 gram of EPA has been shown to improve mood (found in 2 softgels of Omega 3 Mood).
- EPA can be beneficial with regard to mood, age-related memory improvement, and decreased stress.
Research has shown that countries with high rates of fish consumption have improved mental functioning, including mood. EPA has been indentified as the brain-boosting fatty acid.
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Both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN have now shown solid evidence that the new particle discovered in July 2012 behaves even more like the Higgs boson, by establishing that it also decays into particles known as tau leptons, a very heavy version of electrons.
Why is this so important? CMS and ATLAS had already established that the new boson was indeed one type of a Higgs boson. In that case, theory predicted it should decay into several types of particles. So far, decays into W and Z bosons as well as photons were well established. Now, for the first time, both experiments have evidence that it also decays into tau leptons.
The decay of a particle is very much like making change for a coin. If the Higgs boson were a one euro coin, there would be several ways to break it up into smaller coins, but, so far, the change machine seemed to only make change in some particular ways. Now, additional evidence for one more way has been shown.
There are two classes of fundamental particles, called fermions and bosons depending on their spin, their value of angular momentum. Particles of matter (like taus, electrons and quarks) belong to the fermion family. On the other hand, the particles associated with the various forces acting upon these fermions are bosons (like the photons and the W and Z bosons.).
The CMS experiment had already shown evidence for Higgs boson decays into fermions last summer with a signal of 3.4 sigma when combining the tau and b quark channels. A sigma corresponds to one standard deviation, the size of potential statistical fluctuations. Three sigma is needed to claim evidence while five sigma is usually required for a discovery.
For the first time, there is now solid evidence from a single channel – and two experiments have independently produced it. ATLAS collaboration showed evidence for the tau channel alone with a signal of 4.1 sigma, while CMS obtained 3.4 sigma, both bringing strong evidence that this particular type of decays occurs.
Combining their most recent results for taus and b quarks, CMS now has evidence for decays into fermions at the 4.0 sigma level.
The data collected by the ATLAS experiment (black dots) are consistent with coming from the sum of all backgrounds (colour histograms) plus contributions from a Higgs boson going into a pair of tau leptons (red curve). Below, the background is subtracted from the data to reveal the most likely mass of the Higgs boson, namely 125 GeV (red curve).
CMS is also starting to see decays into pairs of b quarks at the 2.0 sigma-level. While this is still not very significant, it is the first indication for this decay so far at the LHC. The Tevatron experiments have reported seeing it at the 2.8 sigma-level. Although the Higgs boson decays into b quarks about 60% of the time, it comes with so much background that it makes it extremely difficult to measure this particular decay at the LHC.
Not only did the experiments report evidence that the Higgs boson decays into tau leptons, but they also measured how often this occurs. The Standard Model, the theory that describes just about everything observed so far in particle physics, states that a Higgs boson should decay into a pair of tau leptons about 8% of the time. CMS measured a value corresponding to 0.87 ± 0.29 times this rate, i.e. a value compatible with 1.0 as expected for the Standard Model Higgs boson. ATLAS obtained 1.4 +0.5 -0.4, which is also consistent within errors with the predicted value of 1.0.
One of the events collected by the CMS collaboration having the characteristics expected from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to a pair of tau leptons. One of the taus decays to a muon (red line) and neutrinos (not visible in the detector), while the other tau decays into a charged hadron (blue towers) and a neutrino. There are also two forward-going particle jets (green towers).
With these new results, the experiments established one more property that was expected for the Standard Model Higgs boson. What remains to be clarified is the exact type of Higgs boson we are dealing with. Is this indeed the simplest one associated with the Standard Model? Or have we uncovered another type of Higgs boson, the lightest one of the five types of Higgs bosons predicted by another theory called supersymmetry.
It is still too early to dismiss the second hypothesis. While the Higgs boson is behaving so far exactly like what is expected for the Standard Model Higgs boson, the measurements lack the precision needed to rule out that it cannot be a supersymmetric type of Higgs boson. Getting a definite answer on this will require more data. This will happen once the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumes operation at nearly twice the current energy in 2015 after the current shutdown needed for maintenance and upgrade.
Meanwhile, these new results will be refined and finalised. But already they represent one small step for the experiments, a giant leap for the Higgs boson.
For all the details, see:
Presentation given by the ATLAS Collaboration on 28 November 2013
Presentation given by the CMS Collaboration on 3 December 2013
To be alerted of new postings, follow me on Twitter: @GagnonPauline or sign-up on this mailing list to receive and e-mail notification.
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Prepare New Beds
When the soil is dry enough to work, till the soil to a depth of 6 to 8 inches. Spread a 3-inch-thick layer of compost or well-rotted manure over the bed and dig it in, then rake the bed smooth. The bed is now ready to plant once the weather warms.
Protect Fruit Trees
Spray apple, cherry, peach, and pear trees with lime-sulfur or fixed copper to prevent diseases this spring. Apply dormant oil sprays now to control scale insects on the bark. Apply all sprays on a calm, dry day when temperatures are above 40F and rain is not predicted for 24 hours.
Plant bare-root plants of asparagus, horseradish, and rhubarb this month. Asparagus crowns are best planted in a 1-foot-deep trench that's filled in as the plant grows. Plant in a full-sun location in soil amended with compost. Keep the area well watered this summer and weed free for best growth.
After the danger of hard frost is past, prune fall-flowering clematis back to the strongest stems. Wait until after blooming is finished on spring-flowering clematis before pruning. After pruning, broadcast fertilizer on the soil beneath the plants, scratch it in, and water well.
Divide summer- and fall-flowering perennials such as chrysanthemums and Shasta daisies now to promote better bloom later this year. Wait until autumn to divide spring-flowering perennials such as candytuft, bleeding heart, and creeping phlox.
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Lunar and Planetary Institute
3600 Bay Area Boulevard
Houston, TX 77058
Grabens on Io: Evidence for extensional tectonics
Io may well be the most geologically active body in the solar system. A variety of volcanic features have been identified, including a few fissure eruptions, but tectonism is generally assumed to be limited to compression driven mountain formation. A wide range of structural features can also be identified including scarps, lineaments, faults, and circular depressions (pits and patera rims). Narrow curvilinear graben (elongated, relatively depressed crustal unit or block that is bounded by faults on its sides) are also scattered across Io’s volcanic plains. These features are dwarfed by the more prominent neighboring volcanoes and mountains, and have been largely ignored in the literature. Although they are likely to be extensional in origin, their relationship to local or global stress fields is unknown. We have mapped the locations, length and width of graben on Io using all available Voyager and Galileo images with a resolution better than 5 km. We compare the locations of graben with existing volcanic centers, paterae and mountain data to determine the degree of correlation between these geologic features and major topographic variations (basins/swells) in our global topographic map of Io.
Geologic Mapping of Vesta: I am currently mapping The AV-11 Pinaria Quadrangle of Asteroid 4Vesta. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit of the inner main belt asteroid “4Vesta” in July 2011, and is spending one year in orbit to characterize its geology, elemental and mineralogical composition, topography, shape, and internal structure.
Investigation of Secondary Craters in the Saturnian System
At present, surface ages of bodies in the outer solar system are determined only from crater densities (a method dependent on an understanding of the projectile populations responsible for impact craters in these planetary systems). To derive accurate ages using impact craters, the impact source must be determined. Impact craters can be primary, secondary or sesquinary. Primary craters are made by direct impact of comets or asteroids. Secondary craters are produced by impact of ejecta thrown some distance away by a primary impact on that same body. Secondary craters are more heavily influenced by surface mechanical properties than their larger counter parts. Our objective is to better understand the contribution of (dispersed) secondary craters to the small crater population, and thereby ultimately that of small comets to the projectile flux on large icy satellites. In this study we investigate the origin of secondary craters in the larger context. We measure the diameter of obvious secondary craters (determined by irregular crater shape and small size) created by Inktomi (a 48 km diameter crater on Rhea). While focusing on Rhea, we also investigate secondary crater size/frequency/distribution/formation and secondary crater chain formation on icy satellites throughout the Jupiter and Saturn systems.
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Seventy years after the appearance of the Four Freedoms sequence, among Norman Rockwell’s best-known works, the artist continues to be derided as an assembly-line purveyor of sentimental kitsch, a victim of his own popularity and of the changing tastes of the late twentieth century.
But that judgment isn’t damning. An American Art Museum exhibition recently featured his paintings from the collections of George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg. And on December 4, seven of his paintings went on the block at Sotheby’s, where his Saying Grace netted $46 million, tripling the previous record for a Rockwell sale.
Today viewers can admire Rockwell’s humor and eye for detail while dismissing the end result as saccharine and self-consciously folksy, embodying a mid-century patriotism and optimism that most Americans no longer feel or even recognize. For instance, nearly all of the figures in his pre-1960s work were white. His masters at the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine whose covers he illustrated from 1916 until 1963, refused to let him depict African Americans in anything but subservient roles.
It was a situation Rockwell attempted to remedy with his most influential and perhaps greatest work, The Problem We All Live With. Run as a two-page spread in Look magazine in 1964, after Rockwell had left the Post, the painting was inspired by Ruby Bridges, the first African American to enter an all-white grade school in New Orleans after court-ordered desegregation. Rockwell’s painting shows the first grader, escorted by federal marshals, determined and staring straight ahead. She ignores the concrete wall beside her, painted with the word “nigger”and the letters “K.K.K.,” and she ignores the unseen, ugly crowd that stands where we, the viewers, stand. The marshals are seen only from the shoulders down, emphasizing the girl’s solitude, and courage.
Five decades later the painting retains its power. Yet at the same time it demonstrates what the U.K. critic Mark Hudson calls “a peculiarly American approach to external conflict: the idea that it is what is being defended that counts; what is being fought about and against is almost irrelevant.” It is an acute insight into Rockwell’s work. His gaze nearly always focused not just on the home front but also on an idealized representation of home and comfort. His were not so much reflections of our country’s innocence as visions of an America that never was.
As Deborah Solomon writes in her expansive yet oddly superficial American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, “Rockwell’s art, however accessible, keeps his deepest inspirations hidden from view.” And they remain hidden, even as she takes readers on a long journey from Yonkers, where Rockwell’s maternal grandfather painted domestic chickens and game birds such as grouse and quail; to New Rochelle, where he lived alongside successful illustrators and artists such as Joseph Leyendecker (creator of the Arrow Collar Man) and Coles Phillips; to Arlington, the Vermont village where his flinty neighbors posed for myriad Saturday Evening Post covers; to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, another quaint New England town.
Rockwell began drawing when he was six or seven years old, copying cigarette cards. Other childhood influences were books illustrated by Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. And his father used to read Dickens aloud to his children, which suggests young Norman would also have seen the work of George Cruikshank and John Leech, noted illustrators of Dickens’s novels and stories. Gangly and unhappy with his appearance, “a bean pole without the beans,” as he wrote in his 1960 autobiography My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell left high school at sixteen and entered art school. His work became his life.
“I put everything into my work,” he wrote.
I feel that I don’t have anything else, that I must keep working or I’ll go back to being pigeon-toed, narrow-shouldered—a lump. When I was younger I used to work night and day, possessed by a sort of panic that I’d lose everything if I didn’t drive myself. . . . the drive is still in me. People ask me why I don’t take vacations or retire altogether. I can’t stop work, that’s the long and short of it.
The panic never went away. Despite the domestic warmth captured in his illustrations, the adult Rockwell was emotionally reticent, depressive, and plagued by near-constant anxiety. He had years of therapy with the famed psychologist Erik Erikson, who came up with the term “identity crisis” to describe a critical stage in human development when an adolescent grapples with various “identity fragments” and attempts to integrate them into a healthy psyche. It is a condition that Solomon’s Rockwell seems to embody. He wed three times, twice impulsively; none of his wives appears to have been a love match. Summing up his first marriage, which lasted fourteen years, he said, “It wasn’t particularly unhappy, but it certainly did not have any of the warmth and love of a real marriage.”
Solomon's book is less mirror than telescope, peering through gaps in the curtains for glimpses of the unsavory in the artist’s life.
He had three children with his second wife, Mary, an alcoholic who was repeatedly hospitalized for depression. A major impetus behind the family’s move to Stockbridge was the presence there of the Austen Riggs Center, a well-known psychiatric hospital where Mary and Tom, one of the Rockwell’s three sons, had spent time. According to Solomon, Rockwell believed Mary “had trouble harmonizing with anyone besides psychiatrists.” It is something that might have been said of the hypochondriac Rockwell, who made a point of surrounding himself with doctors, going so far as to rent a garage apartment to an Austen Riggs psychiatrist and his family.
His late-life marriage to a retired schoolteacher, like him a septuagenarian, appears to have been content.
• • •
Rockwell took pains to refer to himself as an illustrator rather than a fancy-schmancy artist.
“The story is the first thing and the last thing,” he said in a taped lecture at the Art Center School in Pasadena in 1948. To gauge a painting’s success, he’d observe a viewer’s reaction to it.
If you came in, I would just wait to see if you laughed or not. I just love that. That isn’t what a fine-art man goes for. I don’t care whether it is art or not. And by the way, I always say that, and then I have to put in an argument that it is art.
While Rockwell’s artwork is often dismissed as kitsch, most of it lacks the most distinctive feature of kitsch—pretentiousness. An exception is the set of illustrations he did for Look in the 1960s and early 1970s, presidential portraits and attempts to illuminate serious social issues of the day, with titles such as How Goes the War on Poverty?, The Peace Corps (J.F.K.’s Bold Legacy), and The Right to Know. Few of these have anything like the power of The Problem We All Live With.
That power may have emerged from Rockwell’s association with child psychiatrist Robert Coles, a colleague of Erikson’s who witnessed Ruby Bridges being escorted to school. Coles volunteered to counsel Bridges during this period. In 1963 he published a study of the psychological effects of desegregation on African American children, and went on to write Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear. Solomon notes that Rockwell probably read Cole’s 1963 study, and it’s easy to imagine that he was deeply affected by it (he illustrated Coles’s 1968 Dead End School, another book about desegregation). Bridges didn’t model for Rockwell’s painting, but he captured the self-assurance and dignity of the little girl.
Solomon is rightly dismissive of those who refuse to see the artistic merits of Rockwell’s paintings. Yet American Mirror engages in more pop psychology than it does serious analysis of Rockwell’s work or its influences upon American popular culture. It is less mirror than telescope, peering through gaps in the curtains for glimpses of the unsavory in the artist’s life. The book suffers from le vice americaine, that tendency to reduce every life to childhood or sexual trauma or dysfunction or, ideally, all of the above. In Rockwell’s case, there were mother issues (she, too, was a hypochondriac), an ineffectual father, and an older brother who was a star athlete, “a real boy’s boy” whom Rockwell grew estranged from.
Most of all, there is the question of Rockwell’s sexual identity: Was he a repressed homosexual? And did he have a secret thing for young boys?
Solomon isn’t the first to explore sexual undercurrents in Rockwell’s work. In 2006 Richard Halpern’s Norman Rockwell: Underside of Innocence made many of the same points that Solomon does. John Waters’s late films gleefully explode Rockwell’s vision of a more innocent America. He told Solomon, “That painting he did about the little black girl walking . . . inspired Lil’ Inez in Hairspray.” Pecker, the innocent savant obsessively photographing his friends and neighbors (including male and female strippers) in Waters’s eponymous film, could be a sweetly perverse shutterbug stand-in for Rockwell. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks can be seen as sexualized subversions of Rockwell’s golden age vision of small-town America, just as Lynch’s The Straight Story is a Disney-produced homage to the Rockwellian ideal. “Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch,” as Lynch’s sound mixer described Blue Velvet. “I love his work,” Lynch told Solomon in a 2008 interview.
Solomon presents a great deal of anecdotal evidence for Rockwell’s repressed homosexuality. She makes much of a 1934 fishing trip the forty-year-old Rockwell made with his studio assistant Fred Hildebrandt, five years his junior. The two shared a bunk in a remote Quebec camp, with their guides in the upper bunk. In his diary Rockwell writes, “Fred is most fetching in his long flannels” and later, “We paddle to portage near a waterfall. I strip and frollick about—see photos.”
“All of this,” Solomon writes, “is suggestive material, up to and including the ‘lick’ in his spelling of ‘frollick.’”
Really? Given Rockwell’s reticence, would he truly have left a written record of anything that would suggest physical impropriety with another man? Whatever Rockwell’s predilections might have been, Solomon seems almost comically off the mark here. Her speculations take a somewhat darker turn when she discusses Before the Shot, a 1958 Post cover. It shows an eight-year-old boy holding up his pants so that part of his bare backside is exposed. The doctor behind him prepares a needle as the boy stares suspiciously at the doctor’s medical diploma hanging on the wall. The painting is meant to be funny—it is funny, if you can put any thoughts of pedophilia from your mind, which Solomon believes is almost impossible to do in twenty-first century America.
Most of Rockwell’s work is not even illustration in the purest sense of that word, but invention.
Solomon also sees latent homoeroticism in The Runaway, in which the same young model, hobo’s bindlestick on the floor beside him, is painted sitting in a diner with the kindly cop who is buying him lunch before taking him home to his parents. The diner’s amused owner leans expectantly on the counter, presumably waiting for the boy to decide what he wants to eat.
“The officer represents the warm arm of the law,” Solomon writes:
authority at its paternal best; he’s the quintessential Officer Friendly. On closer reading, however, the cop can be seen as a figure of tantalizing masculinity, a muscle man in a skintight uniform and boots. There is something sensual about the expanse of his massive back, the sharp creases in his shirt formed where the fabric pulls.
Solomon also raises an eyebrow over Rockwell’s long affiliation with the Boy Scouts of America, first as a longtime illustrator for Boys’ Life, and later as illustrator of the Boy Scout calendars, which he drew nearly every year between 1925 and 1976, two years before he died.
Solomon’s suggestion that repressed homosexuality was the dark wound that bled into Rockwell’s work is not necessarily wrong, but who knows? And who cares? It is a blinkered view, and her zeal to unearth hidden meanings contributes to some odd readings of individual paintings, as with her analysis of Saying Grace, the Thanksgiving-themed 1951 Post cover and record-seller. The painting shows a grandmother and grandson, formally if not expensively dressed, saying grace in a crowded restaurant to the bemusement of other, more casual diners. Solomon eloquently describes the work as “a ballet of gazes, a delicate interplay of actions and reactions that together affirm the power [of] . . . the act of looking.” She goes on to note:
A smattering of backward, Cubist-style lettering on the window—“TNARU”—spells the end of the word restaurant while containing the anagram UN-ART and suggesting the self-mocking message U R an ANT.
Well, okay, maybe. Whether or not Post readers saw a coded reminder of their own cosmic insignificance, in 1955 they voted Saying Grace their favorite Rockwell cover.
• • •
The Norman Rockwell of American Mirror is a cold fish, clinically anxious and emotionally detached from those closest to him, dependent on psychiatrists and pharmaceutical amphetamines to combat panic attacks. He sounds more asexual than anything else. His third wife lived with another woman before she wed him, and afterward didn’t share his bed. “At last, he had found his feminine ideal,” Solomon writes, “an elderly schoolteacher who was unlikely to make sexual demands on him.”
Yet the golden glow that clings to his images of young boys (and girls) doesn’t strike me as a haze of latent sexual desire. It is a more complex and intense longing: for childhood, for family, for human connection. And it is one that Rockwell himself was acutely aware of.
“Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I thought it to be,” Rockwell mused:
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and painted only aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played football with the kids, and boys fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard. If there was any sadness in this created world of mine it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems. The people in my pictures aren’t mentally ill or deformed. The situations they get into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the agonizing crises and tangles of everyday life.
In his introduction to Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers (1979), Christopher Finch writes:
Every image interlocks with half a dozen others. In a sense they are all part of one massive work. Each takes on a greater significance because of those that have preceded it and those that will follow it. . . . We should not judge Rockwell by any individual work, nor even by a selection of his finest paintings, but rather by the cumulative effect of his total output.
Viewed like this, Rockwell’s century-spanning American panorama isn’t nostalgia or kitsch. Nor is it the “social document” that Solomon memorably calls “America before the fall—a world devoid of pollution, drugs, and violent crime.” It’s something richer and stranger: an alternate history of the United States, one as Rockwell wished it had been. Even his autobiography is a kind of alternate history. “His memory,” his son Tom told Solomon in 1999, “was the Norman Rockwell version of his life.” Most of Rockwell’s work is not even illustration in the purest sense of that word—images designed to elucidate an individual text—but invention.
Nearly all of the work he is best known for—the 332 covers he did for the Saturday Evening Post—depicted vivid scenes and characters, executed in photorealist detail, that were sprung from his own imagination. They are scenes and characters from a movie playing in Rockwell’s head, cast with his neighbors in Arlington and Stockbridge, a film that he projected onto canvas for an audience of millions.
Or, perhaps, his works constitute a deck of magically resonant tarot cards, Major and Minor Arcana depicting the distinctly American, numinous world echoed in their titles: “Contentment,” “Springtime,” “A Temporary Setback,” “First Flight,” “The Critic,” “Fleeing Hobo,” “Armchair General,” “Ticket Agent.” Shuffled and reshuffled, they can be arranged in countless patterns, avatars creating a narrative of hopeful yearning that still manages to move us, even as the imaginary world they inhabit remains forever just beyond our reach.
Images from the Library of Congress.
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THE RESURRECTION AS HISTORY
Catalyst December Issue 2009, Book Review
Life After Death: The Evidence By Dinesh D’Souza. Regnery Publishing, 2009. Order online at www.regnery.com or your favorite bookseller.
Many cultures and religions affirm life after death but only one asserts that someone actually died and returned to life. This claim is made exclusively by Christianity. No one says of Moses or Muhammad that after their deaths they were seen again in the flesh. So if the Christian claim is true, it shows not only the possibility of life after death but also legitimizes the specifically Christian understanding of the afterlife. So let’s for the purpose of argument treat the resurrection as an historical claim no different from any other historical claim.
Here are the four historical facts that have to be accounted for. First, Christ was tried by his enemies, convicted, and crucified to death. Second, shortly after his burial, Christ’s tomb was found to be empty. Third, many of the disciples, but also one or two skeptics, claimed to have seen Christ alive in the flesh, and interacted with him, following his death. Fourth, inspired by the belief in Christ’s bodily resurrection, the disciples initiated a movement that, despite persecutions and martyrdom, converted millions of people to a new way of life based on Christ’s example and his teachings. These facts are in the mainstream of modern historical scholarship. They are known with the same degree of reliability as other facts that are taken for granted about the ancient world: say the fact that Socrates taught in the marketplace of Athens, or the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, or the fact that Alexander the Great won the battle of Gaugamela.
In history, we take the facts that we do know and we try to make sense of them. Historian N.T. Wright, in a mammoth study, argues that the hypothesis that Christ actually rose from the dead may sound intuitively implausible to many but it has great explanatory power. In other words, if it happened, it makes sense of all the other facts listed above. It would help us to understand why the tomb was empty, why the disciples thought they saw Christ after his death, and why this astounding realization motivated them to evangelism and strengthened them to face persecutions and martyrdom without renouncing their new convictions. Wright goes much further, though, suggesting not merely that resurrection is a sufficient hypothesis but also that it is a necessary one. What he means is that no alternative hypothesis can explain the given facts with anything approaching the same degree of plausibility. Since skeptics have been advancing alternative theories for two thousand years, this is quite a claim. So let’s briefly review some of those alternative theories.
Perhaps the most popular one, at least since the Enlightenment, is that the resurrection is a myth; the disciples made it up. “The myth of the resurrection,” writes Corliss Lamont in The Illusion of Immortality, “is just the kind of fable that might be expected to arise in a primitive, pre-scientific society like that of the ancient Hebrews.” The disciples expected that their leader would return, so they concocted the story that they saw him alive after his death.
While this is the view perhaps most widely held by skeptics today, it is actually the weakest attempt to make sense of the facts. First, as Wright shows, the idea that dead people don’t come back to life is not an Enlightenment discovery. The ancient Hebrews knew that as well as we do. Second, Christ’s Jewish followers did not expect him to return to life. Jews believed in bodily resurrection but not until the end of the world. The disciples were utterly amazed when they saw Christ in the flesh, and some refused at first to believe it. Third, it is one thing to make up a story and another thing to be willing to endure persecution unto death for it. Why would the disciples be ready to die for something they knew to be a lie?
A second theory is that the disciples stole the body. This theory is a very old one; in fact, it was advanced by Christ’s Jewish opponents to account for the empty tomb. Jewish polemics against Christianity for two centuries continued to emphasize this theme. The theory, however, has several obstacles. Christ’s tomb was barred by a stone and guarded by Roman soldiers. How could the disciples have gotten by the guards? Moreover, if the disciples stole the body, they would know for a fact that Christ wasn’t raised from the dead. We come back to the problem with the previous theory: why would the disciples’ mourning turn to gladness? Why would they embark on a worldwide campaign of conversion? Why would they refuse to recant their beliefs on pain of death?
What really requires explanation here is not how the disciples stole the body but why Christ’s critics would so tenaciously advance such an implausible explanation. The answer seems obvious: they had to account for the fact that the tomb was empty. The empty tomb is significant because we know that Christ’s followers were proclaiming his resurrection in Jerusalem almost immediately following his death. If they were simply making this up, it would be easy to disprove their claims by producing Christ’s corpse. This didn’t happen, and the obvious explanation is that neither the Jews nor the Romans could do this.
A third theory holds that Christ didn’t really die but was merely in a swoon or trance. In the tomb he revived, made his getaway, and then showed up before the disciples. There are two main problems with this theory. For starters, it presumes that Roman soldiers didn’t know how to kill people. Typically crucifixion is death by asphyxiation, and if Roman soldiers weren’t sure the victim was dead they would break his legs. Christ’s legs were not broken, evidently because the soldiers were convinced he was dead. So the idea of Christ reviving in the tomb is far-fetched.
But even if he did, he would have been barely conscious, at the point of death. Imagine a man in this condition rolling back the stone, eluding the guards, and then presenting himself to his followers. Their expected reaction would be, get this man to a doctor! But this is not what happened. The disciples, disconsolate over Christ’s death, did not claim to experience a wounded man in a swoon; they claimed to see a man who had triumphed over death and was fully returned to life and health. Because of its complete incongruity with the historical evidence, even historian David Strauss, a noted skeptic about the resurrection, rejected the swoon theory.
Finally there is the hypothesis of the hallucinating disciples. We find this view defended in Gerd Ludemann’s The Resurrection of Jesus and also in the work of John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar. Ludemann says that in the same manner that today people claim to have “visions” of the Virgin Mary, the disciples then had “visions” of a Christ returned from the dead. According to Ludemann, these visions proved contagious and “led to more visions” and eventually just about everyone was reporting Jesus sightings. The hallucination theory has gained credibility in recent years with the emergence of a substantial number of people who claim to have seen UFOs, or Elvis returned to life.
But the great problem with the hallucination hypothesis is that hallucinations are almost always private. Except in very rare cases, more than one person does not have the same hallucination. If ten people report seeing something very unlikely, it is not convincing to say they are simply dreaming or imagining things, because you then have to account for why they are all having the same dream or imagining the same thing. Historian Gary Habermas asks us to envision a group of people whose ship has sunk and who are floating around the sea in a raft. Suddenly one man points to the horizon and says, “I see a ship.” Sure, he may be hallucinating, but then no one else is going to see the same ship. Now if the others on the raft also see it, forget about the hallucination theory, it’s time to start yelling for help because there really is a ship out there.
Apply this reasoning to Elvis sightings and it’s obvious that if several normal people say they saw Elvis in Las Vegas, they most likely didn’t make it up. Probably they saw one of the many Elvis impersonators who regularly perform in night clubs and casinos. In the same way, when people report witnessing a UFO they are almost certainly not hallucinating; rather, they did see something in the sky but didn’t know what it was. The problem in most cases isn’t hallucination but misidentification.
Now Christ is reported to have appeared many times to the disciples. Paul notes that on one occasion he appeared to more than 500 people. Many of these people were reportedly alive and in a position to dispute the veracity of Paul’s account. James, who was a skeptic about Christ’s ministry, reportedly became convinced Christ was the messiah only after seeing his resurrected body; so too the apostle Thomas, the famous doubter, was convinced of the resurrection only after he touched the wounds of Jesus. Paul himself was by his own account a persecutor of Christians until Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Never in history have so many diverse individuals, from different backgrounds and on different occasions, reported the same hallucination. Nor can hallucinations account for the empty tomb, or for why the Jews and Romans could settle the whole controversy by producing Jesus’ body.
The remarkable conclusion is that for all their veneer of sophistication, none of the alternative theories provides a remotely satisfactory account of the historical data before us. The resurrection hypothesis, however fanciful it appears at the outset, turns out upon examination to provide the best available explanation. There is no attempt here to definitely prove the resurrection. One of the most striking discoveries of historical research is how little we know for certain about the past. What I am trying to show is that the resurrection cannot be cavalierly dismissed as religious myth. Rather, based on scholarly standards uniformly applied, the resurrection survives scrutiny and deserves to be regarded as an historical event.
Dinesh D’Souza is a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and an author of many books. He serves on the board of advisors of the Catholic League.
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'Tank Man' Makes Stand in Tiananmen Square
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese military violently suppressed peaceful protesters in China. Led by students seeking economic reform and freedom of speech, the country-wide protests lasted seven weeks, and peaked at about 500,000 protesters gathered in Tiananmen in Beijing. The 6-4 Incident, as it is known in China, became famous for the iconic image of a single unarmed protester, referred to as Tank Man, standing in front of a column of People's Liberation Army tanks. Casualty estimates for the incident range up to the thousands.
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The reason for this is that coercion is (at least arguably) not an efficient way to elicit information that is actually accurate from people who are being questioned.
In the criminal justice environment, the most likely reason to coerce someone (other than through the physical coercion that may be needed to arrest them or otherwise control their physical actions) is to gain information from them. The police will, for example, want to get information from people regarding what they have done or what they know about the actions of others.
This is where coercion is arguably inefficient. First, coercion is, of course, illegal. But even supposing that a law enforcement official could get away with using coercion, it might not elicit accurate information. It is very possible that a person being questioned will simply tell the interrogator what they think the interrogator wants to hear. They will try to do this so that they can put an end to the situation in which they are experiencing coercion. This can lead law enforcement to waste time following up on false information.
For this reason, we can argue that coercion is not efficient in most criminal justice situations.
We’ve answered 327,610 questions. We can answer yours, too.Ask a question
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bastard, person born out of wedlock whose legal status is illegitimacy. In civil law countries and in about half the states of the United States, the union of the parents in marriage after birth makes the child legitimate. It is presumed that any child born to a married woman, or within competent time after termination of the marriage, is the child of her husband. If, however, it can be proved that it was physically impossible for the husband to have been the father (e.g., because of nonaccess to the wife), he may bring action to establish the illegitimacy of the child. Unlike civil law, which granted bastards certain rights, English common law treated them almost as persons outside the law and left their care to poorhouses. At common law bastards have no right to inherit property from their mother or father except by specific designation (e.g., in a will). In the mid-20th cent. their condition has been much improved by statute. Discrimination against children born out of wedlock is now subject to constitutional limitation under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. For the status of children born to annulled marriages, see nullity of marriage; husband and wife. See also legitimation.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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Mixing Paint and Other Problems
AO elaboration and other teaching resources
In this unit we look at ratio in the context of objects, physical space, geometric quantities and mixable things such as paint.
- given a ratio find relative numbers of objects, lengths of sides
- given a ratio find the relevant fractions
- given fractions making a whole, find the relevant ratio
- find ratios between three objects
Ratios, proportion, fractions are all related items that come up in both real life and mathematical situations. Ratio is a particularly valuable concept in the context of scale drawings. Here the ratio of the drawing to the actual object gives the idea of the relative size of the drawing to the object.
In mathematics, ratios and proportions are fundamental to trigonometry, coordinate geometry and calculus.
The unit This is to That, Number, Level 4, gives an introduction to ratios and relates them to proportion and fractions. You may want to provide those experiences prior to undertaking this unit.
For more background on this topic of ratios see the Staff Tutorials Ratios.
In session 1 we start off with a series of questions to ask around the class. There are some sample ones below. You can probably make up more of your own. There are some more examples in Copymaster 1.
For the competition in session 1 you have the eight groups a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. They should play each other in the following rounds:
Round 1: a & b; c & d; e & f; g & h
Round 2: a & c; b & d; e & g; f & h
Round 3: a & d; b & c; e & h; f & g
Round 4: a & e; b & f; c & g; d & h
- I have twice as many eggs as you. You have 6 eggs. How many do I have?
- Jane (use the names of people in the class) has three times as many dogs as Bill. Bill has 4 dogs. How many dogs does Jane have?
- Bob have five times as many brazil nuts as Jenny. Jenny has four brazils. How many brazil nuts has Bob?
- I have twice as many eggs as you. I have 10 eggs. How many do you have?
- Jane (use the names of people in the class) has three times as many dogs as Bill. Jane has 15 dogs. How many dogs does Bill have?
- Bob have five times as many brazil nuts as Jenny. Bob has 30 brazils. How many brazil nuts has Jenny?
- I have twice as many eggs as you. What is the ratio of the number of my eggs to the number of your eggs?
- Jane (use the names of people in the class) has three times as many dogs as Bill. What is the ratio of the number of Jane’s dogs to the number of Bill’s dogs?
- Bob have five times as many brazil nuts as Jenny. What is the ratio of the number of Bob’s brazils to the number of Jenny’s brazils?
- If the ratio of my eggs to your eggs is 2:1, what fraction of our eggs do you have? What fraction do I have?
- If the ratio of Jane’s dogs to Bill’s is 3:1, what fraction of their dogs does Jane own? What fraction does Bill own?
- If the ratio of Bob’s brazils to Jenny’s is 5:1, what fraction of the brazils does Jenny have? What fraction does Bob have?
One thing that you should note here is that ratios don’t add. So that if you have two things mixed in the ratio of 2:1 and another mixture of the same items in the ratio 3:1, then the combined mixture is NOT in the ratio 5:2. You can see this by looking at the Staff Tutorial Basic Ratios.
In this session, students are reintroduced to ratios.
- Start with a whole class quick fire quiz. Suggested questions are in the Teachers’ Notes. Go for as long as you think you need to in order for most of the students to be able to answer the type of question being asked.
- Break the class up into eight groups of no more than four in a group. Give the groups Copymaster 1. Let them make up 20 questions along the lines of the questions in 1 above. They have to answer their own questions on the Copymaster.
- Bring the groups together in pairs and get each group to ask its competition pair 5 of the questions that they have made up. Each correct answer gets 1 mark.
- Then pair up the groups again until four rounds have been played. Check the total scores to see who the winner is. (You might subtract a mark if the team that posed the question got the answer wrong.)
In this session, we consolidate ideas relating to ratio.
- Divide the session up into three parts and get the class to tackle one of Copymasters 2, 3, and 4 in each part. They can work on their own or in groups. Depending on the ability of your class you may want to revise the material from the last session. The algebraic questions might be quite hard but it will give the faster students something to puzzle over. It will also give you something to talk about in a whole class setting.
In this session we look at drawing objects involving ratios.
- Try to get hold of some scale models. Talk about the items and the way that ratio/scale is used for that object.
- Show them a metre ruler, 100 cm long. Get different students to answer the following questions
How long would a stick be it the ratio of the ruler to the stick was 2:1; 5:1; 10:1; 1:2; 1:5; 1:10?
- Get them to work in pairs on Copymaster 5. Check that everyone understands the task.
- Now get someone to measure a rectangle that you have made in cardboard. (A size of 25cm by 20 cm would be fine.)
- Get the class to draw rectangles so that your rectangle to theirs is in the ratio 5:1. (Before you do this you may need to refresh their memories of how to draw rectangles, and triangles.)
- Then give them a series of ratios to work with, say, 5:2; 5:3; and 10:1.
- Now give them the series of ratio tasks on Copymaster 6. Note that (vi) can’t be drawn. Why?
- Check the work as they go and hold a discussion at the end.
In this session we draw a physical space to scale.
- Try to get hold of maps with various scales. Talk about the items and the way that ratio/scale is used for that object.
- Talk about drawing the school campus to scale (or use the classroom or some other physical space). Have a discussion with the whole class
What would be a useful scale to use?
How would you decide that? (size of paper; size of campus)
Would it be useful to divide it up between groups of students?
What do you need to measure?
- Check that everyone understands the task
- Give the class time to go take their measurements.
- When they have completed their task get them to measure certain sections on their map (from a tree to a building, and so on).
How far apart are the objects on the ground?
- Repeat this for several distances.
- Give them the chance to measure the actual distance to see how accurate their measurements were and whether their scale is correct.
This is the session where we mix paint and other things.
- Give the class this problem to work on individually. Henry has mixed orange juice to water in a 1 litre jug in the ratio 3:1. Reina has mixed orange juice to water in a litre jug in the ratio 4:1. They put both of their mixtures in a large bowl. What is the ratio of orange to water in the bowl?
(This problem can be found in the Staff Tutorial Orange and Water. Note that the answer is not 7:2. Why?)
- Make sure that as the students finish this they are asked to (i) check their work and (ii) find another way to do it. If possible get them to do it a third way.
- At a suitable time, bring the class together and discuss the answer to the problem. (How many ways can your students find to do this problem?)
- Get them to make up and solve their own drink mixing problem.
- Discuss these problems. If you think that they need more time on this topic, get them to solve each other’s problems.
- Now consider the following paint problem. Henry mixes a litre of paint with red paint to yellow paint to base tone in the ratio of 1:2:4. Reina mixes a litre of paint with red paint to yellow paint to base tone in the ratio of 1:3:5. What is the ratio of red to yellow to base tone in the combined 2 litres of paint?
- Let them work on this in small groups. Encourage them to do it in more than one way.
- Discuss their results.
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A floodplain is that area adjacent to a stream that is composed of alluvium and over which the stream presently flows at times of flooding. Floodplain features are landforms produced by stream erosion, sediment transport, and deposition, such as point bars, oxbow lakes, and terraces.
Topo Map - Photo Comparison:
Copyright © 2007 [Shippensburg University]. All rights reserved.
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This week for our Move & Learn series I was inspired by my little toddler who loves driving cars under chairs and tables. I thought he and my 3-year-old would have fun driving through some tunnels too!
We created these quick and easy alphabet tunnels for our cars and trains and all three of my kiddos (ages 6, 3, 1) got involved. It was a blast!
We also made this activity harder for my kindergartener and constructed some words! Make sure you scroll down to check out what we did AND see the cool Word Construction set GIVEAWAY from Learning Resources.
Materials Needed: colored cardstock, painters tape, cars/trucks/trains, marker, paper cutter or scissors
Prep ahead: Ahead of time you'll want to cut your paper into 4.25 X 11 strips and then write alphabet letters on each strip. I wrote capital on one side and lowercase on the other side so that once they were stuck in the tunnel position both types of letters could be read properly.
Once you've written all of your cards out, tape them to the floor. I used painters tape so it wouldn't leave any residue on the floor. Painters tape also makes it really easy to move these around.
Next, grab your vehicles!!
Here are a few of our favorite vehicles for little kids...
The purpose of this activity is to move around while exploring the alphabet a bit! For most of our alphabet activities we just talk about the letters while we play and I do a little sportscasting and it is amazing what the kids pick up on!
My 3-year-old daughter was especially interested in driving around and finding the letters in her name, since we do a lot of name activities and her name is an important word to her!
Sportscasting means that while the kids drive I might say things like, "Catie you just zoomed your car under the letter E tunnel. So cool!" or "Ryan is driving his truck through the letter H tunnel. The word house starts with the letter H." I also might say things like, "That tunnel has a letter that is in your name! Do you remember that one?... You're right, it's a C!" I try not to drill or quiz the kids on the letters though!
The kids loved to see how many cars they could drive through the tunnels all at one time!
Once my kindergartener got home from school he came up with an awesome idea to move the tunnels around to do some WORD CONSTRUCTION!
He also really wanted to make the cars drive through 2, 3, or even 4 tunnels in a row! His idea was a success and all of my littler kiddos wanted to join in too!
The awesome part about using the cardstock was that it was pretty durable. If you are worried about your kids ripping these down, you could also use thin cardboard.
Some of your little tunnels WILL be knocked down or ripped down as your little one explores! Just set them back up and remind your child what to do.
That is part of the fun and isn't a big deal! Just refocus your kids on driving or rolling things through the tunnels (you could even add some little balls) and they'll be having so much fun that they'll skip ripping down the tunnels.*
If you are worried your child might just be a destroyer and not actually use the tunnels, put 2 tunnels up and practice. If your child can't help himself and keeps ripping the tunnels down, pin this activity for later and skip doing it now!
I thought my 18 month old would destroy our tunnels so we started this activity while he was napping. I was pleasantly surprised with how focused he was during this activity and how little destruction there was! You never know till you try!
Once we were done playing I picked up the tunnels and taped them to the wall inside our guest closet so that we could play again soon... but didn't have to keep stepping on them!
Along with this activity we also did some word building using our cool Word Construction set from Learning Resources.
Word Construction Set Review & Giveaway
The Word Construction set from Learning Resources is geared for kids ages 5+ but my littler kids loved playing with these as well.
Here's what we liked about this Word Construction set...
- The colors are vibrant and we liked how the vowels were all green
- The nuts & bolts design really was intriguing to my kids
- The storage tub was large and could fit all of the materials easily so the kids could clean up quickly!
- Once the nuts were on the bolts they were easy to turn so that kids could read several different words
- The materials were really durable and my 18 month old dumped them out again and again and everything stayed intact!
- The nuts and bolts were large, perfect for little hands to manipulate!
Here's what we'd change about this set...
- We'd love all alphabet letters to be included. There were a few missing when we tried to spell some of our favorite words.
- We'd love the nuts & bolts pieces to be a little bit easier to manipulate. Even I had a hard time getting the pieces onto the bolts the first few times until I discovered the little grooves and taught the kids how they worked.
In addition to having my kindergartener come up with his own words to spell, I also worked with my preschooler to copy words.
I would make a word... and then she would build the same word. It was fun to work together.
My kindergartener also loved to spin the nuts to read the other words on the bolt... and he got a kick out of the nonsense words.
This Word Construction set would be fun to add to your collection of learning materials or to your classroom (if you teach older preschoolers or kindergarteners). This set is definitely one that will require some adult help as kids get used to using it and practice putting the nuts on the bolts.
Today I am excited to give away a Word Construction set to one of our awesome Toddler Approved readers! Read below for the details...
Giveaway Entry Requirements:
- Make sure to fill in the rafflecopter giveaway entry below and complete the mandatory email entry.
- You can get up to twelve entries by completing all tasks mentioned in the rafflecopter form below. Some earn you more entries than others.
- This giveaway is open for entry from Thursday, May 1st to Thursday, May 8th at 12:00am (PST)
- The winning entry will be drawn on Thursday, May 8th. I will notify the winner via email.
- The winner will need to reply to me within 72 hours of my email. If there is no response, a new winner will be drawn.
- See our Official Giveaway Rules for complete guidelines. US Residents only.
Disclosure: This post is sponsored by Learning Resources.
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Unable to Work
Unable to Work by David Olère. 131x162 cm, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York.
Inability to work was often an immediate death sentence. In the background of this painting, smoke rises from the crematorium to form the SS insignia.
David Olère: L'Oeil du Témoin/The Eyes of a Witness. New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989, p. 31.
Reprinted with permission from the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation.
A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology,
College of Education, University of South Florida © 1997-2013.
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Shortly after arriving in the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique I witnessed a puzzling phenomenon: while exploring the network of roads in the woodland savannas of the Park our local driver would barely slow down to avoid hitting antelopes and warthogs, but immediately slammed on the brakes if he noticed a long column of large black ants that were streaming from one side of the road to the other. We couldn’t quite get the exact explanation for his reluctance to drive over the insects (although we were very happy about it), but eventually gathered that driving over them could bring great misfortune. In most places on Earth killing a bunch of ants carries the moral equivalency of blinking, and one might wonder why in Mozambique people would show such respect for these insects. But having met these particular ants before I immediately understood that, like so many seemingly irrational cultural oddities, this one also had a very rational explanation.
I first encountered Matabele ants (Pachycondyla analis) a few years earlier in Africa, and it was a memorable experience. They are named after a particularly fierce tribe of Zulu warriors, and fully deserve this designation – a single ant delivers one of the most painful stings I have ever experienced, and just a few of them can put you out of business for most of the day. So, yes, crossing paths with Matabele ants will certainly bring great misfortune.
A column of Matabele ants streaming towards a termite mound
But other than their propensity for overreacting to being crushed under one’s foot, these insects are truly amazing creatures. Matabele ants are specialist termite hunters, and do so in a very sophisticated way. It all begins with a single scout leaving her underground nest and embarking on a mission of discovery. The scout wanders, seemingly aimlessly for about an hour in all directions, searching for a nest of termites of the genera Odontotermes and Microtermes. Often she finds nothing, and returns to the nest empty handed. But if she finds a termite mound her behavior changes immediately – she runs back along the shortest possible path back to the nest, leaving behind a trail of pheromones that will guide her nestmates to the source of prey. The pheromonal trail is produced by two glands in the ant’s abdomen: the pygidial gland, the secretion of which has a powerful recruitment effect on her nestmates, and the venom gland, which paints longer lasting orientation cues on the trail. Once back in the nest, it takes as little as 60 seconds to get the entire worker cast of the nest mobilized and streaming along the chemical path left by the scout towards the termite mound, which can be as far 100 m away (in human terms, it compares to walking to a grocery store located 10 miles away.)
Matabele ant worker carrying a pupa
Upon arrival at the termite mound, the ants pour in through an opening marked by the scout, and begin to slaughter the termites. Within minutes, several thousand termites are dead. Each Matabele ant then stuffs her mandibles with as many limp bodies as she can carry, and the entire column runs back to the nest. In most cases the ants suffer no casualties during the raid, and the entire colony acts almost as a single, large, predatory organism, equivalent in its impact on the termite colony to a small pangolin.
As I watched the column streaming in a tight formation towards the termite mound during one of many night raids that I encountered in Gorongosa, I could clearly hear the constant chatter of hundreds of workers. Bert Hölldobler and his colleagues (Hölldobler et al. 1994. J. Ins. Physiol. 40: 585-593) concluded that the sound made by the ants serves only as a warning to potential predators, and has no role as a cohesion signal to help keep the column together. But when I recorded these signals with an equipment of much greater sensitivity and frequency range than what was available to these scientists in 1994, I realized that the ants produced not one, but two types of sound, one of frequencies an order of magnitude higher than the warning signals typically heard in insects. One kind of sound was produced by rubbing together segments of the gaster, whereas the other was probably made by the ant’s mandibles. You can hear the sound of the marching column here; a call of a single ant, slowed down 10 times, can be heard here – notice the knocking sound made by the mandibles, and the scraping sound made with the gaster.
In the light of the recent discoveries of acoustic communication in ants, I think that I will revisit and test in Gorongosa the idea that Matabele ants use sound to locate the column if a worker becomes separated from the rest of her nestmates. Ants may have evolved a sophisticated language of chemical compounds but when you need to shout nothing beats the good old sound waves.
Budding myrmecologist Tonga Torcida watching a returning raid of Matabele ants (you can see Tonga assisting E.O. Wilson with ant research in Gorongosa in the new, fantastic BBC documentary “Africa”)
See more of Piotr's posts on his blog The Smaller Majority
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The promise of ubiquitous high speed data transmission has coaxed us into dreams of a bright future. Increased productivity, telecommuting, interactive entertainment, and cheap videotelephone communication seems to be just around the corner. The internet has exploded onto the world scene, altering the way that many of us work and play. Networking is central to computing, more now than ever. There are several emerging technologies for high speed internet access to homes and businesses. How well do they work, where and when will they be available, and are they compatible with the computer systems we want to use?
Several years ago, experts studied the world telecommunications infrastructure and decreed that it would be many years before this dream came to fruition. They were half right. The infrastructure isn't there. It would take billions of dollars to run fiber optic cable all over the world, to every household. However, few people could have guessed at the advances that would be made allowing increasing transmission rates over existing lines.
Surprisingly, the existing lines are not always phone lines. Though several digital solutions over copper phone systems are available, there is also cable TV wires, the digital satellite TV infrastructure, and even the electric company's wires, not to mention wireless networking.
This article will cover technologies that are widely available now, those that should achieve wide availability in the next years, and those that are on the horizon.
About analog modems
The modem, whose name comes from MODulator/DEModulator, is a device which converts data into an analog signal which can be transmitted over a standard voice phone line. Various standards exist which allow a modem on one side of the line to understand and translate the noise coming from the other modem. Though they seem to keep getting faster, modem technology is extremely limited because there is only so much noise that can be emitted and then decoded over a regular phone line. A bad phone line will reduce the quality of the data connection, because the two computers may have to send the same information over and over. If you have a 56k modem, you may have noticed that it's not much faster than your older 33.6 modem. That's because it isn't much faster, no matter what US Robotics says. We have just about hit the analog ceiling.
Analog vs. Digital
Analog transmission of data transmits an analogy of the data. When you play an old LP record, what you are hearing is not the original music but something that sounds very much like the original music because the original sounds were used to make grooves in the record, and the record player creates a reproduction of those sounds based on the grooves. Just like that old game where you tell a detailed story to people down the line and with each retelling it becomes slightly changed, analog transmission loses quality quickly and it subject to severe degradation if the medium is low quality. A good artist can make an amazing likeness of a person's face with canvas and paints. But if all they have to work with is bark and a charred stick, it won't look that real. In technospeak, if the signal to noise ratio becomes too low, the data will not be transmitted properly.
When information is transmitted digitally, it is translated into ones and zeroes, transmitted, then translated back. This process can be repeated infinite times, and as long as the method of translation is the same, the data will not lose quality. Digital transmission can also use a lower quality medium and remain true. Whether using paint and canvas or bark and charcoal the ones and zeroes still look like ones and zeroes. Clearly, now that we have the technology to encode our communications digitally, it is most efficient to transmit them digitally too.
Analog's Last Gasp Efforts: 56k and Bonding
Nobody knows how to make hoopla like the computer industry. Constant fast paced innovation has made high tech companies masters of rolling out new products, and the 56k frenzy is no exception. In creating a new 56k standard, modem companies have the chance to sell new modems to both the end users and the ISPs, so it served their purposes to exaggerate the benefits of the 56k technology. Nevertheless, 56k modems are faster, and the reason is simple: application of digital technology.
Most ISPs have digital connections to the phone company's main switches. A 56k compatible ISP connects to the phone company digitally, while the end user's 56k modem connects just like an analog modem. The result is a slightly faster connection, because half of the connection is digital. So if you need to buy a new modem anyway, you can't get or can't afford higher speed access, and there is a 56k compatible ISP in your area, go ahead and get a 56k modem. It will cost slightly more than an older 33.6 modem, and it will be faster
The analog "pipe" that can carry information can only be so big, but if you use multiple pipes and bond them together, you can get more information. Using this theory, many modem manufacturers are starting to market "bonding" modems, rightly called inverse multiplexing modems. Bonding has been used for years in digital ISDN lines (we'll cover ISDN later); it essentially allows a bunch of data to be split into parts and then reassembled into a whole. For those many people who can not get or afford any other type of high speed access, bonded modems could be a real opportunity. However, most ISPs do not support bonding, multiple phone lines are still expensive, and bonded modems still have a large problem with latency, which we'll cover soon.
A Word About Speed
When talking about networking, we usually talk about the "speed" of a connection. That's not entirely accurate. The speed is not really a factor, because all electronic transmission travels at near the speed of light. The difference between different methods of transmission is the bandwidth, or the capacity of the connection. How much information can fit "through the pipe," so to speak.
Analog's Secret Shame: Latency
If the "speed" of the connection should rightly be though of as the size of the pipe, another important consideration is how many bursts of information can travel through that pipe in a given time. Latency is the speed between the transfer of a packet of information and the transfer of the next packet. It has a huge effect on the perceived speed of a network connection. Analog modem connections have especially poor latency.
To give you an idea of where the modem fits in, the minimum latency for modem is 100ms, or a 100 millisecond delay between transmitted packets. Ironically, the more data the modem crams in, the worse the latency. A 14.4kb/s modem has a theoretical latency of 40ms, and a 33.6 is 64ms. These numbers are theoretical, but tests have shown that all modems score more than 100ms in the real world. To compare, ethernet has a latency of .3 ms and ISDN, 10ms. A hard drive's "seek time" is also very similar.
During our evaluations of the rest of the types of high speed networking we will be examining latency along with bandwidth when determining speed.
Currently Available technologies: ISDN
Integrated Services Digital Network is a method for transmitting digital data over telephone lines. Its big advantage is that it has been around for a long time and it's widely available in urban and suburban areas. Its primary disadvantage is that in many areas it's quite expensive and is rather difficult to set up.
ISDN allows for data transmission at 56 or 64 kb/s. You might say, "well that's not any better than my 56k modem." Well there you go mistaking bandwidth for speed again. With a latency of less than one tenth of your average analog modem connection, ISDN "feels" a lot faster than a modem, even at 64k. By packing all the packets closer together, ISDN can bring the information to you a lot faster. However, if you need more bandwidth, you can easily bond two 64k lines together for a 128k line. Most telephone companies, ISPs, and hardware manufacturers support two channel ISDN bonding. In fact, for years, businesses who have required high bandwidth have bonded two, four, sixteen or more ISDN lines together.
Since ISDN is a digital signal, it is cleaner than analog, and data can be compressed more. Modems try to compress data in order to fit more in the pipe, but ISDN allows for more compression. Another advantage is that an ISDN connection takes only about two seconds to initiate. Anyone who's sick of listening to their modem screech then sit and wait for it to make the connection will be happy to know that from the moment you type your URL into your browser and when the page comes up is so quick you might think that your connection had never hung up at all.
With ISDN, depending on your type of hardware, you can also transmit analog signals over your line. A typical ISDN terminal adapter, often erroneously called an ISDN modem, has two analog phone ports on the back, where a fax machine, phone line, or analog modem can be plugged in. If you are using both channels for data and a phone call comes in, it will drop one channel and ring the phone. Very handy.
OS News Labs
We tested three terminal adapters of different types, using three types of computers: A Windows 95 box, a Mac laptop, and a Linux box. We tried single channel ISDN and bonding. We wrestled and wrangled with our phone company to get the line installed correctly, and we shopped around for the best price. In next week's installment of this article, we'll tell you all about it.
We'll also cover one other widely available high speed data method, Hughes' satellite-based DirecPC, along with DSL and cable modem technology, which is starting to become available to large numbers of people. In our third installment, we'll cover those technologies that may be just over the horizon, like wireless networking and data over other wires.
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Also found in: Thesaurus, Legal, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Related to removed: Once removed
1. Distant in space, time, or nature; remote.
2. Separated in relationship by a given degree of descent: A first cousin's child is one's first cousin once removed.
re·mov′ed·ly (-mo͞o′vĭd-lē) adv.
1. separated by distance or abstract distinction
2. (Law) (postpositive) separated by a degree of descent or kinship: the child of a person's first cousin is his first cousin once removed.
1. remote; separate; not connected with; distinct from.
2. distant by a given number of degrees of descent or kinship: My father's first cousin is my first cousin once removed.
Switch to new thesaurus
|Adj.||1.||removed - separated in relationship by a given degree of descent; "a cousin once removed"|
|2.||removed - separate or apart in time; "distant events"; "the remote past or future"|
far - located at a great distance in time or space or degree; "we come from a far country"; "far corners of the earth"; "the far future"; "a far journey"; "the far side of the road"; "far from the truth"; "far in the future"
1. Far from others in space, time, or relationship:
Idiom: at a distance.
2. Far from centers of human population:
back, insular, isolated, lonely, lonesome, obscure, outlying, out-of-the-way, remote, secluded, solitary.
Idiom: off the beaten path.
removed[rɪˈmuːvd] ADJ to be far removed from sth → distar or apartarse mucho de algo
his political views are far removed from theirs → sus ideas políticas distan or se apartan mucho de las de ellos
an indifference not far removed from contempt → una indiferencia rayana con or que rayaba en el desprecio
first cousin once removed (= parent's cousin) → tío/a m/f segundo/a; (= cousin's child) → sobrino/a m/f segundo/a, hijo/a m/f de primo carnal
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Remains of Upright Horses Discovered in Thracian Tomb
Friday, September 27, 2013
SVESTARI, BULGARIA—A 2,500-year-old chariot and two horses that appear to have been buried in an upright position have been found in a Thracian tomb. Diana Gergova of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences thinks that the pit was dug with a sloping side so that the horses, wearing elaborate harnesses, would have been able to pull the chariot into place before they were killed. A dog had also been chained to the chariot. The vehicle may have been owned by the occupant of a nearby grave, which also contained armor, spears, swords, medication, and an inkwell. The discovery of the intact tomb was a surprise, since many of the tombs in the area have been plundered.
Pirates of the Caribbean, evidence for the oldest Irishman, Iron Age Swiss cheese, India’s cannabis frescoes, and the Silk Road route to Nepal
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The task of creating a Palace of Fine Arts for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition fell to the architect Bernard R. Maybeck. Setting to work on this new project, he chose as his theme a Roman ruin, mutilated and overgrown, in the mood of a Piranesi engraving.
By the closing of the Exposition, on December 4 of the same year, a movement to preserve the Palace was already under way; signatures and money were gathered from the Fine Arts League. But before a restoration could take place, the Palace many different uses. In 1934, eighteen lighted tennis courts were installed and remained there for eight years. During this period, the Palace, without proper maintenance and as a result of vandalism, was gradually crumbling into a genuine ruin. Then during World War II it was requisitioned by the Army for storage of trucks and jeeps. At the end of the war, when the United Nations was created in San Francisco, limousines used by the world's statesmen came from a motor pool there.
In the meantime, from 1947 on, the hall continued to be put to various uses: as a city Park Department warehouse; as a telephone book distribution center; as a flag and tent storage depot; and even as temporary Fire Department headquarters.
The work of demolition and reconstruction began in 1964. The rotunda and the columns were toppled to the ground. Nothing was left but the steel structure of the gallery itself.
By 1966, when 20,000 people visited the unfinished Palace during a public "walk-through," the new structure was close to completion. It had been solidly rebuilt by the best engineers available, the "staff" work being cast, stratified in the casting like stone, and proof against peeling off. A final solution for it's use was presented and in August of 1969, the Park and Recreation Commission formally approved the plan to house a museum.
Starting with a few temporary exhibits, the museum grew rapidly. In 1980, cramped for space by its collection of exhibits, the museum built a mezzanine within the exhibition hall, adding another 15,000 square feet of exhibit space. By 1983, the Exploratorium had more than 500 exhibits on light and color, sound and music, patterns of motion, language, and other natural phenomena.
Over the past decade, Exploratorium has greatly expanded its role in exhibit-based public education, becoming a nucleus for interaction between science, science education, and the public.
The entire history and information can be found here:
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Posted by sarah on 20 Apr 2014 | Category:
This stitch is very decorative with diamond formations. The edges of the diamonds are knotted, which explains the name. The knotted diamond stitch can require some amount of patience from beginners before you get the hang of it. This stitch is worked between two parallel stitch lines. It is better worked from top to bottom.
|Fig 1: Start by making a straight stitch A-B, between the two stitch lines.||Fig 2: Come out from a point C, a little below B. Now, take the needle under the stitch A-B, without plucking the fabric underneath. Twist the thread around the needle from the left, as shown.|
|Fig 3: Pull the needle out towards the right hand side. This creates a small knot on the right side, as you can see. Now, to create a same kind of knot on the left edge, take the needle under the stitch A-B, and twist the thread around the needle from the left as before.||Fig 4: Pull out the needle gently towards the left and create the knot on the left edge. This also makes a new straight stitch below the first one. Now, to create a knot in the middle, bring out the needle from the point D, as shown. Then, take the needle under the new straight stitch and twist the thread around the needle, this time, from the right side.|
|Fig 5: Pull out the needle gently towards you. This creates a knot in the center. Take in the needle through E, a point parallel to D. Now, bring out the needle through F. As illustrated, take the needle under the right portion of the previous stitch and twist the thread around the needle, pull it out to create a knot. Continue with the procedure by taking the needle under the left portion of the previous stitch, and so forth.||Fig 6: A finished portion will look like this.|
P.S : Thank you for all the contributions for the e-book. We are STILL open to contributions.
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This concept teaches students about tangent lines and how to apply theorems related to tangents of circles.
Prove and use theorems involving lines that are tangent to circles.
This video provides the student with a walkthrough on tangent lines.
This video provides the student with a walkthrough of one or more examples from the concept "Tangent Lines".
This video gives more detail about the mathematical principles presented in Tangent Lines.
This video shows how to work step-by-step through one or more of the examples in Tangent Lines.
Provides example problems of determining unknown values using the properties of a tangent line to a circle.
A list of student-submitted discussion questions for Tangent Lines.
This study guide reviews the terminology for circles (tangent, arcs, central angles) and the equation for a circle.
These flashcards help you study important terms and vocabulary from Tangent Lines.
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Math 122 - Calculus for Biology II
San Diego State University -- This page last updated 12-Nov-01
This section begins our study of antiderivatives or integrals. We have examined a few differential equations that vary linearly with the unknown function (dependent variable). There have been a variety of applications, including Malthusian growth, radioactive decay, Newton's law of cooling, and contamination of a lake. However, the last section showed that when time varying (the independent variable) terms enter the equation, other techniques are needed. This section looks at differential equations where the object being studied is totally dependent on outside influences, which may be time varying. We will examine objects under the influence of gravity and the time varying buildup of contaminents in an animal.
The cat has evolved to be a stealthy animal with quick reflexes and extremely good jumping ability. Members of the cat family are considered the best mammalian predators on this planet and occupy an very wide range of niches. Many of the smaller cats have adapted to hunting in trees (or perhaps larger cats have adapted to ground hunting). Thus, they must have tremendous agility. One adaptation that cats have evolved is a very flexible spine, which aids in their ability to spring for prey and absorb shock from their lightning fast strikes. One of the side benefits from this flexible spine is their ability to rapidly rotate their bodies in mid air. With their very sensitive inner ear for balance, which is combined with quick reflexes and a flexible spine, a cat that falls is capable of righting itself very rapidly, insuring that it lands on the ground feet first.
This property of falling feet first has been admired by humans for many years. We are amazed at how few injuries cats have, considering their treacherous lifestyle at heights. It has resulted in jokes about an antigravity device by putting buttered toast on the back of a cat (since buttered toast is believed to always land face down, while cats always land on their feet). Recently, there was a study in the Annals of Improbable Research (1998) on the number of times a particular cat ended up on its feet when dropped from several different heights. There is a serious mathematical research theorem called the Falling Cat Theorem, which examines the torsional behavior of a falling cat in terms of advanced mathematical theory. Other websites relating cats twisting to the physics of skateboards and more detailed physical analysis can be found. In a later section, we will review a scientific study of cats falling out of New York apartments, where paradoxically the cats falling from the highest apartments actually fared better than ones falling from an intermediate height. (Picture and more information can be found from the work of Melvin Leok at Cal Tech.)
Above you can see the dynamics of a cat falling from an inverted position and ending on its feet. It has been shown that a cat can react sufficiently fast that this inversion process (which itself has been the subject of detailed studies) can happen in about 0.3 seconds. With this information, we would like to determine the minimum height from which a cat can be dropped to insure that it lands on its feet.
As noted above, the physics of the cat rotating to get its feet under it during a fall is a moderately complex study in itself. However, our problem is simply to find if the cat has sufficient time to right itself in the air. We are simply going to use Newton's law of motion, which says that mass times acceleration is equal to the sum of all the forces acting on the object. Since the cat is falling only a short distance at a fairly low velocity, it is safe to assume that the only force acting on the cat is gravity. Thus,
where m is the mass of the cat, a is the acceleration of the cat, and -mg is the force of gravity (assuming up is positive), where g is a constant (g = 979 cm/sec2 at a latitude like San Diego when you add centripetal acceleration to the standard value given for g, which is 980.7 cm/sec2 ).
Recall that acceleration is the derivative of the velocity, and velocity is the derivative of position. If we let h(t) be the height (or position) of the cat at any time t, then the equation above implies that the height of a cat is governed by the differential equation
This is a second order linear differential equation. To find the actual height of the cat at any time after the cat is dropped (or falls off something), this differential equation must be further adjoined by two initial conditions. Since the cat is simply falling, we will assume that the initial velocity starts from rest, so is zero. Thus, v(0) = h'(0) = 0. It is customary to let ground level be a height of zero, so the cat begins at some height above ground level, h(0) = h0 > 0.
The problem now reduces to solving this initial value problem and finding what values h0 of produce a solution such that
Since the velocity is the derivative of acceleration, we can begin this problem by finding the velocity at any time. The problem is the first order differential equation given by
Since is -g a constant, we need to find a the velocity function v(t), which upon differentiation produces -g. Thus, we need an antiderivative of a constant. Recall that the derivative of a straight line produces a constant as a straight line is the only function with a constant slope. Thus, we need a straight line with a slope of -g, which in the most general form is
Notice that the antiderivative produces an arbitrary constant, since the derivative of any constant is zero. We use the initial conditions to find the arbitrary constant. Thus,
which gives the velocity for any time as v(t) = -gt. However, the velocity is the derivative of the height, which means we need to repeat this process and find an antiderivative of velocity to determine the height of the cat. To solve the initial value problem
we must find an antiderivative of -gt. We have seen that a quadratic function has a linear derivative, so it is not hard to see that the general solution of this initial value problem becomes
where again c is an arbitrary constant. (You should check this by differentiating and showing it gives the differential equation above.) Again we use the initial condition to give
Thus, the height of the cat any time t for this problem is given by
Using g = 979 cm/sec2, we have the equation for height in centimeters as
We evaluate this at t = 0.3 sec and obtain
Thus, the cat must be higher than 44.1 cm for it to have sufficient time to right itself before hitting the ground. (This is about 1.5 feet.)
Differential Equation with Only Time Varying Function
Consider the special class of differential equations where the derivative of the unknown function depends only on a time varying function f(t) (no dependence on y). Thus, the differential equation is given by
The solution to this differential equation is an antiderivative of the function f(t). The antiderivative is also known as the integral. We write the solution of the time varying differential equation as
Antiderivatives and Integrals
A function F(t) is an antiderivative of f(t) if F '(t) = f(t). From the formula for the derivative of tn+1, we see that
so the antiderivative can be written
The integral formula for tn can be written,
Note that the integral formula has an arbitrary constant c, as the derivative of a constant is zero. Since the derivative of a straight line is a constant, the integral of a constant is a linear function. Thus,
Below is a list of some other basic integrals, which are immediate results from basic formulae for derivatives.
We work some examples using these basic integral formulae.
More Problems are worked in the Worked Examples section.
Mercury Buildup in Fish in the Great Lakes Region
Fishing is one of the favorite recreational sports for people living around the Great Lakes. However, since the mid-1970s, the Michigan Department of Health has been issuing warnings about eating the fish that are caught from the Great Lakes and some of the surrounding tributaries and inland lakes. The greatest concern for these waterways is the buildup of PCBs in the fatty tissues because of the link of PCBs to cancer and their estrogen effects that appear to be disrupting development in some of the wildlife surrounding these lakes. (It should be noted that health officials report that PCBs have declined 90% since 1975 when they were first monitored.) Another major oncern of health officials is the level of mercury (Hg) that is concentrated in the tissues of the fish that are being eaten by people surrounding the Great Lakes. Mercury, a heavy metal, is a dangerous neurotoxin that is very difficult to remove from the body. It especially concentrates in the tissues of fish, and runs particularly high in the larger predatory fish such as Northern Pike, Lake Trout, Bass, and Walleye. The primary sources of mercury in the Great Lakes region come from the runoff of different minerals that are mined in the region and from incinerators that burn waste, especially batteries that are thrown away (most batteries no longer contain mercury). The mercury problem increases due to some bacteria that convert mercury into the highly soluable methyl mercury, which can enter fish by simply passing over their gills. As the smaller contaminated fish are consumed by larger fish, the mercury becomes more concentrated.
Health officials are particularly concerned about the problems that the higher levels of Hg in the contaminated fish may be causing in children with their developing neural system. Scientists suspect that too much mercury in the diet may lead to impaired development of the nervous system and learning disorders. As a result, there is a warning that young children and pregnant women should limit their consumption to less than one fish per month and especially avoid the larger, fattier, predatory fishes with some fish caught in certain areas to be avoided all together. (For more details on these warnings, the Michigan Department of Health has a webpage on specific problem areas and details on which fish to eat and how to prepare them. Note that the fat problem is for the PCBs, not the Hg.) Others are recommended to limit their comsumption to less than one fish a week and avoid eating the larger fish, such as Lake Trout over 22 inches.
So why do fish build up the dangerous levels of Hg in their tissues? One important reason is that Hg is not easily removed from the system, so once it is ingested, it tends to remain in the body. (The best way to remove heavy metals is the use of chelating agents.) Mathematically, this build up is seen by the integral of the ingested Hg over the lifetime of the fish. Thus, we would expect that the older and larger fish should have more Hg than the younger fish. Below we present a model for the build up of Hg in a Lake Trout living in some lake in the Great Lakes region. (There is not a warning for mercury in the Great Lakes surrounding Michigan, but there is a general advisory about mercury in all inland lakes.)
In the homework problems for the Linear Differential Equations section, Problem 13 gives the von Bertalanffy equation for the growth of a fish. A similar model could be used to describe the weight, w(t), of a Lake Trout. The record for a Lake Trout in Michigan is 27.9 kg (124 cm in length). Assume that the weight of a Lake Trout satisfies the differential equation:
We can use our techniques from the Linear Differential Equations section to solve this equation, obtaining the solution:
We can see that this solution levels off at a 25 kg Lake Trout. It takes 5.5 years for these fish to reach 2 kg and about 15 years to reach 5 kg. A graph of the weight of Lake Trout with age is shown below.
A fish will eat a quantity of food that is roughly proportional to its weight. Let H(t) be the amount of Hg (in mg) in a growing Lake Trout. By assuming that the concentration of Hg in its food is constant (though in fact, the larger fish will eat more heavily contaminated, larger fish), then the rate of Hg that is added to the tissues of a fish in the Great Lakes will satisfy the differential
where k = 0.03 mg/yr. With this information and using the information above, H(t) is found by integrating the right hand side of the equation above. This gives
The two integrals fit the formulae above, so we take the antiderivatives, and the solution becomes:
The initial condition gives H(0) = 0, so it follows that
Thus, the solution giving the amount of mercury in a growing Lake Trout is
A graph of the total amount of mercury in a Lake Trout (in mg) as a function of age (in years) is given below.
This shows that the amount of mercury in an aging Lake Trout increases substantially as it eats more and more prey containing mercury. However, it is more important to know what the concentration of mercury in the flesh of the Lake Trout that is eaten (as you generally eat the same amount of fish). Below shows a graph of the concentration of mercury in a Lake Trout as it ages. It becomes clear why the Michigan Department of Health advises against eating larger, hence older and more mercury containing fish. The concentration of Hg is measured in mgrams (of mercury) per gram (of fish), and is given by
Jared M. Diamond (1988), Why cats have nine lives, Nature 332, pp 586-7.
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Shorthorned Grasshoppers, Locusts and RelativesHugh Rowell and Paul Flook
This tree diagram shows the relationships between several groups of organisms.
The root of the current tree connects the organisms featured in this tree to their containing group and the rest of the Tree of Life. The basal branching point in the tree represents the ancestor of the other groups in the tree. This ancestor diversified over time into several descendent subgroups, which are represented as internal nodes and terminal taxa to the right.
You can click on the root to travel down the Tree of Life all the way to the root of all Life, and you can click on the names of descendent subgroups to travel up the Tree of Life all the way to individual species.close box
Recent estimates (Kevan 1982; Günther, 1980, 1992; Otte 1994-1995; subsequent literature) indicate some 2400 valid Caeliferan genera and about 11000 valid species described to date. Many undescribed species exist, especially in tropical wet forests. The Caelifera are predominantly tropical, but most of the superfamilies are represented world wide.
By insect standards the Caelifera are relatively homogenous; all have jumping back legs and are almost exclusively herbivorous. None the less they show considerable diversity. As adults they range in size from a few millimetres to more than 15 cm in length, are flighted or flightless, occupy virtually all non-marine habitats in which plants can live (including deserts, water surfaces, the crowns of forest trees, grasslands, or underground); they eat algae, mosses, the leaves and reproductive organs of ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms, or even the roots of the latter, with all degrees of foodplant specialisation from wide-range polyphagy to strict monophagy.
The Caelifera are probably the oldest living group of chewing folivorous insects. The Tettigonioidea may predate them geologically, but it is unclear how herbivorous these were, as many Tettigonioids are even now still carnivorous or omnivorous. The fossil Caelifera are reviewed by Zeuner (1941-1944), Sharov (1971), Kukalova-Peck (1991), Carpenter (1992) and Ross & Jarzembowski (1993). The split between the Caelifera and the Ensifera is not more recent than the Permo-Triassic boundary (Zeuner 1939). The earliest known representatives of an extant Caeliferan Superfamily are the extinct *Regiatidae (Tridactyloidea) from the Lower Jurassic (Gorochov 1995). Essentially modern Eumastacids are known from the mid-Jurassic, modern Tridactyloids and Tetrigoids from the early Cretaceous, Acridoids from the Eocene. Most, possibly all, of the modern superfamilies probably developed in the Jurassic.
Among other synapomorphies the Caelifera is distinguished from the Ensifera by the structure of the ovipositor, in which the original 6 valves are reduced to 4 functional ones with transverse musculature, by antennae composed of less than 30 segments, and by the absence of auditory organs on the prothorax - if a tympanum or other hearing organ is present, it is abdominal. The sperm are thin and elongate, with an acrosome inserted on the nucleus by means of two lateral processes.
A conservative view of caeliferan relationships is shown in Figure 4. Due to the virtual absence of explicit schemes in the modern literature, this hypothesis follows no particular publication, but it is shared by most modern morphologists (Rentz, 1991).
| =============== Tetrigoidea
| ============ Eumastacoidea
| ========= Trigonopterygoidea
| ====== Pneumoroidea
| === Pamphagoidea
Figure 4: Phylogeny based on morphology, modified after Dirsh (1975).
As in several of the insect orders, few formal phylogenetic analyses of the Caelifera have been undertaken. The major sources of phylogenetic opinion lie in the Discussion sections of primarily taxonomic or morphological publications, and are rarely supported by explicit data. Cladistic analysis of morphological data matrices is rare. Only recently have molecular data been used to examine phylogenetic relationships within this group.
One category of phylogenies is derived from wing venation, as exemplified by the schemes of Zeuner, Sharov, Ragge and Gorochov. In these works, however, the emphasis is on the Ensifera, which have a much more extensive fossil record, and the Caelifera are not treated in detail. Further, some of the Caeliferan relationships implicit in the scheme proposed by Sharov are not supported by any obvious evidence (see e.g. the critique in Amédégnato, 1993). A further problem lies in the identification of the plesiomorphic form of the venation. For example, Ragge concluded that the Pneumorids were the most primitive Caeliferans on the basis of the similarity of their venation with that of the Palaeozoic *Palaeodictyoptera. However, as these are not considered to be ancestral to the orthopteroid insects, their significance in this respect is dubious.
A second category of phylogeny is derived primarily from the male internal genitalia (e.g. Roberts, Dirsh, Descamps, Amédégnato). The most rigorous analysis of genital characters for large numbers of taxa (Amédégnato 1977) was based on phenetic similarity rather than cladistic methodology, and the original data matrix is not available. The resultant phylogenies are however generally in agreement with those derived from molecular data. Numerical phenetic analysis has also been applied to non-genital morphological characteristics to produce a phylogeny of the Orthopteroid orders (Blackith & Blackith 1967), but the number of Caelifera included in the sample was very small.
Molecular approaches to higher level Caeliferan systematics consist to date of a) cladistic analysis of allozyme polymorphism of glycolytic enzymes (Colgan, 1989), again using a very small taxonomic sample, and b) parsimony and distance analysis of a much larger sample of mitochondrial and nuclear ribosomal sequences by the present authors (Flook and Rowell 1997-2000). Perhaps surprisingly, and reassuringly, most of these diverse methodologies produce phylogenies in rough agreement with each other. Originally we analysed the different ribosomal gene sequences separately. Two molecular phylogenies so derived are indicated below (the phylogenies are consensus trees based on parsimony, distance matrix and maximum likelihood reconstructions).
====== Tridactyloidea =============== Tridactyloidea
===|===== Tetrigoidea | ============ Tetrigoidea
| | | |
| ====== Eumastacoidea | | ========= Eumastacoidea
<<===| | | |
| ====== Pneumoroidea sensu Dirsh <<===| | | ====== Pneumoroidea sensu Dirsh
| | ===| | |
===| === Pamphagoidea sensu Dirsh ===| |===== Trigonopterygoidea sensu Dirsh
=== Acridoidea |===== Pamphagoidea sensu Dirsh
12S + 16S mt rRNA gene tree 18S rRNA gene tree
Figure 5: Molecular phylogeny of Caelifera after Flook and Rowell (1997a, 1998)
The topologies differ in the levels at which they resolve, but the branching order of the Superfamilies is not contradicted in either phylogeny. The mitochondrial data do not resolve well the oldest branches, presumably due to site saturation, whereas the 18S data do not resolve well the youngest branches, due to insufficient divergence. For this reason we subsequently used combinations of these data sets, with appropriate precautions, to achieve a broader resolution. This strategy has now allowed us to resolve the phylogeny of the entire Caelifera at the level of Superfamily.
The resultant tree is the following:
<<===| |================= Tetrigoidea
| | |============== Eumastacoidea
| | |=========== Tanaeoceroidea nov
| |=========== Trigonopterygoidea s.n.
| |======== Pneumoroidea s.n.
| |==== Pyrgomorphoidea nov
|==== Acridoidea s.n.
Figure 6: Combined 18S, 12S and 6S gene tree (Flook et al., 1999, 2000)
These molecular data often support unequivocally one of several schemes previously proposed on morphological grounds. Thus, for example, the basal placing of the Tridactyloids, the relatively close relationship of the Tetrigoids and Eumastacoids, and the placement of the Trigonopterygoids as a separate group between the Eumastacoids and Pneumoroids, have all been previously suggested by some (though not all!) morphologists, and will probably be generally accepted without dissent.
Among our more original findings is the dismemberment of the Pneumoroidea sensu Dirsh, with the resultant superfamily status of the Tanaoceroidea, the placement of the Xyronotidae as the sister family of the Trigonopterygidae and their joint elevation to superfamily status as the Trigonopterygoidea, and the restriction of the Pneumoroidea sensu novo to the sole family Pneumoridae. These results are supported by very high levels of statistical probability. The data do not as yet allow resolution of the branching order of the Tanaeoceroidea and Trigonopterygoidea.
The other important finding concerns the Pamphagoidea sensu Dirsh. Some morphologists have seen this group as part of the Acridoidea, others considered the differences in genitalia to warrant separate superfamily status; it was however generally accepted that a) they are monophyletic or at least closely related and b) they are primitive with respect to the remaining Acridoidea. The ribosomal sequences however indicate that this group is actually polyphyletic; the Pyrgomorphidae is indeed a monophyletic clade branching off well before the Acridoidea, but the remaining taxa (principally Pamphagidae & Lentulidae) are embedded within the Acridoidea. We have formalized this finding by raising the Pyrgomorphidae to superfamily status, dropping the superfamily Pamphagoidea and redefining the Acridoidea s.n. to include the Pamphagidae & Lentulidae (see 'A Classification of the Caelifera'). The allozyme data of Colgan (1989), which included a pyrgomorphid, are compatible with our proposition, but do not confirm it, as no other pamphagoid sensu Dirsh was included. Recently, however, Eades (2000) has offered new interpretations of the phallic anatomy of pyrgomorphids, pamphagids and acridids which support the new classification.
The age of the Caelifera and their multiple convergence to common habitats make their morphological classification difficult below the level of the superfamily. For the past 50 years most weight has been placed on the internal genitalia, especially those of the male sex. These are effectively never available in fossil material: the palaeontological classifications, as in most insect orders, are founded principally on wing venation (Kukalova-Peck, 1991).
Modern authors have usually divided the living Caelifera on morphological grounds into 7 higher taxa, which we here treat as superfamilies (see Figure 4 above). The majority of living Caelifera belong to the family Acrididae of the Acridoidea. The difficulties in Orthopteran taxonomy have been discussed by Rentz (1991, p. 378) who remarks: "There are many disparate classifications of the orthopteroid insects (or positions thereof) at the present time. The overriding theme is the escalation of the rank of categories above the tribal level. The lack of congruence among authors contributes to considerable instability. Readers should consult Dirsh (1975) for the extreme of these views and Kevan (1982) for a synthesis of the classifications." The most disputed superfamilies have traditionally been the Pamphagoidea, which some authorities regard as insufficiently separated from the Acridoidea to merit independent status, and the Eumastacoidea, which may or may not include the family Proscopiidae. The position of these taxa is discussed in the Discussion of Phylogenetic Relationships, and the accessory page 'A Classification of the Caelifera' provides a proposal for a classification down to the subfamily level which takes in account the results of recent morphological and molecular analyses.
Additionally, there are two Permian/Mesozoic fossil caeliferan taxa, the *Locustopseidae and the *Locustavidae, each sometimes given Superfamily rank, but by others (e.g. Gorochov 1995) grouped as Superfamily *Locustopsoidea. These families are defined only on the basis of wing venation (trifurcate MA and a branched MP+CuA1 in the forewing, branched MA in the hindwing). At least the former family may be simply an assemblage of primitive forms and contain the early representatives of several of the modern groups.
- Shorthorned grasshoppers
- Shorthorned Grasshoppers, Locusts and Relatives
Amédégnato, C. (1974). Les genres d'Acridiens neotropicaux, leur classification par familles, sous-familes et tribus. Acrida 3: 193-204.
Amédégnato, C. (1976) Structure et évolution des genitalia chez les Acrididae et familles apparentées. Acrida 5: 1-15
Amédégnato, C. (1977) Etude des Acridoidea Centre et Sud Americains (Catantopinae sensu lato): Anatomie des genitalia, classification, repartition, phylogenie. Thesis, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. 385 pp. (mimeo.)
Amédégnato, C. (1993) African-American relationships in the Acridians (Insecta, Orthoptera). In: "The Africa-South America connexion" (W. George & R. Lavocat, Eds.), pp. 59-75, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Ander, K. J. (1939) Vergleichend anatomische und phylogenetische Studien über die Ensifera (Saltatoria). Opuscula Ent. suppl. II, Lund, 8, 306 pp.
Blackith, R. E. and R. M. Blackith (1968) A numerical taxonomy of orthopteroid insects. Austr. J. Zool. 16: 111-131.
Carpenter, F. M. (1992) "Treatise on invertebrate palaeontology. Part R: Arthropoda 4. Vol 3 & 5: Superclass Hexapoda", University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, Kansas.
Chopard, L. (1920) "Recherches sur la conformation et la développement des derniers segmentes abdominaux des Orthoptères". Thèse Faculté des Sciences de Paris, Oberthur, Rennes. 352 pp., pl. 7.
Colgan, D. (1989) Developmental variation and allozymic polymorphism in the enzymes of glycolysis in grasshoppers. J. evol. Biol. 2: 141-151.
Descamps, M. (1973) Revision des Eumastacoidea aux échelons des familles et des sous-familles (genitalia, repartition, phylogénie). Acrida 2: 161-298
Dirsh, V. M. (1956) The phallic complex in Acridoidea (Orthoptera) in relation to taxonomy. Trans. R. ent. Soc. Lond. 108: 223-356
Dirsh, V. M. (1975) "Classification of the acridomorphoid insects", Farringdon, Oxford, Classey.
Eades, D.C. (2000) Evolutionary relationships of phallic structures of Acridomorpha (Orthoptera). Journal of Orthoptera Research 9: 181-210.
Flook, P. K. & Rowell, C. H. F. (1997a) The phylogeny of the Caelifera (Insecta, Orthoptera) as deduced from mitochondrial rRNA gene sequences. Molecular Phylogenetics & Evolution 8: 89-103.
Flook, P. K. & Rowell, C. H. F (1997b) The effectiveness of mitochondrial rRNA gene sequences for the reconcstruction of the phylogeny of an insect order, Orthoptera. Molecular Phylogenetics & Evolution 8: 177-192.
Flook, P. K. & Rowell, C. H. F. (1998) Inferences about orthopteroid phylogeny and molecular evolution from small subunit nuclear ribosomal RNA sequences. Insect Mol. Biol. 7: 163-178.
Flook, P. K. Klee, S., & Rowell, C. H. F. (1999) A combined molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Orthoptera and its implications for their higher systematics. Syst. Biol. 48: 233-253.
Flook, P. K. Klee, S., & Rowell, C. H. F. (2000) Molecular phylogenetic analysis of the basal Acridomorpha (Orthoptera, Caelifera): resolving morphological character conflicts with molecular data. Mol. Phyl. Evol. 15: 345-354.
Gorochov, A. B. (1995) [Contribution to the systematics and evolution of the order Orthoptera] (Russian) Zool. Journal 74: 39-45
Günther, K. K. (1980). Katalog der Caelifera-Unterordnung Tridactylodea (Insecta). Dtsch. ent. Z. N.F. 27: 149-178.
Kevan, D. K. McE., Akbar S. S. and Chang Y-C. (1969) The concealed copulatory structures of the Pyrgomorphidae (Orth. Acridoidea). Part I. General introduction. EOS Madrid 44: 165-266
Kevan, D. K. McE. (1982) Orthoptera. In "Synopsis and classification of living organisms, Vol 2", (S. P. Parker, Ed.), pp. 352-379, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Kukalova-Peck, J. (1991) Fossil history and the evolution of Hexapod structures. In "The insects of Australia, second edition", (I.D. Naumann, Ed.), Vol. 1, pp. 141-179, Melbourne University Press, Victoria
Otte, D. (1994a) "Orthoptera species file 2. Grasshoppers (Acridomorpha) A. Eumastacoidea, Trigonopterygoidea, and Pneumoroidea". Philadelphia, The Orthopterists' Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Otte, D. (1994b) "Orthoptera species file 3. Grasshoppers (Acridomorpha) B. Pamphagoidea". Philadelphia, The Orthopterists' Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Otte, D. (1995a) "Orthoptera species file 4. Grasshoppers (Acridomorpha) C. Acridoidea: Lentulidae, Pauliniidae, Tristiridae, Romaleidae, Acrididae (part)". Philadelphia, The Orthopterists' Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Otte, D. (1995b) "Orthoptera species file 5. Grasshoppers (Acridomorpha) D. Acridoidea: Acrididae (part)". Philadelphia, The Orthopterists' Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Rehn, J. A. G., and H. J. Grant. (1958) The phallic complex in the subfamilies of New World Eumastacidae and the family Tanaoceridae. Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 110: 301-319, pl. 26-30.
Roberts, H. R. (1941) A comparative study of the subfamilies of the Acrididae (Orthoptera) primarily on the basis of their phallic structures. Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia 93: 201-246
Ross, A. J. and E. A. Jarzembowski (1993) Arthropoda (Hexapoda; Insecta). In: "The fossil record, 2nd edition", (I. Benton & M. A. Whyte, Eds.), pp. 363-426, London, Chapman and Hall.
Rowell CHF Flook PK (1998) Phylogeny of the Caelifera and the Orthoptera as derived from ribosomal RNA gene sequences. J. Orthopt. Res. 7: 147-156.
Sharov, A. G. (1971) Phylogeny of the Orthopteroidea. (translated from the Russian). Israel Program for scientific translations, Jerusalem. (Translated from Akademiya Nauk SSSR, Trudy palaeontologicheskogo Instituta 118).
Zeuner, H. (1942) The fossil Acrididae (Orth. Salt.) Part II. Oedipodinae. Ann. Mag. nat. Hist. (Ser. 11) 9: 128-134.
Zeuner, H. (1942) The fossil Acrididae (Orth. Salt.) Part III. Acridinae. Ann. Mag. nat. Hist. (Ser. 11) 9: 304-314.
Zeuner, H. (1942) The Locustopsidae and the phylogeny of the Acridodea (Orthoptera). Proc. R. Entomol. Soc. Lond. (Series B) 11: 1-18.
Zeuner, H. (1944) The fossil Acrididae (Orth. Salt.) Part IV. Acrididae incerta sedis and addendum to Catantopinae. Ann. Mag. nat. Hist. (Ser. 11) 9: 359-383.
Correspondence regarding this page should be directed to Hugh Rowell at
Page copyright © 2001 and
Page: Tree of Life Caelifera. Shorthorned Grasshoppers, Locusts and Relatives. Authored by Hugh Rowell and Paul Flook. The TEXT of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License - Version 3.0. Note that images and other media featured on this page are each governed by their own license, and they may or may not be available for reuse. Click on an image or a media link to access the media data window, which provides the relevant licensing information. For the general terms and conditions of ToL material reuse and redistribution, please see the Tree of Life Copyright Policies.
- First online 04 December 1996
- Content changed 23 March 2001
Citing this page:
Rowell, Hugh and Paul Flook. 2001. Caelifera. Shorthorned Grasshoppers, Locusts and Relatives. Version 23 March 2001. http://tolweb.org/Caelifera/13316/2001.03.23 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/
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To understand the drivers and consequences of climate change on timescales important to humans, the paleoclimate of ice cores, the glacial system and local climate patterns were analysed from the Whitehall Glacier. GPR/GPS (8, 35, 200 and 500MHz) surveys were carried out to provide an image of the internal layering of the glacier and to map the topography of the bedrock-ice interface and internal ... flow structures beneath the glacier. Snow sequences were sampled with high (1cm) resolution for analysis on snow chemistry, isotopic composition, dust content and mineralogy. The ice cores and snow samples were measured for major cations, anions and methylsulfonate, trace elements, oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratio, gas analysis in ice core bubbles (CO2 and CH4), dust concentration and mineralogy, Si detection and tritium concentration and dating the ice core. A 100m core was extracted, measured and logged. Each 1m long core had its core temperature measured (within 5 mins of core recovery), weighed to calculate density and determine the depth of bubble close off and firn/ice transition and investigated for crystal structure, melt and dust/tephra layer occurrence. Analysis of volume, grain size and mineralogy was taken to determine the source and to infer wind pattern and strength. Small chips were used to study gas bubble properties (including porosity, gas bubble size and geometry). The borehole was measured for temperature and light penetrations after drilling.
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A New Perspective on Mars - Temporary Exhibition
This is a past exhibition
15 February to
15 April 2011
Typical time required:
30 – 60 minutes
Since late 2003, the European spacecraft Mars Express has been orbiting Mars to study its geology, mineralogy and atmosphere. The main aim of the mission is to look for signs of water which is believed to have covered large expanses of the planet’s surface in its early history. One of the seven scientific experiments on board the probe is the German High-Resolution Stereo Camera, HRSC, and the images produced by this camera form the basis of this exhibition.
Each of the six natural forces that have shaped the landscape on Mars over billions of years – volcanism, water, ice, erosion, wind, and tectonics – is presented in large 3D images of the surface of the Red Planet. Viewed with red-blue 3D glasses, these anaglyph images provide a stunning impression of this alien and yet curiously familiar landscape.
This exhibition by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) is presented in partnership with:
If you happen to have a pair of red-blue anaglyph glasses, here are some samples of the 3D images in the exhibition:
Parasite Craters on Arsia Mons – On Arsia Mons, the southernmost of the three Tharsis volcanoes, a fault line runs through the mountain. Along the fault zone, a chain of “parasite craters” formed on Arsia’s flanks. The emptied magma chambers collapsed down to two thousand metres in depth.
The „Hourglass“ Double Crater – There is an unusual structure on the eastern rim of the Hellas impact basin. A mixture of ice, water and rocks has accumulated between several mountains and slit down the slopes: at first in a seven kilometre wide bowlshaped impact crater, and then further in a crater with a diameter of 17 kilometres situated 700 metres below.
Chaos on Mars – Once huge quantities of water forced their way through the Hydraotes Chaos landscape on their way to the northern lowland plains. Millions of cubic metres of rock were degraded. What was left behind is an unusual, wildly structured landscape with hundreds of three kilometres high table mountains.
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Suicide is a quintessentially individual act, yet one with unexpectedly broad social implications. Though seen today as a private phenomenon, in the uncertain aftermath of the American Revolution this personal act seemed to many to be a public threat that held no less than the fate of the fledgling Republic in its grip.
Salacious novelists and eager newspapermen broadcast images of a young nation rapidly destroying itself. Parents, physicians, ministers, and magistrates debated the meaning of self-destruction and whether it could (or should) be prevented. Jailers and justice officials rushed to thwart condemned prisoners who made halters from bedsheets, while abolitionists used slave suicides as testimony to both the ravages of the peculiar institution and the humanity of its victims. Struggling to create a viable political community out of extraordinary national turmoil, these interest groups invoked self-murder as a means to confront the most consequential questions facing the newly united states: What is the appropriate balance between individual liberty and social order? Who owns the self? And how far should the control of the state (or the church, or a husband, or a master) extend over the individual?
With visceral prose and an abundance of evocative primary sources, Richard Bell lays bare the ways in which self-destruction in early America was perceived as a transgressive challenge to embodied authority, a portent of both danger and possibility. His unique study of suicide between the Revolution and Reconstruction uncovers what was at stake—personally and politically—in the nation’s fraught first decades.
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The word “outlaw” is a very old English word (first recorded over 1000 years ago). Only in the last century has it come to primarily mean a fugitive living a lawless life. An outlaw, under the old English usage, was a person who was banished from the community. Banishment sometimes included the confiscation of all possessions. Outlaws were put outside the law and, therefore, deprived of its benefits and protections. The word “sinner,” as used in this passage, is very similar.
The word sinner, in modern English, conjures up the image of an immoral or evil person, very similar to the word outlaw in modern English. But sinner, as used in this verse, is closer to the old English “outlaw”. To practicing Jews, sinners were a class of outlaws who had by will, law, or circumstance of birth been placed outside the benefits and protection of covenant law. Even though they were, to some degree, racially Jewish, they could not socialize with practicing Jews, or attend their religious ceremonies. They also had no standing in Jewish courts.
Outlaws, or sinners, tended to congregate in communities, or “outlaw camps.” They would take the only jobs available to them, which were jobs the practicing Jews didn't want or, because of religious/cultural prohibitions, couldn't take. This made them doubly unclean to the Jews, but, other than their outlaw status, they were not necessarily any more sinful in their behavior than the Jews.
Jesus, ignoring the prejudice, freely walked from one camp to the next. To Jesus, the camp of practicing Jews and the outlaw camp were filled with the same people: sinners. All were guilty of breaking God's law, and we are all the same today. We are the banished of Heaven. Some of us live comparably moral lives, but it matters not to God. We are outlaws, the exiled of the Kingdom and we cannot change our condition ourselves. We were all born outside the benefits and protection of God's law.
Some, today, use, “I was born this way!” as some sort of excuse, imagining their behavior is justified by genetics. They are ignorant of the indictment in those words. Some modern pharisees will respond: “Yes, you were born that way. As trash you came into this world, and trash you shall remain.” The spiritually pure, Jesus and the Angels, hear that disclosure and may give no response, for, to them, that statement is a self-indicting truism, so there is nothing more to say. We were all born bent to sin. To those born and raised, like me, in the outlaw camp, we smile or laugh at the ruse. We know the only reason such an exclamation has any traction is because the blue-bloods are having one of their “culture wars” to make some favored condition or sin more acceptable in their camp.
But, in this passage, Jesus walked right into the outlaw camp. He came to sinners... outlaws. He walked right past the boldly painted, cultural Keep Out signs carefully erected by the Pharisees. He came to invite us to His camp. We are, by repentance and faith, welcome in His home... forever. That is gospel sure, and He is an amazing Savior of sinners.
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| 0.981496 | 704 | 3.328125 | 3 |
Posted February 2013
The Milwaukee County Zoo has been successful again breeding red-billed hornbill chicks (tockus erythrorhynchus). The Zoo welcomed a clutch of four chicks on 13 October 2012. At this time, the Milwaukee County Zoo is one of the only North American facilities breeding red-billed hornbills. The Zoo has another set of red-billed hornbill parents who have produced six clutches, 15 chicks total, over the last six years.
Red-billed hornbills undergo a very interesting nesting process. In their natural African habitat, female red-billed hornbills build a nest in tree cavities, sealing the nest with water, mud and feces. The female completely seals herself into the cavity, leaving only a narrow vertical slit, through which the male passes food to her during the next four weeks of egg incubation. She is entirely dependent on him for her food source. Once the eggs hatch, the male continues to pass food through the small, narrow slit, feeding mom and the chicks for the next three weeks. At about the six-week mark, mom will break out of the nest cavity, re-seal it - leaving a narrow slit for feeding - and then team with dad as they both bring food back to the chicks through the small cavity opening. When the chicks are fully fledged, chicks will emerge from the nest by breaking through the narrow slit. Sometimes, they also get a little help from their parents during this process.
The Milwaukee County Zoo’s red-billed hornbill family nested in a wooden box constructed especially for them, by Aviary keepers, in order to help mimic their natural habitat. You can see the new chicks daily, in the Herb and Nada Mahler Family Aviary.
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en
| 0.96667 | 368 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Have you ever noticed that when people start a question with “what if?” it usually ends up being a negative question?
- What if it doesn’t work?
- What if they don’t like it?
- What if the changes I make don’t work?
These are all fear based questions that lead you to focus on negative outcomes and what might go wrong.
You are less likely to take action to make change if you are only focusing on what bad thing might happen.
Asking “what if?” in this context keeps you stuck. If you stay stuck you are not likely to get the results you want in any area of your life.
And that is a pretty heavy cost to pay just from the way you use two little words.
But here is the interesting thing:
If you turn the use of “what if?” around, it can a very powerful way to motivate yourself to move forward.
For example, let’s look at the three examples above again and turn them on their heads:
- What if it not only works but it is a roaring success?
- What if they love it?
- What if the changes you make transform your life, work and relationships?
See the difference?
Asking “what if” in this context is much more likely to motivate and inspire you. If you feel motivated and inspired you are much more likely to take action. And if you are taking action, you are more likely to achieve the outcomes you want.
Isn’t that option a hugely better one than staying stuck because you have kept yourself in a mindset of fear?
Remember, you get what you focus on.
So the next time you are mulling an idea over and you catch yourself muttering “what if this, that and the other?” have a look if you are using it positively or negatively.
Because which way you use “what if?” will influence your outcome and results.
Yes, two words can be that powerful.
Train yourself to use “what if” scenarios to see the possibility, create feelings of motivation and move you forward.
Refuse to allow yourself to use “what if” to nurture fear based thinking that will keep you stuck.
Don’t underestimate the power of how the words you use impact your mindset and the results you get in all areas of your life.
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<urn:uuid:f9c2475c-d355-4cdf-86e7-78f7f424d48d>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://alidavies.com/heavy-cost-asking-yourself-what-if/
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en
| 0.946194 | 512 | 2.53125 | 3 |
HTML: How to Markup Subtitle
This page shows you the proper ways to markup subtitles, alternative title, taglines.
Using the right tag to markup is important, because otherwise search engine may not properly categorize your page. (aka SEO.)
Firsts of all, by W3C's recommendation, you should not use sub-section header such as “h2” to mark subtitle.
Here's proper ways that will be recognized by Google Search.
Using Colon in “h1” Tag
One simple way is to use a colon. Like this:
<h1>Lord of the Flies: on Human Nature</h1>
Using “span” in “h1” Tag
Another way is to use “span” tag for the subtitle. Like this:
<h1>Lord of the Flies <span>on Human Nature</span></h1>
Using “header” Tag
A more elaborate way is to use the “header” tag, like this:
<header> <h1>Lord of the Flies</h1> <p>on Human Nature</p> </header>
You should use CSS to style them. See: CSS Tutorial.
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<urn:uuid:d6f99cd7-ff1a-43c2-a893-68f78612f026>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://xahlee.info/js/html_how_to_markup_subtitles.html
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en
| 0.714652 | 266 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Introduction to "The Java Virtual Machine Specification, Java SE 8 Edition"
1.1 A Bit of History
The Java® programming language is a general-purpose, concurrent, object-oriented language. Its syntax is similar to C and C++, but it omits many of the features that make C and C++ complex, confusing, and unsafe. The Java platform was initially developed to address the problems of building software for networked consumer devices. It was designed to support multiple host architectures and to allow secure delivery of software components. To meet these requirements, compiled code had to survive transport across networks, operate on any client, and assure the client that it was safe to run.
The popularization of the World Wide Web made these attributes much more interesting. Web browsers enabled millions of people to surf the Net and access media-rich content in simple ways. At last there was a medium where what you saw and heard was essentially the same regardless of the machine you were using and whether it was connected to a fast network or a slow modem.
Web enthusiasts soon discovered that the content supported by the Web’s HTML document format was too limited. HTML extensions, such as forms, only highlighted those limitations, while making it clear that no browser could include all the features users wanted. Extensibility was the answer.
The HotJava browser first showcased the interesting properties of the Java programming language and platform by making it possible to embed programs inside HTML pages. Programs are transparently downloaded into the browser along with the HTML pages in which they appear. Before being accepted by the browser, programs are carefully checked to make sure they are safe. Like HTML pages, compiled programs are network- and host-independent. The programs behave the same way regardless of where they come from or what kind of machine they are being loaded into and run on.
A Web browser incorporating the Java platform is no longer limited to a predetermined set of capabilities. Visitors to Web pages incorporating dynamic content can be assured that their machines cannot be damaged by that content. Programmers can write a program once, and it will run on any machine supplying a Java run-time environment.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2211694
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en
| 0.955365 | 434 | 3.765625 | 4 |
January 21, 1999
A weekly feature provided by scientists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
From Lava Flow To Forest: Primary Succession
One of the most striking aspects of a newly formed lava flow is its barren and sterile nature. The process of colonization of such flows by plants and animals is called primary succession, and it is also found on other newly formed surfaces such as glacial deposits, large landslides, and river deposits. When new growth develops on previously vegetated areas that have been disturbed by floods, hurricanes, logging, bulldozing and the like, that process is called secondary succession.
Colonization of new flows begins almost immediately as certain native organisms specially adapted to the harsh conditions begin to arrive from adjoining areas. A wolf spider and cricket may be the first to take up residence, consuming other invertebrates that venture onto the forbidding new environment. The succession process relies heavily on adjacent ecosystems. A steady rain of organic material, seeds, and spores slowly accumulates in cracks and pockets along with tiny fragments of the new lava surface. Some pockets of this infant soil retain enough moisture to support scattered `ohi`a seedlings and a few hardy ferns and shrubs. Over time, the progeny of these colonizers, and additional species from nearby forests, form an open cover of vegetation, gradually changing the conditions to those more favorable to other organisms. The accumulation of fallen leaves, bark, and dead roots is converted by soil organisms into a thin but rich organic soil. A forest can develop in wet regions in less than 150 years.
On Hawaiian lava flows, primary succession proceeds rapidly on wet windward slopes, but more slowly in dry areas. The influence of moisture can be seen on the Kona side, where the same flow can support a forest along the Belt Highway but be nearly barren near the dry coast. Except for the newer flows and disturbed areas, the windward surfaces of Kilauea are heavily forested, but the leeward slope is barren or sparsely vegetated.
All the undisturbed flows on Kilauea, Mauna Loa, and Hualalai volcanoes are young enough to be in some degree of primary succession, and the patterns and relative age of lava flows are reflected in the maturity of vegetation. Only a few of the newest flows on the dry upper slopes of dormant Mauna Kea are young enough to reflect primary succession. Extinct Kohala volcano is too old to find such flows, and vegetation differences reflect rainfall amounts and disturbance.
On wetter slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa, younger flows stand out against a more uniform, older background, as the surfaces are recovered by lava at rates of only 20 and 40 percent a century. Small and more active, Kilauea renews about 90 percent of its surface in the same time period, and the resulting pattern is a patchwork of flows and vegetated remnants (kipuka). The many younger flows rely on the older kipuka to provide sources of plants and animals.
The native forest ecosystems have adapted to the overpowering nature of volcanic eruptions by being able to quickly recolonize from the many kipuka around new flows. However, the added losses due to forest clearing and alien invasion provide additional threats to which the native biota is not adapted. If too many of the native forest areas are cleared or taken over by introduced organisms, natural succession may not be able to provide a replacement native ecosystem on the younger flows. The continuing primary succession process may be already partially interrupted in lower Puna, where so much of the native forest has been cleared for development and where colonizers from nearby areas are mostly introduced organisms.
Lava continued to erupt from Pu`u `O`o and flow through a network of tubes from the vent to the sea. No surface flows from breakouts of the tube system were observed on the coastal flats. Lava is entering the ocean near Kamokuna and forming a new bench. The public is reminded that the ocean entry areas are extremely hazardous, with explosions accompanying frequent collapses of the new land. Especially vigorous explosions took place on Monday and Tuesday, sending spatter to heights of 100 m (300 feet). The steam clouds are highly acidic and laced with glass particles.
Two felt earthquakes were reported during the week ending on January 21. At 0610 a.m. on the 15th, a magitude 3.0 shake took place at a depth of 4 km (2.5 miles) beneath the upper east rift zone of Kilauea and was feld in the summit area. Later in the same day, at 1256 pm.m, residents of the Waimea-Waikoloa area felt an earthquake of magnitude 3.5 located northwest of Mauna Kea summit at a depth of 31 km (19 miles).
The URL of this page is http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/1999/99_01_21.html
Updated: 02 Feb 1999
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/1999/99_01_21.html
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en
| 0.953037 | 1,030 | 4 | 4 |
Border Gateway Protocol
|The TCP/IP model (RFC 1122)|
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the main routing protocol of the Internet. It decides how data gets from one place to another on the Internet. It was made to get rid of the EGP routing protocol to make the Internet more independent.
Most Internet users don't use BGP. It is the ISPs who use it to talk to other ISPs so they can send and get data from each other. It is one of the most important protocols of the Internet.
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<urn:uuid:7a157774-a2c8-47c1-bdf5-c52694bf2a78>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
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en
| 0.882845 | 111 | 3.984375 | 4 |
Detecting Water Loss
Leak surveys help pinpoint & eliminate water loss
The city of Hamilton, Ohio, decided to pursue an active leak detection program as part of an effort to reduce water loss. It also would serve to help stem the loss of overall revenue generated by the water utility. The utility did not have a regular active leak detection program, so the city decided to hire a specialized leak detection firm to provide a concentrated leak detection and location program to ferret out these losses.
When leaks occur in a pressurized water system, the water escaping the pipe creates a distinct sound that often can be detected by listening to the pipe that carries the water through the system. To perform this type of leak noise analysis, specialized equipment has been developed that can “listen” to the pipe. A specially trained leak detection technician can then “hear” this leak noise, analyze the specific sounds and trace the sound to the origin of the leak. Once located, the leak can be excavated and repaired. As simple as this seems, leak noise is not always easy to find or trace.
There are several parameters that must be met before conducting a successful leak detection program. Leak noise is a sound wave that can travel in the water and along the pipe wall for long distances. Piping materials have unique and predictable sound-carrying properties that affect the ability of the pipe to transmit the leak noise over a distance. Pipe can transmit sounds at specific velocities, but the speed of the sound wave is affected by several variables such as pipe material, pipe size, pipe joints, water pressure, soil conditions and water table in the soil. Larger pipe will transmit sound at a slower velocity than smaller pipe, and iron pipe will transmit sound at a higher velocity than plastic pipe. All of these variables need to be accounted for when attempting to listen to a water distribution system for leakage. These conditions will change from location to location within the distribution system, depending on the previously stated variables.
Leak detection used to be conducted by workers who would use probes placed directly over the water main or pushed into the ground above the main to listen for the distinct sound of water escaping the pipe. Leak detection in water systems had been performed in this manner for more than 100 years.
Today, the probes have been replaced with extremely sensitive transducer microphones that pick up the sound. The sound is amplified using a portable device so that a trained leak technician can hear it. When a potential leak has been identified, its relative location is documented.
The leak technician will return to the area a second time to listen again to determine if the noise heard was indeed a leak or if it was possibly water use by a neaby water customer service line.
In Hamilton, the survey process involved listening to every mainline distributing system valve, fire hydrant and selected service connections. The listening intervals were less than 500 ft between each listening point. Technicians surveyed 339 miles of water pipe buried under the city’s streets and parkways to ensure complete leak survey coverage of the water distribution system.
When technicians located an area with a suspected leak, they used a specialized computer (leak correlator) to pinpoint the leak noise source. The correlator analyzes the sound wave from the leak. Leak noise sound waves travel in opposite directions away from the leak on each side of the leak in the pipe. The sound waves have a specific velocity (speed) and bandwidth of sound that travels along the pipe wall.
Two transducer microphones are placed on the pipe, one on each side of the suspected leak, thus bracketing the leak. The sound is picked up by each transducer, amplified and then transmitted by radio to the leak correlator, which measures how fast the sound waves reach each transducer. One transducer will receive the sound wave more quickly than the other. The resulting difference in time indicates the position of the leak.
The leak technician will enter known information—such as pipe materials, pipe sizes and the total distance between the transducers—into the computer correlator, which has the velocities of the flight of sound waves for various pipe materials and sizes programmed into it. Once the leak is pinpointed, the leak technician will confirm its location by listening to the area directly over the location and try various combinations of positions for the transducers.
In Hamilton, the survey successfully located 102 leaks. One location identified as a leak turned out to be an almost fully closed valve that had been lost for several years. Nine mainline leaks—including previously undetected main breaks, 18 undetected customer service line leaks, 14 main line valve packing leaks on the valve stems and 61 fire hydrant leaks—were located and verified. Leak locations included areas where the water entered into sanitary and storm sewers undetected, so no water was surfacing above ground. In some cases, service line leaks did surface with wet spots.
Leak amounts are difficult to estimate because there is no accurate way to do so. It is only when the leak has been excavated and the leak orifice measured that a calculation can be made based on the operating pressure of the water system. To give a good idea of leakage amounts, a 1/4-in. hole at 60 psi can leak about 9 gal per minute (gpm).
Experienced leak technicians have developed methods to estimate leak amounts. Generally, they assign leak amounts to a specific type of leak just to get an estimate of the leak size. Leak amounts are directly related to water pressure inside the pipe, so the higher the pressure, the more water will escape from that leak. The estimated leak amounts are then totaled to get an overall idea of the amount of water loss.
Once the overall amount of loss has been determined, the marginal cost of water is applied to the amount of lost water; this is the production cost and not the retail cost of water, as the water never reached the customer. This cost then is annualized to gauge potential financial loss to the utility.
The estimated loss in Hamilton’s case amounted to $578,554 annually. The daily water loss was estimated at 452,880 gal per day or 314.5 gpm. The return on investment for Hamilton was calculated by taking the cost of the survey and applying it to the annualized loss. According to these calculations, the survey cost will be recovered by Hamilton in about five weeks. In most cases a water utility will consider a two- to three-year payoff a good investment.
It is important to note that a single leak survey may yield high returns, such as in Hamilton’s example. Once a survey has been conducted, however, it should be conducted regularly as a proactive measure to not only locate large leaks, but also to locate smaller leaks that may develop into larger leaks if left unattended. After a few surveys, the number and size of leaks will decrease, as will the overall amount of loss.
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<urn:uuid:9361d30b-49c8-4e51-ae50-6d714b24c3f5>
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http://www.wwdmag.com/leak-detection-products/detecting-water-loss
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en
| 0.959853 | 1,416 | 3.28125 | 3 |
|Scientific name:||Tribulus terrestris L.|
|Other scientific name/s:|
|Other common name/s:||bindii, cat's head, goat's head, yellow vine|
Catchment management authority boundaries
Regionally prohibited in the West Gippsland, Port Phillip & Westernport Catchments
Regionally controlled in the Wimmera, Glenelg Hopkins, North Central, Corangamite, Goulburn Broken and North East Catchments
Restricted in the Mallee and East Gippsland Catchments
Herbaceous plant - Forb (flowering herbaceous plant - not a grass)
Caltrop is a flat, sprawling, summer-growing, annual herb.
Caltrop has numerous green to reddish brown stems radiating from a crown. It grows prostrate to 2 m long with many branches and fine hairs.Stems can be somewhat erect when plants are shaded or competing with taller plants.
Leaves of caltrop are darker on the upper surface than on the lower. They are arranged in pairs, opposite on branches and unequal in size with each leaf consisting of three to eight pairs of opposite leaflets.Each leaflet is about 5-12 mm long and 3-5 mm wide, either sessile or very shortly stalked and hairy (more so on the lower surface) giving a silvery appearance.
Flowers are yellow, 8-15 mm in diameter and borne on short stalks in the axils of the smaller of each pair of leaves.
Flowers each have five petals.Flowers are short lived (opening in the morning and closing or shedding petals in the afternoon).
The fruit of caltrop is a woody burr with sharp rigid spines to about 6 mm long, with the burr about 1 cm in diameter (excluding spines). The burr splits into five wedge-shaped segments when ripe with each segment containing two unequal pairs of spines. Each fruit segment may contain up to 4 seeds.
Growth and lifecycle
Method of reproduction and disperal
The fruit of the caltrop is easily picked up by the feet of animals, vehicle tyres, rubber-soled shoes and almost any object which is placed on it, aiding spread over large distances. It is a common contaminant in vehicle cabins.
Fruit also becomes embedded in the fleece of sheep and much of the weed's spread may have been as a contaminant of wool. It is also a contaminant of dried fruit.
Seedbank propagule persistence
Fruit from the caltrop are formed continually throughout summer and autumn and up to 1,000 fruit can be produced on each plant. Caltrop can produce upward of 20,000 seeds per plant.
Buried seed remains viable for several years.
Caltrop prefers warm-temperate regions mainly on light-textured soils.
It has become a weed of cultivated crops, orchards, over-grazed pastures, stock yards, roadsides and neglected areas, particularly in districts with high summer temperatures and dry sandy soils where there is little competition.
The plant's extensive root system allows it to survive droughts. It is also tolerant of some frost.
In recent years the plant has invaded horticultural and agricultural crops and pastures. It has spread on vehicle tyres from towns to farmyards and to nearby pastures and cropping land.
In Victoria, caltrop is most frequently found in the north of the state, the Mallee, northern Wimmera and northern region.
The icons on the calendar below represent the times of year for flowering, seeding, germination, the dormancy period of Caltrop and also the optimum time for treatment.
Impact on ecosystems and waterways
Caltrop can be found mostly on dry sandy soils where there is little competition. Its presence may help to reduce soil erosion marginally during its growth and flowering period.
The weed grows best in disturbed areas with minimal vegetation. The plant has allelopathic properties which inhibit the growth of grass seedlings and its extensive root system competes effectively for moisture and nutrients. In dense infestations it can dominate the ground flora.
Spines on the fruit damage the feet of animals. When eaten, the fruit can harm the mouth and possibly the lining of the stomach and intestines. It is toxic to sheep and may present similar problems to native fauna.
Agricultural and economic impacts
Caltrop is a significant pest in crops as it is able to extract soil moisture from a great depth, allowing the plant to thrive under very dry conditions. In pastures, in the absence of other suitable fodder, animals will graze on new growth of caltrop potentially causing stock losses due to its toxicity.
The weed contaminates harvested product, particularly in the dried fruit industry, and is a vegetable fault in wool.
The plant can cause some agricultural loss and its presence may affect land value.
Seeds and seed-segments of caltrop cause injury to fruit pickers and shearers. Continuous interruption to remove the weed's spine may increase the time to harvest.
Social value and health impacts
The weed is likely to affect recreational activities as its sharp, rigid spines on its fruit can easily penetrate human flesh causing discomfort.Dense infestations of the plant does not hinder human access.
Prescribed measures for the control of noxious weeds
- Application of a registered herbicide
- Physical removal
Other management techniques
Changes in land use practices and spread prevention may also support buffalo burr management after implementing the prescribed measures above.
Parsons, W.T. and Cuthbertson, E.G. 2001, Noxious weeds of Australia, 2nd edn, Inkata Press, Melbourne & Sydney.
Department of Primary Industries, Regionally Prohibited Weed Information Sheet - Caltrop, 2010.
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<urn:uuid:5e8fd447-f670-4e56-976f-0bfe2b645c42>
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http://agriculture.vic.gov.au/agriculture/pests-diseases-and-weeds/weeds/a-z-of-weeds/caltrop
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en
| 0.917569 | 1,222 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Amaryllis bulbs are often forced to bloom during the winter holidays, sporting flowers in red, pink, white or a combination of these colors. There is no need to purchase fresh amaryllis bulbs each fall, as your old bulbs can be saved and forced into bloom year after year. While the plants appear to die after the blooming, they only go dormant. They must be prepared and stored correctly in order to grow and flower again.
Snip off the flower stalk after the last bloom withers. Cut it off at the base of the plant with a pair of shears, and then set the pot in a bright, sunny window.
Water the amaryllis when the soil surface begins to dry. Water until the excess moisture drains from the bottom of the pot.
Fertilize the amaryllis with a balanced soluble houseplant food once monthly when the foliage is green and growing. Follow label instructions for exact application rate.
Stop watering and fertilizing the plant when the foliage begins to yellow and die back. Cut the dead foliage off where it emerges from the soil.
Place the pot in a dark location that is 45 to 50 degrees F. Lay the pot on its side. This forces the bulb into dormancy. Leave the pot in this location for two to three months, then you can begin the forcing and blooming process again.
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<urn:uuid:1f1ad0a3-d4a9-4f68-8f8e-7dac6968fdff>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.gardenguides.com/112335-save-amaryllis-next-year.html
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| 0.918341 | 282 | 2.65625 | 3 |
find arc length of y=1-x^2 -1<x<1
i used the arc length formula, found the derivative of the function and squared it and plugged it all in and now i'm stuck at this point....
integrating between 1 and -1 the sq.rt of 1+ (x^2/1-x^2) dx
y= sq.rt. of 1-x^2. So, using the chain rule, i got 1/2(1-x^2)^-(1/2)*(-2x).
chugging through that i got -x/(sq.rt. 1-x^2). according to the arc length formula i square the derivative and I got x^2/(1-x^2).
Did I follow through right or did I make a mistake?
and how did you make all of your cool signs? I just started and I don't know where they are or how to use them.
hint: try combining the fractions
see hereand how did you make all of your cool signs? I just started and I don't know where they are or how to use them.
you're supposed to type them between [tex][/tex] tags. click the buttom to insert them to avoid typing the tags outand i can't get that stuff to work for some reason
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<urn:uuid:4fd19ce9-c459-4680-8a2a-b1a5f4726bf5>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://mathhelpforum.com/calculus/50511-solved-finding-arc-length.html
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en
| 0.945436 | 283 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Summer tends to be the time of year for many people to seek some quiet time between the covers of a novel set aside for vacation.
It is also a time when children, away from the classroom for more than two months, are encouraged to undertake literacy activities in an effort to strengthen and retain their reading skills.
Local libraries have so much to offer children and adults, not just in the summer, but also all year round.
One club offered at many libraries is the TD Summer Reading Club, which is a joint initiative with Library and Archives Canada. The theme this year is EUREKA! with a focus on science, technology, reading, creativity and art. The theme was chosen to inspire imaginations and a love of reading. Children registered in the programs will receive free reading club materials in English and French, and a chance to win prizes.
Studies show that children's reading levels often drop over the summer. A report, Literature Review on the Impact of Summer Reading Clubs, found that students, overall, experience significant learning losses during the summer weeks in both reading and math, equivalent to about once month on a grade-level equivalent scale.
With only 70 per cent of students in Grade 3 able to read at the expected level on standardized tests administered in September and October 2013, it is extremely important parents step up to the plate and further decreases.
It was the worst result in seven years.
Literacy is not just reading books. It could be anything that involves the written language, like reading a recipe to make lemonade or homemade popsicles during the summer, to playing a board game or organizing a scavenger hunt with clues.
In 2013, more than 15,400 children and teens participated in more than 1,300 summer reading club programs at Nova Scotia public libraries, reading nearly 120,000 books.
Most library services are offered at no charge to card holders, so cost is not an excuse. Start a new chapter this summer and open a book.
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<urn:uuid:8d774170-617e-4461-ad81-8f00b05dd499>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.trurodaily.com/Opinion/Editorials/2014-07-03/article-3785741/Fall-into-a-book/1
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en
| 0.964968 | 400 | 3.265625 | 3 |
The power of the telescope, computed as focal length of the telescope divided by the
focal length of the eyepiece.
High powers are useful for detecting faint stars, use up to 50X or 75X per inch if seeing conditions permit.
Type of telescope
A Newtonian Reflector uses a primary mirror and a secondary flat mirror.
A Refractor has a lens as its objective.
The Schmidt-Cassegrain has a corrector lens, a primary and secondary mirror.
(not applicable for Refractors)
Choose standard or enhanced mirror coatings (88%-95% reflectivity) as applicable to your telescope.
This is a qualitative evaluation from "Clean" to "Dirty". Pick the value that seems appropriate
for the telescope and eyepiece used.
Fully dilated Eye Pupil Diameter
Only relevant for observing at low power, the fully dilated eye pupil diameter varies between
4 mm and 7 mm, depending on the age of the observer but with large personal variations.
A seemingly counterintuitive result is that by reducing the pupil diameter (increasing the age) without
modifying any other value, the computed telescopic limiting magnitude will increase.
On second thought this result is quite logical: an observer reaching the same NELM with a smaller pupil should be able to see deeper
in the telescope at high powers, where the pupil size disadavantage disappears.
A reduction of the pupil diameter because of age will usually be accompanied by a reduced NELM value.
Experience includes training of the eye ("knowing what to look for"), thorough dark adaptation and
more efficient use of techniques like averted vision or hyperventilation.
The difference between a "Novice" and an "Expert" can easily amount to more than a magnitude.
Naked Eye Limiting Magnitude (NELM) near the Zenith
This is the magnitude of the dimmest star you can see near the zenith.
Typical values are 5.0 for a backyard site, 6.0 for a rural site, 7.0 for an excellent site.
Alternatively, you can measure the sky brightness with a SQM meter.
Under typical conditions the following conversion table applies:
SQM = 22.0 => NELM = 7.0
SQM = 21.0 => NELM = 6.4
SQM = 20.0 => NELM = 5.7
SQM = 19.0 => NELM = 4.9
Variations of several tenths of a magnitude depending on the sky transparency and the observer's visual acuity are to be expected.
Seeing Disk Diameter
The diameter of the image of a star (in arc seconds) depends on the turbulence of the atmosphere
and can vary from less than an arc second to several arc seconds.
You have to judge this at the telescope. Bad seeing negates the advantage of high powers.
Color Index of the star
Value varies from 0 for whitish stars, 0.5 for yellowish stars to more than 1 for red stars.
The angle in degrees from the vertical direction. Close to the zenith the sky is darker and fainter stars are visible.
Typically 0.2-0.6 mag./airmass. High altitude sites can go as low as 0.15, a value for an average site is 0.3.
Bradley Schaefer's article "Telescopic Limiting Magnitudes" in Publications of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific, February 1990
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<urn:uuid:b94e96f7-ad16-4319-9604-afeb32fec980>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.cruxis.com/scope/limitingmagnitude.htm
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en
| 0.890751 | 743 | 3.25 | 3 |
Herbs and spices might have the benefit of decreasing tissue damage caused by diabetes. The result is connected to the anti-inflammatory abilities of herbs and spices high in antioxidants.
Many herbs and spices contain phenols, which are compounds rich in antioxidants. Significant support has been made of late for the anti-inflammatory abilities of antioxidants. High blood sugar levels in diabetes are known to lead to inflammation and tissue damage, so the potential for high antioxidant herbs and spices to prevent diabetes induced damage was logically already present. “Because herbs and spices have a very low calorie content and are relatively inexpensive, they’re a great way to get a lot of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory power into your diet,” says study co-author Dr. James Hargrove.
Diabetes is known to lead to inflammation through excessive immune system response. High blood glucose levels induce a bonding between sugar and proteins called advanced glycation end products (AGE). This triggers an immune response that leads to inflammation and tissue damage.
24 common herbs and spices were used in the study. Some of the spices used were cloves (30% phenol content by weight) and cinnamon (18%), while sage (8%) and oregano (6%) are examples of herbs used for the study. It was found in the study that phenol content was directly related to preventing damage caused by diabetes by inhibiting AGE.
By inhibiting AGE through phenols, herbs and spices should also help prevent diabetes induced cardiovascular disease (CVD). Diabetes and CVD have been closely linked in past research due to diabetes related inflammation, and to inhibit AGE is to decrease this inflammation, lowering CVD risk.
The results of the study were not very specific to each individual spice, and study co-author Dr. Diane Hartle concludes that “if you set up a good herb and spice cabinet and season your food liberally, you could double or even triple the medicinal value of your meal without increasing the caloric content.” In other words, the researchers of this study believe that a good mix of common herbs and spices are best.
Source: Defeat Diabetes Foundation: Hartle, Diane. Hargrove, James. Fahmy, Sam. UGA news release. August 2008.
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| 0.962081 | 460 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Just two days ago on January 25, this female giraffe was born at Burgers’ Zoo in The Netherlands. The baby is named Annelieke, but the zoo staff has already nicknamed her Lieke.
Female giraffes give birth standing up. The baby emerges front feet first, followed by the nose, head, neck, body, and hindquarters. The baby drops about six feet to the ground and within minutes, struggles to stand up. With encouraging licks from mom’s 18-inch-long tongue, the baby eventually stands upright on wobbly legs – at least for a few seconds! Zoo staffers rarely assists in giraffe births, and most babies stand and nurse successfully within the first few hours of life.
Why the hurry to get the baby on its feet? In the wild, baby giraffes are easy prey for hungry lions and hyenas. The sooner the baby can walk and follow the herd, the better.
There are nine subspecies of giraffes, with each found in fragmented populations across central, eastern, and southern Africa.
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en
| 0.951035 | 223 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Classroom Activities 1
STEP 1: Begin with the familiar
STEP 2: Provide an example
Students will study four sample pages from either the teacher’s or a student’s picture book to discuss the concept of using an actual historical event as the basis or inspiration for a picture story. As each page is read, the students should be able to:
STEP 3: Story boarding
After they have created their own story in picture form, they should now tell their story by adding text to each picture. They will decide what the story is about – that is part of their creative or decision-making power. When students are finished, they should share their stories with the rest of the class. At this time, the students should review the complete picture book, A Time of Change.
Sample Student Picture Book Assignment
people who settled and lived in what is present-day New York State.
It is very challenging to find primary sources from the 17th century. A balance of both primary and secondary resources is acceptable. All sources should have appropriate citations. Check to make sure that all sources accurately depict the events surrounding Henry Hudson and his exploration as much as possible. While finding sources, consider the following:
This learning experience provides a forum to generate student understanding of general terms and phrases including copyright protection; fair use; plagiarism; and public domain. Students should recognize appropriate uses of others’ work as the basis of their own. In conjunction with this learning experience and your school’s library media specialists and/or instructional technologists, teach specific tips and strategies for locating, using, and citing primary and secondary source documents from print and online media. Students should be aware of any terms and conditions that apply to the images and text they select. Most copyright rules allow for non-commercial, one-time educational use of sources. If students create picture books for general public distribution or for sale, copyright issues may arise.
For more information, please visit the following Web sites of the U.S. Copyright Office:
STEP 4: Practice what you preach
The remainder of this lesson consists of a teacher-developed model picture book entitled A Time of Change, and presented in a PowerPoint format. The theme is based on the impact of Henry Hudson’s voyage of exploration to America. It is also a tale of the various historical and cultural changes that occurred in New York during its colonial period. The story incorporates multiple cultural perspectives and speaks of the roles of Native Americans, Europeans, and African-Americans in the development of New York. In creating their own books, students may choose to follow the same basic plot or chronology of events but develop characters who may emphasize another culture’s point of view. Some pages of the model have been hyperlinked to websites with videos. These will only work if you are showing the book in a PowerPoint format and have the necessary software programs.
The key components of evaluating this project are historical accuracy and the ability to incorporate historical sources to tell a story. Any teacher-made rubric should reflect this. This project allows for the use of a wide variety of media and therefore should appeal to all students.
Work with your school’s library media specialists and instructional technologists to organize a collection of reference books, picture books, primary/secondary sources, and approved Web sites for students to research the life and explorations of Henry Hudson. If needed and if time permits, provide instruction on how to locate print and online resources that meet the criteria for historical accuracy and general acceptability. Whether such criteria are teacher-, school-, district-, or class-developed, students should understand and apply common standards for locating and using sources for creating any text.
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/chf/midpic/picmidclass.html
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en
| 0.937541 | 749 | 4.09375 | 4 |
The Vatican honored Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes at the Sistine Chapel Wednesday, 500 years to the day after Pope Julius II held an evening vespers service to unveil the masterpiece to the world. Four years in the making, Michelangelo’s interpretation of some of the Old Testament’s most powerful stories -- three each from the creation, the fall of Adam and Eve, and the story of Noah -- would go on to become some of the most iconic images in Western art, and while it was certainly the talk of the town in 1512, the Sistine Chapel is now known the world over. In fact, it’s so well known that as many as 20,000 tourists line up each day to take a peek, making the chapel, arguably, the most visited room in the world.
The Vatican marked the anniversary Wednesday by posing a question: Are the estimated 5 million annual visitors ruining Michelangelo’s work?
The argument first came to light in a scathing letter by Italian literary critic Pietro Citati that was posted in the pages of the Corriere della Sera newspaper last month. The open letter ignited a heated debate after Citati denounced the behavior of crowds visiting the sacred site, saying they “resemble drunken herds.”
"In the universal confusion no-one saw anything," he wrote.
The disrespectful tourists, he said, unwittingly damage the frescoes with their perspiration, body heat and breath, along with the particles of dust on their shoes.
Continue Reading Below
At a vespers service Wednesday, Pope Benedict seemed to agree that the chapel had lost some of its majesty.
“When contemplated in prayer, the Sistine Chapel is even more beautiful, more authentic. It reveals itself in all its richness,” he said.
The director of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci, concurred, saying crowds may be hampering efforts made during a 14-year-long restoration project completed in 1994.
"Pressure caused by humans such as dust introduced, the humidity of bodies, carbon dioxide produced by perspiration can cause unease for the visitors, and in the long run, possible damage to the paintings," he wrote in the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
Paolucci said the Vatican is considering limiting access by putting a cap on the number of daily visitors.
“We will do this if the pressure from tourism were to increase beyond a reasonable level and if we were to fail in resolving the problem efficiently," Paolucci said. "It has a fatal attraction; it is an object of desire, that essential point of arrival for international museum people, for migrants of the so-called cultural tourism.”
The 135 by 44 foot chapel takes its name from Pope Sixtus IV, who commissioned it in 1475. While the Pope enlisted artists like Botticelli, Perugino and Ghirlandaio to decorate the walls, the ceiling featured only a blue sky with stars until Pope Julius II commissioned a reluctant Michelangelo, who at the time considered himself more of a sculptor than a painter.
The artist’s depiction of God reaching out to offer life to Adam is widely considered one of the most famous scenes in the history of art.
Paolucci said the Vatican had commissioned a “new, high-tech, radically innovative” air-purifying system to protect the work that will be “operative in a year.”
"Our era has not been graced with a new Michelangelo,” he warned, “but we have been graced with technology which allows us to preserve Michelangelo's work for the longest possible time."
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<urn:uuid:e146e6f5-fddf-4d11-9072-f4fe8d6fde30>
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CC-MAIN-2016-26
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http://www.ibtimes.com/sistine-chapel-turns-500-battles-drunken-herds-857691
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en
| 0.959375 | 773 | 2.90625 | 3 |
|Peacekeeping Operations of the UN|
According to the UN Charter, the UN Security Council is conferred primary responsibility for the maintenance of world peace and security. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China has been committed to the maintenance of international peace and security. It attaches great importance to the United Nations and supports it in playing its due role in maintaining international peace and security under the guidance of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.
In order to guarantee their success and sound development, UN peacekeeping operations must strictly adhere to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, especially the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in other countries' internal affairs. No UN peacekeeping operations should be launched without the prior consent of the countries concerned. All UN peacekeeping forces should strictly observe neutrality and non-use of force except for self-defense. Peaceful means, rather than coercive measures, should be sought to settle disputes, such as mediation, good offices and negotiation. Double standards and military interference under the name of the UN should be rejected. Any decision on launching UN peacekeeping operations must be based on practicability and capabilities, and no peacekeeping operation should be launched when conditions are not ripe. Peacekeeping forces should not become a party to a conflict, which would be a deviation from the basic purpose of peacekeeping operations.
Adhering to the above principles, China has participated actively in UN peacekeeping activities. So far China has sent 522 military observers, liaison officers or advisers and 800 men in two batches from engineering units to the UN peacekeeping operations, including the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission (UNIKOM), United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), United Nations Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ), United Nations Observer Mission in Liberia (UNOMIL), United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL), United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), and United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE).
At the moment, 43 Chinese military observers are still serving with UNTSO, UNIKOM, MINURSO, UNAMSIL and UNMEE. In January 2000, at the request of the United Nations, the Chinese government dispatched 15 civilian policemen to the United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor, the first time for China to send civilian policemen to UN peacekeeping operations. Now there are 55 civilian policemen serving the UN peacekeeping operations. In addition, the Chinese government has continued to take part in the UN's standby arrangements.
Meanwhile, four Chinese have laid down their lives, and dozens have been wounded in UN peacekeeping operations in order to support the United Nations in fulfilling the mission entrusted to it by the UN Charter.
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en
| 0.911375 | 591 | 2.625 | 3 |
6.3 Other Calibrations
6.3.1 Historical Galactic Supernovae
Early attempts to use the historical galactic supernovae to calibrate SNe Ia were based on Tycho's supernova of 1572 (van den Bergh 1970, de Vaucouleurs 1985). Recent improved estimates of distances to the remnants of historical supernovae (Strom 1988) imply, however, that SN 1572 (MB = -18.0) was significantly less luminous than SN 1006 (MB = -20.0) and Kepler's supernova of 1604 (MB = -19.7), which has led Green (1986) and Strom (1988) to suggest that SN 1572 may have been a Type Ib. In any case SN 1572 should not be used to calibrate SNe Ia, which are the brightest supernovae. Distances from Strom, apparent magnitudes from Clark and Stephenson (1977, 1982), and extinction estimates from various sources lead to a mean absolute magnitude for SNe 1604, 1006, and the (extremely uncertain) SN 185 (MB = -20.2) of MB = -20.0 ± 0.5. It seems unlikely that the remnant distance scale will decrease, because currently favored distances such as Strom's lead to a surprisingly high local supernova frequency that could be reduced by increasing the remnant distances (van den Bergh and Tammann 1991).
6.3.2 Nearby Extragalactic SNe Ia
Among the SNe Ia that have appeared in galaxies within a few megaparsecs, SN 1937C in IC 4182 and SNe 1895B and 1972E in NGC 5253 were observationally normal and not highly reddened, while SN 1986G in NGC 5128 was observationally peculiar and highly reddened and therefore cannot be trusted as a calibrator.
Sandage and Tammann (1982) derived a distance modulus µ0 = 28.21 ± 0.3 (4.4 ± 0.6 Mpc) for IC 4182 by assuming an average <MV(3)> = -7.72 for its three brightest red stars. SN 1937C had B = 8.7 ± 0.2 which, if extinction is negligible (Sandage and Tammann 1982), gives MB = -19.51 ± 0.36. Very recently Pierce et al. (1992) have derived a shorter distance to IC 4182 using I- and K-band photometry of its brightest red stars. Their calibration implies MB = -18.8. Observation of Cepheids in IC 4182 are needed to resolve the discrepancy.
Van den Bergh (1989) reviews the distance to the NGC 5128/5236 group, which he takes to include NGC 5253. Based on the planetary-nebula distance for NGC 5128 relative to that of M31 (Jacoby et al. 1988), van den Bergh recommends µ0 = 27.95 ± 0.13 (3.9 ± 0.2 Mpc) for NGC 5128 and concludes that most of the group members have distances in the range 3.2-4.6 Mpc. With a mean B = 8.35 ± 0.2 for SN 1972E and 1895B, a foreground extinction AB = 0.12 (Burstein and Heiles 1978), and negligible parent-galaxy extinction (Caldwell and Phillips 1989), the distance range of 3.2-4.6 Mpc leads to MB = -19.77 ± 0.45.
With standard assumptions SN 1986G comes out to be less luminous. Adopting B = 12.5 ± 0.1 and E (B - V) = 0.9 ± 0.1 (Phillips et al. 1987, Rich 1987), R = AV / E (B - V) = 3.0 ± 0.5, and µ0 = 27.95 ± 0.13 gives MB = -19.05 ± 0.55. This is fainter than SNe 1972E and 1895B unless NGC 5253 is in front of the NGC 5128/5236 group (de Vaucouleurs 1979, but see also van den Bergh 1980) or the extinction has been underestimated.
6.3.3 Thermal Emission
Current estimates based on thermal emission assume that the optical flux at the supernova photosphere can be approximated by the flux emitted by a blackbody having the same optical (or optical-infrared) color temperature. The radius of the photosphere can be derived by a method analogous to Baade's (1926) method for variable stars (Branch and Patchett 1973) or simply taken to be the product of the expansion velocity at the photosphere and an estimated rise time from explosion to maximum light (Arnett 1982b, Branch et al. 1983). During most of their evolution the energy distribution of SNe Ia is non-Planckian, but for a brief time near 25 days after maximum light the energy distribution from the U to the K band is close to that of a blackbody having T = 6000 ± 1000 K (Leibundgut 1988). With a velocity at the photosphere of 9500 ± 500 km s-1 (Branch et al. 1988), a rise time to maximum light of 17 ± 3 days, and the assumption of blackbody emissivity, the absolute magnitude 25 days after maximum light becomes -18.2 ± 1.0, which corresponds to MB = -20.4 ± 1.0 at maximum light. Very recently Jeffery et al. (1992) have applied this method to near-maximum-light spectra to derive MB = -19.8 for SN 1990N and -20.0 for the peculiar SN 1991T. These simple thermal emission estimates have the virtue of being independent of all intermediate astronomical distance calibrations but a critical uncertainty is how well the blackbody flux approximates the true optical flux (cf. Harkness 1987). The external error in the thermal emission estimates will become known when detailed spectrum calculations for SNe Ia (Branch et al. 1991) have been performed.
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<urn:uuid:b7769c93-9ff8-4ff6-bf1d-2d562dcefa2b>
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http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Jacoby/Jacoby6_3.html
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en
| 0.889369 | 1,285 | 3.21875 | 3 |
One of the most interesting aspects of Gov. Rick Snyder's Detroit school reform plan is the idea of turning schools over to teachers and principals to run.
Given the chance to build a school from scratch, what would teachers do?
Commenter "Little-Duckie" said he is a former teacher of the year and works in a suburban Detroit district. One of my favorite readers, I posed to him the question after he commented in the blog about potential changes to teacher training institutions.
It's a long and thoughtful response, and I wanted to share it with others and see what other teachers think about his suggestions.
Duckie describes a “school of hands-on learning.”
No grade levels. Instead start with a list of goals, things kids should be able to do. If young children are supposed to be able to write complete sentences with a capital letter and a period then that is one of their goals. When it comes to teaching and learning writing, kids who need to work on developing good sentence structure work on those skills. Kids who have already demonstrated that begin to work on paragraph skills. No kid should ever be stuck doing things he or she has already mastered. Different teachers would work with different kids based on the skills they need to develop, not based on how old they are.
Get rid of grading. Students need to demonstrate what they can do. They should develop a portfolio of work that represents where they stand in relationship to meeting their current set of goals. Every kid at all times should understand what he or she needs to do to improve their skills. Kids should be involved and engaged in setting goals for themselves.
No more dull worksheets. Kids should do things. In math when it comes to learning division, kids need to be moving manipulatives, dividing them into piles, gaining a concrete understanding of what a remainder is (leftover pieces that cannot be divided evenly into groups).
When a kid comes home from this school and a parent asks, 'What did you do today?' he or she should be able to tell them a whole list of activities they were engaged in.
No more distinct subject areas. Teach the history of science along with science. If you are going to teach genetics, discuss Gregor Mendel's contribution to the field. Things in the world don't happen in isolation. Science, art, music, history, language and mathematics all happen at once and are often interconnected. Students should be taught how these various disciplines are related and have been related throughout time.
This brings me to the idea that the teachers at this building need to be interesting people. They need to be readers who are interested in everything. If you are going to inspire kids, something about you needs to be inspiring. Can you draw, sculpt, write magazine articles or stories, play music, do you do science, explore chemistry or can you write computer code and build websites from scratch? These things are just some of the things I bring as experiences into my classroom. Teaching in a building full of other interesting, engaged professionals who are always learning as much as they are teaching would be inspiring for both staff and kids.
Parents need to be brought on board early in the process. Any kid is welcome at the school. Of course if you are continually disruptive then the school should have the right to drop you as a student. Every person who attends this school should know how important the mission is and all of the parents, students, administrators and teachers need to be moving towards the same goal - creating a culture of excellence. Students need to direct their own learning by setting personal goals and then meeting them.
Teachers would not teach one group of kids at the school but would work with ever changing groups of kids as students grow and move through their educational goals.
Teacher to student ratio is important. One teacher for every 20 kids. That way teachers can get to know their students and tailor lessons to meet more individualized needs.
Flexible school hours. If teachers need time to collaborate and plan, don't have them meet once a card marking and pretend this is professional development. Give teachers the opportunity to work together as part of their work day. Let them develop the program based on the needs of the kids in the school. Set aside real time for parents, students and teachers to generate ideas as a team on how to improve the school. Top down mandates do not work.
Kids need to be given real feedback on how they are doing, parent teacher conferences should be kid-parent-teacher conferences where all three parties sit down and discuss how each child is doing in relationship to meeting the learning goals. Kids should be the leaders at this conference, explaining what they have learned and describing where they are headed next.
This school needs to have lots of hands-on manipulatives in the math, science, art and music rooms. Even laboratory mice benefit from rich stimulating environments. Kids need to have a rich stimulating environment in which to learn. I would add a "making room", a large work room where kids could go to build catapults for math and science or just to create things they need as part of the learning process. The art teacher at this building needs to be an artist, and the music teacher needs to be a musician. Experts who make these areas come alive for their students.
I read Duckie's comments and was reminded of some of the aspects of the New Tech Network schools that serve as the basis for Kentwood's Global Tech program, Holland's New Tech High and the Kent Innovations High that is planned to open in the fall.
I'll pose the same question to other readers out there, especially the ones that say lawmakers have no business trying to redesign schools. If these reforms were left in the hands of teachers and principals, what would they create?
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| 0.975821 | 1,183 | 2.90625 | 3 |
The first three years of my life were joyful ones. I had loving parents who took me all over to show me off to my grandparents, various aunts and uncles and other relatives who took turns deciding if I had “Dad’s eyes” or “Mom’s nose” and generally spoiled me the way any kid wants. Then one day, a little brother appeared, and my life was never the same again.
Instead of being the center of my parents’ universe, now I had to share a room and travel around and listen to these same relatives making a fuss over this new little kid. It took some getting used to. Over the years, I learned to accept the little kid around and, occasionally, even enjoyed having a little brother, but don’t let him know that, so he doesn’t get a big head.
Bringing home a new dog or cat to a household that already has one can be just as upsetting to your existing pets if you don’t do your homework first. Many people, for example, think they can just bring a new dog home and let the dogs work things out themselves. For the lucky ones, this works out OK, but more often than not, people find themselves in the middle of a dog fight and wonder what went wrong.
Animals that live in packs, like dogs, establish a social structure within the group called a dominance hierarchy. This dominance hierarchy serves to maintain order, reduce conflict and promote cooperation among pack members. Dogs also establish territories, which they may defend against intruders or rivals. This social and territorial nature affects their behavior when a new dog is introduced to their household.
One way to overcome problems is to introduce the dogs on “neutral territory.” We encourage someone looking to adopt from the SPCA to go home, bring back their other dog(s) and let them all meet in the fenced area once they find the new dog they want to adopt. The dogs will be supervised by the SPCA staff to help make sure the adoption is a good fit for everyone.
Using positive reinforcement is important, too. If you expect good things to happen and stay calm while the dogs sniff each other and get acquainted, the odds are better it will work. Sometimes, the owner is so nervous that they get their dog nervous, and no new dog will be accepted because the dog is so stressed out that the meeting probably won’t go well.
If you are looking to add a cat to your family, introductions should be done at a quiet time when the household is calm and will remain calm for a few weeks. Avoid busy times such as parties or visits from relatives or friends. Ideally, give the new cat his own room to begin with. He needs to settle in to this “safe room” before meeting other pets. The room must be made escape-proof and quiet.
If possible, use a screen door on the newcomer’s room so that the cats can see and sniff each other but not touch. The cats can be allowed to meet through the screen or mesh after about a week. If not, the first meeting should be carefully supervised with the cats being distracted with food treats so they associate the meeting with rewards.
Whether you add a dog or a cat to your family, it is important to have patience and give everyone enough love and attention while they find their place in your family’s hierarchy. Remember, the new dog or cat doesn’t know everything about your home and lifestyle yet, and it takes a little time to get adjusted. You should plan on sleeping a few hours less than normal the first few days while you sort it all out.
It even worked for me. Eventually, my little brother got his own bedroom, and he learned to stay away from my toys and my favorite boxes of cereal. At the SPCA, we can’t help you find a little brother; but if you want to add a great dog or cat to your family, call 648-6863 or visit 199 Willow Run Road in Aiken.
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| 0.968626 | 844 | 2.5625 | 3 |
People who have been treated for cancer and had lymph nodes removed are at risk of developing a debilitating condition called lymphedema , which causes swelling in any part of the body, but most commonly the arms or legs. While it is a chronic condition, there are many ways to treat and manage the disease.
At Good Shepherd, we have specially trained occupational and physical therapists at several outpatient sites who can help patients manage the disease. Lymphedema therapists have received advanced training and may be certified by the Lymphology Association of North America.
Causes of Lymphedema
Lymphedema is caused by a buildup of lymphatic fluid, which consists of proteins, water, fats, cellular waste and even foreign cells, such as bacteria. The lymphatic vessels drain this fluid from your tissues and carry it to the lymph nodes. These nodes filter the fluid to remove waste and toxic substances. Eventually this fluid is returned to the circulatory system. Damage to the lymphatic system causes the lymphatic fluid to build up in the tissues, causing swelling.
There are two types of lymphedema:
Symptoms of Lymphedema
Treatment of Lymphedema
Lymphedema therapy consists of the following:
Although lymphedema is a chronic condition, with the right treatment patients can expect to lead normal, healthy lives. If your physician has diagnosed you with this condition, contact Good Shepherd for an appointment for lymphedema therapy .
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| 0.952883 | 303 | 2.671875 | 3 |
The side of an offensive formation that has more players at the line of scrimmage. This usually refers to the side that the tight end is lined up on, but it can refer to a number of different alignments. The easiest way to denote the strong side is to examine which side of the formation has more players lined up on the offensive line. The strong side is considered a better side to run to, since the offense has more blockers on that side to open holes for the ball carrier.
The strong side is the primary side for running plays. A tight end and fullback can give the offense two more blockers to take on the defense and create running lanes for the tailback. The rules that dictate where offensive players line up force an offense to have a certain number of players to be directly on the line of scrimmage, and this usually creates a strong side/weak side difference. The strong side can change before the snap depending on which players go in motion, as a tight end can switch from one side to the other. Defenses will respond to formations by rotating players toward the strong side, usually a linebacker or strong safety.
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| 0.963591 | 226 | 2.84375 | 3 |
rhododendron (rōˌdədĕnˈdrən) [key] [Gr., = rose tree], any plant of the genus Rhododendron, shrubs of the family Ericaceae (heath family) found chiefly in mountainous areas of the arctic and north temperate regions and also of the mountainous tropics. Encompassing more than 1,000 species, they are particularly abundant in Asia, whence many of the popular cultivated species and hybrids derive. They commonly have large, shining, leathery, evergreen, semievergreen, or deciduous leaves and clusters of large pink, white, or purplish flowers. Native American species include the great laurel, or rose bay ( R. maximum ), the common eastern species and the state flower of West Virginia; the mountain rose bay ( R. catawbiense ) of the southern mountains; and the western rhododendron ( R. californicum ), the state flower of Washington. The azalea and the rhodora are names used for similar shrubs of the same genus with more typically deciduous leaves. Rhododendrons are classified in the division Magnoliophyta, class Magnoliopsida, order Ericales, family Ericaceae.
See F. P. Lee, The Azalea Book (1965); C. L. Phillips, The Rothschild Rhododendrons (1967); J. Brown, Tales of the Rose Tree (2006).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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| 0.849261 | 331 | 3.5 | 4 |
Costa Concordia: An ecological disaster?
- 17 January 2012
- From the section Science & Environment
Even as the search continues for any further survivors of the Costa Concordia accident, questions are being asked about the potential environmental impact.
We have a big ship with tanks full of fuel, aground on an island in a sea fringed with natural protected areas.
So the worst case scenario is pretty bad.
Isola del Giglio, where the stricken cruise ship rests, is part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, the largest marine protected area in Italy.
Among its inhabitants are important plants and birds and some rare frogs, while the seas support coral, cetaceans and the occasional Mediterranean monk seal - a critically endangered species.
However, there is also quite a large human presence in the archipelago. On Giglio itself, only about half the land area is protected, and none of the seas around the shore.
Other islands further to the north and west - Elba, Pianosa, Montecristo - contain more natural riches.
To the east on the mainland, lies the Laguna di Orbetello, an important bird reserve.
A little further north is the Natural Park of Maremma - the only Italian habitat for at least one dune-dwelling plant, a stopover point for migratory birds, and the location for a successful reintroduction of osprey.
Elena Moutier, a scientific consultant working at the park, told BBC News that an oil spill there "would be a disaster".
"The Maremma Park is one of the most important regional parks in Italy, for the landscape, the ecosystem and the richness in endemic species of plants and animals," she said.
However, all of this is in the realms of the potential, not the actual.
As far as we are aware - and sources including the salvage company Smit and environmental group WWF concur - there has been no fuel spillage so far.
There has been a fair amount of confusion about what material is on board, with some reports saying the Concordia runs on heavy fuel oil and others citing diesel.
That's a crucial point if there is a spill.
While relatively light diesel would disperse fairly quickly in a swelling sea, heavy fuel oil is clumpy and clinging, as we saw in the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010.
The answer is that the ship contains both. Smit's figures are 2,400 tonnes of heavy fuel oil and 200 tonnes of diesel; the manufacturer of the ship's engines told BBC News that they are "fuel flexible".
For comparison, said Simon Boxall from the UK's National Oceanography Centre, the fuel oil consignment is equivalent to "about half of a day's output" from the Deepwater Horizon disaster "when spewing oil at the full rate".
But the ship's proximity to the coast means a spill would be "damaging", he said.
Smit's experts and equipment are now in place near the stricken ship, and are ready to begin extracting the oil. The process involves drilling holes at the highest and lowest points of the tanks and fitting valves to them.
Seawater exerts pressure from the bottom, forcing the oil up and and out of the top valve. The sticky oil is encouraged to flow by using heat from a steam generator on a nearby barge.
The process could take two to four weeks.
The big risk in the meantime would be if the vessel began breaking up.
During a news conference on Tuesday morning, contractors were optimistic that it would not.
The seas are said to be calm; and although the Concordia is perched in coastal shallows with the potential to tumble into deeper waters, Smit believes it's unlikely to move.
"Based on the first underwater pictures, there are quite a number of [hull] penetrations on the starboard side," operations manager Kees van Essen told reporters.
"They are acting as an anchor; so although we never underestimate the danger, the chance of the vessel sliding down into deeper water is minimal."
In case of spillages in the meantime, the site is surrounded by booms - although as Deepwater Horizon proved, their utility as barriers can be substantially less than promised.
Perhaps the closest recent comparator is the Rena, the container ship that struck New Zealand's Astrolabe Reef in October.
Again, the site was in an area of outstanding ecological importance. And the pounding seas eventually broke the ship in two.
Nevertheless, the incident fell a long way short of constituting an environmental disaster - mainly because salvage operators were able to pump out the vast majority of the oil.
So far, the indications are that the Concordia may prove even less damaging - at least from an environmental point of view.
In both cases, there's a wider question. Neither vessel was on its scheduled course, for different reasons.
But parts of the Italian government and environment groups are asking whether such large vessels should be able to travel through, or even close to, areas that are supposed to be protected.
As Italy's Environment Minister Corrado Clini put it, referring to the passenger boats that ferry people around the Venetian lagoon: "That's enough, we have to stop treating these ships like they were simple vaporetti [small ferries]."
But cargo ships and cruise liners have commercial imperatives to go where they go. We will see whether Mr Clini wins the argument he is bound to have if he is serious about reining them in.
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en
| 0.958614 | 1,148 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Rate of aging of young adults
excelife at earthlink.net
Sun Oct 11 04:37:39 EST 1998
In article <3620365c.122538298 at nntp.ix.netcom.com>, ufotruth at ix.netcom.com
>From what I understand it seems to me that the aging of an individual
>would not have to be caused by a build up of senescent cells for the
>telomeric theory of aging to be valid. We know for a fact that as a
>cell divides up to the limit of around 32 divisions that it "ages".
>Its division rate slows down, several changes takes place, and it
>generally "ages" in negative ways. So it seems to me that a human
>could age, because his cells are aging, without ONE SINGLE SENESCENT
>cell in his body.
>Of course a build up of senescent cells could still occur and
>contribute to aging. But it would not be required for telomere
>shortening to be causing aging.
>Do you agree or disagree with me?
In discussing replicating cellular systems I would have to disagree.
In doing a literature search I was unable to find any research that suggest
there is an age related change in these cells until they, or at least a
subset of the cells, were of sufficient age or had replicated enough times to
have reached senescence.
Now relatively few of these studies actually "controlled" for senescence or
replicative capacity but the age related changes were all within the time
frames that we would expect senescence to occur.
In vivo studies of cells in culture do show a "build up" in in-appropriate
phenotype expression. "Moreover, senescent cells express genes that have
long-range, pleiotropic effects - degradative enzymes, growth factors, and
inflammatory cytokines. ...the altered differentiation may be critical for
compromising the function and integrity of organs like the skin during
aging.", (Campisi J, J Investig Dermatol Symp Proc 1998 Aug;3(1):1-5, "The
role of cellular senescence in skin aging.").
This phenomena and the increased time between doublings of a culture are
consistent with an accumulation of senescent cells. No other "aging"
mechanism is necessary to explain these results.
Are there other ways of analyzing this same data? Of course there are and
research into many of them are continuing. From what I can see the telomeric
theory of aging has the best fit for the available data and has few if any
contradictory results. Most other aging theories can not explain all of the
phenomena seen and/or have contradictory findings in-consistent with their
(Note:see my next post regarding aging in non-replicating cells.)
Thomas Mahoney, Pres.
Lifeline Laboratories, Inc.
More information about the Ageing
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| 0.925627 | 645 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Kavouras, Stavros A. PhD; Anastasiou, Costas A. PhD
Life on earth has evolved as a consequence of the presence of water. Although some alternative theories have been suggested for the generation of life in nonaqueous environments, virtually all known living systems depend on water for survival. Water has many properties that seem indispensable for the functioning of cells.1 It is an excellent solvent for ions, required for nerve signaling, enzyme activity, mineralization of organic compounds, and the properties of DNA. It is also a master of weak intermolecular interactions, such as hydrogen bonds, necessary for the protein binding in their substrates, and hydrophobic reactions, necessary for protein structure. The high specific heat of water, in relation to other substances, makes it capable of absorbing or losing heat without a large temperature change, thus protecting living cells from massive temperature changes that could cause cell impairment or even death.
Water movement through the gastrointestinal wall has great significance, not only for the delivery of ingested fluids but also for the digestion of other nutrients and as a defense from pathogens. In fact, there is equilibrium between intestinal water secretion (through the pancreatic juices, bile, gastric secretion, and saliva) and water absorption that should be maintained within narrow limits, because disturbances in this equilibrium result in diarrhea or constipation. Water movement across the intestinal epithelium may occur paracellularly through the tight junctions and transcellularly through cell membranes. Experiments in canine intestinal segments have shown that the potential for water absorption differs among the various parts of the intestine. Specifically, the large intestine has a greater capacity to absorb a hypotonic solution compared with the jejunum or the ileum, whereas a negative net water flux is observed in the duodenum in the presence of a hypotonic solution.2 However, most of the water entering the intestine is absorbed in the small intestine. From a total of approximately 8 L, about 6.5 L is absorbed through the small intestine, whereas the absorptive function of the large intestine is limited to about 1.3 L.3 Although water may diffuse to some extent through cellular membranes, the hydrophobic properties of their lipid bilayer do not allow the degree of absorption required. Instead, the greater part of absorbed water is transferred through channel systems, such as the aquaporins.4 Water movement in the gastrointestinal tract is regulated by osmotic gradients and is linked to ionic movements. Specifically, absorption of water is linked primarily to the movement of sodium ions, whereas secretion is linked to the movement of chloride ions.5 This linkage to ionic movements is less essential to the large intestine, where absorption of even distilled water may occur.6
Distribution of Water in Body Fluid Compartments
The fluid compartments of the human body include the intracellular fluid, accounting for 55% of total body water, and the extracellular fluid compartment. The latter can be further subdivided into the intravascular fluid compartment or plasma (7.5% of total body water), the rapidly equilibrating interstitial fluid and lymph (20%), and some smaller compartments (the slowly equilibrating interstitial fluid of dense connective tissue and cartilage, the inaccessible interstitial fluid in the bones, and the transcellular fluid, which is produced by the secretory cells).7 Water distribution across the capillary endothelium is controlled by the balance of filtration forces (that tend to move water from the plasma to the interstitial space) and reabsorption forces, as first described by Starling.8 The main filtration forces are the hydrostatic pressure that is caused by the pumping of the heart and a less potent colloid osmotic pressure of a negligible amount of protein that is trapped in the interstitial space. The major reabsorption pressure is the plasma osmotic pressure that is attributed to the solute molecules in the plasma.
Integrated Regulation of Body Fluid Balance
Water homeostasis is maintained by mechanisms that sense changes in intravascular volume and plasma osmolality.9 Changes in the intravascular volume are sensed by peripheral volume and pressure receptors that induce the release of the antidiuretic hormone, arginine vasopressin, from the neurohypophysis. In addition, neuron-like cells, the osmoreceptors, located within the central nervous system, sense changes in plasma osmolality and also trigger antidiuretic hormone release and the induction of thirst. A second important humoral factor in body fluid regulation is angiotensin II. This hormone may act directly, by stimulating the release of antidiuretic hormone in the central nervous system, or indirectly, by stimulating aldosterone release, which in turn induces sodium conservation, a subsequent increase in plasma osmolality, and expansion of the extracellular volume. Antidiuretic hormone is the key factor in renal water handling, promoting water reabsorption in the nephron. Specifically, antidiuretic hormone binds to its receptor in the basolateral membrane of the principal collecting duct cells, initiating a cascade of reactions that lead to the translocation of the aquaporin 2 water channels from intracellular vesicles to the apical membrane, rendering this membrane permeable to water.10
Human Requirements and Recommendations
Human Body Water Content
In healthy adult humans, total body water represents an average of 59% for males and 56% for females, according to body mass. Large variation is observed across and within age groups, with infants having higher values of water content.11 These variations may be attributed solely to differences in body composition, because it has been recognized that the hydration status of fat-free body mass is not altered by age or sex.12 These relatively high amounts of body fluids are continuously recycled, with equilibrium being established when fluid intake matches fluid loss. In fact, a water deficit may occur over the course of a few hours when intake is reduced or losses are increased.
Human Body Water Functions
Body fluids serve a variety of functions in the human body, including a key role in the digestion, absorption and transportation of other nutrients, formation and stability of cell structures, removal of waste products and toxins, as a solvent for biochemical reactions, thermoregulation of the human body, and lubrication of cavities such as joints. Cell physiologists also have discovered new functions of cellular water. Because water is the main constituent of the cells, cellular water and fluxes of water between extracellular and intracellular compartments are the primary factors affecting cell volume, which in turn regulates a wide variety of cellular functions, such as epithelial transport, metabolism, excitation, hormone release, migration, cell proliferation, or even cell death.13
Given the numerous biological functions of water, as well as the fact that it is a main constituent of the human body, it is a surprising fact that water is often ignored as a nutrient. Most textbooks consider protein, carbohydrate, and fat as the macronutrients because these nutrients provide energy. However, if we consider the quantities of water and the energy-producing nutrients needed for an average person, it becomes clear that water is the quintessential macronutrient. However, many problems and considerations have arisen in the study of water in terms of human physiology and nutrition.
Defining Water Requirements
Defining the nutritional status of water as a nutrient, usually referred to as fluid balance or hydration status and subsequently fluid needs, is a challenging task. The main reason for this is that there is no reserve of water in the human body, and thus, fluids must be continuously recycled. Ideally, fluid balance may be determined by measuring fluid gain (via nutrition and metabolic water production) and fluid losses (via the urinary system, the respiratory tract, the skin, and the gastrointestinal system) under controlled environmental conditions and over a set, relatively small amount of time. Such studies have yielded fluid needs in the range of 1.6 to 3.2 L, depending on the environmental conditions and the physical activity performed by the subjects.14 More recently, isotope-labeled water has been used to measure body fluid turnover and water needs by following the decline in hydrogen isotope over time. This technique offers the advantage of measuring fluid balance under real conditions of daily living and has produced similar results to those of water balance studies.15
Fluid dynamics may vary considerably within the same person over a period of a day, or even a few hours. Therefore, on many occasions, hydration status (ie, the water status of the body at a specific time point) may be of more interest than overall fluid balance. Many markers have been proposed for the assessment of hydration status, including hematologic indices (such as plasma osmolality and sodium concentrations) and urinary indices (ie, urine osmolality, urine color, and specific gravity); the assessment of total body water by bioelectrical impedance; and cardiovascular function measures (such as heart rate, blood pressure, and orthostatic tolerance).16 These markers may provide a reasonable estimation of a deficiency (dehydration) or an overload (overhydration) of fluid in the body; however. they cannot provide estimates of actual water needs.
A general problem in the study of water as a nutrient is that there is a scarcity of studies examining the effect of long-term water deficiency and its complications in the human body. Acute mild dehydration (a 4% change in body weight) provokes unfavorable effects in the cardiovascular function as plasma volume drops. These effects include an increase in stroke volume and a concomitant increase in heart rate, to maintain constant cardiac output.17 In the periphery, dehydration decreases skin blood flow and sweating,18 thus compromising thermoregulation and increasing body core temperature.19 However, these levels of water deficiency are fixed rapidly by a decrease in body water loss and the stimulation of thirst, 2 mechanisms that will be discussed later.
Long-term effects of water deprivation have not been described in detail. The only experiments describing severe dehydration conditions were performed in 1944. In one of these experiments, involving a 6-day period of water and/or food deprivation in healthy male soldiers, it was found that body fluid loss follows a biphasic manner: during the first 48 hours, the loss of fluid occurred predominantly from the extracellular space and subsequently from the intracellular space, with the net effect being equal for both spaces at the end of the experiment.20 Lassitude was pronounced, and the authors reported that the subjects were "irritable and foolishly argumentative." Ingestion of a hypotonic sodium solution when subjects were already dehydrated resulted in a reduction of water loss, and the same effect was observed when subjects ingested carbohydrates, whereas total fasting increased the negative water balance. These notions highlight the importance of water in retaining internal homeostasis. In the case of salt ingestion, retention of water would be necessary to maintain plasma electrolytes in normal ranges, whereas in the case of carbohydrate ingestion, their protein-sparing effect decreased the need for removal of the nitrogen products of protein break down, as occurred in the case of total fasting.
Another study of water deprivation with balanced energy intake for 3 to 4 days, published at the same time, described decreased efficiency and unhealthy appearance after dehydration, a slight change in voice, sunken and pale face, and cyanosed lips as characteristics of water deprivation that vanished a few hours after restoration of fluid.21 This study reported that there was practically no increase in the plasma proteins or hematocrit, indicating that the volume of the blood was maintained at the expense of some other fluid compartment. Dehydration led to an increased production of urea, indicating that water deprivation is accompanied by catabolism of body tissues, even if the energy needs are met.
Although a clear picture of human physiology under chronic and severe dehydration has not been obtained, the aforementioned studies indicate that chronic dehydration represents a threat to body homeostasis and health. Numerous later studies, mainly epidemiological in nature, have explored the association between hydration status and health. Although not consistent, hydration status and fluid intake have been associated with many chronic diseases, such as urolithiasis, urinary tract infections, bladder and colon cancer, constipation, bronchopulmonary disorders, hypertension, cerebral infarct, fatal coronary heart disease, venous thromboembolism, mitral valve prolapse, diabetic ketoacidosis, dental diseases, gallstones, glaucoma, and dental diseases.22 This era of science provides continuous, promising research.
The period that is compatible with life, under conditions of full water deprivation, is not known. Some anecdotal cases of accidental incidents, such as the runner Mauro Prosperi, who lost his way in a sandstorm during the Marathon des Sables, have shown that water deprivation may be sustained for more than 9 days, with losses of body water as high as 13 kg. In critically ill, end-point patients, refusal to take rehydration and nutrition has been considered as a method of euthanasia that takes several days to a few weeks until death occurs.23 This observation is certainly not applicable to healthy humans, because death may not be attributed solely to dehydration; however, it may indicate that life may be sustained for several weeks under full water deprivation in healthy humans.
Most nutrients display toxicity if their intake exceeds a critical threshold that represents the tolerable upper intake level. For water, no such threshold has ever been established, assuming that the functioning kidney removes the excess fluid. However, in some circumstances, massive fluid intake may indeed provoke toxicity. In psychiatric patients, particularly those with schizophrenia, polydipsia (excess intake of fluids) occurs frequently and may lead to dilutional hyponatremia, a condition also known as water intoxication. Although this kind of hyponatremia is usually associated with an inability to excrete water because of kidney and/or antidiuretic hormone disturbances, some patients are reported to drink such a large fluid volume that they exceed the ability of the kidney to excrete water.24 This kind of hyponatremia leads to brain edema, causing neurological symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, delirium, ataxia, seizures, and coma, which in turn worsen the psychiatric symptoms of these patients.25 Water intoxication with hyponatremia may appear also in many other clinical conditions accompanied by a primary defect in the renal excretion of free water and a subsequent expansion of extracellular fluid, but these cases are not related to fluid consumption.26 Based on the dietary intake data from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1988-1994), the top 99th percentile of men aged 31 to 50 years was consuming 8.1 L of fluids per day, and 5% of that age group, more than 6.4 L/d. In a recent study, 44 men aged 55 to 75 years increased their water intake by 2 L/d for 2 months, resulting in an improved lower urinary tract function.27 In summary, because hyponatremia is extremely rare, no tolerable upper limit has been set by the Institute of Medicine.14
An interesting condition of water intoxication is exertional hyponatremia, occurring in some athletes during long ultraendurance events (>3 hours). This type of water toxicity is associated with a fluid intake during exercise that exceeds fluid losses via the sweat, without a concomitant replacement of sodium lost.28 Decreased free water clearance from the kidney, because of redistribution of cardiac output to the active muscle and the skin capillary bed, as well as inappropriate secretion of antidiuretic hormone may contribute to this kind of water toxicity.29 However, no adverse effects have been reported as a result of chronically high intakes of fluids, when intake approximates losses.
The first official and specific guideline for water intake was reported in 1964 by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academies of Science of the United States.30 This report recommended that a reasonable standard for calculating water allowance is 1 mL/kcal of food. In the 1989 recommendations of the same body, it was stated that because of the low risk of water intoxication, water requirements may increase to 1.5 mL/kcal, to cover variations in activity level, sweating, and solute load.
A systematic approach to water requirements appeared only recently, in the latest version of the Dietary Reference Intakes.14 These recommendations include absolute values (in liters per day) as recommendations, in terms of adequate intake across all age groups, total water intake (a combination of drinking water, beverages, and food), and water intake by drinking water and beverages, assuming that food contributes to water intake by approximately 19% (Table). Adequate intakes for water vary from 0.7 L/d of total water in infants to 3.7 and 2.7 L/d in male and female adults, respectively. Special recommendations are provided for pregnancy and breast-feeding. Recently, the European Food Safety Authority prepared a report on water requirements [EFSA Panel Dietetics Products, Nutrition (NDA); Scientific Opinion on Dietary Reference Values for Water. EFSA J. 2010;8(3):1459; available online at www.efsa.europa.eu]. As in the recommendations provided by the National Academies of Science of the United States, the European committee provides adequate intakes for water in terms of absolute values for many age groups; however, the panel considers the requirements of adolescents beyond the age of 14 years, as well as the requirements of the elderly as being the same as those of adults. Proposed intakes for adults were set at 2.5 and 2.0 L/d for males and females, respectively. Interestingly, these values are considerably lower than those proposed for the population of the United States.
Table. Dietary Refer...Image Tools
Water is the most abundant and the most frequently recycled element in the human body. Its numerous functions, in combination with the fact that several mechanisms exist for the tight regulation of fluid balance, suggest that water should be considered as the most significant nutrient in human nutrition. Future research in water physiology should focus on the association between fluid balance or intake and disease, at both molecular and epidemiological levels, and the establishment of more effective methodologies to assess fluid balance and water requirements.
1. Ball P. Water and life: seeking the solution. Nature
2. Grim E. Water and electrolyte flux rates in the duodenum, jejunum, ileum and colon, and effects of osmolarity. Am J Dig Dis
3. Ma T, Verkman AS. Aquaporin water channels in gastrointestinal physiology. J Physiol
. 1999;517(pt 2):317-326.
4. Matsuzaki T, Tajika Y, Ablimit A, Aoki T, Hagiwara H, Takata K. Aquaporins in the digestive system. Med Electron Microsc
5. Martinez-Augustin O, Romero-Calvo I, Suarez MD, Zarzuelo A, de Medina FS. Molecular bases of impaired water and ion movements in inflammatory bowel diseases. Inflamm Bowel Dis
6. Nishinaka D, Kishino F, Matsuura A. Water and electrolyte absorption from hypotonic oral rehydration solution in rat small intestine and colon. Pediatr Int
7. Edelman IS, Leibman J. Anatomy of body water and electrolytes. Am J Med
8. Starling EH. On the absorption of fluids from the connective tissue spaces. J Physiol
9. Boone M, Deen PM. Physiology and pathophysiology of the vasopressin-regulated renal water reabsorption. Pflugers Arch
10. Nielsen S, Chou CL, Marples D, Christensen EI, Kishore BK, Knepper MA. Vasopressin increases water permeability of kidney collecting duct by inducing translocation of aquaporin-CD water channels to plasma membrane. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA
11. Altman PL. Blood and Other Body Fluids
. Washington, DC: Federations of American Societies on Experimental Biology; 1961.
12. Visser M, Gallagher D, Deurenberg P, Wang J, Pierson RN Jr, Heymsfield SB. Density of fat-free body mass: relationship with race, age, and level of body fatness. Am J Physiol
13. Lang F, Busch GL, Ritter M, et al. Functional significance of cell volume regulatory mechanisms. Physiol Rev
14. Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Water, Potassium, Sodium, Chloride and Sulfate
. Washington, DC: The National Academies, Food and Nutrition Board; 2004:73-185.
15. Sawka MN, Cheuvront SN, Carter R 3rd. Human water needs. Nutr Rev
16. Kavouras SA. Assessing hydration status. Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care
17. Gonzalez-Alonso J, Mora-Rodriguez R, Below PR, Coyle EF. Dehydration markedly impairs cardiovascular function in hyperthermic endurance athletes during exercise. J Appl Physiol
18. Nishiyasu TS, Shi XG, Mack GW, Nadel ER. Effect of hypovolemia on forearm vascular resistance control during exercise in the heat. J Appl Physiol
19. Pitts GC, Johnson RE, Consolazio FC. Work in the heat as affected by intake of water, salt and glucose. Am J Physiol
20. Winkler AW, Danowski TS, Elkinton JR, Peters JP. Electrolyte and fluid studies during water deprivation and starvation in human subjects and the effect of ingestion of fish, of carbohydrate, and of salt solutions. J Clin Invest
21. Black DAK, McCance RA, Young WF. A study of dehydration be means of balance experiments. J Physiol
22. Manz F, Wentz A. The importance of good hydration for the prevention of chronic diseases. Nutr Rev
23. Quill TE, Byock IR. Responding to intractable terminal suffering: the role of terminal sedation and voluntary refusal of food and fluids. ACP-ASIM End-of-Life Care Consensus Panel. American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine. Ann Intern Med
24. Langgard H, Smith WO. Self-induced water intoxication without predisposing illness. N Engl J Med
25. de Leon J, Verghese C, Tracy JI, Josiassen RC, Simpson GM. Polydipsia and water intoxication in psychiatric patients: a review of the epidemiological literature. Biol Psychiatry
26. Weitzman RE, Kleeman CR. The clinical physiology of water metabolism. Part III: the water depletion (hyperosmolar) and water excess (hyposmolar) syndromes. West J Med
27. Spigt MG, Knottnerus JA, van de Beek C, van Kerrebroeck PE, van Amelsvoort LG, van Schayck CP. Short-term effects of increased urine output on male bladder function and lower urinary tract symptoms. Urology
28. Anastasiou CA, Kavouras SA, Arnaoutis G, et al. Sodium replacement and plasma sodium drop during exercise in the heat when fluid intake matches fluid loss. J Athl Train
29. Armstrong LE, Casa DJ, Watson G. Exertional hyponatremia. Curr Sports Med Rep
30. Institute of Medicine. Recommended Dietary Allowances
. 6th ed. Washington, DC: The National Academies, Food and Nutrition Board; 1964.
© 2010 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc.
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expert advice MORE
Q: I have a five-year-old who will rock late at night on top of his head; just above the forehead. He practically burns his hair off. It even smells burned. Why does he do it and when should it have stopped? He's been doing it since he's been old enough to get on his hands and knees.
A: Believe it or not, rocking and head banging are not uncommon events in childhood. Some estimates have said that five to ten percent of children do this. There is no specific association of rocking or head banging with any later abnormalities or problems in children who are developmentally normal. (Only children with severe developmental problems, such as mental retardation and autism, have a higher rate of rocking and head banging that persists when they are older.)
Most children who rock or head bang started between six and twelve months of age. It often consists of rocking on the hands and knees and potentially banging the head against the side of the crib. Some children do this to soothe themselves and some children do this, particularly at bed time, as part of a ritual that helps them fall asleep.
Most children do stop this activity spontaneously between three and four years of age, however there are some children who continue to do it through five or six. If it persists longer than this, it would be reasonable to evaluate it further and find out if there are any other psychological stresses that may be contributing to the symptoms. I would recommend that you see if you can encourage him to develop another bed routine. If you continue to have difficulty with it, I would recommend talking to your pediatrician.
More on: Expert Advice
Shari Nethersole is a physician at Children's Hospital, Boston, and an instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She graduated from Yale University and Harvard Medical School, and did her internship and residency at Children's Hospital, Boston. As a pediatrician, she tries to work with parents to identify and address their concerns.
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Definitions for immortalityˌɪm ɔrˈtæl ɪ ti
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word immortality
the quality or state of being immortal
perpetual life after death
The condition of being immortal.
In Greek mythology, Tithonus was granted immortality but not eternal youth.
the quality or state of being immortal; exemption from death and annihilation; unending existance; as, the immortality of the soul
exemption from oblivion; perpetuity; as, the immortality of fame
Origin: [L. immortalitas: cf. F. immortalit.]
Immortality is the ability to live forever, or eternal life. Biological forms have inherent limitations which medical interventions or engineering may or may not be able to overcome. Natural selection has developed potential biological immortality in at least one species, the jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula. Certain scientists, futurists, and philosophers, have theorized about the immortality of the human body, and advocate that human immortality is achievable in the first few decades of the 21st century, while other advocates believe that life extension is a more achievable goal in the short term, with immortality awaiting further research breakthroughs into an indefinite future. Aubrey de Grey, a researcher who has developed a series of biomedical rejuvenation strategies to reverse human aging, believes that his proposed plan for ending aging may be implementable in two or three decades. The absence of aging would provide humans with biological immortality, but not invulnerability to death by physical trauma. What form an unending human life would take, or whether an immaterial soul exists and possesses immortality, has been a major point of focus of religion, as well as the subject of speculation, fantasy, and debate.
The Nuttall Encyclopedia
the doctrine of the continued existence of the soul of each individual after death, a doctrine the belief of which is, in one form or another, common to most religious systems; even to those which contemplate absorption in the Deity as the final goal of existence, as is evident from the prevalence in them of the doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation.
The Roycroft Dictionary
1. A reward given to infidels and atheists by a somewhat humorous God, for not groveling before Him and annoying Him with importunities. 2. A system of punishment for suicides, which makes suicide impossible, thereby putting one over on the ingrate who was tired of the gift of life, by compelling him to live forever, willy-nilly. 3. A valueless thing, because unlimited in quantity, which those hotly intent upon achieving will forfeit through the law which provides that that for which we clutch we lose. 4. A condition sought by political officeholders where the incumbent never either dies or resigns. 5. A state of being encouraged by annuitants, and those who live in the Garden of Allah-Money. 6. A flimflam offer by a theologian of inchoate title to improved real estate in the Sky for real estate, rentals and cash on Earth. 7. A doctrine that the rich teach the poor for good and sufficient reasons. 8. Divine Compensation for the starving. 9. A superfluous addition to life; to go on living after one desires and hopes to remain dead.
The numerical value of immortality in Chaldean Numerology is: 5
The numerical value of immortality in Pythagorean Numerology is: 2
Sample Sentences & Example Usage
Images & Illustrations of immortality
Translations for immortality
From our Multilingual Translation Dictionary
- immortalitatCatalan, Valencian
- אלמלי, אלמלא, אלמותHebrew
- 永生, 不老不死, 不死, 不朽Japanese
- бессмертие, бессмертностьRussian
- бесмртност, besmrtnostSerbo-Croatian
- hali ya kutokufaSwahili
Get even more translations for immortality »
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By Akshay Kumar
One of the most prominent misconceptions of economics can best be understood by an analogical comparison to ‘Quantum Mechanics’. Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics which deals with physical phenomena at microscopic scales, where the action is on the order of exotic elementary particles such as electron and nucleons and even smaller. Central Board of Secondary Education class 12th Physics textbook elucidates and wraps up the Quantum theory, arguably the most complex and vital theory of 20th century, in just one very simple Schrodinger equation involving a fashionable ‘operator’. However, when one analyses the equation further the first thing critical variable that one witnesses is ‘psi’, ψ, wave function of particle. The variable persists in the study of quantum mechanics from this critical point to the understanding of virtually anything in the miniscule or majuscule study of a microscopic particle. In the study of macro-economics, if one has to pin-point the ψ of macroeconomics (let’s call it ψm), it has to be the GDP (Growth Domestic Product). The story of macroeconomics or at least the cult of macroeconomics has also been like the CBSE’s elucidation of one-line Schrodinger equation. In dealing with performance, structure, behaviour, and decision- making of an economy, macro-economists have not been able to go beyond such indicators of state as GDP, unemployment rate, and price indices and ironically not all parameters are independent. Essentially, macro-economic state can truly be mirrored by one simple indicator, GDP (ψm); other parameters could be mirrored or factored in terms of GDP. What macroeconomists need to learn and replicate from a quantum ψ (let’s call it ψq from hereon) is that ψq has no physical significance. ψq2 (square of ψq) has physical significance as it measures the probability of finding a particle at a given point in space at a specific point in time. Similarly, GDP (ψm) should not be categorized and hailed by economists as having physical relevance as they have till now. There has to be another more specific and true indicator that responds to and reflects the complex state of an economy at a specific point in time. For instance, let’s say a company named ‘Booster’ manufacturers luxury cars. During the process of manufacturing one unit of luxury car many metals and plastics are used. These materials and plastics are initially refined, moulded and casted in specific shapes and components through various industrial processes. During these processes, invariably, a lot of pollutants are released in the environment and the raw metals are consumed from the current stock-pool of nature. The outcomes of the entire process can be summarized as-
1. A luxury car model valued the market price set by ‘Booster’ (let’s say equivalent to worth $A)
2. The creation of services during the configuration of vehicle and prior to that in processes such as metal refinement, casting, and moulding etc. (let’s say equivalent to worth $B)
3. Exhaustion of 100+ Kgs of metal and other raw materials ( a very moderate number) from the earth’s stock-pool of resources in nature (let’s say equivalent to worth $C)
4. Creation of huge volumes of pollutants during material extraction, refinement, casting and finally vehicle manufacturing and assembling (let’s say equivalent to worth $D)
5. Expense of other sources of energy indirectly during the entire chain such as x units of electricity power consumption and y units of fuel consumption in order to sustain the fixed assets of a company or a refinery (let’s say equivalent to worth $Es)
Now, the GDP is the gross domestic value of all the goods and services that are produced in an economy in a given year. As per the calculations of macroeconomists the GDP of a country has increased by $ (A+B) after this entire chain. It totally ignores the impact of (C+D+E), which is obviously negative, that is the value of goods or services destroyed. Hence, ψm2 should be a function of (A+B-C-D-E), which can be negative like ψq2, instead of the current outcome which always has a positive value, dependent solely on (A+B). Not only this, another flaw in the GDP macroeconomic model lies in measuring its rate of growth or fall. The current system measures it in terms rate of change of A+B over time rather than A+B-C-D-E over time. Hence, the actual state of an economy, as represented by GDP, is an inflated figure both in terms of absolute value and rate of growth of that absolute value. The same measurement ignores the future negative value (operational value) of the same luxury product once it is sold. During it’s lifetime the vehicle emits several pollutants, equating to several carbon credits, thereby further inflexioning the value of C+D+E, while the GDP measurement takes into account only the positive values of oil and services consumed (in its reapirs) by the vehicle, inflexioning the value A+B. Hence, the true measure of the state of economy is usually overstated with the current measurement of indicators in macro-economics. In another case, take for example, the case of regulation of CDOs (Collateralized debt obligation, financial derivatives at the core of 2007 financial crash). Whether regulated or de-regulated the current macroeconomic measurement measures the value generated by 1 unit of CDO equally. The current indicators do not differentiate between the risk-adjusted and risk performance. Macroeconomics needs to be analysed, developed and invented substantially as it has mostly and utterly failed to capture the true state of any economy. Some Schrodinger will have to work his skin out to develop the true wave function of ‘macroeconomic particle’, which squared yields some substantial physical significance.
The author is an undergraduate in Civil Engineering from IIT Delhi and, currently, working at Ernst & Young in strategy consulting. He has been engaged in debating for the past 11 years at various levels. Since past 4 years, he has primarily focused on policy and economics debates and research papers and has been engaged at premier global debating platforms such as G8-G20 Group, Harvard debates, EUDC. Recently, he has developed debating models and tested them at national debating conferences.
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Martin Gardner's Lucky Number
Library Home || Full Table of Contents || Suggest a Link || Library Help
|Ivars Peterson (MathTrek)|
|Hunting for prime numbers, those evenly divisible only by themselves and 1, requires a sieve to separate them from the rest. For example, the sieve of Eratosthenes, named for a Greek mathematician of the third century B.C., generates a list of prime numbers by the process of elimination. Other types of sieves isolate different sequences of numbers. Around 1955, the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1984) identified a particular sequence made up of what he called "lucky numbers," and mathematicians have been playing with them ever since. This particular sieving process yields certain numbers that permanently escape getting killed. That's why Ulam called them "lucky."|
|Levels:||Middle School (6-8), High School (9-12), College|
|Resource Types:||Problems/Puzzles, Articles|
|Math Topics:||Number Sense/About Numbers, Prime Numbers|
© 1994- The Math Forum at NCTM. All rights reserved.
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Stands for "Red Green Blue." It refers to the three hues of light (red, green, and blue, for those of you that are a little slow), that can mix together to form any color. When the highest intensity of each color is mixed together, white light is created. When each hue is set to zero intensity, the result is black. TVs and computer monitors use RGB to create the colorful images you see on the screen. In print, however, the 4 colors -- cyan, yellow, magenta, and black (CYMK) -- are used to create color images.
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| 0.904535 | 122 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Skateboard (PDF - 710K)
Placed October 2004 – May 2005
The visual shows part of a skateboard and wheels.
Caption: Active children are better balanced.
Copy: A steady regimen of physical activity doesn’t just keep children fit, it helps build social skills and confidence. There are lots of ways to get kids moving. All they need is a little push. Get the whole family to join in. Remember, active means healthy. What could be simpler?
Logos: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Compliance: Made possible by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers Disease Control and Prevention
VERB™ is a trademark of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All rights reserved.
Documents on this page are available in Portable Document Format (PDF). Learn about viewing and printing PDFs with Acrobat Reader.
- Page last reviewed: August 1, 2007 Historical Document
- Page last updated: August 1, 2007
- Content source: National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Division of Adolescent and School Health
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Corals Damaged By Deepwater Horizon
Filtering Out Speculation from Science
Nearly two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the meticulous, long-term efforts of scientists finally yielded the official results: namely, that the brown, wilted, dying corals found at the Mississippi Canyon lease block 294 were indeed damaged by a plume of oil from the spill.
For many, it seemed a foregone conclusion. Back in December 2010, when news of the damaged corals first came out, their proximity to the leaking Macondo well seemed to be a “smoking gun” in its own right. What else could brown gunk (flocculent matter, if you are a scientist) covering damaged corals seven miles from the Deepwater Horizon site be, if not oil from the spill?
Yet, to this team of scientists, it was worth taking a closer look at the evidence with two-dimensional gas chromatography, sediment cores, coral samples, and mosaic imagery. Why? Because too much was at stake to base judgments on mere speculation.
In order to understand the damage in the deep, the scientists had to start by understanding what was down there to begin with.
To support that mission, enter USGS research benthic ecologist Dr. Amanda Demopoulos, who studies life on the sea floor to piece together what types of organisms typically live together in deep sea communities. Her work involves digging sediment cores from the bottom of the ocean and sorting through the many tiny forms of life found there.
In addition to deep sea coral ecosystems, Demopoulos studies communities in parts of the Gulf where oil naturally seeps up from the seafloor and is in fact a wellspring of life, not a source of damage. Chemosynthetic ecosystems – the ones where food webs are based on chemicals rather than sunlight – tend to have different forms of life, such as tubeworms.
Demopoulos was on the November 2010 research expedition which first discovered the damaged corals. Funded by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the agency now known as the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, the goal of that expedition was to gather the basic data needed to construct a scientific understanding of the various undersea ecosystems. It was part of a decades-long collaborative effort among federal and university scientists to explore deep sea ecosystems in an effort to provide sound baseline information for governance decisions about how to best balance natural resource use with protection. Demopoulos recalled watching the first images from the damaged site come in from remotely-operated vehicle.
“When we were watching the ROV video in the lab, I looked up at the video screen, and it looked starkly different from anything we’d ever seen before,” Demopoulos said. “The corals were all dark grey and lumped over, and it was clear these animals were not healthy. We’d seen dead coral, but this was so different, we immediately knew it was worth investigating further. When we got closer, there didn’t seem to be any secondary colonization, as we’d seen in the past on dead coral.”
The fact that no new animals — such as barnacles or hydroids — had begun to attach to and grow on the dead corals suggested the coral deaths had been recent, noted Demopoulos. This process, known as secondary colonization, is commonly observed on dead corals, but takes time to occur.
The discovery of the damaged coral triggered a follow-up expedition to more carefully investigate the damage itself, supported by a special National Science Foundation RAPID grant. Demopoulos would later work with scientists from Haverford College, Penn State University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Temple University, and BOEM to assess the damage.
Demopoulos’ part in the overall effort to understand life in the deep ocean has been to understand what lives in the sediments of different types of environments, such as deep-sea corals and chemosynthetic communities. Some species may be generalists found in a variety of environments, while others will be unique to one type of habitat. Demopoulos also pieces together new information about how these tiny organisms are connected through food webs.
Without a baseline for understanding what is typical, Demopoulos would not be able to assess how those sediment dwellers were affected by the oil spill. Based on her expertise with sediment samples, Demopoulos helped design the best approach for assessing the corals at the Mississippi Canyon lease block 294 for the presence of oil and the extent of damage.
“The challenge we faced in this study was piecing together what happened from multiple lines of evidence, because no one was sitting on the sea floor when the plume went by. The corals were the only witness,” said Demopoulos, “We had to consider the proximity to the Deepwater Horizon site and the fact a deep-water plume had recently passed over the site, then closely examine the corals for tissue damage and signs of stress, such as the presence of mucus, and of course, the chemical signature of the oil. It was truly an interdisciplinary effort.”
Demopoulos pointed out that the cumulative knowledge about deep-sea communities from previous expeditions provided the baseline for scientifically assessing what they saw at the site. “This is but one site in the Gulf of Mexico,” she said, “but it has shown how important it was for us to have a frame of reference as to what a healthy deep-sea coral ecosystem looks like. We are still trying to understand the extent to which this is occurring elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The results of the efforts were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
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I mentioned last week that research from Texas Tech University had finally busted the myth that glass was a liquid. Only, that wasn’t what the research was about at all. As usual, the truth is much less… concrete*.
If I may digress a moment, how many of you were actually taught in school that glass was a liquid? Anybody? I sure wasn’t. My father told me the old window thing and I was promptly laughed at when I brought it up in school. While I love a good old myth-busting, I feel like the whole “liquid glass, saggy window” myth isn’t something the average person encounters in their daily life. I’d be curious to know how prevalent it is outside of trivia circles. Moving on…
In the paper, Jing Zhao, Sindee L. Simon, and Gregory B. McKenna subjected a 20 million year-old piece of amber to tests in order to determine if it had settled into an equilibrium or if it was still flowing. Now, you may be wondering what ancient amber has to do with glass, and this is where the misleading headlines do injustice to the research. Amber and glass belong to the same category of matter called, well, glasses. They’re also called amorphous solids. They’re similar to foams, pastes, concrete, and other non-newtonian fluids in that they do not have the rigid, crystal structures found in metals and other solids, but nor do their molecules flow freely like in a liquid. The researchers wanted to show that amber could be used as viable experimental model.
The issue was never whether glass is a solid or a liquid, because it never fit into the 3rd-grade holy trinity of matter.
What the team at Texas Tech found was that while the amber did settle to equilibrium over the course of 20 million years, it did not change over the few weeks it was experimented on—nor is it likely to have changed over a mere 400 years. With any luck, archaeologists 20 million years in the future will dig up some cathedrals and finally put the matter…..at rest**.
Hey, if you can’t get enough complex fluids, check out one of the longest running experiments ever: The pitch drop. Pitch is a resin formerly used to seal boats and drop on invading armies. When cooled, it is hard and can be shattered with a hammer, but it actually flows over a measurable time period. Thomas Parnell, an physics professor at the University of Queensland started the experiment in 1927, and since then the pitch had dripped 8 times. D. Eric Franks on the comments mentioned that the 9th drop is due to fall anytime now. So if you have nothing better to do, you can watch the live feed and perhaps even make history: For in the 86 years it has been going, nobody has actually caught a drop in action.
Special thanks to Redditor N8CCRG, who provided the best explanation I had seen regarding glasses, non-newtonian fluids, and long range order. I wanted to feature them as the third puppet in the comic, but did not receive a response in time.
*In the defense of the other articles, they actually reported the science right, but the sensationalized headlines didn’t do the research justice.
**Oh c’mon, I had to sneak another one in there.
Boom goes the Strip Search! Thanks, Obama.
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Formerly a Cistercian monastery in the Diocese of Eichstätt in Middle Franconia. It was founded in 1133 by St. Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, and received its first monks with their Abbot Rapatho from the Cistercian monastery of Ebrach in Upper Franconia. It was richly endowed by the dukes of Abenberg and their heirs, the burgraves of Nuremberg. The abbey church contains the sepulchral monuments of most of the burgraves of Nuremberg and the electors of Brandenburg. Heilsbronn was a flourishing monastery until the time of the Reformation. In 1530 Abbot John Schopper founded a monastic school at Heilsbronn, which later became a Protestant school for princes. Under Abbot Schopper (1529-1540) the doctrines of Luther found favour in the monastery. His successor, Sebastian Wagner, openly supported Protestantism. He married and resigned in 1543. In 1549 the Catholic religion was restored at Heilsbronn, but only ostensibly. The last abbot who made any pretense to Catholicity was Melchior Wunderer (1562-1578). The five succeeding abbots were Protestants, and in 1631 Heilsbronn ceased to be an abbey. Its valuable library is at present at Erlangen.
The Catholic Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive resource on Catholic teaching, history, and information ever gathered in all of human history. This easy-to-search online version was originally printed between 1907 and 1912 in fifteen hard copy volumes.
Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the Encyclopedia contains not only precise statements of what the Church has defined, but also an impartial record of different views of acknowledged authority on all disputed questions, national, political or factional. In the determination of the truth the most recent and acknowledged scientific methods are employed, and the results of the latest research in theology, philosophy, history, apologetics, archaeology, and other sciences are given careful consideration.
No one who is interested in human history, past and present, can ignore the Catholic Church, either as an institution which has been the central figure in the civilized world for nearly two thousand years, decisively affecting its destinies, religious, literary, scientific, social and political, or as an existing power whose influence and activity extend to every part of the globe. In the past century the Church has grown both extensively and intensively among English-speaking peoples. Their living interests demand that they should have the means of informing themselves about this vast institution, which, whether they are Catholics or not, affects their fortunes and their destiny.
Copyright © Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company New York, NY. Volume 1: 1907; Volume 2: 1907; Volume 3: 1908; Volume 4: 1908; Volume 5: 1909; Volume 6: 1909; Volume 7: 1910; Volume 8: 1910; Volume 9: 1910; Volume 10: 1911; Volume 11: - 1911; Volume 12: - 1911; Volume 13: - 1912; Volume 14: 1912; Volume 15: 1912
Catholic Online Catholic Encyclopedia Digital version Compiled and Copyright © Catholic Online
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| 0.947782 | 667 | 3 | 3 |
Bile Duct Cancer: Introduction
What is cancer?
Cancer is when cells in the body change and grow out of control. To help understand what happens when you have cancer, look at how your body works normally. Your body is made up of tiny building blocks called cells. Normal cells grow when your body needs them, and die when your body does not need them any longer.
Cancer is made up of abnormal cells that grow even though your body doesn’t need them. In most cancers, the abnormal cells grow to form a lump or mass called a tumor. If cancer cells are in the body long enough, they can grow into (invade) nearby areas. They can even spread to other parts of the body (metastasis).
What are bile ducts?
The bile ducts are thin tubes that go from the liver to the gallbladder and from the gallbladder to the small intestine. Their purpose is to transport bile. Bile is a fluid made in the liver that breaks down fats during digestion. When the liver secretes bile, it is then stored by the gallbladder. During meals, the gallbladder releases bile through the bile duct to help with the digestion of food in the intestines. Two areas of the bile duct system are involved in this process:
Intrahepatic bile ducts. This is the duct system inside the liver. It’s a network of many small tubes inside the liver that collect bile from liver cells. These join into right and left larger ducts that then exit the liver.
Extrahepatic bile ducts. These are ducts outside the liver. After exiting the liver, the right and left hepatic ducts join together in an area called the hilum to form the common hepatic duct. The duct draining the gallbladder--called the cystic duct--then merges with the common hepatic duct to form the common bile duct. The common bile duct then empties into the first part of the small intestine.
What is bile duct cancer?
Bile duct cancer can grow in any part of the bile ducts. Another term for bile duct cancer is cholangiocarcinoma. This cancer is grouped by different types depending on where it starts. Each type can cause different symptoms. The types are:
Perihilar l (hilar) bile duct cancers. These grow in the hilum, where the main right and left bile ducts join as they are leaving the liver. Most bile duct cancers are in this area.
Intrahepatic bile duct cancers. These commonly grow in the tiny bile ducts inside the liver. A small percentage of bile duct cancers are this type.
Distal bile duct cancers. These typically grow in the common bile duct near the first part of the small intestine.
Talk with your healthcare provider
If you have questions about bile duct cancer, talk with your healthcare provider. Your healthcare provider can help you understand more about this cancer.
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| 0.950765 | 643 | 3.78125 | 4 |
Owing to both papal and canonical disapproval, beards have been underrepresented in the Latin church. Whereas Orthodox hierarchs have long been barbate and bushy, Latin clerics have typically preferred naked cheeks and smooth chins. The Catholic Encyclopedia offers some background for this bias, but it’s fun to consider a period when this prejudice was sorely tested.
By my reading of things, it all starts with the papal election of 1455. The conclave had whittled down its options, and one of the finalists was a Greek cardinal named Basilios Bessarion (1403-1472). Though he had abandoned the eastern church, he retained the Orthodox habit of wearing his beard long and full.
At one point in the final deliberations a French cardinal jumped to his feet and implored his fellow cardinals to reject Bessarion. “Shall we give a Greek pope to the Latin Church?” he started. “Shall we make a neophyte the supreme head? Bessarion has not yet shaven his beard. . . .” That Jesus and the apostles likely had beards must not have occurred to him. Said Bessarion’s opponent in so many words, We can do better.
In his place, the conclave elected the beardless Callixtus III. Born Alfons de Borja, the Italians knew this Spanish cardinal as Alonzo Borgia. The Borgias are sometimes considered Europe’s first crime family. While Callixtus’ reputation was faultless, his nephew later became pope and is primarily remembered for his many illegitimate children and general corruption — though he did possess a pristinely hairless chin.
More than even the papacy, Bessarion’s beard might have also cost him his life. Remaining active in church affairs following the conclave, he suffered another embarrassment while on embassy to France. During a meeting with Louis XI, the king took a disliking to him and yanked his beard while saying that Greeks are partial to their barbarism — surely the kind of pun that garnered chuckles from the court. For his part, Bessarion was so humiliated by the indignity that he died on the way home.
But poor Bessarion was just a man before his time!
About fifty years after the conclave Pope Julius II (1443-1513) stopped shaving for a couple of years to mourn the wartime loss of a city. The habit skipped a couple of popes but Clement VII (1478-1534) also let one grow when Rome was sacked in 1527 by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
Some criticized Pope Clement for his beard, which he maintained until he died. But to his defense swung the humanist Pierio Valeriano who penned Pro Sacerdotum Barbis, which as the title of the tract suggests is about priests and their beards. If your Latin is any good, you can read it here. My Latin isn’t, and so I rely instead on the summary provided by Kenneth Gouwens in Remembering the Renaissance:
Tellingly, the Pro sacerdotum barbis locates the causes of Rome’s sufferings in the “feminine” delicacies of the Roman clergy, which had provoked the wrath of God and threatened to do so again. Because of the excesses, God “commanded that our goods be taken from us, that our rather sumptuous houses be either brought down or burned, and that the many delights of our too-wanton minds be plucked away from us.” The wearing of beards, then, signifies the effort to reform the “effeminacy” into which the clergy had slipped. (p. 151)
Charles V, after all, had a beard.
Valeriano’s treatise did the job. The beard was back from exile — but only for a while. Portraits of popes from Clement VII to Urban VIII (1568-1644) feature full beards, some quite bushy and bristly. The preferred style shrank to a narrow goatee and mustache with Innocent X (1574-1655) and stayed that way until Innocent XII (1615-1700) took the fashion with him to the grave. No pope has worn a beard since.
Feel free to make more than is warranted of the correlation between that sad fact and the world going to hell in a hand basket during all the many years that followed.
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There is usually a slow onset of a tender red area along the superficial veins on the skin. A long, thin red area may be seen as the inflammation follows the path of the superficial vein. It may spread in a spider like pattern if smaller feeder veins become involved.
This area may feel hard, warm, and tender. The skin around the vein may be itchy and swollen.
The area may begin to throb or burn.
Symptoms may be worse when the leg is lowered, especially when first getting out of bed in the morning.
A low-grade fever may occur.
Sometimes phlebitis may occur at the site where a peripheral intravenous (IV) line was started. The surrounding area may be sore and tender along the vein.
If an infection is present, symptoms may include redness, fever, pain, swelling, or breakdown of the skin.
Deep vein thrombophlebitis
The classic signs and symptoms include redness, warmth, swelling, and pain in the affected extremity. Often one extremity is more swollen than the other. Occasionally the discoloration may be more bluish than red.
Medically Reviewed by a Doctor on 2/9/2016
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Patient Comments & Reviews
The eMedicineHealth doctors ask about Phlebitis:
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Oranges are not only one of the most popular fruits, but also one of the most nutritious. A single orange contains high amounts of vitamin C, fiber, thiamin and potassium. It also contains small amounts of vitamin B6, vitamin A, niacin, magnesium and iron. Although there are many types and varieties of oranges, all have similar nutritional values.
Oranges (and orange juice) are one of best sources of vitamin C. In fact, a single glass of orange juice provides you with 137% of your daily requirement of vitamin C. Vitamin C is a powerful anti-oxidant that can help protect your body against the effects of free radicals, which age your cells and can lead to the development of certain diseases and health issues, including atherosclerosis, heart disease, breast cancer and stroke.
A glass of 100% unsweetened orange juice also gives you two other important nutrients: potassium (14% of your daily requirement) and thiamin (18%). Potassium is essential for the health of muscle, including heart muscle, as well as for the proper functioning of the kidneys, and to regulate blood pressure. Thiamin is one of the B vitamins (B1). Its main function is to help your body convert blood sugar into energy, regulating appetite in the process. Thiamin also helps improve the health of your muscles and nervous system.
Fresh Oranges vs. Orange Juice
Pros of Orange Juice: Orange juice has one major advantage over fresh oranges. Many brands of boxed orange juice now come with added calcium. Depending on the brand, a single glass of orange juice can provide you with up to 50% of your daily requirements of calcium.
Pros of Fresh Oranges: Fresh natural oranges are much lower in sugar and calories than orange juice. This is because artificial sugar is added to boxed juice in order to improve its taste. That added sugar also increases the calorie count. A single medium-size orange contains about 64 calories, while the calories in a glass of orange juice are much higher: 110 calories for every 8-oz. Fresh juice sold as “100% juice” should be free from added sugars, but always check labels to make sure. When sugars are added, a single glass of orange juice can contain as much sugar as a glass of Coca Cola.
Another big advantage of eating an orange versus drinking a glass of juice is the orange’s fiber content. Fiber is essential if you’re trying to lose weight, as it keeps you full without adding a lot of calories to your diet. Fiber can also keep you regular, help lower cholesterol and could help prevent certain types of cancer (especially colon cancer).
Pros and Cons of Frozen Concentrate Juice
Many people think frozen juice concentrate is just juice that has been frozen. However, frozen concentrate packs much more nutritional value than juice (even fresh juice made at home).
One big advantage of frozen concentrate juice is that is cheaper than fresh boxed juice and a more practical option if you don’t drink juice every day, since it can last for months in the freezer.
If you choose frozen orange juice from concentrate, you get an additional advantage. Fresh or boxed orange juice contains only the juice of an orange. Although that gives you all the vitamins and minerals found in an orange, you’ll be missing the fiber, which is only found in the pulp of the fruit. Orange juice made from concentrate is made using the whole fruit, including the peel and sometimes the pith (depending on the brand). This means juice from concentrate is the most nutritious option or at least as good as eating a whole fresh orange. Juice from concentrate gives you more soluble pectin (a form of fiber that slows down glucose absorption and binds to cholesterol) and more antioxidants than any other option.
Frozen concentrate doesn’t taste as “fresh” as boxed orange juice. This is especially true after you’ve already opened the container and then return it to the freezer, where it can absorb odors or get freezer burn.
Drinking orange juice could be a great way to add important nutrients to your diet. However, the key is in choosing the best available option. Always read labels and make sure you’re choosing a brand with no added sugars. Also, look for the words “100% juice” on the front label.
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Cities may not seem like hotbeds of evolution. Tropical rain forests, maybe. The Galapagos Islands, certainly. But Central Park?
Yes, even Central Park. Wherever there is life, there is evolution. Organisms reproduce, passing down their genes to their offspring. Some variants of those genes may become more common over the generations thanks to lucky rolls of the genetic dice. But they can also become more common thanks to natural selection–because they make individuals better able to survive and reproduce than others. That advantage depends in large part on their particular environment. If the environment changes dramatically–if, for example, people cut down forests and put up skyscrapers–then a new set of mutations may give organisms an evolutionary advantage.
Urban evolution is probably one of the most common forms of evolution on Earth today. After all, cities are spreading over so much of the terrestrial surface of the planet. Yet the city is still a lonely frontier for evolutionary biologists. They’ve traditionally searched out “natural” habitats in order to document the workings of evolution. Only recently have some evolutionary biologists made the city into a field site.
Jason Munshi-South, a scientist at Baruch College, is doing some of the most interesting research on urban evolution these days, working in the green spaces of New York City. New York has been growing for over three centuries, but twenty percent of it remains wooded today, and it’s still home to a variety of wild animals, plants, and other organisms. New Yorkers may think that their wildlife consists solely of cockroaches, but the streets and parks and rivers of the city are full of other species too. Some, like coyotes in the Bronx, are newcomers, while others never left. New York’s native biodiversity has many surprises left for urban biologists to discover–consider, for example, that a new species of frog turned up in Staten Island just last year. (See this 2011 article I wrote for the New York Times for more on evolution in New York.)
One of the animals Munshi-South studies most closely is the white-footed mouse, Permoyscus leucopus. This is not the house mouse that rummages around in the kitchen cabinets of New York apartments. It’s the white-footed mouse, which was living in the forests of New York before Europeans arrived and which stayed in those forests as they shrank into islands of parkland. While house mice will happily dart across Broadway in search of food, white-footed mice are far less bold. As New York’s forested land has become isolated, so have its populations of mice.
Munshi-South wondered if these rodents have veered off on their own evolutionary trajectory, separate from the white-footed mice that live in the forests outside of New York City. As new mutations arise in a New York population of mice, they may become widespread–but only on their urban island. Compared to their rural counterparts, New York mice may face different challenges for survival. The air they breathe and the soil through which they burrow is more polluted. They may encounter more pathogens because New York is a hub for travelers. New York mice also live in denser populations, which may mean they have to compete more for food or mates. Munshi-South hypothesized that over the past couple centuries, the city mice have adapted to these challenges in ways that their rural cousins have not.
To test his hypothesis, Munshi-South and his students trapped mice in various spots around the city including Central Park. They also headed out of town to grab some mice living in forests where they don’t face the pressures of urban life. They then took a look at the genes of the mice. The genes bear the scars of the isolation in which the city mice live. Mice living in two New York parks may be more genetically distinct than rural mice living in different states.
Munshi-South and his colleagues then searched for genetic differences between city mice and country mice that might be the result of natural selection. Like other organisms, white-footed mice make copies of their genes out of a molecule called RNA, which they then use as a guide to building proteins. The scientists pulled out all the RNA from liver and brain tissue from their mice, a couple hundred animals all told. They then sequenced the RNA fragments and used a computer to reconstruct the sequence of the mouse genes.
Once they could look at the sequence of the mouse genes, they then hunted for mutations that showed signs of having spread thanks to natural selection. They found a handful of genes in the city mice that appear to have evolved due to natural selection. The functions of these genes are, in many cases, exactly the sort that you’d expect to evolve in a city mouse. Some of them are known to be involved in recognizing pathogens, and others help launch an immune system attack against them. Others help to detoxify pollutants. These genes not only evolved relatively quickly–in just the past couple centuries at most–but also repeatedly. In park after park, the same adaptations were favored by natural selection.
For now, these genes are only promising candidates for targets of natural selection. Researchers will have to examine them more closely and see if their mutations do indeed alter the biology of the city mice in important ways. It will be fascinating to see them investigate this grand experiment in evolution that is New York. Urban evolution may turn out to transform species in unexpected ways. Among the genes that show hints of natural selection in the white-footed mice of New York are genes involved in sperm, for example. In the crowded populations of mice in New York’s parks, males may be competing more intensely to father the next generation. Perhaps there’s a sexual revolution underway in the big city.
(Munshi-South’s results are available as a preprint at PeerJ, a new scientific publisher.)
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|Stormwater Drainage and Land Reclamation for Urban Development (HABITAT, 1991, 94 p.)|
|Annex I: STORMWATER DRAINAGE DESIGN PROCEDURES|
Any landform includes a natural drainage system and planning and development of new areas should be in harmony with this system to preserve it in its natural state as far as possible.
All new development proposals should take account of:
(a) Possible flood hazards in the whole system;
(b) Possibility of upstream development;
(c) Erosion hazards;
(d) Runoff reduction as an objective.
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Every year in May or June, dragon boat races are held all over the world. There are races in Hong Kong, San Francisco, New York, London and everywhere in between. These races originate from the Chinese celebration of the Duan Wu Festival (端午節) on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, which this year falls on Thursday the 28th of May. The most widely told story of the origin of the festival is that it commemorates the death of QuYuan (屈原), a patriotic minister and poet to the court of Emperor Huai (楚懷王) of the Chu Kingdom (楚國) during the Warring Sates period (春秋戰國) around 300 BCE. After serving the emperor loyally for many years, Qu Yuan ran afoul of court politics and was banished. He was devastated and started writing poetry lamenting the loss of the emperor’s favor and the decline of his native kingdom. Saddened by the eventual fall of the Chu Kingdom and the death of Emperor Huai he killed himself in the Mi Luo River (汨羅江). However there is a deep dark secret that is not often discussed.
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A team of scientists from Cambridge University has found a way to print lasers onto virtually any surface using everyday inkjet technology. The UK-based team hopes that their breakthrough will lead to a wide range of applications, including biomedical testing and laser arrays for displays.
The research was printed in the journal “Soft Matter”, which detailed how the team found a way to ‘print’ an laser onto any surface. Most lasers are made of silicon wafers using expensive processes similar to those used to make microprocessors. However the team from Cambridge’s Centre for Molecular Materials for Photonics and Electronics believed the same effect could be achieved using everyday technologies found in the home.
The team developed lasers based on chiral nematic liquid crystals (LCs), similar to those found in flat-panel LCD displays. They found that under the right conditions, these photonic materials can be stimulated to produce laser emissions. By aligning the helix-shaped structure of the LC molecules properly, the team found that they could act as an optically resonant cavity – which is an essential component of any laser. Once they added a fluorescent dye, the cavity could then be optically excited to produce laser light.
In a press release, the Cambridge team said that “Until now, high quality LC lasers have been produced by filling a thin layer of LC material between two accurately spaced glass plates a hundredth of a millimetre wide. The glass is covered with a specially-prepared polymer coating to align the LC molecules.”
“Unfortunately the process is still a complex one – it requires a cleanroom environment and involves multiple, intricate production steps. Furthermore, the range of substrates available is pretty limited – typically restricted to glass or silicon, for example.”
Working in collaboration with the university’s Inkjet Research Centre, the Cambridge team found a way to align the LC molecules and produce high resolution multi-color laser arrays in one step, by printing them. They used a custom inkjet printing system to print hundreds of small dots of LC materials on to a substrate covered with a wet polymer solution layer. Once the polymer solution dried, the chemical interaction and mechanical stress caused the LC molecules to align and turn the printed dots into individual lasers.
By developing this simple process, the team believe they can form lasers on virtually any surface, rigid or flexible using pre-existing publishing technology. The potential applications are limited only by the imagination.
Images: dmuth and University of Cambridge
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|First Posted: Feb 8, 2007|
May 9, 2016
Equine Recurrent Uveitis
by Brian C. Gilger, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACVO
Equine recurrent uveitis (ERU) (also known as moon blindness, iridocyclitis, and periodic ophthalmia) is a major ophthalmic disease of the horse and is the most common cause of blindness in this species. Fortunately, recent advances in the treatment of horses with ERU have led to the successful management of this disease in some horses. The prevalence of uveitis in the United States horse population is about 8% based on a 2005 study. There could be aa many as 736,000 horses with moon blindness in the United States at this time. (April 2008)
This page discusses some important facts about ERU, its causes, and potential treatment options for the affected horse.
What Is Equine Recurrent Uveitis?
Uveitis refers to inflammation of the uveal tract of the eye. The uveal tract consists of three components: the iris (colored portion of the eye responsible for opening and closing the pupil), the ciliary body (produces a watery fluid that maintains the shape of the eye) and the choroid (back portion of the eye responsible for supplying blood and nutrients). Equine recurrent uveitis is the term used for eye inflammation that recurs periodically. Equine recurrent uveitis occurs to varying degrees among horses and may affect one, or both eyes. After a horse is affected, ERU recurs at varying intervals, each time causing additional ocular damage that leads to permanent changes in the internal structures of the eye.
What Causes Recurrent Uveitis in Horses?
Any injury to a horse's eye may result in the development of uveitis and subsequent ERU. The two most common causes of ocular injury are trauma and infectious diseases. Trauma to the eye may result from a blunt blow or by penetration of the globe (eyeball) by a sharp object. Other common causes include:
What Treatment Is Available for Recurrent Uveitis in Horses?
The main goals of therapy for ERU are to preserve vision and reduce and control ocular inflammation in an attempt to limit permanent damage to the eye. In horses where a definite inciting cause has been identified, treatment is directed at eliminating the primary problem, and initial tests to isolate an inciting agent are performed. These tests may consist of a complete blood count, biochemistry profile, conjunctival biopsy, and serology for bacterial and viral agents. More often, however, one particular cause cannot be isolated. In these instances, therapy is directed at the allaying of symptoms and reducing ocular inflammation.
Because vision loss is a common long-term manifestation of ERU, initial therapy must be aggressive. In acute cases, treatment in the form of systemic and local therapy consisting of antibiotics, corticosteroids and anti-inflammatory drugs is used, many times simultaneously. Initial therapy is instituted for at least two weeks, and may be continued for an additional two weeks after the resolution of clinical signs. In severe cases, local subconjunctival injections of corticosteroids may be indicated as an adjunct to therapy. In most instances, a subpalpebral lavage catheter is placed to facilitate delivery of topical medications.
Unfortunately, certain horses are never able to completely eliminate their uveitis and for these horses alternative forms of therapy must be considered.
Although traditional therapy may be used to control recurrent flare-ups, no therapy has proven to be 100% effective in eliminating ERU. Some horses respond well to long-term topical and systemic therapy and are able to be managed in this fashion. Other horses, however, do not respond to traditional therapy and may experience recurrences of uveitis more frequently. Fortunately, studies investigating the use of an immunosuppressive drug known as cyclosporin are currently underway in an attempt to manage these horses. This treatment involves the ocular implantation of a cyclosporin delivery device, which requires general anesthesia.
How Will I Know If My Horse Has Recurrent Uveitis?
The equine eye is a highly specialized structure and therefore responds to inflammation in a variety of ways. One sign is a cloudy, red, painful eye. Horses with this condition are typically blepharospastic (holding the eyelids closed or squinting) and may be sensitive to light due to the painful nature of this disease. Other signs include ocular discharge (which may be evident as tearing), corneal edema (bluish tinge to the cornea) and conjunctival hyperemia or scleral injection (prominent vessels in the whites of the eye). Any of these signs may indicate a potential problem and should alert the owner and veterinarian to the possibility of ERU.
What Is the Long-Term Effect of Equine Recurrent Uveitis?
The recurrent nature of ERU allows multiple opportunities for damage to occur in the internal structures of the eye, and therefore the prognosis is guarded. Some manifestations of damage include cataract formation, degeneration of the globe with pthisis bulbi (shrinking of the eye) and blindness.
Your Veterinarian's Role
Your horse's veterinarian plays a key role in the successful management of ERU. Although vision loss is a common result of ERU, early recognition by your veterinarian, with possible referral to a veterinary ophthalmologist for persistent or nonresponsive cases, can have a positive effect on the eventual outcome.
Update: "...Ophthalmology in horses was declared such an important topic at the 2009 American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) Convention in early December that two Table Topics were held. In one session approximately 175 veterinarians attended, and in the second session about 120 practitioners were in attendance.
The discussion in the first Ophthalmology Table Topic started with a review from Ann Dwyer, DVM, on the AAEP-sponsored Focus on Ophthalmology Meeting that was held in Raleigh, N.C., in October 2009. Dwyer reported the attendance for the Focus meeting was excellent, and the veterinarians attending the meeting found the conference to be very helpful in improving their abilities to diagnosis and treat equine ophthalmic disease.
Amber Labelle, DVM, then gave a brief overview of the suspected causes and mechanisms of equine recurrent uveitis (ERU or moon blindness), including a novel surgical therapy using Suprachoroidal Cyclosporine A Implants.
Dwyer and Labelle agreed ERU is a very frustrating disease to treat. While progress has been made in treatment options and understanding of the pathophysiology and various risk factors of the syndrome, ERU is still a major cause of blindness in horses. Both veterinarians repeatedly emphasized the need for routine eye exams, especially as part of annual or bi-annual wellness exams, careful documentation of all findings, and aggressive therapy for intraocular inflammation..." Equine Eye Problems Discussed by VeterinariansFor More Information:
A Look at Equine Recurrent Uveitis and Leptospirosis
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Time of the Aces:
Marine Pilots in the Solomons, 1942-1944
Marines in World War II
by Commander Peter B. Mersky, U.S. Naval Reserve
Time of the Aces:by Commander Peter B. Mersky, U.S. Naval Reserve
Marine Pilots in the Solomons, 1942-1944
"Foggerty's Fate--22 Oct 1942." TSgt John Fogerty, an enlisted Marine pilot, was killed this date. Watercolor by Col Albert M. Leahy, USMCR (Ret.), in the Marine Corps Art Collection.
The morale of the men of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal soared dramatically in the late afternoon of 20 August 1942. That was when 19 Grumann F4F Wildcats of Captain John L. Smith's Marine Fighter Squadron (VMF) 223 and 12 Douglas Dauntless SBDs of Major Richard C. Mangrum's Marine Scout-Bomber Squadron (VMSB) 232 landed on yet-uncompleted Henderson Field. Ever since the assault landing on Guadalcanal on 7 August, and subject to unchallenged Japanese air raids from that time, the ground troops wondered, "Where are our planes?" Like so many other soldiers in so many other campaigns, they had little knowledge of the progress of the war elsewhere in the Pacific.
From the very beginning of World War II, with the Japanese attack on Wake Island, Marine aircraft, pilots, and crews became immediately and personally involved in the fighting. On Wake, Marine Wildcat pilots of VMF-211 gave a good account of themselves, even after the number of the squadron's flyable planes was reduced to four, and when those planes were damaged beyond repair, all aviation personnel became riflemen. And in the Battle of Midway, Marine pilots for the first time at first hand apprehended the nature of the war in the air as they flew against combat-experienced Japanese aircrews. But by the time of the landings on Guadalcanal and when the war was nearly a year old, only a relatively small number of Marine pilots had seen combat. A few had shot down several Japanese aircraft, although none had scored a fifth kill which would entitle him to be designated an ace. The leading Marine scorer at Midway was Captain Marion Carl, who had downed two Mitsubishi Type "O" Carrier Fighters. The Americans would later call them "Zeros" or "Zekes" and would shoot them down regularly despite the early reputation they received for being a highly maneuverable and deadly adversary in the air. Before he left the Pacific, Captain Carl would add considerably to his score, as would some of the other fighter pilots who landed on Guadalcanal with him on the 20th.
The Douglas SBD Dauntless divebomber fought in nearly every theater, flying with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, as well as the U.S. Army (as the A-24 Banshee). The SBD made its reputation in the Pacific, especially at Midway and Guadalcanal.
Marine Aircraft Group (MAG) 23, the initial air unit participating in the Guadalcanal operation, was assigned the mission of supporting the ground operations of the 1st Marine Division as well the air defense of the island once the landing had been made. MAG-23 included VMF-223 and -224, and VMSB-231 and -232. The fighter squadrons flew the F4F-4, the Grumann Wildcat with folding wings and six wing-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. The two VMSBs flew the Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless dive-bomber. Another fighter squadron, VMF-212, under Major Harold W. Bauer, was on the island of Efate in the New Hebrides, while MAG-23 headquarters had yet to sail from Hawaii by the time Marines hit the beaches on 7 August 1942. The first contingent of MAG-23--VMF-223 and VMSB-232--1eft Hawaii on board the escort carrier USS Long Island (CVE 1). On 20 August, 200 miles from Guadalcanal, the two squadrons launched toward their new home. VMF-224 (Captain Robert E. Galer) and VMSB-231 (Major Leo R. Smith) followed in the aircraft transports USS Kitty
Guadalcanal: The Beginning of the Long Road Back
Hawk (APV 1) and USS Hammondsport (APV 2), and flew on to the island on 30 August. While en route toward the launch point for GuadalcanaI, Captain Smith wisely decided to trade eight of his less experienced junior pilots for eight pilots of VMF-212 who had more flight time and training in the F4F than had Smith's fledglings.
Capt. Henry T. Elrod, a Wildcat pilot with VMF-211, earned what is chronologically the first Marine Corps--but not the first actually awarded--Medal of Honor for World War II. His exploits during the defense of Wake Island were not known until after the war. After his squadron's aircraft were all destroyed, Capt Elrod fought on the ground and was finally killed by a Japanese rifleman.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 26044
The newly arrived squadrons barely had time to get settled before they were in heavy action. Early on the 21st, the Japanese sent a 900-man force to attack Henderson Field, named after Major Lofton R. Henderson, a dive-bomber pilot killed at Midway. Around mid-day, Captain Smith was leading a four-plane patrol north of Savo Island heading toward the Russell Islands with Second Lieutenants Noyes McLennan and Charles H. Kendrick, and Technical Sergeant John Lindley. The two lieutenants had 16 days of operational flight training in F4Fs, and Lindley had been through ACTG, the Aircraft Carrier Training Group, which, as part of its training syllabus, gave tyro pilots indoctrination into fighter tactics.
Beyond Savo, six Zeros came straight at them from the north, with an altitude advantage of 500 feet. Smith recognized the Zeros immediately, although neither he nor any of the other three pilots had ever seen one before. He turned his flight toward them and the Zeros headed toward the F4Fs.
It was hard to say just what happened next except that the Zero Smith was shooting at pulled up and he shot fairly well into the belly of the enemy plane as it went by, only to find that now he had two Zeros on his tail. Captain Smith dove toward Henderson Field and the Japs broke away.
Minutes later, the Zero Captain Smith shot became VMF-223's first kill when it crashed into the water just off Savo Island. Smith's plane had some bullet holes but was flying alright. Two F4Fs joined on him. They looked back and it appeared that the Zeros were in a dogfight near Savo. The Marines thought they were ganging up on Sergeant Lindley so they went back to help him, but found that there was no F4F, just five Zeros acting like they were fighting.
The three Marines then got into another dogfight and the Zeros shot them up some more. Lindley and Kendrick got back to Henderson and made dead stick landings. Lindley was burned and blinded by hot oil when his oil tank was shattered and landed wheels up. Kendrick's oil line was shot away and he crash-landed. His airplane never flew again. It took eight days before Smith's plane was patched up enough to fly once again. Repairs on the fourth plane required 10 days. Only 15 of the 19 F4Fs were flyable after their first day of action from Henderson Field.
Photo courtesy of BGen Robert E. Galer
Members of VMF-224 pose by one of their fighters on Guadalcanal in mid-September 1942. Rear row, left to right: 2dLt George L. Hollowell, SSgt Clifford D. Garrabrant, 2dLt Robert A. Jefferies, Jr., 2dLt Alan M. Johnson, 2dLt Matthew H. Kennedy, 2dLt. Charles H. Kunz, 2dLt Dean S. Hartley, Jr., MG William R. Fuller. Front row: 2dLt Robert M. D'Arcy, Capt Stanley S. Nicolay, Maj John F. Dobbin, Maj Robert E. Galer, Maj Kirk Armistead, Capt Dale D. Irwin, 2dLt Howard L. Walter, 2dLt Gordon E. Thompson. All in this picture are pilots except MG Fuler, who was the Engineering Officer. Lt Thompson was reported missing in action on 31 1942.
'CUB One' at Guadalcanal On 8 August 1942, U.S. Marines captured a nearly completed enemy airstrip on Guadalcanal, which would prove critical to the success of the island campaign. It was essential that the airstrip become operational as quickly as possible, not only to contest enemy aircraft in the skies over Guadalcanal but also to ensure that badly needed supplies could be flown in and wounded Marines flown out. As it turned out, Henderson Field also proved to be a safe haven for Navy planes whose carriers had been sunk or badly damaged.
A Marine fighter squadron (VMF-223) and a Marine dive bomber squadron (VMSB-232) were expected to arrive on Guadalcanal around 16 August. Unfortunately. Marine aviation ground crews scrambled to accompany the two squadrons to Guadalcanal were still in Hawaii, and would not arrive on the island for nearly two weeks. Aircraft ground crews were urgently needed to service the two Marine squadrons upon their arrival.
The nearest aircraft ground crews to Guadalcanal were not Marines but 450 Navy personnel of a unit known as CUB One. an advanced base unit consisting of the personnel and material necessary for the establishment of a medium-sized advanced fuel and supply base. CUB One had only recently arrived at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.
On 13 August, Admiral John S. McCain ordered Marine Major Charles H. "Fog" Hayes, executive officer of Marine Observation Squadron 251, to proceed to Guadalcanal with 120 men of CUB One to assist Marine engineer s in completing the airfield (recently named Henderson Field in honor of a Marine pilot killed in the Battle of Midway), and to serve as ground crews for the Marine fighters and dive bombers scheduled to arrive within a few days. Navy Ensign George W. Polk was in command of the 120-man unit, and was briefed by Major Hayes concerning the unit's critical mission. (After the war, Polk became a noted newsman for the Columbia Broadcasting system, and was murdered by terrorists during the Greek Civil War. A prestigious journalism award was established and named in his honor).
Utilizing four destroyer transports of World War I vintage, the 120-man contingent from CUB One departed Espiritu Santo on the evening of 13 August. The total supply carried northward by the four transports included 400 drums of aviation gasoline, 32 drums of lubricant, 282 bombs (100 to 500 pounders), belted ammunition, a variety of tools, and critically needed spare parts.
The echelon arrived at Guadalcanal on the evening of 15 August, unloaded its passengers and supplies, and began assisting Marine engineers the following morning on increasing the length of Henderson Field. In spite of daily raids by Japanese aircraft, the arduous work continued, and on 19 August, the airstrip was completed, CUB One personnel also installed and manned an air-raid warning system in the famous "Pagoda," the Japanese-built control tower.
On 20 August, 19 planes of VMF-223 and 12 dive bombers of VMSB-232 were launched from the escort carrier Long Island and arrived safely at Henderson Field. The Marine pilots were quickly put into action over the skies of Guadalcanal in combat operations against enemy aircraft.
The men of CUB One performed heroics in servicing the newly arrived Marine fighters and bombers. Few tools existed or had yet arrived to perform many of the aircraft servicing jobs to which CUB One was assigned. It was necessary to fuel the Marine aircraft from 55-gallon drums of gasoline. As there were no fuel pumps on the island, the drums had to be man-handled and tipped into the wing tanks of the SBDs and the fuselage tanks of the F4F fighters. To do this. CUB One personnel stood precariously on the slippery wings of the aircraft and sloshed the gasoline from the heavy drums into the aircraft's gas tanks. The men used a make-ship funnel made from palm-log lumber.
Bomb carts or hoists were also at a premium during the early days of the Guadalcanal campaign, so aircraft bombs had to be raised by hand to the SBD drop brackets, as the exhausted, straining men wallowed in the mud beneath the airplanes.
No automatic belting machines were available at this time as well, so that the 50-caliber ammunition for the four guns on each fighter had to be hand-belted one round at a time by the men of CUB One. The gunners on the dive bombers loaded their ammunition by the same laborious method.
The dedicated personnel of CUB One performed these feats for 12 days before Marine squadron ground crews arrived with the proper equipment to service the aircraft. The crucial support provided by CUB One was instrumental to the success of the "Cactus Air Force" on Guadalcanal.
Allied air operations in the Solomons were controlled from the "Pagoda,: built by the Japanese and rehabilitated by the men of CUB One.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 51812
Like their Marine counterparts, the personnel of CUB One suffered from malaria, dengue fever, sleepless nights, and the ever-present shortage of food, clothing, and supplies. They would remain on Guadalcanal, performing their duties in an exemplary manner, until relieved on 5 February 1943. CUB One richly earned the Presidential Unit Citation awarded to the unit for its gallant participation in the Guadalcanal campaign.
--Arvil L. Jones with Robert V. Aquilina.
Photo courtesy of Capt Stanley S. Nicolay
Three personalities of the Cactus Air Force pose after receiving the Navy Cross from Adm Nimitz on 30 September 1942. From left: Maj John L. Smith, Maj Robert E. Galer, and Capt Marion E. Carl.
Marion Carl, now assigned to VMF-223, shot down three Japanese aircraft on 24 August to become the Marine Corps' first ace. Carl added two more kills on the 26th. The young fighter pilot found himself in competition with his squadron commander, as John Smith also began accumulating kills with regularity.
The 30th was a busy day for the Marine fighters on Guadalcanal The previous day's action saw eight Japanese aircraft shot down. However, by now, six of VMF-223's original complement of 19 Wildcats had also been destroyed or put out of action. The combat had been fast and furious since Smith and his squadron had arrived only nine days before. His young pilots were learning, but at a price.
One of the squadrons that shared Henderson Field with the Marines was the 67th Fighter Squadron, a somewhat orphaned group of Army Air Corps pilots, who had arrived on 22 August, led by Captain Dale Brannon, and their P-400 Airacobras, an export version of the Bell P-39. Despite its racy looks, the Airacobra found it difficult to get above 15,000 feet, where much of the aerial combat was taking place.
The 67th had had a miserable time of it so far because of their plane's poor performance, and morale was low. The pilots were beginning to question their value to the overall effort, and their commander, desperate for any measure of success to share with his men, asked Captain Smith if he and his squadron could accompany the Marines on their next scramble.
Smith agreed and on 30 August, the Marine and Army fighters--eight F4Fs and seven P-400s launched for a lengthy combat air patrol.
The fighters rendezvoused north of Henderson, maintaining 15,000 feet because of the P-400s' lack of oxygen. Coastwatchers had identified a large formation of Japanese bombers heading toward Henderson but had lost sight of their quarry in the rapidly building wall of thunderclouds approaching the island. The defenders orbited for 40 minutes, watching for the enemy bombers and their escorts.
Suddenly, Captain Smith saw the seven Army fighters dive toward the water, in hot pursuit of Zeros that had emerged from the clouds. The highly maneuverable Zeros quickly turned the tables on the P-400's, however. As the Japanese fighters concentrated on the hapless Bells, the Marine Wildcats lined up behind the Zeros and quickly shot down four of the dark green Mitsubishis. The effect of the F4Fs' heavy machine guns was devastating.
Making a second run, Captain Smith found himself going head-to-head with a Zero, its pilot just as
A profile of Bell P-39 Airacobra by Larry Lapadura. "Short Stroke" operated from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal from late 1942 to early 1943. The aircraft's deceptively streamlined shape belied a mediocre performance, especially above 15,000 feet. However, the aircraft was well armed and used with success as a ground strafer.
Maj John L. Smith poses in a Wildcat after returning to the States. A tough, capable combat leader, Smith received the Medal of Honor for his service at Guadalcanal.
Photo courtesy of Capt Stanley S. Nicolay
determined as his Marine opponent. Smith's guns finally blew the Zero up just before a collision or before one of the two fighter pilots would have had to turn away. By the end of the engagement, John Smith had shot down two more Zeros for a total of four kills. With nine kills, Smith was the leading Marine Corps ace at the time. Fourteen Japanese fighters--the bombers they were escorting had turned back -- had been shot down by the Marine and Army pilots, although four of the P-400s were also destroyed. Two of the pilots returned to Guadalcanal; two did not.
The Marine fighter contingent at Guadalcanal was now down to five operational aircraft; it needed reinforcement immediately. Help was on the way, however, for VMF-224 arrived in the afternoon of the 30th, after John Smith and his tired, but elated squadron returned from their frantic encounter with the Japanese fighter force. For their first few missions, VMF-224's pilots accompanied the now-veteran Rainbow Squadron pilots of VMF-223.[*]
Captain Galer's VMF 224 had no time to acclimate to its new base. (The day after its arrival, it was in action.) The squadron landed on the 30th in the midst of an alert, and was quickly directed to its parking areas on the field.
The next two weeks saw several of the Marine aviators bail out of their Wildcats after tangling with the enemy Zeros. On 31 August, First Lieutenant Stanley S. Nicolay of VMF-224 was on a flight with Second Lieutenant Richard R. Amerine, Second Lieutenant Charles E. Bryans, and Captain John E Dobbin, the squadron executive officer. It was VMF-224's first combat mission since its arrival the day before. As the Marines struggled past 18,000 feet on their way up to 20,000, Lieutenant Nicolay noticed two of the wingmen lagging farther and farther back.
He called Amerine and Bryans but got no response, He then called Dobbin and said he wanted to drop back to check on the wayward Wildcats. "It's too late to break up the formation," Dobbin wisely said. "There's nothing we can do." Nicolay closed up on Dobbin and they continued on.
The two young aviators had problems with their primitive oxygen systems and lacking sufficient oxygen, they possibly had even passed out in the thin air. Nicolay recalled,
We never saw Bryans again. It was so senseless, I remember thinking that after all their training and effort, neither one of them ever fired a shot in anger. They had no chance. The oxygen system was just a tiny, white triangular mask that fitted over the nose and mouth. You turned on the bottle, and that was it. No pressure system, nothing.
Apparently, the two Marine pilots had been jumped by roving Zeros. Bryans was thought to be killed almost immediately, while Amerine was able to bail out. He parachuted to the relative safety of the jungle, and as he attempted to
[*] When it was first established on 1 May 1942, VMF-223 was called the "Rainbow" Squadron. In May 1943, it changed its nickname to the more Marine-like "Bulldogs."
Photo courtesy of Capt Stanley S. Nicolay
1stLt Stanley S. Nicolay beside a Wildcat, probably just before deploying to the Pacific in 1942. He eventually shot down three Betty bombers at Guadalcanal. Note the narrow track of the Wildcat's main landing gear.
A rare photo of an exuberant LtCol Bauer as he demonstrates his technique to two ground crewmen. Intensely competitive, and known as "the Coach," Bauer was one of several Marine Corps aviators who received the Medal of Honor, albeit posthumously, at Guadalcanal.
National Archives photo 208-PU-14X-1 PNT
return to Henderson Field, he encountered several Japanese patrols on the way back, killing four enemy soldiers before returning to the Marine lines.
Marion Carl, who had 11 kills, had his own escape-and-evasion experience after he and his wingman, Lieutenant Clayton M. Canfield, were shot down on 9 September. Carl bailed out of his burning Wildcat and landed in the water where a friendly native scooped him up and hid him from the roving Japanese patrols. (Canfield had been quickly rescued by an American destroyer.)
The native took the ace to a native doctor who spoke English. The doctor gave Carl a small boat with an old motor which needed some work before it functioned properly. With the Japanese army all around, it was important that the American pilot get out as soon as he could.
Finally, he and the doctor arrived offshore of Marine positions on Guadalcanal. Dennis Byrd recalled Carl's return on the afternoon of 14 September:
A small motor launch operated by a very black native with a huge head of frizzled hair pulled up to the Navy jetty at Kukum. The tall white man tending the boat's wheezing engine was VMF-223's Captain Marion Carl. He had been listed as missing in action since September 9th and was presumed dead....Carl reported that on the day he disappeared, he'd shot down two more Jap bombers. Captain Carl's score was now 12 and Major Smith's, 14.
Now-Major Galer scored his squadron's first kills when he shot down two Zeros during a noontime raid of 26 bombers and eight Zero escorts over Henderson on 5 September. VMF-224 went up to intercept them, and the squadron commander knocked down a bomber and a fighter, after which he was shot down by a Zero that tacked onto him from behind and riddled his Wildcat. Recalling the action, in a wartime press release, Galer said:
I knew I'd be forced to land, but that Zero getting me dead to rights made me sore. I headed into a cloud, and instead of coming out below it as he expected, I came out on top and let him have it .... Then we both fell, but he was in flames and done for. I made a forced landing in a field, and before my wheels could stop rolling, Major Rivers J. Morrell and Lieutenant Pond of VMF-223, both forced their ships on the same deck--all within three minutes of each other!
Two days after his forced landing, Major Galer had to ditch his aircraft once more after another round with the Japanese. His flight was returning from a mission when it ran into a group of enemy bombers. He related that:
One of them fell to my guns, and pulling out of the dive, I took after a Zero. But I didn't pull around fast enough, and his guns knocked out my engine, setting it on fire. We were at about 5,000 feet, but I feared the swirling mass of Japs more than the fire.. ÷ so I laid over on my back and dove headlong for some clouds below me. Coming through the clouds, I didn't see any more Japs, and leveled off at 2,000 feet. I changed my angle of flight and grade of descent so I'd land as near as possible to shore. I set down in the drink some 200 or 300 yards from shore and swam in, unhurt.[*]
[*] This was not the first time Galer had a watery end to a flight. As a first lieutenant with VMF-2 in 1940, he had to ride his Grumman F3F biplane fighter in wihle approaching the carrier Saratoga (CV-3). The Grumman sank and stayed on the bottom off San Diego for 40 years. It was discovered by a Navy exploration team and reased, somewhat the worse forwear. Retired Brigadier General Robert Galer was at the dock when his old mount found dry land once more.
The Aircraft in the Conflict The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were definitely at a disadvantage when America entered World War II in December 1941. Besides other areas, their frontline aircraft were well behind world standards.
The Japanese did not suffer similarly, however, for they were busy building up their arsenal as they sought sources of raw materials they needed and were prepared to go to war to acquire. Besides possessing what was the finest aerial torpedo in the world -- the Long Lance -- they had the aircraft to deliver it. And they had fighters to protect the bombers. Although the world initially refused to believe how good Japanese aircraft and their pilots were, it wasn't long after the attack on Pearl Harbor that reality seeped in.
In many respects, the U.S. Army Air Force-it had been the U.S. Army Air Corps until 20 June 1941- and the Navy and Marine Corps had the same problems in the first two years of the war. The Army's top fighters were the Bell P-39 Airacobra and the Curtiss P-40B/E Tomahawk/Kittyhawk. The Navy and Marine Corps' two frontline fighters were the Brewster F2A-3 Buffalo and the Grumman F4F-3/4 Wildcat during 1942.
Of these single-seaters, only the Army's P-40 and the Navy's F4F achieved any measure of success against the Japanese in 1942. The P-40's main attributes were its diving speed, which let it disengage from a fight, and its ability to absorb punishment and still fly, a confidence builder for its hard-pressed pilots. The Wildcat was also a tough little fighter ("built like Grumman iron" was a popular catch-phrase of the period), and had a devastating battery of four (for the F4F-3) or six .50-caliber machine guns (for the F4F-4) and a fair degree of maneuverability.
Both the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy also had outstanding aircraft. The Army's primary fighter of the early war was the Nakajima K.43 Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon), a light, little aircraft, with a slim, tapered fuselage and a bubble canopy.
The Navy's fighter came to symbolize the Japanese air effort, even for the Japanese, themselves. The Mitsubishi Type "O" Carrier Fighter (its official designation) was as much a trend-setting design as was Britain's Spitfire or the American Corsair.
However, as author Norman Franks wrote, the Allied crews found that "the Japanese airmen were…far superior to the crude stereotypes so disparaged by the popular press and cartoonists. And in a Zero they were highly dangerous."
The hallmark of Japanese fighters had always been superb maneuverability. Early biplanes--which had been developed from British and French designs--set the pace. By the mid-1930s, the Army and Navy had two world class fighters, the Nakajima Ki.27 and the Mitsubishi A5M series, respectively, both low-wing, fixed gear aircraft. The Ki27 did have a modern enclosed cockpit, while the A5M's cockpit was open (except for one variant that experimented with a canopy
The first production model of Grumman's stubby, little Wildcat was the F4F-3, which carried four .50-caliber machine guns in the wings. Its wings did not fold, unlike the -4 which added two more machine guns and folding wings. These F4F-3s of VMF-121 carry prewar exercise markings.
The Wildcat was a relatively small aircraft, as were most of the pre-war fighters thgroughout the world. The aircraft's narrow gear track is shown to advantage in this ground view of a VMF-121 F4F-3.
This A6M3 is taking off from Rabaul in 1943.
Brewster's fat little F2A Buffalo is credited with a dismal performance in American and British service, although the Finns racked up a fine score against the Russians. This view of a Marine Brewster shows the aptness of its popular name, which actually came from the British. Its characteristic greenhouse canopy and main wheels tucked snugly into its belly are also well shown.
which was soon discarded in service.) A major and fatal disadvantage of most Japanese fighters was their light armament, usually a pair of .30-caliber machine guns and lack of armor, as well as their great flammability.
When the Type "0" first flew in 1939, most Japanese pilots were enthusiastic about the new fighter. It was fast, had retractable landing gear and an enclosed cockpit, and carried two 20mm cannons besides the two machine guns. Initial operational evaluation in China in 1940 confirmed the aircraft's potential.
By the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the A6M2 was the imperial Navy's standard carrier fighter, and rapidly replaced the older A5Ms still in service. As the A6M2 proved successful in combat, it acquired its wartime nickname, "Zero," although the Japanese rarely referred to it as such. The evocative name came from the custom of designating aircraft in reference to the Japanese calendar. Thus, since 1940 corresponded to the year 2600 in Japan, the fighter was the Type "00" fighter, which was shortened to "0." The western press picked up the designation and the name "Zero" was born.
The fighter received another name in 1943 which was almost as popular, especially among the American flight crews. A system of first names referred to various enemy aircraft, in much the same way that the postwar NATO system referred to Soviet and Chinese aircraft. The Zero was tagged "Zeke," and the names were used interchangeably by everyone, from flight crews to intelligence officers. (Other examples of the system included "Claude" [ASM], "Betty" [Mitsubishi G4M bomber], and "Oscar" [Ki,431]).
As discussed in the main text, the Navy and Marine Corps Wildcats were sometimes initially hard-pressed to defend their ships and fields against the large forces of Betty bombers and their Zero escorts, which had ranges of 800 miles or more through the use of drop tanks.
The Brewster Buffalo had little to show for its few encounters with the Japanese, which is difficult to understand given the type's early success during the Russo-Finnish War. The F2A-1, a lighter, earlier model of the -3 which served with the Marines, was the standard Finnish fighter plane. In its short combat career in American service, the Brewster failed miserably.
The Zero's incredible maneuverability came at some expense from its top speed. In an effort to increase the speed, the designers clipped the folding wingtips from the carrier-based A6M2 and evolved the land-based A6M3, Model 32. The pilots were not impressed with the speed increase and the production run was short, the A6M3 reverting back to its span as the Model 22. The type was originally called "Hap," after Gen Henry "Hap" Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Force. Arnold was so angry at thedubious honor that the name was quickly changed to Hamp. This Hamp is shown in the Solomons during the Guadalcanal campaign.
Thus, the only fighter capable of meeting the Japanese on anything approaching equal terms was the F4F, which was fortunate because the Wildcat was really all that was available in those dark days following Pearl Harbor. Retired Brigadier General Robert E. Galer described the Wildcat as "very rugged and very mistreated (at Guadalcanal)." He added:
Full throttle, very few replacement parts, muddy landing strips, battle damage, roughly repaired. We loved them. We did not worry about flight characteristics except when senior officers wanted to make them bombers as well as fighters.
Photo courtesy of Robert Mikesh
The A6M2-N floatplane version of the Zero did fairly well, suffering only a smal loss in its legendary maneuverability. Top speed was somewhat affected, however, and the aircraft's relatively light armament was a detriment..
The Japanese also operated a unique form of fighter. Other combatants had tried to make seaplanes of existing designs. The U.S. Navy had even hung floats on the Wildcat, which quickly became the "Wildcatfish." The British had done it with the Spitfire. But the resulting combination left much to be desired and sapped the original design of much of its speed and maneuverability.
The Japanese, however, seeing the need for a water-based fighter in the expanses of the Pacific, modified the A6M2 Zero, and came up with what was arguably the most successful water-based fighter of the war, the A6M2-N, which was allocated the Allied codename "Rufe."
Manufactured by Mitsubishi's competitor, Nakajima, float Zeros served in such disparate climates as the Aleutians and the Solomons. Although the floats bled off at least 40 mph from the land based version's top speed, they seemed to have had only a minor effect on its original maneuverability; the Rufe acquired the same respect as its sire.
While the F4F and P-40 (along with the luckless P-39) held the line in the Pacific, other, newer designs were leaving production lines, and none too soon. The two best newcomers were the Army's Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the Navy's Vought F4U Corsair. The P-38 quickly captured the headlines and public interest with its unique twin boomed, twin engine layout. It soon developed into a long-range escort, and served in the Pacific as well as Europe.
The Corsair was originally intended to fly from aircraft carriers, but its high landing speed, long nose that obliterated the pilot's view forward during the landing approach, and its tendency to bounce, banished the big fighter from American flight decks for a while. The British, however, modified the aircraft, mainly by clipping its wings, and flew it from their small decks.
Deprived of its new carrier fighter--having settled on the new Grumman F6F Hellcat as its main carrier fighter--the Navy offered the F4U to the Marines. They took the first squadrons to the Solomons, and after a few disappointing first missions, they made the gullwinged fighter their own, eventually even flying it from the small decks of Navy escort carriers in the later stages of the war.
A good view of an early F4U-1 under construction in 1942. The massive amount of wiring and piping for the aircraft's huge Pratt & Whitney engine shows up here, as do the Corsair's gull wings.
The Marine pilot of this F4U-1, Lt Donald Balch, contemplates his good fortune by the damaged tail of his fighter. The Corsair was a relatively tough aircraft, but like any plane, damage to vital portions of its controls or powerplant could prove fatal.
National Archives 80G-54284
This "bird-cage" Corsair is landing at Espiritu Santo in September 1943. The aircraft's paint is well-weathered and its main gear tires are "dusty" from the coral runways of the area.
National Archives 80G-54279
1stLt Rolland M. Rinabarger of VMF-214 in his early F4U-1 Corsair at Espiritu Santo in September 1943. Badly shot up by Zeros during an early mission to Kahili only two weeks after the photo was taken, Lt. Rinabarger returned to the States for lengthy treatment. He was still in California when the war ended. The national insignia on his Corsair is outlined in read, a short-lived attempt to regain that color from the prewar marking after the red circle was deleted following Pearl Harbor to avoid confusion with the Japanese "meatball." Even this small amount of red was deceptive, however, and by mid-1944, it was gone from the insignia again. Note the large mud spray on the aft under fuselage.
Besides the two main fighters, the Army's Oscar and the Navy's Zeke and its floatplane derivative, the Rufe, the Japanese flew a wide assortment of aircraft, including land-based bombers, such as the Mitsubishi G4M (code-named Betty) and Ki.21 (Sally). Carrier-based bombers included the Aichi D3A dive-bomber (the Val) which saw considerable service during the first three years of the war, and its stablemate, the torpedo bomber from Nakajima, the B5N (Kate), one of the most capable torpedo-carriers of the first half of the war. The Marine Corps squadrons in the Solomons regularly encountered these aircraft. First Lieutenant James Swett's two engagements on 7 April 1943 netted the young Wildcat pilot seven Vals, and the Medal of Honor.
Although early wartime propaganda ridiculed Japanese aircraft and their pilots, returning Allied aviators told different stories, although the details of their experiences' were kept classified. Each side's culture provided the basis for their aircraft design philosophies. Eventually, the Japanese were overwhelmed by American technology and numerical superiority. However, for the important first 18 months of the Pacific war, they had the best. But, as was also the case in the European theaters, a series of misfortunes, coincidences, a lack of understanding by leaders, as well as the drain of prolonged combat, finally allowed the Americans and their Allies to overcome the enemy's initial edge.
Photo courtesy Robert Mikesh
Mitsubishi G4M Betty bombers, perhaps during the Solomons campaign. Probably the best Japanese land-based bomber in the war's first two years, the G4M series enjoyed a long range, but could burst into flames under attack, much to the chagrin of its crews. The type flew as a suicide aircraft, and finally, painted white with green crosses, carried surrender teams to various sites.
Galer would also be shot down three more times during his flying career--twice more during World War II and once during a tour in Korea.
The last half of September 1942 was a time of extreme trial for the Cactus Air Force (Cactus was the code name for Guadalcanal). Some relief for the Marine squadrons came in the form of bad weather and the arrival of disjointed contingents of Navy aircraft and crews who were displaced from carriers which were either sunk, or damaged. Saratoga (CV-3) and Enterprise (CV-6) had been torpedoed or bombed and sent back to rear area repair stations. The remaining carriers, Hornet (CV-8) and Wasp (CV-7), patrolled off Guadalcanal, their captains and admirals decidedly uneasy about exposing the last American flattops in the Pacific as meaty targets to the numerically superior Japanese ships and aircraft.
Wasp took a lurking Japanese submarine's torpedoes on 15 September while covering a convoy. Now only Hornet remained. Navy planes and crews from Enterprise, Saratoga, and now Wasp flew into Henderson Field to supplement the hard-pressed Marine fighter and bomber squadrons there. It was still a meager force of 63 barely operational aircraft, a collection of Navy and Marine F4Fs and SBDs, Navy Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers, and a few forlorn Army P-400s. A few new Marine pilots from VMF-121 filtered in on 25 September. However, two days later, the crews from Enterprise's contingent took their planes out to meet their carrier steaming in to arrive on station off Guadalcanal. As the weather broke on the 27th, the Enterprise crews took their leave of Guadalcanal
The next day, the Japanese mounted their first raid in nearly two weeks. Warned by the coast-watchers, Navy and Marine fighters rose to intercept the 70-plane force. Now a lieutenant colonel, Harold "Indian Joe" Bauer was making one of his periodic visits from Efate, and scored a kill, a Zero, before landing.
A native of North Platte, Nebraska, Bauer was part-Indian (as was Major Gregory "Pappy" Boyington). A veteran of 10 years as a Marine aviator, he watched the progress of the campaign at Guadalcanal from his rear-area base on Efate. He would come north, using as an excuse the need to check on those members of his squadron who had been Sent to Henderson and would occasionally fly with the Cactus fighters.
His victory on the 28th was his first, and soon, Bauer was a familiar face to the Henderson crews. Bauer was visiting VMF-224 on 3 October when a coastwatcher reported a large group of Japanese bombers inbound for Henderson. VMF-223 and -224 took off to intercept the raiders. The Marine Wildcats accounted for 11 enemy aircraft; Lieutenant Colonel Bauer claimed four, making him an ace.
On 30 September, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, braved a heavy rainstorm to fly in to Henderson for an awards ceremony. John Smith, Marion Carl, and Bob Galer, as well as some 1st Marine Division personnel, received the Navy Cross. Other members of the Cactus Air Force, Navy and Marine, were decorated with Distinguished Flying Crosses. Nimitz departed in a blinding rain after presenting a total of 27 medals to the men of the Cactus Air Force.
October was a pivotal month for the air campaign on Guadalcanal. It was a time when the men who had arrived in August were clearly at the end of their endurance, for sickness and fatigue hit them after they had survived Japanese bullets. However, new squadrons and crews were arriving, among them VMF-121, led by Major Leonard K. "Duke" Davis. His executive officer, Captain Joseph J. Foss, would soon make a name for himself.
Combat in October
Foss came from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and as a boy had developed a shooting eye which would stand him in good stead over Guadalcanal. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in February 1940 and received his wings of gold 13 months later. Originally considered too old to fly fighters (he was 27), he was ordered to a photo reconnaissance squadron in San Diego. However, he kept submitting requests for transfer to fighters and was finally sent to VMF-121.
A few days after arriving at Henderson, Foss scored his first victory on 13 October. As an attacking Zero fired and missed, Foss fired his guns sending the enemy fighter down. Three more Zeros then attacked Foss, putting holes in his Wildcat's oil system. The newly blooded pilot had to make a deadstick landing back at Cactus Base.
Other veterans of the campaign had not stayed idle. Major Smith of VMF-223 had taken his squadron up on 2 October against a raid by Japanese bombers and fighters. The Zero escorts dove on the climbing Navy and Marine Wildcats, quickly shooting down two fighters from VMF-223. Smith exited a cloud to confront three Zeros. He blasted a fighter into a ball of flame. However, the two remaining Zeros got on his tail and peppered the struggling little blue-gray F4F with cannon and machine gun fire. Listening to a repaired radio from a damaged SBD back at Guadalcanal, the crews of Dennis Byrd's VMSB-232 heard Captain Carl call to his skipper. "John, you've got a Zero on your tail!" "I know, I know," Smith
Department of Defense photo (USMC) A707812
Maj John L. Smith, LtCol Richard C. Mangrum, and Capt Marion E. Carl pose for photos after returning to the States. LtCol Mangrum commanded an SBD squadron at the height of the Cactus campaign and was universally admired. he eventually attained the rank of lieutenant general, while Marion Carol retired as a major general after fighting in three wars--World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.
Marion Carl, now a major and commanding his old squadron, VMF-223, made his 17th kill in December 1943, when he shot down a Japanese Tony over Rabaul. Carl was escorting Marine PBJ (B-25) bombers in his F4U-1 Corsair when the enemy fighter jumped the raiders. The victory was Carl's next-to-last score.
Painting by William S. Philips, courtesy of the Greenwich Workshop
replied, "shoot the SOB if you can!" Then all was silence.
Smith's aircraft was mortally wounded, and he tried to regain the field. He finally had to make a deadstick landing six miles from the strip and walk back, watching all the time for roving Japanese patrols.
Second Lieutenant Charles H. Kendrick was not as fortunate as his skipper. The Zeros had gotten him on their first pass, and he tried to guide his stricken fighter to a crash landing. He apparently landed close to Henderson, but his fighter flipped over on its back, killing the young pilot.
Major Smith led a party to the crash site. They found Kendrick still in his cockpit. They released and buried him beside his plane. Stan Nicolay recalled, "I don't know how many we lost that day. We really took a beating." Actually, six Wildcats had been shot down or returned with strike damage. Several others required major repair.
VMF-224's skipper was also shot down. Bob Galer bailed out over the water--his third shootdown in less than three weeks--and was rescued. He had accounted for two Zeros, however. He recalled:
I was up with six fighters, cruising about at 20,000 or 25,000 feet. Suddenly, 18 Zeros came at us out of the sun, and we took 'em on. The day was cloudy and after a few minutes, the only other Marine I could find was Second Lieutenant Dean Hartley. In the melee of first contact, I heard several Jap bullets splatter against--and through--my ship, but none stopped me. At about the same moment, Hartley and I started to climb into a group of seven Zeros hovering above us. In about four minutes, I shot down two Zeros and Hartley got a possible. The other four were just too many and we were both shot down. Hartley got to a field, but I couldn't make it. The Jap that got me really had me bore-sighted. He raked my ship from wingtip to wingtip. He blasted the rudder bar right from under my foot. My cockpit was so perforated it's a miracle that I escaped. The blast drove the rivets from the pedal into my leg. I pancaked into the water near Florida Island. It took me an hour-and-a-half to swim ashore....l worried not only about the Japs but about the tide turning against me, and sharks.
Major Galer struggled ashore where he encountered four men armed with machetes and spears. Fortunately, the natives were friendly and took the bedraggled pilot to their village. After enjoying what hospitality his hosts could offer, Major Galer rode in a native canoe to a Marine camp on a beach five miles away. He made his way back to Henderson from there.
Marine Aircraft Group 23 and the rest of its squadrons also left the following day, having earned a rest from the intense combat of the last two-and-a-half months. Between 20 August and 16 October, the squadrons of MAG-23 and attached Army and Navy squadrons had shot down 244 Japanese aircraft, including 111.5 by VMF-223 and 60.5 by VMF-224. The score had not come free, though. Twenty-two pilots of the group, as well as 33 aviators from other Navy, Marine, and Army squadrons assigned to the Cactus Air Force, had been lost.
John Smith had seen his last engagement. He received the Medal of Honor for his leadership during the Guadalcanal campaign and finished the war as the sixth highest on the
list of Marine Corps aces, closely followed by his friend and rival, Marion Carl. Much to his initial chagrin, Smith found himself on the War Bond circuit, and then training new pilots. It was not until two years later, in 1944, that Lieutenant Colonel Smith got a combat assignment again. As commanding officer of MAG-32 in Hawaii, he took the group to Bougainville and the Philippines.
Marion Carl assumed command of his old squadron, VMF-223, in the United States in January 1943 and took the newly renamed Bulldogs to the South Pacific late in the fall. He gained two more kills--a Ki.61 Tony (a Japanese Army fighter) and a Zero, on 23 December and 27 December 1943, respectively-this time in a Vought F4U Corsair. His final score at the end of the war was 18.5 Japanese aircraft destroyed.
The night of 13-14 October saw the Japanese pound beleaguered Henderson Field with every gun they could fire from their assembled flotilla offshore, as well as the entrenched artillery positions hidden in the dense jungle surrounding the field. The night-long barrage might very well have been the end for the Cactus Marines.
The new day revealed that of 39 Dauntlesses, only seven could be considered operational, only a few Army fighters could stagger into the air, and all the TBF Avenger torpedo bombers were destroyed or down. The only saving factor was that the fighter strip was relatively untouched. By the afternoon, a few Wildcats were sent up to mount a patrol over Henderson while it pulled itself together. For the next few days, the Cactus Air Force---Marine, Navy, and Army--flew as though its collective life was on the line, which it was.
Although VMF-223 had left, Guadalcanal still had several top scoring aces left, among them Captain Joe Foss of VMF-121 and Lieutenant Colonel Harold Bauer of VMF-212. Throughout October 1942, Foss and Bauer were kept busy by constant Japanese raids, desperately trying to dislodge the determined Marines from the island.
A New Crew at Cactus
Lieutenant Colonel Bauer had led his VMF-212 up from Espiritu Santo on the afternoon of 16 October, when he finally had his own squadron at Henderson. With empty gas tanks, the 18 Wildcats were running on fumes as they entered the landing pattern in time to see a U.S. transport under attack from Japanese dive-bombers. Without hesitating, Bauer broke from the pattern and charged into the Vals, shooting down four of them. It was an incredible way to advertise the arrival of his squadron.
Joe Foss took off on the afternoon of 23 October to intercept an incoming force of Betty bombers, escorted by Zeros. Five of the escorting fighters dove toward Foss and his flight, followed by 20 more Zeros. Diving to gain speed, the VMF-121 executive officer saw a Wildcat pursued by a Zero. He fired at the Japanese fighter, shredding it with his six .50-caliber machine guns.
Without losing speed, Foss racked his aircraft into a loop behind another Zero. He destroyed this second Mitsubishi while both fighters hung inverted over Guadalcanal. As he came out of the loop, Foss hit a third Zero. A fourth kill finished off a highly productive mission.
On 25 October, Foss took off again against a Japanese raid, and this time, he shot down two enemy aircraft. Later the same day, Foss gunned down three more Zeros for a total of five in one day, and an overall score of 16 kills.
- Marine Corps Aviators Who Received the Medal of Honor in World War II Of the 81 Medals of Honor awarded to Marines for service during World War II, 11 Marine Corps aviators received America's highest military award. Except for two posthumous awards, the medals all went to aces who served in the Solomons and Bougainville campaigns. The Medal of Honor was awarded to Captain Henry T. Elrod of VMF-211 and Captain Richard E. Fleming of VMSB-241. Captain Elrod was killed on Wake in December 1941. Although his award is chronologically the first Medal of Honor to be awarded to a Marine during the war, his performance did not become known until survivors of Wake had been repatriated after the war.
Captain Fleming was a dive-bomber pilot at Midway in 1942. VMSB-241 flew both the obsolete Vought SB2U Vindicator and the SBD Dauntless during this pivotal battle. On 5 June 1942, Captain Fleming was last seen diving on a Japanese ship amidst a wall of flak. His Vindicator struck the cruiser's aft turret.
Two of the remaining nine awards were for specific actions; the other seven were for periods of continued service or more than one mission. Seven of these awards were for service in the Solomons-Guadalcanal Campaign. The awards for specific actions went to First Lieutenant Jefferson DeBlanc (31 January 1943) and First Lieutenant James E. Swett (7 April 1943).
Five of these awards were originally posthumous. However, Major Gregory Boyington made a surprise return from captivity as a prisoner of war to receive his award in person from President Harry S. Truman.
The Pilots and Their Aircraft *Lieutenant Colonel Harold W. Bauer, VMF-212. For service from May to November 1942. Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat.
Major Gregory Boyington, VMF-214. For service from September 1943 to January 1944 in the Central Solomons. Vought F4U-1/F4U-1A Corsair.
First Lieutenant Jefferson J. DeBlanc, VMF-112. For action on 31 January 1943. Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat.
*Captain Henry T. Elrod, VMF-211. For action on Wake Island 8-23 December 1941. Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat.
*Captain Richard E. Fleming, VMSB-241. For action at the Battle of Midway, 4-5 June 1942. Vought SB2U-3 Vindicator.
Captain Joseph J. Foss, VMF-121. For service in the Guadalcanal Campaign, October 1942-January 1943. Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat.
Major Robert E. Galer, VMF-224. For service in the Guadalcanal Campaign, August-September 1942. Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat.
*First Lieutenant Robert M. Hanson, VMF-215. For action in the Central Solomons, November 1943 and January 1944. Vought F4U-1 Corsair.
Major Robert L. Smith, VMF-223. For service in the Guadalcanal Campaign, August-September 1942. Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat.
First Lieutenant James E. Swett, VMF-221. For action on 7 April 1943 over Guadalcanal. Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat.
First Lieutenant Kenneth A. Walsh, VMF-124. For action on 15 and 30 August 1943. Vought F4U-1 Corsair.
* indicates a posthumous award
Lieutenant Colonel Bauer was adding to his score, too. A veteran aviator, Colonel Bauer was a respected flight leader. He frequently gave pep talks to his younger pilots, earning the affectionate nickname of "Coach." Bauer had taken over as commander of fighters on Guadalcanal on 23 October.
Before the big mission on 23 October, the Coach had told his pilots, "When you see Zeros, dogfight 'em!" His instructions went against the warnings that most of American fighter pilots had been given about the lithe little Japanese fighter. Joe Foss' success on this day seemed to vindicate Bauer, however. Twenty Zeros and two Bettys, including the four Zeros claimed by Foss, went down in front of Marine Wildcats.
Up to this time the Zero was considered the best fighter in the Pacific. This belief stemmed from the fact that the Zero had spectacular characteristics of performance in both maneuverability, rate of climb, and radius of action, all first noted at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. And it was because of its performances in these actions that it achieved the seeming invincibility that it did. At the same time, the Zero was highly flammable because it lacked armor plate in any form in its design and also because it had no self-sealing fuel tanks, such as existed in U.S. aircraft. Initially in the war, in the hands of a good pilot, the Zero could usually take care of itself against its heavier and tougher American opponents, but early in the air battles over Guadalcanal, its days of supremacy became numbered. By the end of the war in the Pacific, the kill ratio of U.S. planes over Japanese aircraft went from approximately 2.5:1 to better than 10:1.
What made the difference as far as Lieutenant Colonel Bauer was concerned was his feeling that, in the 10 months of intense combat after Pearl Harbor, including their disastrous and failed adventure at Midway, the Japanese had lost many of their most experienced pilots, and their replacements were neither so good nor experienced. Many of the major aces of the Zero squadrons--the ones who had accumulated many combat hours over China--had, indeed, been lost or been rotated out of the combat zone. Whatever the situation, most of the Marine pilots in this early part of the war in the South Pacific would still admit that the Japanese remained a force to be reckoned with.
The Japanese endeavored to reassert their dominance on 25 October. In a last-ditch effort to remove American carriers from the South Pacific, a fleet including three aircraft carriers sortied to find the U.S. carriers Enterprise and Hornet, all that remained at the moment of the meager U.S. carrier strength in the Pacific.
The Japanese fleet was discovered during an intensive search by PBY flying boats, and the battle was joined early in the morning of 26 October. What became known as the Battle of Santa Cruz occurred some 300 miles southeast of Guadalcanal. Indeed, most of the Marine and Navy flight crews attempting to blunt remaining enemy air raids still plaguing the positions of the embattled ground forces on Guadalcanal had no idea that another desperate fight was being waged that would have a distinct impact on their situation back at Henderson.
Many American Navy flight crews received their baptism of fire during Santa Cruz. Hornet was hit by Japanese dive-bombers and eventually abandoned--one of the few times that a still-floating American ship had been left to the enemy, even though she was burning from stem to stern. (The carrier was only a year old.) Enterprise was hit by Val dive-bombers, and the aircraft of her Air Group 10 were ultimately forced to land on Guadalcanal. The displaced Navy crews remained at Henderson until 10 November, while their ship underwent repairs at Noumea, New Caledonia.
While the Marines on Guadalcanal fought for their lives, their Navy compatriots far offshore also challenged the Japanese. At the Battle of Santa Cruz, October 1942, Japanese bombers hit the American ships, damaging the vital carrier Enterprise as well as attacking squadrons of inexperienced Navy aircrews. This A6M2 Model 21 Zero launches from the carrier Sholalu during Santa Cruz while deck crewmen cheer on the pilot, Lt Hideki Shingo.
While blame and recriminations went the rounds of the Navy's Pacific commands--for it seemed that Santa Cruz was a debacle, a strategic and tactical defeat for the hard-pressed carrier force--the effects of the battle would become clear soon. Sixty-nine Japanese aircraft had been shot down by Navy F4Fs and antiaircraft fire. An additional 23 were forced to ditch because of crippling battle damage.
Like Midway, Santa Cruz deprived the Japanese of many of their vital aircraft and their experienced flight crews and flight commanders. Thus, as the frantic month of October gave way to November, and although they did not know it at the time, the Cactus Air Force crews had been given a respite, and
Brigadier General Roy S. Geiger, USMC General Geiger, commander of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, arrived on Guadalcanal on 3 September 1942 to assume command of air operations emanating from Henderson Field. He was 57 years old, and he had been a Marine for 35 of those years, commanded a squadron in France in World War I, served a number of tours fighting the bandits in Central America, and had served in the Philippines and China. He was designated a naval aviator in June 1917, thus becoming the fifth flyer in the Marine Corps and the 49th in the naval service. In the course of his career, he had a number of assignments to staff and command billets as well as tours at senior military courses such as the ones at the Army Command and Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, the Army War College at Carlisle, and the Navy War College at Newport. He also was both a student and instructor at various times at the Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia. Among other reasons, it was because of his sound training in strategy, and tactics at these schools and his long experience as a Marine that he was so well equipped to assume command of I Marine Amphibious Corps (later III Amphibious Corps) for the Bougainville, Guam, Peleliu, and Okinawa operations.
When Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., USA, commander of the Tenth Army on Okinawa was killed, and based on General Buckner's stated decision before the operation, General Geiger took over command and became the first Marine ever to accede to command of as large a unit as an army. He was then 60, an age when many men in civilian life looked forward to retirement.
But it was at Guadalcanal, where his knowledge of Marine planes and pilots was so important in defeating the myth of Japanese invincibility in the air, that he first made his mark in the Pacific War. A short, husky, tanned, and white-haired Marine, whose deep blue eyes were piercing and whose reputation had preceded him, compelled instant attention, recognition, and dedication on the part of his junior pilots, many of whom had but a few hours of experience in the planes they were flying. As told in this pamphlet, out of meager beginnings grew the reputation and success in combat of the aces in the Solomons.
Benis M. Frank
ultimately, the key to victory over the island.
Meanwhile, under the command of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese decided to make one more try to land troops and material on Guadalcanal and to regain the island and its airstrips. The Americans were also bringing new squadrons and men in to fortify Cactus Base and Henderson Field. MAG-11 arrived on 1 November, bringing the SBDs of VMSB-132 and the F4Fs of VMF-112. Newly promoted Brigadier General Louis Woods arrived on 7 November to relieve Brigadier General Roy S. Geiger as commander of the Cactus Air Force. Both men were pioneer Marine aviators, and Geiger had led his squadrons through some of the most intense combat to be seen during the war. But, almost inevitably, the strain was beginning to show on the tough, 57-year-old Geiger. He had once taken off in an SBD in full view of his troops and dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on a Japanese position, showing his troops that a former squadron commander in France in World War I could still do it.
As new planes and crews arrived at Henderson and the frustrated Japanese planned their final attacks, the Cactus Marines fought on. On 7 November, a sighting of a force of Japanese ships near Florida Island scrambled a strike group of SBDs and their F4F escorts. Captain Joe Foss led eight VMF-121 Wildcats, each with 250-pound bombs beneath its wings. The VMSB-132 Dauntlesses carried 500-pounders in their centerline mounted bomb racks.
The heavily laden aircraft took some 30 minutes to climb to 12,000 feet as their crews searched for the enemy flotilla. As he looked ahead and below, Foss spotted six Japanese floatplane Zeros--a modification of the A6M2 model of the land-and carrier-based Zero--crossing from right to left, descending. Alerting his squadron mates, he dropped his light bombs and headed toward the unsuspecting enemy fighters.
Painting by Ted Wilbur, courtesy of the artist
Using hit-and-run tactics, Capt Joe Foss flames a Japanese Zero over Henderson Field in October 1942.
In one slashing pass, Foss' Wildcats shot down five of the six Zeros, Foss' target literally disintegrating under the weight of his heavy machine gun fire. One of the other Wildcats shot down the surviving Zero. All six enemy pilots bailed out of their fighters and seemed to be out of danger as they floated toward the water. As the incredulous Marine pilots watched, however, the six Japanese aviators unlatched their parachute harnesses and fell to their deaths.
Foss called for his fighters to regroup in preparation for a strafing run on the enemy warships below. He spotted a slow float biplane--probably a Mitsubishi type used for reconnaissance-and lined up for what he thought would be an easy kill. However, the two-seater was surprisingly maneuverable, and its pilot chopped the throttle, letting his rear gunner get a good shot at the surprised American fighter.
The gunner's aim was good and Foss' Wildcat suffered heavy damage before he finally dispatched the audacious little floatplane. Soon, the VMF-121 executive officer found a third victim, another floatplane, and shot it down. Regrouping with a portion of his group, he flew back to Henderson Field with another badly damaged Wildcat. However, the two cripples were spotted en route by enemy fighters. The two American fighters tried to get to the protection of clouds. Foss succeeded, but his wingman was apparently shot down by the enemy flight.
Foss was not out of danger, however, as his engine finally quit, forcing him to glide toward the sea, 3,500 feet below. He dropped through heavy rain, trying to gauge the best way to put his aircraft down in the water. He spotted a small village on the coast of a nearby island and wondered if the natives would turn him over to the Japanese.
He hit the water with enough force to slam his canopy shut, momentarily trapping him in the cockpit as the Wildcat began to sink. In a few seconds which seemed like an
Two aces walk with another famous aviator. Charles Lindbergh, right, visited the Pacific combat areas several times to help Army, Navy, and Marine Corps squadrons get the most from the respective mounts. Here, the pioneer transatlantic flier visits with now-Maj Joe Foss, left, and now-Maj Marion Carl, center, in May 1944.
Department of Defense photo (USMC) 97555
eternity, he struggled to free himself from his seat and the straps of his parachute, and force the canopy open again. His aircraft was well below the surface and only after an adrenalin-charged push, was he able to ram the canopy back and shoot from his plane. He remembered to inflate his Mae West life preserver, which helped him get to the surface where he lay gasping for air
After floating for a long time as darkness fell, Foss was finally rescued by natives and a missionary priest from the village he had seen as he dropped toward the water. The rescue came none too soon as sharks, which frequented the waters near the island, had begun to appear around the Marine pilot.
A PBY flew up from Henderson the next day to collect him and he was back in action the day after he returned. On 12 November, he scored three kills, making him the top American ace of the war, and the first to reach 20 kills.
On the night of 12-13 November, American and Japanese naval forces fought a classic naval battle which has been called the First Battle of Guadalcanal. It was a tactical defeat for the Americans who lost two rear admirals killed in action on the bridges of their respective flagships.
The Battle for Guadalcanal
The next day, 14 November, the Second Battle of Guadalcanal pitted aircraft from the carrier Enterprise and Henderson Field against a large enemy force trying to run the Slot, the body of water running down the Solomons chain between Guadalcanal and New Georgia. By midnight, another naval engagement was underway. This battle turned out differently for the Japanese, who lost several ships, including 10 transports carrying more than 4,000 troops and their equipment.
The Navy and Marines from Enterprise and Henderson hammered the enemy ships, while the Americans on the island, in turn, were harassed day and night by well-entrenched enemy artillery positions still on Guadalcanal and the huge guns of the Japanese battleships and cruisers offshore.
During these furious engagements, Lieutenant Colonel Bauer had dutifully stayed on the ground, organizing Cactus air strikes and ordering other people into the air. Finally, on the afternoon of 14 November, Colonel Bauer scheduled himself to lead seven F4Fs from VMF-121 as escorts for a strike by SBDs and TBFs against the Japanese transport ships.
Together with Captain Foss and Second Lieutenant Thomas W. "Coot" Furlow, Bauer strafed one of the transports before turning back for Henderson. Two Zeros sneaked up on the Marine fighters, but Bauer turned to meet the threat, shooting down one of the Japanese attackers. The second Zero dragged Foss and Furlow over a Japanese destroyer which did its best to take out the Wildcats. By the time they had shaken the Zero and returned to the point where they last saw the Coach, they found a large oil slick with Colonel Bauer in the middle, wearing his yellow Mae West, waving furiously at his squadron mates.
Foss quickly flew back to Henderson and jumped into a Grumman Duck, a large amphibian used as a hack transport and rescue vehicle. Precious time was lost as the Duck had to hold for a squadron of Army B-26 bombers landing after a flight from New Caledonia; they were nearly out of gas. Finally, Foss and the Duck's pilot, Lieutenant Joseph N. Renner, roared off in the last light of the day. By the time they arrived over Bauer's last position, it was dark and the Coach was nowhere to be seen.
The next morning a desperate search found nothing of Lieutenant Colonel Bauer. He was never found and was presumed to have drowned or have been attacked by the sharks which were a constant threat to all aviators forced to parachute into the waters around Guadalcanal during the campaign.
Bauer's official score of 11 Japanese aircraft destroyed (revised lists credit him with 10) did not begin to tell the impact the loss the tough veteran had on the young Marine and Navy crews at Henderson. He was decorated with a Medal of Honor posthumously for his flight on 16 October, when he shot down four Japanese Val dive-bombers, but the high award could also be considered as having been given in recognition of his leadership of his own squadron, VMF-212, and later, as the commander of the fighters of the Cactus Air Force.
Painting by William S. Philips, courtesy of the Greenwich Workshop
Capt Foss saves a fellow pilot by shooting down an attacking Zero during an engagement on 23 October 1942.
The loss of the Coach was a hard blow. Another loss, albeit temporary, was that of Joe Foss who became severely ill with malaria. (Many of the Cactus Air Force aviators, like the ground troops, battled one tropical malady or another during their combat tours.) Foss flew out to New Caledonia on 19 November with a temperature of 104 degrees. He spent the next month on sick leave, also losing 37 pounds. While in Australia, he met some of the Australian pilots who had flown against Nazi pilots in the Desert War in North Africa. In one of his conversations with them, he told the Aussies, "We have a saying up at Guadalcanal, if you're alone and you meet a Zero, run like hell because you're outnumbered." In the coming months, they would find out he knew was he was talking about.
Foss returned to Guadalcanal on 31 December 1942, and remained on combat status until 17 February 1943, when he was ordered back to the U.S. By this time, besides enduring several return bouts with malaria, he had shot down another six Japanese aircraft for a final total of 26 aircraft and no balloons, thus becoming the first American pilot to equal the score of Captain Edward Rickenbacker, the top U.S. ace in World War I. In that war, tethered balloons shot down counted as aircraft splashed. Of the 26 planes Rickenbacker was given credit for, four were balloons.
Joe Foss was one of the Cactus Marines who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his cumulative work during their intense campaign. Summoned to the White House on 18 May 1943, he was decorated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After his action-packed tour at Guadalcanal, Captain Foss went on the requisite War Bond tour. Promoted to major, he took command of a new fighter squadron, VMF-115, equipped with F4U-1 Corsairs.
Originally nicknamed "Joe's Jokers,'' in deference to their famous skipper, VMF-115 flew a short combat tour from Bougainville during May when there was little or no enemy air activity from and above Rabaul. Major Foss did not add to his score.
This front view of an F4F-4 shows an unusual aspect of Grumman's tubby little fighter. By Christmas 1942, the Japanese position was clearly untenable. Their troops who remained on Guadalcanal were sick and short of food, medicine, and ammunition. There was still plenty of action on the ground and in the air, but not like the intense engagements of the previous fall. On 31 January 1943, First Lieutenant Jefferson J. DeBlanc of VMF-112 led six Wildcats as escorts for a strike by Dauntlesses and Avengers. He encountered a strong force of Zeros near Kolombangara Island and took his fighters down to meet the threat before the Japanese could reach the Marine bombers.
In a wild melee, DeBlanc, who already had three Zeros to his credit, shot down three more before hearing a call for help from the bombers now under attack by floatplane Zeros. DeBlanc and his flight climbed back to the formation and dispersed the float Zeros.
Soon after the SBDs and TBFs made their attacks on Japanese ships, DeBlanc discovered two more Zeros closing from behind. He engaged and destroyed these two attackers with his badly damaged Wildcat. DeBlanc and a member of his flight, Staff Sergeant James A. Fellton, had to abandon their F4Fs over Kolombangara. A coastwatcher cared for the two Marine aviators until a plane could come from Henderson to retrieve them.
National Archives Photo 80-G-37929
A good closeup of a Wildcat's cockpit and the aircraft's captain on Guadalcanal. Although this F4F displays 19 Japanese flags, it is doubtful that it flew with these since such a large scoreboard would have attracted unwanted attention from the Japanese. Note the reflector gunsight inside the windscreen.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 57750
On 31 January 1943, 1stLt Jefferson DeBlanc of VMF-112 earned the Medal of Honor while escorting Marine dive bombers and torpedo-bombers to Vella Gulf. His flight encountered a larger enemy force and during the melee, DeBlanc shot down three float planes and two Zeros before being forced to abandon his own plane at a very low altitude over Japanese-held Kolombangara.
1stLt James E. Swett of VMF-221 was in a flight which rose from Guadalcanal to challenge a large group of enemy planes bent on destroying shipping off the island on 7 April 1943. In a 15-minute period, Swett shot down seven Japanese bombers, a performance which earned him the Medal of Honor.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 310355
DeBlanc received the Medal of Honor for his day's work.
The Japanese evacuated Guadalcanal on the night of 7-8 February 1943. The campaign had been costly for both sides, but in the longer term, the Japanese were the big losers. Their myth of invincibility on the ground in the jungle was shattered, as was the myth surrounding the Zero and the pilots who flew it. The lack of reliable records by both sides leaves historians with only wide-ranging estimates of losses. Estimates placed 263 Japanese aircraft lost, while American losses were put at 118. Ninety-four American pilots were also killed in action during the campaign.
Even though the main body of their troops had been evacuated, the Japanese continued to oppose Allied advances by attacking ships and positions. The enemy mounted these attacks through June 1943 from their huge bases in southern Bougainville and from Rabaul on New Britain.
Post-Guadalcanal Operations, February-December 1943
On 7 April 1943, the enemy sent a huge strike against Allied shipping around Guadalcanal. The Japanese force consisted of more than 100 Zero escorts and perhaps 70 bombers, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. It was an incredibly large raid, the likes of which had not been seen in the Solomons for several months. But it was also, at best, a last desperate gamble by the Japanese in the area.
Henderson scrambled over 100 fighters--Wildcats, Corsairs, P-38s, P-39s, and P-40s. Among this gaggle were the F4Fs of VMF-221. First Lieutenant James E. Swett, leading one of the squadron's divisions, waded into a formation of Val dive bombers. Swett had arrived on Guadalcanal in February and had participated in a few patrols, but had yet to fire his guns in combat.
As he led his four Wildcats toward the Japanese formation, Swett ignored the flak from the American ships below. He targeted two Vals and brought them down. He got a third dive-bomber as a flak shell put a hole in his Wildcat's port wing.
Disengaging, Swett tested his wounded fighter, and satisfied that he could still fly and fight with it, he reentered the fight. Spotting five Vals hightailing it home, he caught up with the little formation and methodically disposed of four of the fixed-gear Vals. The gunner of the fifth bomber, however, hit Swett's Wildcat with a well-aimed burst from his light machine gun, putting .30-caliber ammunition into the Marine fighter's engine and cockpit canopy.
Wounded from the shattering glass, and with his vision obscured from spouting engine oil, Swett pumped more fire into the Val, killing the gunner. The Japanese aircraft disappeared into a cloud, leaving a smoke trail behind. American soldiers later found the Val, with its dead crew. The troops presented Swett with the radio code from the Val's cockpit. However, the aircraft was apparently never credited to Swett's account, leaving his official total for the day at seven.
Swett struggled toward Henderson but over Tulagi harbor, his aircraft's engine quit, leaving him to
Painting by Robert Taylor, courtesy of the Military Gallery
A Marine Wildcat dogfights a Zero over Henderson as other F4Fs finish off another enemy fighter at low level.
ditch. The Wildcat hit hard, throwing its pilot against the prominent gunsight, stunning him and breaking his nose. Like Joe Foss six months before him, Swett was momentarily trapped as his aircraft sunk, dragging him below the surface. He finally broke free and struggled to the surface where he was rescued by a small picket boat from Gavutu Island. Only one of the four fighters of Swett's division had made it back to Henderson. After intelligence confirmed Swett's incredible one-mission tally, he became the sixth Marine Wildcat pilot to receive the Medal of Honor for action over Guadalcanal.
Swett's engagement was part of the last great aerial battle in the Solomons. The Japanese were forced to turn their attention elsewhere as the American strategy of island-hopping began to gather momentum. All the Marine Corps Wildcat squadrons at Henderson soon transitioned to the next generation of Marine fighter aircraft, the world-beating Vought F4U Corsair which would also provide its own generation of Leatherneck aces in the coming months.
James Swett transitioned to the Corsair and served with VMF-221 when the squadron embarked in the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill (CV-17). By 11 May 1945, when he shot down his last victim, a Japanese kamikaze, he had a total of 15.5 kills in Wildcats and Corsairs.
The campaign and victory on Guadalcanal signaled the containment of the seemingly unstoppable Japanese, and the beginning of the long, but ultimately successful, Allied drive through the Pacific to Japan. The first step of the long journey began with the island with the strange name.
The Marine Corsair Aces of Bougainville and the Central Pacific, 1943-44
Once secured, however, by 7 February 1943, Guadalcanal quickly became the major support base for the remainder of the Solomons campaign. While Marine ground forces slugged their way up the Solomons chain in the middle of 1943, Allied air power provided much-needed support, primarily from newly secured Guadalcanal. Marine and Navy squadrons were accompanied by Army and New Zealand squadrons as they made low-level sweeps along the islands, or escorted bombers against the harbor and airfields around Rabaul. The U.S. Army Air Force sent strikes by B-24 Liberators against Kahili, escorted by Corsairs, P-38s, P-39s, and P-40s. For Marine aviators, it was the time of the Corsair aces.
Because the Navy decided that the F6F Wildcat was a better carrier fighter than the F4U Vought Corsair, the Marines got a chance to field the first operational squadron to fly the plane. Thus, Major William Gise led the 24 F4U-1s of VMF-124 onto Henderson Field on 12 February 1943.
The First Corsair Ace
As the Allied offensive across the Pacific gathered momentum, the fighting above the Solomons and the surrounding islands continued as the Japanese constantly harassed the advancing Allied troops. The Corsair's first engagements were tentative. The pilots of the first squadron, VMF-124, had only an average of 25 hours each in the plane when they landed at Guadalcanal. The very next day, they were off to Bougainville as escorts for Army B-17s and Navy PB4Y Liberators. It was a lot to ask, but they did it, taking some losses of both
National Archives 127-N-55431
Marine mechanics service an early F4U Corsair, perhaps of VMF-124, on Guadalcanal in early 1943. "Bubbles" is already showing the effects of its harsh tropical environment as well as the constant scuffing of its keepers' boots. Note the Corsair's large gull wings and long nose, which prohibited a clear view forward, especially during taxi and landings.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 60940
Enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1933, 1stLt Kenneth A. Walsh eventually went through flight training as a private, gaining his wings in 1937. By 1943, Walsh was in aerial combat over the Solomons and became the first Corsair-mounted ace.
National Archives photo 80-G-54291
1stLt Ken Walsh of VMF-124 connects his radio lead to his flight helmet before a mission in 1943. He was the first F4U pilot to be decorated with the Medal of Honor, for a mission on 30 August 1943, during which he shot down four Japanese Zeroes before ditching his borrowed Corsair.
bombers and escorts. While it was a rough start, the Marines soon settled down and began to exploit the great performance of this new machine, soon to become known to the Japanese as "Whistling Death," and to the Corsair pilots as the "Bent Wing Widow Maker."
After the first few missions, the new experience with the Corsair's capabilities began to really take hold. First Lieutenant Kenneth A. Walsh, a former enlisted pilot (he received his wings of gold as a private), shot down three enemy aircraft on 1 April. Six weeks later, after several patrols, Walsh dropped three more Zeros on 13 May 1943, becoming the first Corsair ace. By 15 August, Walsh had 10 victories to his credit.
On 30 August, he was scheduled to fly escort for Army B-24s on a strike against the Japanese airfield at Kahili, Bougainville. Walsh's four-plane section launched before noontime to make the flight to a forward base on Banika in the Russell Islands. After refueling and grabbing some lunch, the four Marine pilots took off again to rendezvous with the bombers. As the escorts--more F4Us and Army P-38s--joined up with the bombers, Walsh's engine acted up, forcing him to make an emergency landing at Munda.
A friend, Major James L. Neefus, was in charge of the Munda airfield, and he let Walsh choose another fighter from Corsairs that were parked on Munda's airstrip. Walsh took off in his borrowed fighter and headed toward Kahili to try to find and rejoin with his division. As he finally approached the enemy base, he saw the B-24s in their bomb runs, beset by swarms of angry Zeros. Alone, at least for the moment, Walsh piled into the enemy interceptors which had already begun to work on the Army bombers.
As Walsh fought off several attacks by some 50 Zeros, thereby disrupting to a degree their attack on the bombers, he wondered where all the other American fighters might be. Finally, several other Corsairs appeared to relieve the hard-pressed ace. As other aircraft took the burden from Walsh, he eased his damaged fighter east to take stock of his situation. He was able to shoot down two Zeros, but the enemy interceptors were nearly overwhelming. The B-24s were struggling to turn for home as more Zeros took off from Kahili.
Lieutenant Walsh managed to down two more Zeros before he had to disengage his badly damaged Corsair. Pursued by the Japanese, who pumped cannon and machine gun fire into his plane, Walsh knew he would not return this Corsair to
This VMF-124 F4U-1, No. 13, was flown by 1stLt Ken Walsh during his first combat tour in which he became the first Corsair-mounted ace.
Profile by Larry Lapadura, courtesy of the artist
Major Neefus at Munda. Several Corsairs and a lone P-40 arrived to scatter the Zeros which were using Walsh for target practice.
He ditched his battered fighter off Vella Lavella and was picked up by the Seabees who borrowed a boat after watching the Marine Corsair splash into the sea. For his spirited single-handed defense of the B-24s over Bougainville, Lieutenant Walsh became the first Corsair pilot to receive the Medal of Honor. The four Zeros he shot down during this incredible mission ran his score to 20.
Ken Walsh shot down one more aircraft, another Zero, off Okinawa on 22 June 1945, the day the island was secured. At the time, Walsh was the operations officer for VMF-222, shore based on the newly secured island.
A series of assaults during the spring and summer of 1943 netted the Allies several important islands up the Solomons chain. An amphibious assault of Bougainville at Empress Augusta Bay on 1 November 1943, caught the Japanese defenders off guard. In spite of Japanese reaction and reinforcement, a secure perimeter was quickly established, and within 40 days, the first of three airfields was in operation with two more to follow by the new year. Aircraft from these strips flew fighter sweeps first, later to be followed by daily escorted SBD and TBF strikes. With the establishment of this air strength at Bougainville, the rest of the island was effectively bypassed, and the fate of Rabaul sealed.
Marine aircraft began flying from their base at Torokina Point at Empress Augusta Bay, the site for the initial landing on Bougainville's midwestern coast. Navy Seabees then quickly hacked out two more airstrips from the jungle--Piva North and Piva South. Piva Village was a settlement on the Piva River, east of the airfield complex.
The official Marine Corps history noted that "whenever there was no combat air patrol over the beachhead, the Japanese were quite apt to drop shells into the airfield area. The Seabees and Marine engineers moved to the end of the field which was not being hit and continued to work."
Maj Gregory "Pappy" Boyington became the best known Marine ace. A member of the Flying Tigers in China before World War II, he later commanded VMF-122 before taking over VMF-214. By early January 1944, he was the Corps' leading scorer. Here, the colorful Boyington, center, relaxes with some of his pilots.
Comparative Table for Main Types of Fighters Aircraft Length Span Engine (hp) Max Speed
Range normal/max (miles) Armament Number Built U.S. Navy F4F-4 Wildcat 28'9" 38'0" Pratt & Whitney R-I 830-86 (1,200) 320/19,400 910/1,250 4x (later 6) .50-cal. machine guns 1,168 4U-I Corsair 33'4" 41'0" Pratt & Whitney R-2800-8 (2,000) 417/19,900 1,015/1,562 6x.50-cal. machine guns 19,444 USAAF P-400 (P-39D) Airacobra 30'2" 34'0" Allison V-1710 (1,150) 335/5,000 600/1,100 1x20mm can., 4x.30-cal., 2x.50-cal. machine guns 2179 P-40E Warhawk 31'2" 37'4" Allison V-1710 (1,150) 335/5,000 650/850 6x.50-cal. machine guns 2,320 Japanese Navy A6M2 Model 21 Zero-sen (Zeke) 29'8" 39'4" Nakajima Sakai 12 (925) 331/15,000 1,160/1,930 2x20mm can., 2x7.7mm machine guns 31,100 A6M2-N (Rufe) 33'1" 39'4" Nakajima Sakai 12 (925) 270/16,400 714/1,107 2x20mm can., 2x7.7mm machine guns 327 Japanese Army Ki.43-1a Hayabusa (Oscar) 28'11" 37'6" Nakajima Ha-25 (950) 308/13,100 745 max 2x7.7mm or 12.7mm machine guns 716 Ki61-1a Hien (Tony) 28'8" 39'4" Kawasaki Ha-40 (1,175) 368/16,000 373/684 2x12.7mm, 2x7.7mm machine guns 1,380 1 Includes all variants of the F4U-1, i.e., the -1, -1A, -1C (armed with 4x20mm cannon), and -1D, as well as those built by Goodyear as the FG-1A/D, and by Brewster as the F3A-1D.
2 The amount reclaimed by the USAAF from the original RAF order of 675. Approximately 100 P-400 and 90 P39Ds served with the USAAF in the Pacific. Others served with the Soviet Air Force, and the USAAF in the Middle East and the Mediterranean theater.
Major Gregory "Pappy" Boyington Every one of the Corps' aces had special qualities that set him apart from his squadron mates. Flying and shooting skills, tenacity, aggressiveness, and a generous share of luck--the aces had these in abundance. One man probably had more than his share of these qualities, and that was the legendary "Pappy' Boyington.
The One and Only 'Pappy'
A native of Idaho, Gregory Boyington went through flight training as a Marine Aviation Cadet, earning a reputation for irreverence and highjinks that did not go down well with his superiors. His thirst for adventure, as well as his accumulated financial debts, led him to resign his commission as a first lieutenant and join the American Volunteer Group (AVG), better known as the Flying Tigers. Like other service pilots who joined the AVG, he first resigned his commission and this letter was then put in a safe to be redeemed and torn up when he rejoined the Marine Corps.
Boyington claimed to have shot down six Japanese aircraft while with the Flying Tigers. However, AVG records were poorly kept, and were lost in air raids. To compound the problem, the U.S. Air Force does not officially recognize the kills made by the AVG, even though the Tigers were eventually absorbed into the Fourteenth Air Force, led by Major General Claire Chennault. Thus, the best confirmation that can be obtained on Boyington's record with the AVG is that he scored 3.5 kills.
Whatever today's accounts show, Boyington returned to the U.S. claiming to be one of America's first aces. He was perhaps the first Marine aviator to have flown in combat against the Japanese, though, and he felt he would easily regain his commission in the Marine Corps. To his frustration, no one in any service seemed to want him. His reputation was well known and this made his reception not exactly open armed.
Boyington finally telegrammed his qualifications to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and as a result, found himself back in the Marine Corps on active duty as a Reserve major. He deployed as executive officer of VMF-122 from the West Coast to the Solomons. He was based at Espiritu Santo, initially flying squadron training, non-combat missions. He deployed for a short but inactive tour at Guadalcanal in March 1943, and after the squadron was withdrawn, he relieved Major Elmer Brackett as commanding officer in April 1943. His first command tour was disappointing. He eventually landed in VMF-112, which he commanded for three weeks in the rear area. Prior to forward deployment, he broke his leg while wrestling and was hospitalized.
Boyington got another chance and took command of a reconstituted VMF-214. The original unit had returned from a combat tour, during which it had lost its commanding officer, Major William Pace. When the squadron returned from a short rest and recreation tour in Australia, the decision was made to reorganize the unit because the squadron did not have a full complement of combat-ready pilots. Thus, the squadron number went to a newly organized squadron under Major Boyington. In his illuminating wartime memoir, Once They
Black Sheep pilots scramble toward their F4U-1 "birdcage" Corsairs. The early model fighters had framed cockpit canopies. The next F4U-1As and subsequent models used bubble canopies which enhanced the limited visibility from the fighter's cockpit.
Were Eagles: The Men of the Black Sheep Squadron, the squadron intelligence officer, First Lieutenant Frank Walton, described how Boyington got the new squadron command:
Major Boyington was the right rank for a squadron commander; he was an experienced combat pilot; he was available; and the need was great. These assets overcame such reservations as the general [Major General Ralph J. Mitchell, Wing Commander of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing] may have had about his personal problems. General Mitchell made the decision. "We need an aggressive combat leader. We'll go with Boyington.' The squadron had its commander.
Pappy briefs his pilots before a mission from Espiritu Santo. Front row, from left: Boyington, holding paper, Stanley R. Bailey, Virgil G. Ray, Robert A. Alexander; standing, from left: William N. Case, Rolland N. Rinabarger, Don H. Fisher, Henry M. Bourgeois, John F. Begert, Robert T. Ewing, Denmark Groover, Jr., Burney L. Tucker.
Much has been written about Boyington and his squadron. At 31, Boyington was older than his 22-year-old lieutenants. His men called him "Gramps" or "Pappy." In prewar days, he was called "Rats," after the Russian-born actor, Gregory Ratoff. The squadron wanted to call themselves the alliterative "Boyington's Bastards," but 1940s sensitivities would not allow such language. They decided on the more evocative "Black Sheep."
The popular image of VMF-214 as a collection of malcontents and ne'er-do-wells is not at all accurate. The television program of the late 1970s did nothing to dispel this inaccurate impression. In truth, Pappy's squadron was much like any other fighter squadron, with a cross-section of people of varying capabilities and experience. The two things that welded the new squadron into such a fearsome fighting unit was its new mount, the F4U-1 Corsair, and its indomitable leader.
Boyington took his squadron to Munda on New Georgia in September. On the 16th, the Black Sheep flew their first mission, a bomber escort to Ballale, a Japanese airfield on a small island about five miles southeast of Bougainville. The mission turned into a free-for-all as about 40 Zeros descended on the bombers. Boyington downed a Zero for his squadron's first kill He quickly added four more. Six other Black Sheep scored kills. It was an auspicious debut, marred only by the loss of one -214 pilot, Captain Robert T. Ewing.
The following weeks were filled with continuous action. Boyington and his squadron rampaged through the enemy formations, whether the Marine Corsairs were escorting bombers, or making pure fighter sweeps. The frustrated Japanese tried to lure Pappy into several traps, but the pugnacious ace taunted them over the radio, challenging
Maintenance crews service this F4U-1 at a Pacific base. The Corsair's size is shown to advantage in this view, as is the bubble canopy of the late-production-1s and subsequent models.
them to come and get him.
By mid-December 1943, VMF-214, along with the other Allied fighter squadrons, began mounting large fighter sweeps staged through the new fighter strip at Torokina Point on Bougainville. Author Barrett Tillman described the state of affairs in the area at the end of December 1943:
...Boyington and other senior airmen saw the disadvantage of [these] large fighter sweeps. They intimidated the opposition into remaining grounded, which was the opposite reaction desired. A set of guidelines was drawn up for future operations. It specified that the maximum number of fighters should be limited to no more than 48. As few aircraft types and squadrons should be employed as possible, for better coordination and mutual support.
This strategy was fine, except that Boyington was beginning to feel the pressure that being a top ace seemed to bring. People kept wondering when Pappy would achieve, then break, the magic number of 26, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker's score in World War I. Joe Foss had already equaled the early ace's total, but was now out of action. Boyington scored four kills on 23 December 1943, bringing his tally to 24. Boyington was certainly feeling the pressure to break Rickenbacker's 25-year-old record. Boyington's intelligence officer, First Lieutenant Frank Walton, wrote of his tenseness and quick flare-ups when pressed about when and by how much he would surpass the magic 26.
A few days before his final mission, Boyington reacted to a persistent public affairs officer. "Sure, I'd like to break the record," said Boyington. "Who wouldn't? I'd like to get 40 if I could. The more we can shoot down here, the fewer there'll be up the line to stop us."
Later that night, Boyington told Walton, "Christ, I don't care if I break the record or not, if they'd just leave me alone." Walton told his skipper the squadron was behind him and that he was probably in the best position he'd ever be in to break the record.
The fighter strip at Torokina was hacked out of the Bougainville jungle. This December 1943 view shows a lineup of Corsairs and an SBD, which is completing its landing rollout past a grading machine still working to finish the new landing field.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 74672
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 73114
1stLt Robert M. Hanson of VMF-215 enjoyed a brief career in which he shot down 20 of his final total of 25 Japanese planes in 13 days. He was shot down during a strafing run on 3 February 1944, a day before his 24th birthday.
"You'll never have another chance," Walton said. "It's now or never."
"Yes," Boyington agreed, "I guess you're right."
Like a melodrama, however, Boyington's life now seemed to revolve around raising his score. Even those devoted members of his squadron could not help wondering--if only to cheer their squadron commander on--when he would do it.
Pappy's agony was about to come to a crashing halt. He got a single kill on 27 December during a huge fight against 60 Zeros. But, after taking off on a mission against Rabaul on 2 January 1944, at the head of 56 Navy and Marine fighters, Boyington had problems with his Corsair's engine. He returned without adding to his score.
The following day, he launched at the head of another sweep staging through Bougainville. By late morning, other VMF-214 pilots returned with the news that Boyington had, indeed, been in action. When they last saw him, Pappy had already disposed of one Zero, and together with his wingman, Captain George M. Ashmun, was hot on the tails of other victims.
The initial happy anticipation turned to apprehension as the day wore on and neither Pappy nor Ashmun returned. By the afternoon, without word from other bases, the squadron had to face the unthinkable: Boyington was missing. The Black Sheep mounted patrols to look for their leader, but within a few days, they had to admit that Pappy was not coming back.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 72421
Capt Donald N. Aldrich was a 20-kill aces with VMF-215, and had learned to fly with the Royal Canadian Air Force before the U.S. entered the war. Although he survived the war, he was killed in a flying mishap in 1947.
In fact, Boyington and his wingman had been shot down after Pappy had bagged three more Zeros, thus bringing his claimed total to 28, breaking the Rickenbacker tally, and establishing Boyington as the top-scoring Marine ace of the war, and, for that matter, of all time. However, these final victories were unknown until Boyington's return from a Japanese prison camp in 1945. Boyington's last two kills were thus unconfirmed. The only one who could have seen Pappy's victories was his wingman, Captain Ashmun, shot down along with his skipper. While there is no reason to doubt his claims, the strict rules of verifying kills were apparently relaxed for the returning hero when he was recovered from a prisoner of war camp after the war.
Pappy and his wingman had been overwhelmed by a swarm of Zeros and had to bail out of their faltering Corsairs near Cape St. George on New Ireland. Captain Ashmun was never recovered, but Boyington was retrieved by a Japanese submarine after being strafed by the vengeful Zeros that had just shot him down. Boyington spent the next 20 months as a prisoner of war, although no one in the U.S. knew it until after V-J Day.
He endured torture and beatings during interrogations, and was finally rescued when someone painted "Boyington Here!" on the roof of his prison barracks. Aircraft dropping supplies to the prisoners shortly after the ceasefire in August 1945 spotted the message and soon
One of Boyington's Black Sheep, 1stLt John F. Bolt, already an ace, shot down his sixth plane over Rabaul in early January 1944. During the Korean war, when he was flying as an exchange pilot with the Air Force, he shot down six North Korean planes to become the Marine Corps' first jet ace.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 72421
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 73119
Three of the Corps' top aces pose at Torokina in early 1944. From left: 1stLt Robert Hanson, Capt Donald N. Aldrich, and Capt Harold Spears were members of VMF-215 during the busy period following the loss of Pappy Boyington. The three aviators accounted for a combined total of 60 Japanese aircraft.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 72424
Capt Harold L. Spears was Robert Hanson's flight leader on the day Hanson was shot down and killed after Spears gave Hanson permission to make a strafing run against a Japanese position in December 1944.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 58384
On 30 June 1943, 1stLt Wilbur J. Thomas of VMF-213 shot down four enemy planes while providing air cover for American operations on New Georgia. Two weeks later, on 15 July, he shot down three more Japanese bombers. Before he left the Pacific, his total of kills was 181/2.
everyone knew that Pappy was coming back.
Although he had never received a single decoration while he was in combat, Boyington returned to the U.S. to find that he not only had been awarded the Navy Cross, but the Medal of Honor as well, albeit "posthumously."
With Pappy Boyington gone, several other young Marine aviators began to make themselves known. The most productive, and unfortunately, the one with the shortest career, was First Lieutenant Robert M. Hanson of VMF-215. Although born in India of missionary parents, Hanson called Massachusetts home. A husky, competitive man, he quickly took to the life of a Marine combat aviator.
During his first and second tours, flying from Vella Lavella with other squadrons, including Boyington's Black Sheep, Hanson shot down five Japanese planes, although during one of these fights, he, himself, was forced to ditch his Corsair in Empress Augusta Bay.
For his third tour, he joined VMF-215 at Torokina. By mid-January, Hanson had begun such a hot streak of kills, that the young pilot had earned the name "Butcher Bob." Hanson shot Japanese planes down in bunches. On 18 January 1944, he disposed of five enemy aircraft. On 24 January, he added four more Zeros. Another four Japanese planes went down before Hanson's Corsair on 30 January. His score now stood at 25, 20 of which had been gained in 13 days in only six missions. Hanson's successes were happening so quickly that he was relatively unknown outside his combat area. Very few combat correspondents knew of his record until later.
Lieutenant Hanson took off for a mission on 3 February 1944. The next day would be his 24th birthday, and the squadron's third tour would end in a few days. He was going back home. He called his flight commander, Captain Harold L. Spears, and asked if he could strafe Japanese antiaircraft artillery positions at Cape St. George on New Ireland, the same general area over which Pappy Boyington had been shot down a month before.
Hanson made his run, firing his plane's six .50-caliber machine guns. The Japanese returned fire as the big, blue-gray Marine fighter rocketed past, seemingly under control. However, Hanson's plane dove into the water from a low altitude, leaving only an oil slick.
Hanson's meteoric career saw him become the highest-scoring Marine Corsair ace, and the second Marine high-scorer, one behind Joe Foss. Lieutenant Hanson received a posthumous Medal of Honor for his third tour of combat. As Barrett Tillman points out in his book on the F4U, Hanson "became the third and last Corsair pilot to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II. And the youngest."
Japanese Pilots in the Solomons Air War The stereotypical picture of a small, emaciated Japanese pilot, wearing glasses whose lenses were the thickness of the bottoms of Coke bottles, grasping the stick of his bamboo-and-rice-paper airplane (the design was probably stolen from the U.S., too) did not persist for long after the war began. The first American aircrews to return from combat knew that they had faced some of the world's most experienced combat pilots equipped with some pretty impressive airplanes.
A rebuilt late-model Zero shows off the clean lines of the A6M series, which changed little during the production run of more than 10,000 fighters.
Newly commissioned Ens Junichi Sasai in May 1941.
Certainly, Japanese society was completely alien to most Americans. Adherence to ancestral codes of honor and a national history--one of constant internal, localized strife where personal weakness was not tolerated, especially in the Samurai class of professional warriors--did not permit the individual Japanese soldier to surrender even in the face of overwhelming odds.
This capability did not come by accident. Japanese training was tough. in some respects, it went far beyond the legendary limits of even U.S. Marine Corps boot training. However, as the war turned against them, the Japanese relaxed their stringent prewar requirements and mass-produced pilots to replace the veterans who were lost at Midway and in the Solomons. For instance, before the war, pilots learned navigation and how to pack a parachute. After 1942, these subjects were eliminated from training to save time.
young men who were accepted for flight training were subjected to an excruciating preflight indoctrination into military life. Their instructors--mostly enlisted--were literally their rulers, with nearly life-or-death control of the recruits' existence. After surviving the physical training, the recruits began flight training where the rigors of their preflight classes were maintained. By the time Japanese troops evacuated Guadalcanal in February 1943, however, their edge had begun wearing thin as they had lost many of their most experienced pilots and flight commanders, along with their aircraft.
The failed Japanese adventure at midway in June 1942, as well as the heavy losses in the almost daily combat over Guadalcanal and the Solomons deprived them of irreplaceable talent. Even the most experienced pilots eventually came up against a losing roll of the dice.
As noted in the main text, Japanese aces such as Sakai, Sasai, and Ota were invalided out of combat, or eventually killed. Rotation of pilots out of the war zone was a system employed neither by the Japanese nor the Germans, as a matter of fact. As several surviving Axis aces have noted in their memoirs, they flew until they couldn't. Indeed many Japanese and German aces flew
until 1945-if they were lucky enough to survive-accumulating incredible numbers of sorties and combat hours, as well as high scores which doubled and tripled the final tallies of their American counterparts.
Unfortunately, Japanese records are not as complete as Allied histories, perhaps because of the tremendous damage and confusion wrought by the U.S. strategic bombing during the last year of the war. Thus, certainly Japanese scores are not as firm as they are for Allied aviators.
In the popularly accepted sense, the Japanese did not have "aces." Those pilots who achieved high scores were referred to as Gekitsui-O (Shoot-Down Kings). A pilot's report of his successes was taken at face value, without a confirmation system such as required by the Allies. Without medals or formal recognition, it was believed that there was little need for selfpromotion. Fighters did not have gun cameras, either. Japanese air strategy was to inflict as much damage as possible without worrying about confirming a kill. (This outwardly cavalier attitude about claiming victories is somewhat suspect since many Zeros carried large "scoreboards" on their tails and fuselages. These markings might have been attributed to the aircraft rather than to a specific pilot.)
A lineup of A6M2 Zeros at Buin in 1943. By this time, the heavy combat over Guadalcanal had been replaced by engagements with Marine Corsairs over the approaches to Bougainville. Japanese Navy aircraft occasionally flew from land bases, as these Zeros, although they are actually assigned to the carrier Zuikaku.
The Aces Although the men in the Zeros were probably much like-at least in temperament-Marine Wildcat and Corsair pilots they opposed, the Imperial Japanese Navy pilots had an advantage: many of them had been flying combat for perhaps a year-maybe longer-before meeting the untried American aviators over Guadalcanal in August 1942. Saburo Sakai was severely wounded during an engagement with U.S. Navy SBDs on the opening day of the invasion. He returned to Japan with about 60 kills to his credit. Actually, because he was so badly wounded early in the Guadalcanal fighting, Sakai never got a chance to engage Marine Corps pilots. They were still in transit to the Solomons two weeks after Sakai had been invalided home. (His commonly accepted final score of 64 is only a best guess, even by his own logbook.)
Enlisted pilots of the Tainan Kokutai pose at Rabaul in 1942. Several of these aviators would be among the top Japanese aces, including Saburo Sakai (middle row, second from left), and Hiroyoshi Nishizawa (standing, first on left).
After graduating from flight training, Sakai joined a squadron in China flying Mitsubishi Type 96 fighters, small, open-cockpit, fixed-landing-gear fighters. As a third-class petty officer, Sakai shot down a Russianbuilt SB-3 bomber in October 1939. He later joined the Tainan Kokutai (Tainan air wing), which would become one of the Navy's premier fighter units, and participated in the Pacific war's opening actions in the Philippines.
A colorful personality, Sakai was also a dedicated flight leader. He never lost a wingman in combat, and also tried to pass on his hard-won expertise to more junior pilots. After a particularly unsuccessful mission in April 1942, where his flight failed to bring down a single American bomber from a flight of seven Martin 1326 Marauders, he sternly lectured his pilots about maintaining flight discipline instead of hurling themselves against their foes. His words had great effectSakai was respected by subordinates and superiors alike and his men soon formed a well-working unit, responsible for many kills in the early months of the Pacific war.
Typically, Junichi Sasai, a lieutenant, junior grade, and one of Sakai's young aces with 27 confirmed kills, was posthumously promoted two grades to lieutenant commander. This practice was common for those
Japanese aviators with proven records, or high scores, who were killed during the war. Japan was unique among all the combatants during the war in that it had no regular or defined system of awards, except for occasional inclusion in war newswhat the British might call being "mentioned in dispatches."
This somewhat frustrating lack of recognition was described by Masatake Okumiya, a Navy fighter commander, in his classic book Zero! (with Jiro Horikoshi). Describing a meeting with senior officers, he asked them, "Why in the name of heaven does Headquarters delay so long in according our combat men the honors they deserve? ... Our Navy does absolutely nothing to recognize its heroes ...."
Lt (j.g.) Junichi Sadai of the Tainan Air Group. This 1942 photo shows the young combat leader, o f such men as Sakai and Nishizawa, shortly before his death over Guadalcanal.
Occasionally, senior officers would give gifts, such as ceremonial swords, to those pilots who had performed great services. And sometimes, superiors would try to buck the unbending system without much success. Saburo Sakai described one instance in June 1942 where the captain in charge of his wing summoned him and Lieutenant Sasai to his quarters.
Dejectedly, the captain told his two pilots how he had asked Tokyo to recognize them for their great accomplishments. "...Tokyo is adamant about making any changes at this time," he said. "They have refused even to award a medal or to promote in rank." The captain's deputy commander then said how the captain had asked that Sasai be promoted to commander-an incredible jump of three grades-and that Sakai be commissioned as an ensign.
LCdr Tadashi Nakajima, who led the Tainan Air Group, was typical of the more senior aviators. His responsibilities were largely administrative but he tried to fly missions whenever his schedule permitted, usually with unproductive results. He led several of the early missions over Guadalcanal and survived to lead a Shiden unit in 1944. It is doubtful that Nakajima scored more than 2 or 3 kills.
Perhaps one of the most enigmatic, yet enduring, personalities of the Zero pilots was the man who is generally acknowledged to be the top-scoring Japanese ace, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa. Saburo Sakai described him as "tall and lanky for a Japanese, nearly five feet, eight inches in height," and possessing "almost supernatural vision."
Photo courtesy of Robert Mikesh
These A6M3s are from the Taman Air Group, and several sources have identified aircraft 106 as being flown by top ace Nishizawa. Typically, these fighters carry a single centerline fuel tank. The Zero's range was phenomenal, sometimes extending to nearly 1,600 miles, making for a very long flight for its exhausted pilots.
Petty Officer Hiroyoshi Nishizawa at Lae, New Guinea, in 1942. Usually considered the top Japanese ace, Navy or Army. A definitive total will probably never be determined. Nishizawa died while flying as a passenger in a transport headed for the Philippines in October 7944. The transport was caught by American Navy Hellcats, and Lt(j.g.)Harold Newell shot it down.
Photo courtesy of Henry Sakaida
Petty Officer Sadamu Komachi flew throughout the Pacific War, from Pearl Harbor to the Solomons, from Bougainville to the defense of the Home Islands. His final score was 18.
Nishizawa kept himself usually aloof, enjoying a detached but respected status as he rolled up an impressive victory tally through the Solomons campaign. He was eventually promoted to warrant officer in November 1943. Like a few other high-scoring aces, Nishizawa met death in an unexpected manner in the Philippines. He was shot down while riding as a passenger in a bomber used to transport him to another base to ferry a Zero in late October 1944. In keeping with the established tradition, Nishizawa was posthumously promoted two ranks to lieutenant junior grade. His score has been variously given as 102, 103, and as high as 150. However, the currently accepted total for him is 87.
Henry Sakaida, a well-known authority on Japanese pilots in World War II, wrote:
No Japanese pilot ever scored more than 100 victories! In fact, Nishizawa entered combat in 1942 and his period of active duty was around 18 months. On the other hand, Lieutenant junior grade Tetsuo Iwamoto fought from 1938 until the end of the war. If there is a top Navy ace, it's him.
Iwamoto claimed 202 victories, many of which were against U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, including 142 at Rabaul. I don't believe his claims are accurate, but I don't believe Nishizawa's total of 87, either. (I might believe 30.) Among Iwamoto's claims were 48 Corsairs and 48 SBDs! His actual score might be around 80.
Several of Sho-ichi Sugita's kills--which are informally reckoned to total 70--were Marine aircraft. He was barely 19 when he first saw combat in the Solomons. (He had flown at Midway but saw little of the fighting.) Flying from Buin on the southern tip of Bougainville, he first scored on 1 December 1942, against a USAAF B-17. Sugita was one of the six Zero escort pilots that watched as P-38s shot down Admiral Yamamoto's Betty on 18 April 1943. There was little they could do to alert the bombers carrying the admiral and his staff since their Zeros' primitive radios had been taken out to save weight.
The problem of keeping accurate records probably came from the directive issued in June 1943 by Tokyo forbidding the recording of individual records, the better to foster teamwork in the seemingly once-invincible Zero squadrons. Prior to the directive, Japanese Zero pilots were the epitome of the hunter-pilots personified by the World War I German ace, Baron Manfred von Richthofen. The Japanese Navy pilots roamed where they wished and attacked when they wanted, assured in the superiority of their fighters.
Occasionally, discipline would disappear as flight leaders dove into Allied bomber formations, their wingmen hugging their tails as they attacked with their maneuverable Zeros, seemingly simulating their Samurai role models whose expertise with swords is legendary.
Most of the Japanese aces, and most of the rank-and-file pilots, were enlisted petty officers. In fact, no other combatant nation had so many enlisted fighter pilots. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had a relatively few enlisted pilots who flew in combat in World War II and for a short time in Korea. Britain and Germany had a considerable number of enlisted aviators without whose services they could not have maintained the momentum of their respective campaigns.
However, the Japanese officer corps was relatively small, and the number of those commissioned pilots serving as combat flight commanders was even smaller. Thus, the main task of fighting the growing Allied air threat in the Pacific fell to dedicated enlisted pilots, many of them barely out of their teens.
During a recent interview, Saburo Sakai shed light on the role of Japanese officer-pilots. He said:
They did fight, but generally, they were not very good because they were inexperienced. In my group, it would be the enlisted pilots that would first spot the enemy. The first one to see the enemy would lead and signal the others to follow. And the officer pilot would be back there, wondering where everyone went! In this sense, it was the enlisted pilots who led, not the officers.
Edward Overend, shown here in a Wildcat in San Diego in 1945, flew with the Flying Tigers, shooting down five Japanese air craft, thus becoming one of the first American aces of the Pacific war, albeit under another country's colors. Maj Overend scored 3.5 kills while leading VMF-321, for a combined total of 8.5 victories in P-40Bs and F4U-1As. Although the colorful time of the Solomons Campaign, and the equally colorful men like Boyington and Hanson, were gone, other Leatherneck aviators achieved size able scores, and a measure of fame, if only within their operating areas and squadrons.
Other Marine Aces
VMF-214's five-month tour of combat created eight aces, including Pappy Boyington. The Black Sheep accounted for 97 Japanese aircraft downed. VMF-215's tour lasted four-and-a-half months, and Bob Hanson and his squadron mates-the squadron's roster included 10 aces-destroyed 137 enemy aircraft, 106 in the last six weeks.
Besides Boyington, the Black Sheep alumnus who had one of the most interesting careers was John Bolt. Then-First Lieutenant Bolt shot down six aircraft in the Pacific. Ten years later, now-Major Bolt flew F-86s as an exchange pilot with the U.S. Air Force in Korea. During a three-month period, May-July 1953, he shot down six Russian-built MiG-15s, becoming the Marine Corps' first and only jet ace, and one of a very select number of pilots who became aces in two wars.
While Lieutenant Robert Hanson was the star of VMF-215 for a few short weeks, there were two captains who were just as busy. Donald N. Aldrich eventually scored 20 kills, while Harold L. Spears accounted for 15 Japanese planes. The two aces were among the senior flight leaders of VMF-215.
Don Aldrich had been turned down by recruiters before Pearl Harbor because he was married. Like many other eager young men of his generation, he went across the Canadian border and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in February 1941. He got his wings that November. But the RCAF put the new aviator to work as an instructor. When the U.S. entered the war, Aldrich had no trouble rejoining his countrymen, and eventually got his wings of gold as a Marine aviator, following which, he headed for the Solomons. From August 1943 to February 1944, in three combat
tours, Captain Aldrich gained an impressive number of kills, 20. Although he survived the war, he died in an operational accident in 1947.
Harold Spears was commissioned a Marine second lieutenant and got his Marine commission and his wings in August 1942. He joined VMF-215 as the squadron wandered around the various forward bases near Bougainville. Spears wanted to make the service his career, and shortly after finishing his combat tour, during which he shot down 15 Japanese planes, he was assigned to El Toro, and eventually to a new fighter squadron, VMF-462.
One of the most successful but least known Marine Corsair aces was First Lieutenant Wilbur J. Thomas, whom Barrett Tillman called "one of the deadliest fighter pilots the Corps ever produced." He scored 18.5 kills while flying with VMF-213. Thomas' combat career is remarkable because he scored most of his kills in a one-month period during the hotly contested landings on Rendova and Vangunu islands in mid-1944.
After staying in the rear area of the New Hebrides, Thomas was finally transferred to the combat zone. He flew his first missions in June and July 1943. His mission on 30 June was a CAP mission over amphibious landings at Wickham Anchorage on the southern tip of New Georgia.
Zero fighter-bombers prepare to launch for a raid from their Bougainville base in late 1943. Originally an air superiority weapon, the Zero toted light bombs as required, and ended the war as one of the primary aircraft used by the Kamikaze suicide pilots.
Fifteen Zeros pounced Thomas's fighters. After he had become separated from his group, seven Zeros had attacked the lone F4U, but, undeterred by the odds, Thomas turned into the Japanese, eventually shooting down four of them. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for this mission. Three weeks later, on 17 July, Thomas and his wingman attacked a group of Japanese bombers and their Zero escort, and shot down one of the bombers.
Thomas was on the receiving end of enemy fire on 23 September. After shooting down three Zeros, and splitting a fourth with his wingman, the young ace found he had taken hits in the oil lines. His engine seized and he glided toward the water, eventually bailing out at 3,000 feet. He scrambled into his rubber raft and waited for rescue. He paddled for five hours to keep from drifting to enemy positions. After 10 hours, a Consolidated Catalina flying boat (PBY) set down beside him and brought him home.
By the time VMF-213 left for the States in December, Wilbur Thomas had scored 16.5 kills in five dogfights. He returned for another combat tour, this time on board the carrier Essex (CV 9) headed for the South China Sea and Japanese bases in Southeast Asia. He added two more kills to his previous score when he took out two Zeros near Tokyo during Essex's first strike against the Japanese Home Islands on the afternoon of 16 February 1945.
Again, as did several of the young aces who managed to survive the war, now-Captain Thomas died in a postwar flying mishap in 1947.
By mid-1944, the war had moved on, past the Solomons and Bougainville, closer to Japan and into the final battles in the Philippines and on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. There were still occasional encounters in these now-rear areas until the end of the war, and other Marine aviators became aces, but the end of the Solomons Campaign also saw the end of the heyday of the aces.
Fighter pilots and their missions sometimes fall into a nondescript category. By themselves, they rarely decide the outcome of major battles or campaigns, although exceptions might well be Guadalcanal and the Battle of Britain.
The Cactus fighters defended their base daily against enemy raids, and the Marine Corps aces were colorful. They established a tradition of dedication, courage, and skill for their successors in future generations of military aviators. It is 50 years since John Smith, Bob Galer, Marion Carl, Joe Foss, and Greg Boyington led their squadrons into the swirling dogfights over the Solomons. But the legacy these early Marine aces left to their modern successors lives on in a new era of advanced weapons and technology.
Photo courtesy of BGen Robert Galer, USMC (Ret)<
Maj Robert Galer with his ubiquitous baseball cap leans against his Wildcat. "Barbara Jane" was a high school sweetheart. (He didn't marry her.) The square panel directly beneath the aircraft's wing was an observational window.
Researching the Aces' Scores Meticulous investigation by Dr. Frank Olynyk has refined and changed the established list of aces. In most respects, he has reduced by one or two kills an individual's score, but in some instances, he has generated enough doubt about the vital fifth kill that at least two aviators have lost their status as aces during World War II. One man, Technical Sergeant John W. Andre of nightfighter squadron VMF(N)-541, shot down four Japanese planes in the Pacific, and scored a fifth kill in Korea. Thus, he is a bonafide ace, but not solely by his service in World War II.
In an article published in the Summer 1981 issue of Fortitudine, the bulletin of the Marine Corps History and Museums Division, Dr. Olynyk discussed the problems associated with compiling records of aerial kills, especially for the Marine Corps. Whether an enemy aircraft which was last seen descending with a trail of smoke should be considered destroyed cannot always be decided. Thus, several "smokers" were claimed as definite kills.
He also commented, "...most of the pilots whose scores are subject to some uncertainty are all from the 1942-early 1943 period when air combat was the heaviest. War diaries from this period are often incomplete, or even non-existent..."
Retired Brigadier General Robert Galer put the question of aces and their kills in perspective. In a recent letter to the author he wrote, "Aces' scores are not an exact number. There were too many people shooting at the same targets. The enemy might sustain some battle damage, such as in the engine, but they could run for another five minutes. It was tough to be accurate."
Then-Captain Stanley S. Nicolay, who shot down three Bettys during his tour with VMF-224, also commented on the problems of simply engaging the enemy.
"There were a lot of people out there who didn't get any (kills), but they worked their tails off. Shooting down an airplane is 90 percent luck; you're lucky if you find one. Most of the time, you can't. That sky gets bigger and bigger the higher you go.
"We had no radar. Even our radios weren't very good. We depended on our sight. Look, look, look, with our heads on a swivel."
USMC Aces During the Period August 1942-April 1944
* Awarded the Medal of Honor.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul J. Fontana. 5 victories. Retired as a major general.
Major Archie G. Donahue. 14 victories.
Major Robert B. Fraser. 6 victories.
Captain Jefferson J. DeBlanc*. 9 victories (1 in F4Us).
Captain James G. Percy. 6 victories (1 in F4Us).
First Lieutenant John B. Maas, Jr. 5.5 victories.
Lieutenant Colonel Donald K. Yost. 8 victories (2 in F4Us).
Lieutenant Colonel Leonard K. Davis. 5 victories.
Major Joseph H. Reinburg. 7 victories.
Major Francis E. Pierce, Jr. 6 victories.
Major Perry L. Shuman. 6 victories in F4Us.
Captain Joseph J. Foss*. 26 victories. Retired as a brigadier general in Air National Guard
Captain Thomas H. Mann, Jr. 9 victories. Also flew with VMF-224.
Captain Ernest A. Powell. 5 victories.
Captain Robert M. Baker. 5 victories.
Captain Donald C. Owen. 5 victories.
Captain Kenneth M. Ford. 5 victories in F4Us.
First Lieutenant William P Marontate. 13 victories.
First Lieutenant William B. Freeman. 6 victories.
First Lieutenant Roger A. Haberman. 6.5 victories.
Captain Gregory K. Loesch. 8.5 victories.
Second Lieutenant Cecil J. Doyle. 5 victories.
Second Lieutenant Joseph L. Narr. 7 victories.
Captain Kenneth A. Walsh*. 21 victories in F4Us.
Lieutenant Colonel Harold W. Bauer*. 10 victories
Major Frank C. Drury. 6 victories (1 in F4Us). Also flew with VMF-223.
Major Robert E Stout. 6 victories. Flew with VMF-224.
Captain Jack E. Conger. 10 victories.
Captain Phillip C. DeLong. 11-1/6 victories in World War II, two victories in Korea (all in F4Us).
Major Hugh M. Elwood. 5.1 victories. Retired as a lieutenant general.
Captain Loren D. Everton. 10 victories. Also flew with VMF-223.
Warrant Officer Henry B. Hamilton. 7 victories. Also flew with VMF-223.
Major Frederick R. Payne, Jr. 5.5 victories. Also flew with VMF-223.
VMF-213 (all kills in F4Us):
Lieutenant Colonel Gregory J. Weissenberger. 5 victories.
Major James N. Cupp. 12 victories.
Captain Sheldon O. Hall. 6 victories.
Captain John L Morgan, Jr. 8.5 victories.
Captain Edward O. Shaw. 14.5 victories.
Captain Wilbur J. Thomas. 18.5 victories.
VMF-214 (all kills in F4Us):
Major Gregory Boyington*. 28 official victories.
Captain William N. Case. 8 victories.
Captain Arthur R. Conant. 6 victories.
Captain Donald H. Fisher. 6 victories.
Captain John E Bolt, Jr. 6 victories in World War II, six victories in Korea.
Captain Christopher L. Magee. 9 victories.
Captain Robert W. McClurg. 7 victories.
Captain Paul A. Mullen. 6.5 victories.
Captain Edwin L. Olander. 5 victories.
First Lieutenant Alvin J. Jensen. 7 victories.
VMF-215 (all kills in F4Us):
Captain Donald N. Aldrich. 20 victories.
Captain Harold L. Spears. 15 victories.
First Lieutenant Robert M. Hanson*. 25 victories.
Lieutenant Colonel Nathan T Post, Jr. 8 victories.
Captain Harold E. Segal. 12 victories.
Captain William N. Snider. 11.5 victories.
Captain James E. Swett*. 15.5 victories (7 in F4Fs).
Captain Albert E. Hacking, Jr. 5 victories (in F4Fs).
VMF-222 (all in F4Us):
Major Donald H. Sapp (later changed to Stapp). 10 victories.
Major John L. Smith*. 19 victories.
Major Hyde Phillips. 5 victories.
Captain Marion E. Carl. 18.5 victories (2 in F4Us). Retired as a major general.
Captain Kenneth D. Frazier. 13.5 victories (1 in F4Us).
Captain Fred E. Gutt. 8 victories.
Captain Orvin H. Ramlo. 5 victories.
First Lieutenant Charles Kendrick. 5 victories.
First Lieutenant Eugene A. Trowbridge. 6 victories.
Second Lieutenant Zenneth A. Pond. 6 victories.
Lieutenant Colonel John E Dobbin. 7.5 victories.
Major Robert E. Galer*. 14 victories. Retired as a brigadier general.
Major Charles M. Kunz. 8 victories.
Captain George L. Hollowell. 8 victories.
First Lieutenant Jack Pittman, Jr. 5 victories.
VMF-321 (all in F4Us):
Major Edmund E Overend. 8.5 victories, including 5 with the Flying Tigers (3.5 in F4Us).
Captain Robert B. See. 5 victories.
Sources for this booklet fall into two basic categories: general historical publications for the overall situation in the Pacific, and references that describe specific subjects, such as aircraft, personalities, and campaigns. I found several general official and commercial publications invaluable, including LtCol Frank R. Hough, Maj Verle J. Ludwig, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal and Reduction of Rabaul, volumes 1 and 2, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, (Washington: Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, USMC, 1958 and 1963, respectively), and Reboert Sherrod, History of Marine Corps Aviation in World War II (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1980). Other general histories included, Peter B. Mersky, U.S. Marine Corps Aviation, 1912-Present (Baltimore: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1983, 1986), Masatake Okimuya and Jiro Horikoshi, Zero! (New York: Ballantine Books, 1956), and John Lundstrom, The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1984).
The author would like to thank MajGen John P. Condon, USMC (Ret), a fighter pilot and Cactus operations officer in early 1943, for reviewing the manuscript and making thoughtful and valuable insights. Gratitude is also extended to Dan Crawford, Benis M. Frank, and Regina Strother of the Marine Corps Historical Center; Dale Connelly and Rutha Dicks of the National Archiges Still Picture Branch; and Robert Mikesh, James Landsdale, Henry Sakaida, James Farmer, and Linda Cullen and Mary Beth Straight of the U.S. Naval Institute.
About the Author
Peter B. Mersky is a graduate of the Rhode Island School fo Design with a baccalaureate degree in illustration. He was commissioned thhrough the Navy's Aviation Officer Candidate School in May 1968. Following active duty, he remained inthe Naval Reserve and served two tours as an air intelligence officer with Light Photographic Squadron 306, one of the Navy's last F-8 Crusader squadrons.
His is the assistant editor of Approach, the Navy's aviation safety magazine, published by the Naval Safety Center in Norfolk, Virginia. Commander Mersky has written or coauthored several books on Navy and Marine Corps aviation, including The Naval Air Wa in Vietnam (with Norman Polmar), U.S. Marine Corps Aviation, 1912-Present, Vought F-8 Crusader, and A History of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 231. He has written many magazine articles for American and British publications, and he also writes a regular book review column for Naval Aviation News.
THIS PAMPHLET HISTORY, one in a series devoted to U.S. Marines in the World War II era, is published for the education and training of Marines by the History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C., as a part of the U.S. Department of Defense observance of the 50th anniversary of victory in that war.
Editorial costs of preparing this pamphlet have been defrayed in part by a bequest from the estate of Emilie H. Watts, in memory of her late husband, Thomas M. Watts, who served as a Marine and was the recipient of a Purple Heart.
WORLD WAR II COMMEMORATIVE SERIES
DIRECTOR OF MARINE CORPS HISTORY AND MUSEUMS
Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons, USMC (Ret)
WORLD WAR II COMMEMORATIVE SERIES
Benis M. Frank
George C. MacGillivray
EDITING AND DESIGN SECTION, HISTORY AND MUSEUMS DIVISION
Robert E. Struder, Senior Editor; W. Stephen Hill, Visual Information
Specialist; Catherine A. Kerns, Composition Services Technician
Marine Corps Historical Center
Building 58, Washington Navy Yard
Washington, D.C. 20374-0580
PCN 190 003122 00
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| 0.97663 | 30,349 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Comprehensive study of Moscow’s walled city, for centuries a byword for power, secrecy and cruelty.
“The Kremlin’s history is a tale of survival, and it is certainly an epic, but there is nothing inevitable about any of it.” So writes Merridale (Contemporary History/Queen Mary Univ. of London), author of the excellent Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (2006), casting subtle doubt on the claims of the Putin government and its assertions of imperial destiny. Glorifying the past, of course, is a way to take eyes off the present, though the stratagem can sometimes backfire. What is of central importance to the history of the Kremlin and, by extension, that of Russia, is the capacity of its builders to return time and again to scenes of utter destruction and start from scratch. Or not quite from scratch, since, as Merridale notes at the close of her book, Russians were recently delighted to learn that the workmen who had been ordered to destroy the Kremlin’s Orthodox religious icons in the 1930s had defied Stalin’s orders and instead painted them over; and so skillfully that the paint can (comparatively, anyway) easily be removed and the icons restored. Stalin naturally figures heavily in these pages, a ruler whose apparatus was extremely effective in delivering cruelty. What is just as interesting, and perhaps surprising to most readers, is the role of non-Russians in making the Kremlin over the centuries, from a Venetian master builder to German craftsmen fleeing the religious wars of their homeland—to say nothing of the Byzantine hierarchy to whom Russian religious leaders used to answer.
Visitors of Russia and social historians alike will benefit from Merridale’s thoroughgoing research and lively writing.
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| 0.955918 | 378 | 2.609375 | 3 |
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