To-Do List: Moon Trees

While researching my post on our day in Philadelphia, I stumbled across a new “must see” travel goal:  the moon trees.

When Apollo 14 went to the moon, the astronauts took tree seeds with them.  Upon the return of Apollo 14 to Earth, scientists attempted to germinate the seeds, resulting in over 400 seedlings (some of which were produced from cuttings).  The resulting trees were planted all over the nation and some were given to other countries, including Brazil and Japan.

NASA’s website has an article on the moon trees.  The page includes a list of some trees believed to be moon trees (unfortunately no official list was kept).  The list of locations is a strange one, including four trees in Alabama, for example, but the only one identified as being in Texas is at a “private residence” in Westlake.  I intend to ask around to see if by some miracle there is a moon tree here in San Antonio.  It would seem that out of hundreds of trees, more than that one should be in Texas.

At any rate, as Alex and I travel over the next few years, I will see how many moon trees I can see.  It looks like I can fit one into our 2018 vacation.  We’re planning to go to Seattle and take a side trip to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.  It looks like there is a Douglas Fir at the State Capitol in Salem, which is only half an hour from McMinnville.  That sounds doable to me.

2015 Vacation Destinations: The Empire State Building, New York City

When I went to New York City with my parents in 1988, we visited the Empire State Building.  I not only enjoyed the view of the city, I was very impressed by the detail that went into the building.  This was a building that exists not just to be a place of business, but also to impress its visitors.  And it does this very well indeed.  So, when I started planning Alex and my 2015 vacation, I knew that I had to visit the Empire State Building again.

Additionally, my 1988 visit was in the evening and I took a picture of the shadow of the building stretching out over Manhattan.  I wanted to duplicate that photo on this trip, as well, so as to see how the city has changed over the last 27 years.

We went the same day as our trip to the Intrepid Museum and needed to get some rest and cool off a bit after all of the walking we’d done that day.  As a result, we ended up arriving at the observation deck of the Empire State Building about an hour later than it had been when we had been there in 1988.  I got the picture, though.  The 1988 picture was pretty overexposed, and so I attempted to fix it.  I’m still really new at this, so it’s probably not the best job ever, but it’s not too bad for a beginner.  I think.

Empire State Building, August 16, 1988, 5:00 p.m.
The view from the Empire State Building at around 5:00 p.m. on, near as I can figure, August 16, 1988.

Empire State Building, July 16, 2015 6:00 p.m.
The view from the Empire State Building at around 6:00 p.m. on July 16, 2015.

The groundbreaking of the Empire State Building was held on March 17, 1930 and the building was officially opened on May 1, 1931.  An additional 200 feet of height were added to the building so that it could serve as a docking station for airships (zeppelins, blimps, and similar craft).  However, as fate would have it, the airship was supplanted by another technology — the jet airplane — and the closest any airship ever got to docking at the Empire State Building was when an airship tied to the mast for three minutes in a high wind.  And, when it comes down to it, that was the downfall of the plan to use the Empire State Building as a docking station for airships.  The wind is too strong at that height.  However, the Empire State Corporation did get their extra 200 feet, and for over 40 years, from the opening of the building until September of 1973, when the Sears Tower opened, the Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world.

The Empire State Building is open from 8:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m.  Visiting the Empire State Building Experience website will give you the estimated time from the front doors to the 86th floor.  Visitors are required to take the elevator to and from the 80th floor, but from that point, visitors have a choice between taking the elevator and walking the last six stories.  My son and I chose to climb the stairs, and I think we may have climbed the stairs in 1988 as well.  For all I know, you get chilled champagne and a mani-pedi on the elevator between the 80th and 86th floors.  I don’t think I’ve ever been in it.

The Empire State Building is wheelchair-accessible.  There are areas of the 86th Floor observatory where the walls have been lowered to allow wheelchair users to enjoy the view.  As of this writing, the walls of the 102nd Floor observatory are high, but they are attempting to remedy that shortcoming.

2/4/2019 On or around November 28, 2018, I realized that I need to start monetizing this blog. To that end, I’m starting to put what I call Gratuitous Amazon Links into my posts. As of January 12, 2019, I’m going back to add GALs to my older posts. If I can’t find anything exactly on-topic to the post, I’m choosing from among the highest-rated items on the same topic as the post. For example, for a post on a park, I’ll search Amazon for books on parks and choose one of the ones with the highest reader ratings. Here is the GAL for this post:

Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings — Revised and Updated by Judith Dupre (Author), Adrian Smith (Introduction)

National Geographic July 2014

The Hunt for Life Beyond Earth, by Michael D. Lemonick, photographs by Mark Thiessen

The Hunt for Life Beyond Earth is pretty much just like it says:  it’s about scientists’ attempts to find life on other planets.  Needless to say, Mars is one of the planets they are considering as home for this extraterrestrial life, but Mars is too close.  Rocks travel back and forth between Earth and Mars periodically.  As a result,  the discovery of life on Mars would not prove that said life developed there.  It could be terrestrial life that made the trip between the two planets.

Based on the premise that life should be develop in places with liquid water, we are also looking at two of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as possible sites of life.  Saturn’s moon Titan also has liquid, but that liquid is methane and not water.  As a result, scientists who are looking for life haven’t ruled Titan out, but they are uncertain what kind of life would develop in liquid methane.

Then there is the possibility of life beyond our solar system.  In 1961, an astronomer named Frank Drake created what is now known as the Drake Equation, which is an equation to calculate how many extrasolar civilizations we should be able to contact.  The equation included the number of sunlike stars in our galaxy, the number of those stars that had planetary systems, the number of planetary systems that have planets capable of sustaining life, the number of planets that actually do develop life, the number of those whose residents develop intelligence, and the number of those who develop radio signals that we could detect.  We are just now starting to be able to apply numbers to these variables.

As someone who has read and watched entirely too much science fiction for her own good, I think that the Drake Equation may understate the number of planets that we might be able to communicate with.  What if a society jumped right to television?  Or used some other form of radiation that we cannot yet detect to communicate?  Or evolved while orbiting a sun completely different from ours?  The Drake Equation might be a good estimate, but there are no guarantees that it is the only way for life to develop.  It’s just the way that our life developed.

The Next Breadbasket, by Joel K. Bourne, Jr., photographs by Robin Hammond

The Next Breadbasket is another installment in the Future of Food series.  For this installment, we travel to Africa to watch the various ways that the fertile land, and those who work it, are being both used and exploited by agribusiness.  In too many African countries, the government allows the agribusiness entities to run people, some of whom have been farming this land for generations, off of their land.  Bourne names names, both of the companies that have treated the indigenous people well and those who have treated the people poorly.

So far, two of the ones that Bourne seems to support are a company called African Century Agriculture which uses an “outgrower” model, in which African Century provides soybeans, weeding, and training in conservation agriculture to small farmers. The farmers then sell the soybeans that they grow back to African Century, which deducts the costs of their services from the payment.  This way, the small farmers get to keep their land and also get education in the latest agricultural techniques.

Another company that Bourne seems to me to think well of is Bananalandia, the largest banana farm in Mozambique.  The owner of Bananalandia, Dries Gouws, pays his workers at least 110% of the Mozambican minimum wage and he also has done things to improve the lives of the people in the surrounding villages, including paving roads, providing electricity, building a school, and making improvements to the sewage system.  I know well that 110% of minimum wage is in no way going to raise these people out of poverty, but I feel that the other improvements in the quality of life that Gouws has made are not insignificant either.

The Wells of Memory, by Paul Salopek, photographs by John Stanmeyer

In The Wells of Memory, the second installment of Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk series, Salopek is walking up the western coast of Saudi Arabia, through an area known as the Hejaz.  The Hejaz was added to what is now Saudi Arabia in 1925. Both Mecca and Medina are in the Hejaz, so until the era of airplane flight, most of the pilgrims coming from around the world had to pass through the Hejaz. Jeddah, also in the Hejaz is the burial place of Eve, according to legends.

Salopek focuses in part on the wells that are spread, a day’s walk apart, through the Hejaz.  The wells date back to the Caliphate of Caliph Umar in 638.  There were also guesthouses, forts, and hospitals along the route, courtesy fo the Caliph.  Today, in addition to the ancient wells, there are asbila, outdoor electric water coolers along the route these days.

Salopek is one of the first, if not the first, Westerner to travel this route in close to a century, but this is the route taken by other Westerners in the past, including Lawrence of Arabia.

As with nearly all National Geographic stories, The Wells of Memory is punctuated by photographs.  However, some of the photographs in this story were taken with a smartphone and then edited to look like vintage, sepia-toned photographs with an app called Hipstamatic.  Stanmeyer chose this approach to reflect his feeling that he “had one foot in the present, and the other had stepped back a hundred years.”

Big Fish, by Jennifer S. Holland, photographs by David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes

For the past 25 years, the Altantic goliath grouper has been a protected species.  Once sport fishermen would catch them by the dozen, but goliath groupers are long-lived and reproduce slowly.  This meant that the fish were not able to replace their numbers as quickly as they were being harvested.  This resulted in the species being granted legal protection as an endangered species.

Now, some fishermen believe that their numbers have rebounded enough that it should be safe to start catching them again.  In part they want the trophies, but these fishermen also believe that the goliath grouper is eating fish that the fishermen should legally be able to catch, thus reducing the numbers of legal fish even farther.

Holland seems unswayed by these fisherman’s arguments.  She has spoken with scientists who are studying goliath grouper and who believe that the population is still too low.  Goliath groupers tend to stick to one area, and until they start to overpopulate that area, they will not spread elsewhere in their range.  Additionally, according to Holland, there are a number of studies (she doesn’t tell us which ones) that show that there is not much overlap between the targets of the fishermen and those of the goliath grouper.  If the fishermen are finding it difficult to find fish to catch, it is not the fault of the goliath grouper.

Additionally, just because their numbers are rebounding now does not mean that this will continue indefinitely.  Goliath grouper juveniles live in mangrove swamps, and the mangroves in their home range are being decimated.  To make matters worse, due to mercury levels, goliath grouper are coming down with lesions in their livers.  This may also have an impact on their population numbers in the long term.  It also makes goliath grouper unsafe to eat, so fishermen who catch them would need to throw them back, or use them only for trophy purposes, which would be wasteful.

Empire of Rock, by McKenzie Funk, photographs by Carsten Peter

Alas, Empire of Rock has nothing to do with popular music.  It is, in fact, about the karst caves underneath Guizhou, China.  This part of China was once covered by a sea.  Over the centuries, the mollusks left their shells behind, which compressed into a  limestone formation known as karst.  Karst is limestone which is punctured by holes.  Water seeps down into the holes, which wears the holes away until they join together and eventually form caves.  This area is relatively unique in that this process has taken place over so many centuries that there are entire mountains of karst on the surface.  Have you ever seen photographs or Chinese paintings of large, steep stone mountains, usually surrounded by mist?  Those are karst mountains.

Funk accompanied a group of scientists and cavers who were attempting to measure the volume of one of the largest cave chambers in the world, the Hong Meigui chamber.  Though Funk’s eyes we watch them descend into the chamber and see their laser scanners, which Funk tells us is about the same size as a human head, measure the volume of the cave.  Funk and her hosts also visit other caves and karst formations in the area.

“Hong Meigui,” by the way, is the word that inspired me make my last post, on my experiences with foreign language.  “Hong Meigui,” depending on the tones, can mean “red rose.”  And I suspect that may be the meaning here, since there is a caving organization called the Hong Meigui Cave Exploration Society and the characters for the name of that group are the “hong,” “mei,” and “gui” of “red rose.”  Another chamber mentioned is the Miao Room, and my first instinct was that the “miao” in question is “temple,” but, when looking at a list of other “miao”s, it could also be the “miao” that means “infinity,” or any of a number of other Mandarin words that can be transliterated as “miao.”  I just don’t know.  To make things more frustrating, Funk does imply one translation when he tells us that the Yanzi cave is named for the swallows that live in the walls.

Two months after the cover date on this magazine, in September 2014, the title of the largest cave in the world was granted to the Miao Room.

(originally posted June and July 2015)

2/3/2019 On or around November 28, 2018, I realized that I need to start monetizing this blog. To that end, I’m starting to put what I call Gratuitous Amazon Links into my posts. As of January 12, 2019, I’m going back to add GALs to my older posts. If I can’t find anything exactly on-topic to the post, I’m choosing from among the highest-rated items on the same topic as the post. For example, for a post on a park, I’ll search Amazon for books on parks and choose one of the ones with the highest reader ratings. Here is the GAL for this post:

National Geographic Animal Encyclopedia: 2,500 Animals with Photos, Maps, and More! by Lucy Spelman (Author)

My Travel Memories: Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida

I was thinking that my next My Travel Memories post would be the start of what will likely turn out to be a bunch of posts on Walt Disney World, but I just looked at a map, and apparently the Kennedy Space Center is ever-so-slightly farther north than Walt Disney World.  So, in accordance with my north-to-south (to the extent I can piece my earliest memories together) literary itinerary, the Kennedy Space Center is next.

The Kennedy Space Center is the place that all of the manned space flights since 1972 launched from.  This means that every space shuttle launch took off from Kennedy.  When my folks retired to Florida, they could see the space shuttle launches from the beach near their house. I never visited during a launch, though, so I didn’t get to see them. I don’t know if I would have wanted to have seen it, either.  After the Challenger disaster in 1986, any time a space shuttle launched, I watched metaphorically through my fingers.

I’ve needed to do some research into when I went to the Kennedy Space Center.  It was definitely before the space shuttle era.   I am virtually certain that it was still Cape Kennedy at the time because I can remember telling an adult that we went to Cape Kennedy and the adult was confused at first because she knew it only as Cape Canaveral.  So that means that it was most likely in or before 1973, because they changed the name of the cape from Cape Kennedy back to Cape Canaveral on October 9, 1973 and we always went on vacation before October.

I suspect if I went back today there would be things that would trigger sense memories in me, but from here, sitting in my breakfast nook in Texas, the only thing that seems to have made a really lasting impression on me was what I am pretty sure was the Apollo 14 command module.  I remember it because it was less shiny and silver than I was expecting.  It was actually a rather unattractive shade of brown.  Apollo 14 was in 1971, so that narrows the date even farther, to sometime between 1971 and 1973.

Edited to Add:  I found our 1972 Florida trip album and there is no mention of the Kennedy Space Center in it.  Since we basically went to Florida every year during my early childhood, it looks like 1971 or 1973 are likely to be our target year.

(originally posted July 6, 2015)

2/1/2019 On or around November 28, 2018, I realized that I need to start monetizing this blog. To that end, I’m starting to put what I call Gratuitous Amazon Links into my posts. As of January 12, 2019, I’m going back to add GALs to my older posts. If I can’t find anything exactly on-topic to the post, I’m choosing from among the highest-rated items on the same topic as the post. For example, for a post on a park, I’ll search Amazon for books on parks and choose one of the ones with the highest reader ratings. Here is the GAL for this post:

Earth and Space: Photographs from the Archives of NASA Nirmala Nataraj (Author), NASA (Photographer), Bill Nye (Preface)

The 330-Week Money Challenge

You know that 52-week money challenge thing that goes around once in a while, particularly towards Christmas?  Well I use a similar approach to save up for bigger trips.  The 330 weeks I mention in the subject line is how long it will take me from my start just about a year ago to save up the money for a planned trip to China in 2021.  I started studying Mandarin in 2007 in hopes of one day taking a trip to China, but it never worked out, so I have tentatively scheduled this long-awaited trip for 2021. At the moment, I have two other trips planned that I am using a similar approach, one to Germany and one to New Zealand, between now and 2021.

And before you ask, I’m not ever going to put $330 aside in one week. The plan goes something like this.  For a trip to China, I figured that $10,000 should do it (and checking Expedia, it looks like I can do it much more cheaply than that, but you never know what will happen to prices over the next five years).  So I counted the weeks between the date I started and the end of December 2020 (since I want to book the trip around six months in advance, plus I made this calculation using San Antonio and Shanghai as my endpoints and I hope to do a bit more traveling around the country than that, which will raise the cost) and got 330 weeks.  Dividing $10,000 into 330 weeks gives me an average amount of just a little more than $30 per week, so my first week will be $1 and my final week should be $60 (though it won’t, as we will see).  Since 330 divided by 60 is 5.5, I will round down and start at $1 the first five weeks and go up $1 every five weeks after that.  This will mean that my final five weeks will be $66, rather than $60.  At the end of those 330 weeks, I will have a little more than $11,000.

And you know what?  If my trip to China doesn’t end up costing me $11,000, then I can use that money on another trip.  I want to return to Naples (I loved Naples — more on that later) to see the blood miracle of San Gennaro in the early 2020s as well, so that seems like it might be a good use of any extra money.

Additionally, in practice, it doesn’t always work out so perfectly, since sometimes money is a little tighter than others and I end up having to carry that week’s amount forward another week or two to tide me over.  But, in theory, I should have plenty of money to do whatever travel I want to do in China saved up in plenty of time for the trip I hope to make.

I am also doing a reverse version of this to save up for smaller trips.  I chose a dollar amount as a maximum and I am counting down in reverse from that amount, decreasing every two or three weeks, depending on my financial state that week.  This money added up quickly and if I suffer some kind of financial setback, the money is already there for me to use on a smaller weekend trip sometime in the future. The thought occurs that I should go to Mexico at some point, speaking of travel to countries where I speak the language. Mexico is, after all, right there. I went to Nuevo Laredo once in the 1990s, but have never been farther into the country than that.

1/28/2019 On or around November 28, 2018, I realized that I need to start monetizing this blog. To that end, I’m starting to put what I call Gratuitous Amazon Links into my posts. As of January 12, 2019, I’m going back to add GALs to my older posts. If I can’t find anything exactly on-topic to the post, I’m choosing from among the highest-rated items on the same topic as the post. For example, for a post on a park, I’ll search Amazon for books on parks and choose one of the ones with the highest reader ratings. Here is the GAL for this post:

Rock Retirement: A Simple Guide to Help You Take Control and be More Optimistic About the Future (Kindle Edition) by Roger Whitney (Author), Joe Saul-Sehy (Foreword)

National Geographic October 2014

The Next Green Revolution, by Tim Folger, photographs by Craig Cutler

This installation of the “Future of Food” series focuses on technological improvements in food production, including genetic modification.  Folger starts out talking about the original green revolution.  Fears that millions of people in Asia would die of famine led to selective breeding of wheat and rice.  This allowed the volume of food to increase faster than the population, which meant that not only did they prevent the famine, but that the nutrition level of most of the people of Asia actually increased.

Now, we may be facing another potential famine and we, in Folger’s words, “need another green revolution.”  And one of the potential tools for this new green revolution is genetic modification.  Rather than using crossbreeding and taking your chances of developing another lenape potato (which had dangerously high levels of the poison solanin), scientists can identify the genes that contain the desirable traits and transfer them directly.   These transfers can be done across species, as well.  One famous example of this cross-species transfer is golden rice, which has a gene isolated from corn.  This gene allows the rice to produce beta carotene.  Beta carotene is the ingredient that the human body uses to produce Vitamin A.  Getting enough beta carotene will not only save vision, it will save lives.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of one to two million people die from Vitamin A deficiency every year.

The Next Green Revolution discusses genetic modification and the ways it could conceivably help the people of Africa and Asia in particular.  Among others, we see cassava that are being bred to be resistant to brown streak virus and rice that is being bred to be able to survive under water (for use in places that are prone to flooding).

As you have likely guessed by my lack of panic, I am not against genetic modification, particularly where plants are concerned. I am not a trained scientist or anything of that nature, but I speak a little of the language of science.  I am trained as a medical librarian and I work as a pharmacy technician.  I can see value in genetic modification.  Humans have been messing with our food forever.  Just look at teosinte, the ancestor of corn.  Over years and years, humans increased the size, sweetness, and nutition of the teosinte kernels until they became something entirely different. And a number of our food has been similarly changed.  Watermelons are far different from their original ancestors, as well.

Most of these were done through selective breeding, which involves a lot of wasted time and resources.  Let’s say that you are breeding for trait A.  Your parent plants are likely to be Aa, where “a” is an undesirable trait.  Half of your child plants, on average, will also be Aa.  One-quarter will be aa, which won’t help at all, since “a” is exactly what you don’t want.  Only one-quarter of the child plants will have the desired genes of AA.  With genetic modification, you can take the A from another cell, replace the a in the original seed with it, and the plant that results will be AA.  This means that plants with the desired trait can be tested for safety and put into use a lot faster than they would be with selective breeding.

When the Snows Fail, by Michelle Nijhuis, photographs by Peter Essick

In When the Snows Fail, Nijhuis discusses the drought in the southwest United States.  We meet the Diener family who run a small family farm.  In addition to the usual crops, almonds, broccoli, tomatoes, and so forth, the Dieners are experimenting with growing prickly pear cactus.  Not only is the fruit of the prickly pear cactus edible, but so are the pads, which are known as nopales in Spanish.

The Dieners live in the Central Valley of California, which is where most of the fruits and nuts sold for food in the United States is grown.  The Central Valley was chosen as a place to grow such high-water-use crops because of the richness of its soil and the moderateness of its temperatures.  There is only one problem.  The Central Valley has a dry climate.  This means that in order to grow all of the asparagus, carrots, grapes, and pistachios, water must be pumped in.  Some is groundwater pumped up from wells, but the rest must be brought in from reservoirs. These reservoirs are filled by melting snows from the mountains the surround the valley.

Thanks to climate change, the winters are becoming milder, which means less water in the mountains.  Less water in the mountains then, of course, translates to less water for the farmers.  This is requiring the farmers to rethink their water use and, in some cases, like Diener, the crops they grow, as well.

Medieval Mountain Hideaway, by Brook Larmer, photographs by Aaron Huey

Medieval Mountain Hideaway is about an area of the nation of Georgia known as Svaneti.  For a long time, the region of Upper Svaneti was isolated from the outside by the mountains that surround it.  However, from the invasion of the Russians in the 19th Century and into the 20th and 21st Centuries, much of the culture of Svaneti is slowly being lost.  Only the very oldest of the Svans, for example, speak Svan fluently.  The youth of Svaneti are engaged in something of a cultural revival, however, learning the old Svans songs and dances and learning to play the old Svan musical instruments.  However, it is likely the much of the language which is not preserved in these songs will be lost.

Prior to the Christianization of Svaneti in the 4th century, the Svans were sun worshipers and some of those traditions, largely dealing with fire, were imported into the Christian holiday observances of the Svan.

Svaneti is facing two new threats to its culture.  The first is emigration.  Jobs are scares in Svaneti, and there were dangers in the area including bandits on the roads (the bandits were vanquished by security forces in 2004).  Thousands of people have left for the lowlands.  The village of Adishi once had 60 families, but the population dwindled to the point where only four families remained.

On top of this, the goverment is attempting to turn Svaneti into a tourist destination.  The capital of Mesti, in particular, has many guest houses, and there are new ski resorts being built in the mountains around the area. The question that remains to be answered is whether tourism will save or destroy Svan culture.

Mister Big, by Tom Mueller, photographs by Mike Hettwer

Mister Big is the tale of the discovery of Spinosaurus, the largest theropod dinosaur yet discovered.  The earliest bones of Spinosaurus were found in Egypt in the early 20th century by Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach, a German paleontologist and aristocrat.  Among the bones of the partial skeleton that Strohmer found were vertebrae with tall spines sticking up from them, presumably supporting a sail of some sort.   Stromer gave this new discovery the name Spinosaurus aegypticus.

Stromer found it odd that so many top-level predators were found in the same area as Spinosaurus, but comparatively few herbivorous dinosaurs were found in that area.  The paleontologist who figured the answer to this question was Nizar Ibrahim.

In 2008, Ibrahim was shown some dinosaur bones, one of which was broken, in purplish sandstone.  He bought the bones, despite their condition.  In 2009, he saw a partial Spinosaurus in a museum in Milan, and it was clear that the bone he had bought was broken off of one of the bones of the dinosaur in Milan.

In 2013, he found the fossil hunter who sold him that first piece of Spinosaurus (and who also sold the bones in the Milan museum). Ibrahim has since found more bones that are likely from that individual and perhaps bones from others as well, in that location.

The current belief is that Spinosaurus spent at least part of its time in the water.  This would explain some peculiarities in the anatomy of the Spinosaurus, including the positioning of its back legs, which would be better for paddling than for walking.  Also, this would explain the relative lack of prey — the valley where the Spinosaurus was found was part of a network of rivers that was inhabited by large aquatic animals, including both fish and turtles.

The Nuclear Tourist, by George Johnson, photographs by Gerd Ludwig

Chernobyl, in Ukraine (it is a real challenge for me to get used to not typing the “the” that used to be in front of “Ukraine”), is the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.  For some unknown reason, on April 26, 1986 the people operating the reactor at Chernobyl decided to do a safety test with a skeleton staff. As it turned out, the plant was not safe. During the test, the reactor overheated and there were two explosions. Most upsetting of all, it took 36 hours for them to start to evacuate the nearby residents.  In June of 1986, work began on enclosing the building in a steel and concrete enclosure known in English as the “sarcophagus.”  The sarcophagus was completed in November 1986.  However, the sarcophagus was not sealed properly, and so beginning in 2006, construction on another enclosure, called the New Safe Confinement, was begun.   In 2011, Chernobyl was opened for business as a tourist attraction.

The Nuclear Tourist is an account of the one tour group’s trip into the Chernobyl area.  We see, in words and pictures, the damage done by the disaster, by time, and by tourist groups and the occasional vandal. I found particularly interesting how relaxed the tourists became about radiation.  At one point, the tour guide actually led the group into a high-radiation area and the tourists used their radiation meters to see how high it would go.

Speaking of radiation, the one thing that I found confusing about The Nuclear Tourist were Johnson’s references to radiation levels. I spent a bit of time checking his math and referring back to other parts of the article.  He also opens with the statistic that five sieverts of radiation will kill you, then says that the rescue workers were exposed to 16 sieverts.  My initial response was, “Wouldn’t that have killed them?”  I’m still working on that one.  From what I’ve seen in other sources, it looks like they did develop acute radiation sickness but didn’t die until several days later.

(originally posted June 2015)

Foreign Languages

I have an at-least-passing familiarity with four foreign languages. They are, in order that I started to learn them: Spanish, German, Mandarin, and Italian. Eventually I want to be proficient in at least Spanish and Mandarin and hope to pick up enough of several other languages, particularly Czech, since I am of Czech ancestry, to get along in the countries where those languages are spoken by the time I travel there.

I think my first impulse to learn a foreign language was probably French. We were visiting my cousin and her daughter (who was just a baby at the time, which means that I was probably around nine or ten) and we went to the pool of her apartment complex. A young woman there was speaking French and I was fascinated.

Then, my sophomore year of high school, I had an opening for an elective and I wanted to take German. My mom strong-armed me into taking Spanish instead. During the rest of my high school experience, I ended up taking three years of Spanish. My senior year I finally had an extra opening and got to take German I in addition to Spanish III. I took to German like the proverbial duck to water and after my mom had a chance to meet the young adults in the German III class (who would have been my classmates, had she allowed me to take German) my mom said that she should have let me take German after all. The kids in my Spanish III class were largely the ones whose parents were forcing them to take a foreign language, but the ones in the German III class were creative, and fun, and seemed more motivated. One went on to become a German professor on the college level.

I have to admit that Spanish has been useful. Being as close to Mexico as we are, we get Mexican nationals who don’t speak English in the store from time to time and I can help them myself, rather than having to track down a Spanish-speaker to help me. I am not good enough at Spanish yet to be approved to speak to pharmacy patients about their medications, but I hope to get that good someday. There won’t be any extra money in it, but it will look good on my resume if I can say that I am that proficient.

My son and I started to learn Italian because, frankly, it was the one language that I could find a lot of resources for. We started to learn Italian in the summer of 2013, and in the summer of 2014, we traveled to Italy. My son was mostly able to say things like “Grazie” and “Buongiorno,” but I got along pretty well. I was able to do basic transactions in Italian, even if we did eventually have to resort to English in a lot of cases.

The reason I am writing about this now is because of my Mandarin studies. I still have a lot to learn, but I’m coming along, and in two upcoming posts — one on a planned trip to China in 2021 and my post on the July 2014 issue of National Geographic, I mention my progress in learning Mandarin. In the National Geographic article, I am nearly certain that I was able to understand the name of one of the chambers, but never once does the writer give us any idea what the Chinese corresponds to in English. I am still wrestling with the name of one of the other chambers. Probably most people won’t even notice, but I know just enough Mandarin to know how much I don’t know yet, and so for me, this was really frustrating.

(originally posted, in a slightly different form, on July 2, 2015)

2015 Vacation Destinations: The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, New York City

I actually considered having Alex, the family airplane enthusiast, write a guest post for me for this one.  During June, as I was planning our vacation, I saw a reference in something unrelated to the vacation that one of the Concorde passenger planes was in New York City.  “How interesting,” I thought, “New York City is a big place, though.  It might not be anywhere near where we are going to be.”  When I looked it up, I discovered that the Concorde’s home is now The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum (which I will refer to from here on as “The Intrepid Museum”) and that not only do they have a Concorde, they offer special tours of it.  I knew then that Alex and I had to at least visit the museum, even if we weren’t able to do any of the special tours they offered.  As fate would have it, we were allowed to do one of the special tours.  But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The Intrepid Museum is housed in the Intrepid, a World War II-era aircraft carrier berthed at Pier 86 on the Hudson River.  Four decks of the Intrepid: the hangar deck, the gallery deck, the third deck and the flight deck, are open to the public.  The hangar deck of the Intrepid is pretty typical museum, with exhibits and artifacts around the themes of the museum.  The third deck has been restored and is designed to give you an idea of what life was like for the sailors who were stationed aboard the Intrepid. The flight deck is where we spent most of our time on board.   This is where most of the aircraft on display are located.  The fore part (you can tell that I’m hip with the nautical lingo here) of the deck holds aircraft that are out in the open.  The aft part holds a tent where they restore aircraft, and which is open so that the public can see what they are doing, and the space shuttle pavilion.

The space shuttle pavilion is a permanent structure that holds, you guessed it, a space shuttle.  The space shuttle that is housed at The Intrepid Museum is the very first space shuttle built, the Enterprise.  They used the Enterprise to do tests in the atmosphere, and they intended to add things like engines and bathroom facilities later so that it could go into space.  As fate would have it, when they were building the second shuttle, Columbia, they made changes to the design of the shuttles and NASA decided that it would be too expensive and time-consuming to make those changes to the Enterprise.  As a result, the Enterprise is the only space shuttle that has never gone into space.

There are two exhibits that are not on or in the Intrepid itself.  One is a submarine, the Growler, which dates to the Cold War era and is the only guided missile submarine on public display.  Unfortunately, the lines for the Growler were prohibitively long and so we ended up not being able to get in to see the submarine.

However, we did have the chance to spend quite a bit of time around (and, courtesy of the guided tours offered at The Intrepid Museum, inside) the Concorde.  The Concorde that The Intrepid Museum has in their collection is G-BOAD, a British Airways plane, which is something of a celebrity, as airplanes go.  I’ll try to avoid the infodump, but G-BOAD holds the record for fastest crossing of the Atlantic by a passenger jet going both directions.  G-BOAD (commonly known as Alpha Delta) was also the only Concorde to be painted with the markings of an airline other than either British Airways or Air France.  This airline was Singapore Airlines and G-BOAD had British Airways livery on the starboard (right) side and Singapore Airlines livery on the left (port) side in 1980.  By the time the plane was retired in 2004, both sides had been painted with the then-current British Airways livery.  Our guide was very informative and the tour was well worth the extra $20 per person to me, and I am not the airplane enthusiast in our family.

The Intrepid Museum is largely wheelchair-accessible.  I say “largely,” because neither the Growler nor G-BOAD are wheelchair-accessible.  The only places aboard the ship itself that are not wheelchair-accessible are the Fo’c’s’le and the Combat Information Center.

And if the Intrepid Museum has provided you with enough metal for one day and you are craving some green time, the next pier over, Pier 84, has been converted into a public park.  There is a dog park, a playground, kayaking lessons, PD O’Hurley’s restaurant, and water taxi access all available at Pier 84.

Piers 86 and 84 are on 12th Avenue between 46th and 43rd Streets.

Jimmy Carter Has Cancer

Jimmy Carter is my favorite person who has ever held the office of President of the United States.  Just about everything I have heard about him tells what an awesome person he is.  And he is also the only President I have ever met (and he was a sitting President at the time).  Not that he’d remember the meeting.  We were on another trip to Florida (1979, this time, so I haven’t covered the trip in my My Travel Memories topics yet) and we decided to take a side trip to Plains, Georgia, which is President Carter’s home town.  President Carter was in town at the time and we stood with a crowd of gawkers waiting for him to come out of church, of all things.

President Carter came out and my mom grabbed my hand and pushed it through the crowd, yelling for President Carter to shake my hand, which he did.

And now he has metastatic cancer.  All of our heroes have to die eventually, I guess.  90 years is a good run.  He raised his children to adulthood and saw most of his grandchildren grow up.  But I am still distressed by this news. I can only pray that President Carter and his physicians have the wisdom to make the best possible choices for his care.

National Geographic April 2015

Lincoln, by Adam Goodheart, photographs by Eugene Richards

April 15, 2015 was the sesquicentennial (they use “150th anniversary” in the article, but we have such a nice word for “150th anniversary” that I couldn’t resist) of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In recognition (and, of course, anticipation, since the trek had to be done ahead of time so as to make it to print in time for April) of the occasion, Goodheart traced the train that carried Lincoln’s body as it made the journey from Washington, DC to Springfield, Illinois.  There was no continuous rail line between the two, so the body ended up making a two-week journey up through Maryland, then into Pennsylvania, to New York (both the city and the state), then through Ohio and Indiana before arriving in Illinois.  The body the went from Northwest Indiana to Chicago and then down to Springfield.  Lincoln’s body had stayed in Washington, DC from the 15th through the 21st, so by the time the body arrived in Springfield, it was three weeks old and had deteriorated considerably.

We see, through Goodheart’s words, we see the body as it travels through the night along tracks lined with people and at its stops in Philadelphia, Buffalo, New York City, and then on to Springfield, where his remains ended up being moved 14 times during the years after Lincoln’s death.  Then, they proceeded to reconstruct the tomb — the current structure is from the 1930s.

Most of the tracks that carried Lincoln’s funeral train are long gone.  There are markers along the way showing where the train passed, and some of the tracks were removed recently enough that you can still see the gravel.  I grew up in Chicago, and it is very likely that those tracks still exist, as Chicago is still a major rail hub.  Additionally, the freight lines connecting the suburbs to downtown carry commuter trains today.  In fact, doing some digging, it looks like if you wanted to travel some of the Lincoln funeral train trail yourself, you could take the Metra Heritage Corridor line from Chicago to Joliet.  Metra’s website says that the Lemont and Lockport stations were there when the funeral train went through.

Hubble’s Greatest Hits, by Timothy Ferris

Ferris shares some of the history of the Hubble telescope.  Originally, the astronomers wanted the telescope to be farther out, but instead the telescope ended up being put close enough to be reached by space shuttle.  And it turned out to be fortunate that it was put so close in.  Problems plagued the early days of the telescope and if it had been unreachable, it would have been a waste of billions of dollars.  Since it was put in closer orbit, however, astronauts were able to bring replacement parts and fix the telescope, which has been sending amazing pictures of deep space for 25 years as of April 24, 2015.

The photos which accompany the article are actually colorized composites.  The one at #9, for example, of the Crab Nebula, is a composite of four images.  The most complex photograph, and the one that captured my attention best, is the image at #2, which is created from 32 images of the Carina Nebula.  It looks almost like one of the later works of JMW  Turner.

How Coal Fuels India’s Insurgency, by Anthony Loyd, photographs by Lynsey Addario

How Coal Fuels India’s Insurgency is about the Naxalites, a Maoist group that is causing problems for the government of India.  Loyd jumps right into the violent nature of the conflict by introducing us to a leader who goes by various names, including Prashant, Paramjeet, Gopalji.  This man of many names introduces himself to Loyd as “Manas.”  Manas had just been part of a confrontation that killed six policemen and injured eight more.

The Naxalites, who take their name from a village in West Bengal where the movement began.  However, now all Maoist rebels are known as Naxalites, regardless of their place of origin.

Most of the followers of the Naxalites are the poorest of India’s poor.  They are poor farmers, Dalits, and members of an aboriginal group known as the Adivasi.  There are a number of college students who have found common cause with the Naxalites, as well.  The Naxalites flourish in the undeveloped parts of eastern India, mostly in the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.  This region, as it happens, is also the center of India’s mineral wealth.  Beneath the lands where the Naxalites and their followers live, work, and fight are bauxite, dolomite, iron, limestone and, above all, coal.  An area where there used to be farmlands and wildlife is now given over to mines, much of which is done in open “strip” mines.  And effectively none of the wealth generated by these mines are being given to the people of the region.  This feeds the resentment and leads to further recruits for the Naxalites.

And so, until the government of India finds a way to reach out to and communicate with the residents of this poverty-stricken area, it is unlikely that the question of the Naxalites will ever be resolved.

The Bug That’s Eating the Woods, by Hillary Rosner, photographs by Peter Essick

The Bug That’s Eating the Woods is about the mountain pine beetle, a tiny bug that has killed pine trees in an area stretching from northern British Columbia down into California and as far east as South Dakota.  In some areas, such as the area around Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, nearly all of the trees in the region are killed.

Scientists are trying to figure out why the beetle has had such a devastating effect in recent years and at least part of this devastation is laid at the feet of climate change.  The beetle can travel farther during the warmer months because the farther northern reaches are no longer too cold for them.  Additionally, we have significantly cut down on forest fires, which has made it easier for the beetle to spread.  Some areas are experimenting with controlled burns to isolate the beetle, but it is too soon to see if that will do any good.  There is also some hope that climate change may help.  The beetle’s actual source of food comes from two fungi that it carries with them, one of which needs cold weather.  As cold weather ceases to be quite so cold, perhaps that fungus will become less effective and end the life cycle of the beetle.

I was a small child during the Dutch elm disease outbreak of 1950s through 1970s (specifically the 1970s end), and currently live in an area where oak wilt is always a concern.  As a result, I am aware of the maxim of urban forestry that no more than 10% of an area should be one particular species of tree.  I cannot help but think that something like that might not be a bad rule to follow when planning what to do with the areas that the beetle has hit, even though it is not technically urban.  Perhaps the forestry departments of the various governments could look into broadleaf trees that would fill a similar niche ecologically and economically.  Then they could  plant 50% pine trees and 25% each two chosen broadleaf species, or a 68%/16%/16% mix, perhaps.

Trajan’s Amazing Column, by Andrew Curry, photographs by Kenneth Garrett

Trajan’s Column is a monument in Rome which chronicles the defeat of the Dacians by the Romans during the rule of Trajan.  The column is also where Trajan’s ashes were laid to rest after Trajan’s death in 117 AD.  We are certain that at least that second statement is true. Trajan’s Amazing Column lists some of the arguments that historians are using against the idea that the details given on the column are as accurate as has generally been assumed.  Some of the details match up with what archaeologists are discovering, but much of it may be made up to conform with the idea of how the war should have gone.

When my son and I were in Rome in 2014, we discovered Trajan’s Column by accident.  I’m not sure how we managed to miss it standing there being all columnar and monumental, but we did.  It wasn’t until our last day in Rome that we found it.  We had been to the Trevi Fountain and stopped in a carryout pizza place.  Our purchase of pizza was purely in the interest of science, of course.  We had had pizza in Naples and needed another sample so that we could compare the two.

We now had two slices of pizza and no place to eat it.  So we walked back in the general direction of our hotel, figuring that if we didn’t see any place to sit down before we got to the hotel, we could eat the pizza in our room.  After walking for a while, we found some people sitting on the steps of a church.  This looked as good a spot as any to eat, so we sat, too.

That’s when we noticed the huge monument right there.  Once we finished our pizza we explored the area, taking lots of pictures of the monument and of the ruins of the forums (fora?) of Trajan and Augustus.  I took a panoramic photo of the column.  It wasn’t perfect, since I didn’t have my tripod, but it turned out pretty well.

In the article, Curry mentions tour guides explaining the column.  The signage, at least when we were there, is excellent, though, so one doesn’t need a tour guide.  There is a long sign running alongside the ruins of Trajan’s forum with pictures of the sections and an explanation of what is there (see image).  This sign must be new, since I cannot see it in Google Street View in June 2014, but it was there in July and Google Street View shows it in October, as well.

Sign at Trajan's Column
The interpretive sign at Trajan’s Column in July, 2014.

Argentine Identities, story and photographs by Marco Vernaschi

Vernaschi is an Italian native living in Argentina.  Vernaschi loves his adopted country and feels that the increasing reliance on soybeans as an agricultural industry is counterproductive.  As a result, he and his wife traveled across the country helping small family farmers find new sustainable agricultural projects.  He also took pictures of the residents of the areas that he traveled to.  He stayed away from the “poverty tourism” aspect of photography, where small rural farmers are shown as impoverished.  Instead, he wanted to focus on their culture, including two photographs in which the subjects are wearing ceremonial clothing and one which features a female gaucho. Tags: