Olivia

National Geographic January 2013, Part 2

Rain Forest for Sale, by Scott Wallace photographs by Tim Laman, Ivan Kashinsky, Karla Gachet, David Liittschwager, and Steve Winter

Wow! That’s quite the listing of photographers. Each photographer was assigned a particular subject area to photograph. Laman photographed primates and birds, Kashinsky and Gachet photographed people, Liitschwager photographed the “microfauna” (which apparently means bugs and things in this case; microfauna usually means things like protozoans and tardigrades) and Winter photographed the people.

Rain Forest for Sale is about the exploitation for oil of the national parks of Ecuador. Wallace and the team of photographers traveled to Ecuador to capture the lives of the people and fauna of the region so as to bring awareness of the plight that the indigenous peoples of the region are in.

One of the things that is highlighted and that particularly appalled me (so obviously their highlighting of the issue worked the way it was intended) is that the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, offered not to exploit the oil in part of this sensitive area if the people of other countries would give Ecuador $3.6 Billion. My initial response was, “Nice park we have here. Shame if something were to happen to it.” I don’t think that’s how a protection racket is supposed to work. I think you’re supposed to protect your own natural areas, not threaten to destroy them if others won’t pay you off.

It didn’t work, by the way. In September 2016, they started drilling for oil in that area of the park.

Into the Unknown, by David Roberts, photographs by Frank Hurley

In 1912, an explorer, Douglas Mawson, sent out eight teams of three men to explore Antarctica. They weren’t trying to get to the South Pole, they just wanted to find out as much as they could about our southernmost continent.

Mawson’s team fell into trouble about a month into their part of the expedition. A sinkhole opened up behind Mawson’s sledge and one of their team members, half of their dogs, their tent, all of the food for the sled dogs, and most of the food for the humans. So, of course, the remaining two members of the team, headed immediately back to their home base.

As they traveled, they lost their dogs one by one (they euthanized each dog with a bullet and then ate the dogs to preserve the remainder of their food). Then Mawson’s human companion died. Mawson buried him in the snow and kept going. As Mawson’s body began to fail, he began to despair, but he kept moving. Finally, he returned to the base camp and found that, while their ship had left without them, some men had stayed behind to look for Mawson’s team. It would take another ten months for the ship to return.

Mawson and Mertz had to get rid of any unnecessary equipment that they carried, which included their camera.

Mawson died in 1958. Frank Hurley, the photographer for this article, was also on the 1912 expedition and, near as I can tell, these are his photos from that expedition.

My Travel Memories: The Bell Witch Cave

I have very little hipster cred, so I’m going take the opportunity to do the hipster thing here and say that I knew about the Bell Witch before it was cool. In 1989, my folks and I were driving from Chicago to visit our family in Florida (remember them?). As we passed into Tennessee, we passed a sign that said, “See the Bell Witch Cave” or words to that effect. My folks were always up for a cave (and for a good supernatural story). So, long before An American Haunting, or Bell Witch: The Movie, we heard the story from the current owners of the cave.

I was looking through the photo album of this trip and saw pictures of a cave. “I wonder if that was the Bell Witch Cave. It would be about the right timing for that.” So I searched for ‘Bell Witch Cave’ on Google Images and saw a (considerably less overexposed) shot of this same location on someone else’s website. So I can say with about 90% certainty that this is, in fact, a picture of the Bell Witch Cave.

According to the legend, in the early 19th century, the family of a farmer named John Bell began to experience something that was generally thought of as supernatural. He, his family, and visitors to his home, heard voices. Sometimes it was the voice of a woman, at other times it was the voices of other people. It was reported that the voices, at one point, began repeating the words of two church services taking place simultaneously in two different churches miles from the Bell home.

The entity claimed to be “Kate Batts’s witch.” Kate Batts was a neighbor that the Bells had had problems with over some kind of economic transaction, either the purchase of land or of slaves. Given the time period that this story took place in, my money’s on the latter. At any rate, the apparition was given the name “Kate” and would apparently respond to that name.

In the end, “Kate,” presumably the spirit and not the neighbor (though in my memory, it seemed that the man telling the story was unclear on this point), fled to the cave. There are several legends of her interacting with people in the cave.

Do I believe in the Bell Witch? I try to keep an open mind about things like ghosts, because I have seen some things that seem unexplainable (and on several occasions I was by myself, so they couldn’t have been practical jokes or anything of that nature). But I do wonder if the Bell Witch was real or was an attempt to slander a neighbor who had a grievance.

Next up: Stone Mountain, Atlanta. I may have to see if there are any public domain photos of the park because I don’t have a single one in my collection.

National Geographic January 2013, Part 1

Now for the National Geographic post I had attempted back on the 12th:

Restless Genes, by David Dobbs

At first, I thought that this would be a rehash of what we covered back on June 29, 2016 or that the magazine would cover again in June of 2013, depending on your perspective. The thesis in that issue was that people take risks because they get a dopamine rush from it.

Instead, though, we talk about the possible genetic impetus and benefits of exploration. Dobbs discusses how unusual homo sapiens sapiens is for our desire to explore and to cover new territory. Other species may travel with us (rats and cockroaches, for example), but it’s doubtful whether those species would have spread out that far without us. Even our other homo sapiens cousins (such as the Neanderthal) didn’t spread out and conquer the world like we did.

We start out with one gene, DRD4, which controls dopamine (this is where I thought the two articles would overlap). A variant called DRD4-7R seems to correlate highly with exploration. But for all of the studies that seem to make that correlation, there are others that refute it.

One of the scientists who discovered the 7R variant believes that it is a collection of genetic changes, not just that one, that leads humanity to explore. We are better-suited than our primate cousins to walk far distances, and our brains take longer to develop but end up larger than theirs are. And even the long time it takes us to mature may help. Our long childhoods lead us to develop imaginations, which feed our curiosity and lead children to naturally become scientists and explorers. Some of us retain those tendencies into adulthood.

And explorers tend to breed new explorers. A community in Quebec spread out into the wilderness and as they progressed farther into the wilderness, the communities they founded had different traits. They married younger and had more children, and those children married younger and had even more children. Lawrence Excoffier, a population geneticist, believes that this sort of sorting happened over and over throughout human history, leading explorers to perhaps have had more children, and thus had a stronger impact on the human genome in general.

We start and end the article, and possibly also the story of human migration, with the population of the South Pacific. These peoples were the descendants of some of the first to leave Africa. Once they reached the end of the continent of Asia going westward, they started moving from through the islands in small canoes, always within sight of another island. But when they reached the end of the chain of islands that were “intervisible,” they stopped until centuries later, when people from somewhere else, perhaps Taiwan, brought a larger boat that could travel farther distances. And after that, nothing stopped them from conquering that entire part of the world.

Crazy Far, by Tim Folger photographs by Stephan Martiniere

We begin this article with a discussion of the NERVA project, which was an attempt to get humans to Mars in a nuclear-powered spaceship. The original plan was to leave for Mars in 1981. Obviously, we never got there.

In this article, we discuss the technology that could, someday, bring that old dream back to life, including nuclear fusion or a giant sail that would catch solar winds (Hey! I was just reminiscing about that Classic Doctor Who episode!)

The article concludes with the idea that before we can build a starship, though, we will need to build a society that will build a starship. That seemed like a good prospect in 2013. In 2017, I think we’re likely to take a big step backwards before we can even start on that project.

This Was Going to Be a National Geographic Post, but What the Heck

No, I haven’t forgotten about this blog. But I’ve been really exhausted after work and have been using the energy that I do have on my language-learning project (maybe I’ll start a topic for that . . .), so I haven’t had the time or energy to spend on reading magazines. Except for Vanity Fair, because I am one of that magazine’s tens of thousands of new subscribers. I’m considering subscribing to Teen Vogue, as well, for their political reporting. There’s apparently also a project going where people are subscribing Republican politicians to Teen Vogue as well (a subscription is only $5 per year).

As for the language-learning project, as of yesterday I have hit the $90 mark, and as of today I’ve finished Level 1 of Rosetta Stone Vietnamese. As far as Spanish goes, I’m apparently somewhere in the midst of heading towards CEFR* Level B1. B1 is a high intermediate/low advanced level, so I can live with that, I think (for now, at least). The only thing stopping me from being at a higher level is vocabulary, so I’m considering adding vocabulary flash cards to my regimen. One of the things that bugs me about Duolingo is that the gold circles (indicating that you’ve completed that exercise) stop being gold after a while (as a prompt to make you practice more). I wish Duolingo would let me specify that I use Spanish nearly daily in my job, so that the circles take longer to stop being gold. Having to do the same lessons over and over because Duolingo assumes that I don’t use the language enough to keep the vocabulary fresh can be kind of frustrating.

I’ve also discovered a new tool, Language Zen, which I’m trying out. So far they only have Spanish for English speakers (and their second plan is for English for Spanish speakers), but if the site takes off, they’ll be adding more languages later. It’s a little translation-heavy (they give you sentences in English and you have to write the Spanish for them), which doesn’t do so much to prepare you to speak the language, but it’s hopefully going to broaden my vocabulary. There’s an odd “less than (number) words need practice” thing in the corner that I haven’t quite been able to figure out yet. I had 60 words at one time, then worked my way down to ten, and now I’m at 255. I can’t wait to figure out what that means. As I worked on this post, I was working on that site and I’m down to 245. Still don’t know 245 words until what, exactly.

There’s also been a change in plans for our bigger 2017 trip. Alex has a friend in California that he wants to meet in person, so we’re going to be going to Southern California for the week. I have been there four times before (and Alex went once as a baby), but, again, the now-ex (who still doesn’t have a pseudonym) has most of our photos from those trips. So I’ll be taking new pictures of those places to replace the ones that I no longer have. I also hope to make it to a few new places (the Queen Mary and Catalina Island, specifically).

*Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

Just a Few Updates . . .

I’ve continued hitting the languages pretty hard. I’m listening to foreign language books and/or podcasts in the car on my way to and from work, I am doing at least two Duolingo Spanish lessons per day, and I also am doing Rosetta Stone for both Vietnamese and Mandarin. My employer requires us to do five hours per month to keep our access to Rosetta Stone and as we get farther into it, that has become more of a challenge. I’m on-target for January and may even exceed my five hours. Let’s see how I do in February, though, when the material is becoming tougher and I have three fewer days to get it than I will have had in January.

I really like Rosetta Stone, by the way (and you don’t know how tempted I am to link to their page at Amazon). The biggest challenge for me, the way they teach foreign languages in school, is to stop thinking in English and translating into my target language, because that’s how they teach a foreign language. Rosetta Stone doesn’t ever get you using your first language as a crutch by taking it entirely out of the equation. I have had to look up a couple of things where I couldn’t quite grasp what they were getting at. One of these was the difference between “chúng tôi” and “chúng ta,” which both clearly mean “we,” but I just couldn’t quite tease out the difference.*

In addition, I bought a copy of Pride and Prejudice in Vietnamese and am rereading the original paired with the translation. I’m still trying to avoid the whole translation trap, so I am doing it chapter by chapter. The night of January 24, I reread Chapter 8 in the original and then followed it up by the first two pages in the translation. My Vietnamese is not so good yet that I understand very much of it at all, but that’s okay. It’ll come with practice. Right now I’m just looking at the words for things that look familiar. There are so many diacritical marks on the vowels in Vietnamese, and I’m hoping that the book will also make those come a little more naturally.

I started paying myself to do this, and it looks like I’m on-target to have $70 saved up by the end of January. Once I have $100, I’m going to start investing the money that I’ve saved up. I’m not sure if I’ll be buying a CD or putting it on the stock market. We’ll see what I decide once I get there.

Alex and I did go to the march. He told his dad that we were going, so I felt pretty much committed when he did that. We got there a little late, but managed to join up with the march and Alex and I walk pretty quickly, so it didn’t take long to reach near the center of the 1,500 people who were marching in San Antonio. I hope to keep up with the things that the Women’s March organizers are suggesting we do to keep up the momentum, including mailing my representatives about issues that are important to me. I’m not sure if I’ll use the official Women’s March postcards or just pick up a few touristy ones at my local store and use them.

And, finally, my planned trip to Canada is now less than six months away. That means that I can finally put in for the time off at work and can shell out the however-many dollars it’s going to take to pay for this trip. This is my least-favorite part of travel. The interface for putting in for time off is awkward, and then there’s the whole “paying for it” part, even though I’ve already got the money saved up.

*”Chúng tôi” is the exclusive “we” and “chúng ta” is inclusive. So, if I am speaking to you and including you in the “we,” I would use “chúng ta.” If I am speaking to you of something that affects me and someone who isn’t you, then “chúng tôi” is appropriate.

South Texas Destinations: Stone Oak Park, San Antonio, Texas

Despite it being out of the way, I’ve been to Stone Oak Park twice. The first time was July of 2015 and it was just amazingly hot. It seemed like a nice park, though, so Alex and I returned in November of 2015 so that we could finish the rest of the main walking path.

It turns out that we saw most of the exciting stuff on that first trip.

Stone Oak Park has the usual things, bicycle trails, a playground, a picnic pavilion, portable restroom facilities, and so forth. The park also has a 2.7-mile walking trail marked by public artworks. I am trying to find the names of the artworks, but haven’t had much luck so far. Perhaps this will be my excuse to return.

Stone Oak Park Artwork — Artwork at Stone Oak Park, San Antonio, Texas 2015

Stone Oak Park is also home to two caves, known as Bear Cave and Cub Cave. Bear Cave got its name from the bones of a black bear that were found inside. Cub Cave got its name because whoever named the caves wanted to stick with the “bear” theme and Cub Cave is smaller than Bear Cave. Bear Cave is blocked off to keep people from climbing or falling in. As of my last visit, Cub Cave was still open.

Stone Oak Park was founded for one very practical reason — it is in a vulnerable area of the state known as the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. In particular, the caves along the recharge zone are important for cleaning the water as it enters the aquifer. The aquifer is where San Antonio and its surrounding area gets its drinking water. The water drains into the aquifer in a region from just outside Loop 1604, stretching up past the western boundaries of New Braunfels and San Marcos, and way off to the west to around Brackettville (which is between Uvalde and the border with Mexico). In the process of preserving this land, the city has preserved two of the most important caves for keeping our water clean.

Women’s Marches 2016

As most of you likely know, there is a major demonstration for feminists (here defined as “people who think that women deserve to be treated like people”) in Washington, DC. You may also be aware that there are a number of “sister marches” being held in other cities (the official list is something like 673 marches with over 2 million expected marchers).

San Antonio is going to have a march today (as this posts, not as I’m writing it) and Alex and I are planning to attend the actual march itself, if not the rally part at the beginning or the planning part at the end. If we do make it, I’ll make a post updating y’all on what happened and what it felt like to participate in an event like this.

I’m categorizing this as “walking” as well as “2016 election” since the marchers will be walking nearly two miles just as the official marching part of the march. Getting there and then back to the bus stop will probably add quite a bit more.

National Geographic July 2016 Part 3

Smartphone Americana, story and photographs by David Guttenfelder

Guttenfelder spent 20 years living abroad working as a photojournalist. He returned to the United States in 2014 and began to explore the country of his birth as if he were a new immigrant. Rather than using the expensive cameras he used in his years abroad, however, he chose to use his smartphone. He says that he “want(s his) images to be imperfect and immediate, to capture something both fleeting and timeless about the America that (he is) rediscovering.”

And the pictures he took really are stunning. I think that my personal favorite is the tail end of an RV with mountainous scenery as it drives past a view of the Badlands in South Dakota.

My Travel Memories: Baltimore, Maryland

I’m nearly certain that our 1988 trip to Baltimore was the second time I’d been there. The first time would have been our 1980 trip, when we visited Washington, DC, I think, and we stayed overnight in Baltimore at a Holiday Inn that was off the beaten path and I think we went to Fort McHenry, but don’t quote me on that.

This trip, we stayed at a hotel closer to the Inner Harbor. I remember taking the Skywalk (which they are apparently demolishing, much to my dismay) from our hotel to the Inner Harbor. We spent a lot of time exploring the Harborplace mall. When I was 11, we moved from our small house to a larger one in the town next door. The people who bought our old house wanted us out immediately and the people who owned our new house didn’t want to move until early July. Fortunately, the people who (31 years later) became my ex-in-laws offered to let us stay in their house for a few weeks of that, beginning around the middle of June. That still left us several weeks without a home. We ended up staying in one of those motels that had those little cottages during this time. Watching the four walls of our cottage drove my folks crazy and so we started visiting shopping malls just to get out of the house. We called this activity “malling” and we would occasionally “mall” in travel destinations. So when we found a new (not just new-to-us, but it seemed to be recently constructed as well) mall in Baltimore, of course we malled there. Why wouldn’t we?

One of the oddest things about the Inner Harbor is the World Trade Center building. The Inner Harbor area is paved with these large red sort of cement flagstones, and suddenly, in the middle of this big open area, there’s the World Trade Center. I don’t even recall the building being labeled. It took me years (until after I got the Internet) to figure out what that building had been. I wondered briefly if it was an apartment building of some sort, but it was locked up really well, which seemed like it might be a danger to the residents if there were a fire. There’s an observation deck at the top, but I don’t think I’ve ever been there when it was open. Maybe on a future visit I’ll get a chance to go up there.

We also visited Westminster Hall and the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was originally buried at the back of the graveyard, near his grandfather, but the grave grew neglected and a schoolteacher, Sara Sigourney Rice, spearheaded the effort to buy a new headstone for the grave. They didn’t just put up a new headstone, though. They exhumed and moved his entire body. So today Poe is buried near the front of the graveyard under a large four-sided monument with a bronze medallion of his face on one side.

Constellation in Baltimore 1988 — The USS Constellation with the World Trade Center behind it, 1988

Our purpose for being in Baltimore was to visit the USS Constellation, the last sail ship built by the United States Navy, and the place where my paternal grandfather trained when he joined the Navy. How did my grandfather train on a ship that had been used in the Civil War? Well, the Constellation had been in service for nearly 100 years when it was finally retired in 1954. However, my paternal grandfather was also born a long time ago. As you can probably surmise from some of the things I’ve said, I’m no spring chicken, and my father was, not old, but not in the first blush of youth when I was born. My grandfather was almost the age that I am now when my dad was born. So, yeah. He trained for the Navy on a sail-powered ship that had been used in the Civil War.

The tour of the Constellation was very interesting, but it made me glad that I didn’t have to travel like that. I would like a yacht someday, so that I can travel to other countries with my critters, but that’s a yacht and not a Civil-War-era battleship. The Constellation seemed kind of claustrophobic and it didn’t seem like there would be a lot of air circulation in there (windows weren’t a high priority in the 1850s, apparently). In 1994, they declared the Constellation to be dangerous and took it completely apart to repair it. They put it back together looking better than it had when we were there. The inside is now brighter than I recall it being, but it still has that pesky lack of windows that make it not someplace I would like to spend an entire ocean voyage.

National Geographic July 2016, Part 2

Great White Mystery by Erik Vance, photography by Brian Sherry

We think we know the great white shark. After all, didn’t Richard Dreyfuss tell us everything we need to know in Jaws? Actually, not so much. Vance lists some of the things we don’t know about the great white shark, including such things as the life expectancy, gestation period or the age at which a great white undergoes puberty (or whatever passes for puberty among sharks). This information was why my first thought about posting a link to my Amazon Associates account wasn’t for Jaws but for Deep Wizardry, the second book in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series.* The whole “we don’t know where they come from or where they go” part of this article reminded me of a great white shark whose very long name the kids shorten to “Ed” in Deep Wizardry.

The article goes on to talk about some of the things we do know about great white sharks, like their anatomy and the areas of the ocean where they are seen most frequently. And the article ends by asking whether the great white shark is a healthy or threatened population. The answer is, as of the publication of this article, as yet unknown

Greece, Gods, and the Great Beyond by Caroline Alexander, photographs by Vincent J. Musi and David Coventry

This is a little bit of text on the evolution of religion in Ancient Greece, from propitiating the gods that were believed to cause good and bad thing to befall them and with a fear of death and the underworld through the mystery cults that eventually informed the religion that became Christianity.

The photographs are of Greek sacred sites, including the Erechtheion in Athens and, in an interesting choice, the Temple of Athena in Delphi. The Temple of Apollo was much more famous, being where the Oracle did her oracle-ing. I wonder if the photograph didn’t turn out as well as the one of the Temple of Athena (which is a lovely photo).

There is also a two-page illustration of what Samothrace looked like at its peak, including where the famous statue of Nike was located. This page also has a reconstruction of what Nike probably looked like before she lost her arms and head.

If you want to see Nike, by the way, and don’t have the time or money to go to the Louvre, a cement reproduction of the statue can be seen at Miraflores Park on Hildebrand in San Antonio. Miraflores Park is still, a decade after the city took possession of it, not open to the public, but you can see the statue from the street.

*As threatened previously, I also need to include a link to the first book, So You Want to Be a Wizard.