Our number-two daughter starts radiation therapy this week.
I gather that she’ll be going in Monday through Friday, but if I knew how long it will be going on, I’ve lost that bit of information.
Quite aside from the worry I’m probably feeling about the cancer we all hope has already been removed — I don’t know how she and that household will manage the logistics.
They live in rural North Dakota. She’ll be going to a medical facility that’s about an hour down the road. That’s about two hours of each weekday, right there.
Add whatever time it takes to sign in, get the radiation treatment(s) done, and sign out: my guess is that there’ll be about three hours out of each weekday, 15 hours each week, dedicated to this medical process.
Make that 30 hours, if the treatments make driving an ill-advised activity.
She and our son-in-law are operating businesses, as well as raising our grandchild. I don’t know how they’ll get everything done. But I’m pretty sure they will.
As for what’s next in reference to the cancer: I’m hoping that it will be in remission. Or gone. Hoping and praying, and I’ll wind this up with more-or-less-related links:
One of the Kalambo River logs, showing areas of intentional modification. Lawrence Barham et al. (2023)
Wood generally doesn’t last long if left out in the open. That’s why finding interlocking logs near the Kalambo River is such a big deal. Well, part of the reason.
They’ve been submerged, it that’s the right word, in wet sediment. For something like a half-million years. Which makes them part of the oldest known wooden structure.
“The discovery of ancient wooden logs in the banks of a river in Zambia has changed archaeologists’ understanding of ancient human life.
“Researchers found evidence the wood had been used to build a structure almost half a million years ago.
“The findings, published in the journal Nature, suggest stone-age people built what may have been shelters….”
Actually, what caught my attention was another BBC News article. It was about a sand dune called Lala Lallia in Morocco.
The sand dune write-up mentioned luminescence dating, and that brought me to Victoria Gill’s September 2023 article: which got me thinking about evolution, being human, and changing attitudes.
And luminescence dating.
Luminescence dating works just like carbon-14 dating, except for how it doesn’t.
Luminescence Dating and Carbon 14: a Nerdish Digression
Willard Libby, at the University of Chicago, worked the bugs out of Carbon 14 dating in the late 1940s. Don’t bother remembering those names, like I keep saying: there won’t be a test.
Carbon 14 dating works because when cosmic rays, tiny particles zipping along just under the speed of light, hit nitrogen atoms, we get protons and 14C — long story short, 14C is a radioactive isotope of carbon that can get metabolized by plants.
Animals eat plants or animals that have eaten plants, and all of the above stop metabolizing 14C when they stop living. Then the 14C stops getting refreshed in the formerly-living material.
Since 14C turns into 14N — that’s another topic, for another time — at a steady rate, scientists can tell when stuff like wood stopped living by measuring the 14C fraction.
After about 50,000 years, so much 14C has decayed that carbon-14 dating won’t work.
Complicated, isn’t it?
Luminescence dating works the same way, sort of. Except that scientists check the brightness of glowing minerals.
Here’s how it works. There’s a little radioactive stuff in soil and sediments, so buried minerals like feldspar and quartz keep getting energized. Until sunlight hits them. Then they release their energy as light, and that’s what scientists measure.
I’m oversimplifying the process something fearful, but that’s the basic idea.
Getting back to the Zambia site, researchers took 16 sand samples around the wood. They used optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) for the younger samples, and pIR IRSL (postinfrared infrared stimulated luminescence) for the older ones.1
I’ve no idea how they pronounce pIR IRSL. It’s a newer and more accurate sort of luminescence dating: which is saying something, since we didn’t have luminescence dating before the 1950s.
Finally Finding Kalambo Falls
Lawrence Barham et al.: Kalambo Falls archaeological site and excavated areas. (September 2023)
I spent more time than I probably should have, trying to work out exactly where the Kalambo Falls archaeological site is.
It’s on the UNESCO World Heritage Convention ‘tentative’ list, and they give latitude and longitude for the place. Problem is, when I put those coordinates into Google Maps, I got a spot that’s just over the border, in Tanzania.
That led me down several rabbit holes, until I got smart and looked for an accessible copy of the research paper.
The Kalambo Falls archaeological site is just upstream of Kalambo Falls, a spectacular waterfall, and just south of a town called Kalambo Falls. The town is in Tanzania.
The archaeological site is, by a few hundred yards, in Zambia.
The good news is that the Zambia-Tanzania border isn’t a war zone at the moment. In my considered opinion, folks in Africa would have tough rows to hoe, even if Leopold II of Belgium hadn’t turned the Congo/Zaire/Kongo/whatever basin into — enough of that.2
If there’s time, I’ll get back to non-archaeological issues involved here.
Cavemen, Labels, and Me
“…overlapping logs exposed in the excavation”. (BBC News)
“…This discovery challenges the prevailing view that Stone Age humans were nomadic. At Kalambo Falls these humans not only had a perennial source of water, but the forest around them provided enough food to enable them to settle and make structures.
Professor Larry Barham, from the University of Liverpool’s Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, who leads the ‘Deep Roots of Humanity’ research project said:
‘This find has changed how I think about our early ancestors. Forget the label “Stone Age,” look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood. They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they’d never seen before, something that had never previously existed.
‘They transformed their surroundings to make life easier, even if it was only by making a platform to sit on by the river to do their daily chores. These folks were more like us than we thought.’…”
[emphasis mine]
There’s quite a bit going on here.
First of all, there’s researchers calling whoever built the Kalambo Falls structure(s) “humans”.
Since scientists figure that anatomically modern humans (AMH) or early modern humans (EMH) — apparently the terms are changing — weren’t around until somewhere between 200,000 and maybe 500,000 years back —
Whoosh. I’d better back up a bit.
Based on what we know today, the odds are that either the Kalambo Falls builders weren’t “human” by the old ‘cavemen aren’t human’ standards, or that AMH/EMH are a lot older than we thought.3
I’ll admit to a bias here. Seeing folks like Neanderthals and the like as “human” is easy for me, since I only look “Anglo-Teutonic” from the eyebrows up.
I’m the product of miscegenation. Or, as one of my ancestors said of my father’s father, “he doesn’t have family, he’s Irish”. I really don’t miss the ‘good old days’.
Lincoln Logs Long Before Lincoln
“Scientists created models to show how overlapping logs could have been used”. (BBC News)
Whoever the Kalambo Falls builders were, they obviously didn’t have access to a Pleistocene Menards. Or if they did, that era’s home improvement products and services weren’t up to contemporary American standards.
That said, their structural technology should look very familiar. To anyone who’s had a Lincoln Logs set, at least: or a lower-cost equivalent.
I remember having a building set called “Linkin’ Logs” as a child, and my father remarking that they were in our price range. My guess is that whoever owns the Lincoln Logs trademark has swallowed whatever outfit made Linkin’ Logs, and that’s yet another topic.
I gather that Lincoln Logs were invented by John Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright: and that the interlocking logs reflect the elder Wright’s interlocking log beam design for Japan’s Imperial Hotel.
The Imperial Hotel has a complicated history, and predates Frank Lloyd Wright’s input by decades.
Wright’s main building is noteworthy for not collapsing during the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake: damaged, yes; destroyed, no.
That, plus Abraham Lincoln’s place in American history and folklore, helped put Lincoln Logs on the map.
F. L. Wright’s design for the Imperial Hotel gets described as “innovative”. Maybe it is. My guess is that he took a cue or two from my country’s old-school log cabins.4
And maybe their Japanese equivalents.
I’m mildly surprised that Mr. Wright and Lincoln Logs haven’t been denounced and declared guilty of cultural appropriation. Maybe they have, and I missed it. I expose myself to only so much of the daily sound and fury. And that’s yet again another topic. Topics.
This Doesn’t Change Everything: But It’s a Big Deal
Photos of wood fragments found at the Kalambo Falls site. (Nature, via Wikipedia)
Based on results from luminescence dating, those scientists figure that the interlocking log structure at the Kalambo Falls site is 476,000 years old, give or take 23,000.
That doesn’t make it the oldest known bit of worked wood. There’s a fragment of polished plank, found at the Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, that’s around 780,000 years old.
What sets the Kalambo “Lincoln Logs” apart is that they’re fairly large: and unlike anything else we’ve found from that period.
Besides the interlocking logs, the researchers found what’s left of four wooden tools. They’re much more recent: dating back 390,000 to 324,000 years before we learned that power tools with cast metal housings can give users unwanted electoshock therapy.5
I didn’t find the Kalambo Falls research paper until Thursday afternoon, so there wasn’t time to do more than skim the thing.
Frustrating, but this week’s been like that.
I’d say the odds are very good that we haven’t heard the last about the Kalambo Falls site in particular, and humanity’s early technologies in general.
I’ll be sounding off on Leopold II of Belgium, Congo/Zaire/Kongo/whatever, Zambia and Tanzania, and what I see as really good news connected with the Kalambo Falls research.
But first — an excerpt from that research paper’s introduction, and the caption for those photos you saw up there.
“…These new data not only extend the age range of woodworking in Africa but expand our understanding of the technical cognition of early hominins, forcing re-examination of the use of trees in the history of technology….”
“Extended Data Fig. 4 | Shaping marks on the upper surfaces of object 1033 and on the underlying treetrunk (Fig. 3). Clockwise, from left upper left; chop marks on Part 2 (Extended Data Fig. 3); cluster of small convex hewing marks on Part 1, near Part 2 (Fig. 4); cutmark (upper arrow) and small facets (lower arrows) on Part 1 near Part 3 (Fig. 4); intercutting chop marks on the upper right edge of the Part 3 taper (Fig. 4); underlying log midsection, intersecting cutmarks transverse to the grain (bold arrow, upper left, indicating direction of grain). Marks on underlying treetrunk interpreted as result of scraping, perhaps from debarking.” (“Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago“, Lawrence Barham, Geoff Duller, I. Candy, C. Scott; Nature (September 2023) via ResearchGate)
‘Friends, Romans, Hominins…’
“…ancient … wood that was excavated near the Kalambo river in Zambia.” (NPR)
“…’I would say we need to consider these humans as having the ability to abstract forms from the environment and make them happen, and to pass [that knowledge] on through generations,’ says Barham. ‘And that’s opened my mind to these pre-sapiens hominins being capable of what we would think of as quite complex behavior.’
“Barham even argues that the complexity of these technologies might have necessitated some form of spoken language — again, far earlier than conventional wisdom holds.
“For Maggie Katongo, this finding refutes stereotypes about human ancestors.
“‘When we make reference to these hominins we always perceive them as primitive. But from the technology that we’ve been able to discover at the site, you see how sophisticated these hominins were.’
“An important find for Zambia
“Katongo says the Deep Roots Project, with its extensive incorporation of local research talent, is creating a new model for archaeology in Africa.
“‘There’s been a long history of [European] researchers just coming in and working in isolation, discovering stuff and then going out there and sort of writing stuff in a very complicated, scientific way that doesn’t trickle back to the very community where these sites are. This new approach, where there’s active involvement of the local collaborators, I’m hoping this sets a standard to be followed or imitated by other researchers that would want to work in Zambia.’…”
[emphasis mine]
I can’t emphasize enough — actually, I could; but I won’t — how important these two phrases are: “these humans” and “pre-sapiens hominins”.
I’m guessing that there are still folks who see the Irish, the English, and Ethiopians as different “species”. Just as I’m pretty sure that some of my eight billion or so neighbors are convinced that an American president and the pope are the Antichrist.
Whoever built the Kalambo Falls structure may not have qualified as Homo sapiens sapiens: anatomically modern or early modern humans. And if they did, humanity’s current model has been around for longer than most scientists thought.
While I’m thinking of it: we’re in the Hominidae, Homininae, and Hominini groups.6 Sorting out who’s using which definitions for each is more than I have time for this week. Basically, they’re labels for various tailless primates: like chimps, gorillas, gibbons, and us.
That doesn’t mean I think we’re merely animals, or that chimps should have voting rights. And getting upset because we’re learning more about “the dust of the ground” God makes us from? To me, that doesn’t make sense.
And I’m drifting off-topic. Or maybe not so much.
Good News, Bad News, and (Slowly) Changing Attitudes
Good news: there’s an enormous wealth of resources — like timber, diamonds, and petroleum — in the Congo Basin.
Bad news: same thing.
Leopold II of Belgium was, I gather, mainly after rubber when he said that what he called the Congo Free State was his personal property.
Even by standards of his day, late 19th and early 20th century, the behavior of Leopold II’s enforcers was open to criticism.
On the other hand, his atrocities helped convince folks that “crimes against humanity” was a meaningful phrase. And, arguably, more generally palatable than Chesterton’s “sin against humanity”.
“…Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity….” (“Orthodoxy“, G. K. Chesterton (1908))
Leopold II’s Congo Free State closed shop in 1908. He died the next year. Folks living in the Congo Basin — have not been having a good time since then.
République du Congo / Republic of the Congo was rebranded as Zaire for a few decades. Now it’s the Democratic Republic of Congo: and I gather that a fair number of its subjects escaped into Zambia.
Maybe, a few centuries from now, folks living in the Congo Basin won’t be trying to get out: and will be enjoying the comparative prosperity which their land’s resources could make possible. With prudent and rational management, and that’s still another topic.
Right now, I’m thankful that I live in a comparatively stable country. And that there’s reasonable hope that folks living around the Congo Basin are rebuilding their societies.
Tanzania has had the same constitution since 1977, Zambia’s has been in effect since 2016. And the Zambia-Tanzania border is, as I said, not a war zone.7 That’s hopeful.
Another hopeful sign, for me, is that attitudes can change.
Take, for example, the sovereign right of warlords to kill people they find distasteful. General acceptance of that cherished right has eroded since my youth.
“…When Lemkin asked about a way to punish the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, a law professor told him: ‘Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.’ As late as 1959, many world leaders still ‘believed states had a right to commit genocide against people within their borders’, according to political scientist Douglas Irvin-Erickson….” (Genocide, Wikipedia and see Raphael Lemkin, Early years, Wikipedia)
Can’t say that I’m disappointed.
We’re Learning
The Kalambo River.
I’ll end this week’s post on an upbeat note.
Between calling the Kalambo Falls builders “human”, and accepting scholars whose ancestors actually lived in lands that other scholars find interesting, I’d say that many of us are learning that ‘those people over there’ are — people.
That, I think, is a good idea.
I’ve talked about Earth’s long story, and ours, before:
Intuitive Machines CEO showing what may have happened when Odysseus landed. (February 23, 2024)
“Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.” (Gerald R. Massie, photographer, following the crash-landing of his B-17 (1944) (from “Stayin alive — 16 favorite aviation quotes“, Dan Littmann, Air Facts (August 25, 2016))
So far, this has been a good year for Lunar exploration.
Both JAXA’s SLIM and Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus made good landings. Not perfect: and that’s what I’ll be talking about this week.
Horace Kearney was okay, the airplane wasn’t. Exhibition flight at Dunn Meadow, Indiana. (1911)
“If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.” (Chuck Yeager, Top 25 Chuck Yeager Quotes, chuckyeager.org, The Unofficial Fan Site)
By Massie and Yeager’s criteria, the Odysseus landing last week was successful. If I take “walk away” as a metaphor. Literally walking away from the landing wasn’t an option, no matter how excellent the landing was.
Odysseus carried several science packages, and at least one camera; but no rovers. Intuitive Machines has been showing us images from Odysseus, and have been receiving data from the science payloads.
I’d say it was an outstanding landing, if I define “next day” as February 23, 2024: since Odysseus was still doing its job.
If the “next day” is when the sun rises again at the landing site??
Odysseus wasn’t designed to keep running after the Lunar night. So coming back online at sunrise would be above and beyond “outstanding”.
I’ll call that a mostly-successful landing. Even though something obviously went wrong. That picture, taken by Odysseus about 35 seconds after touchdown, is looking at two of the spacecraft’s landing legs.1
When a camera that’s looking ‘down’ shows us the horizon, something’s amiss.
The IM-1 Odysseus Mission: a “Spicy” Experience and Serendipity
View from Odysseus, during flyover of Schomberger crater. (February 22, 2024)
Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus called the IM-1 mission/landing “spicy” during a NASA news conference. I’ve embedded that video toward the end of this post.
Odysseus is a smart lander. With some help from the folks back on Earth, it decided when and where it should take itself out of orbit, heading for the surface.
On the whole, Odysseus did a pretty good job. Particularly considering that its laser altimeters had been left in ‘safe’ mode.
IM-1 ground control wouldn’t have noticed the situation until minutes before landing — which would likely have been too late — but an unexpectedly elliptical orbit (I think I got that right) clued them in to the situation.
What with one thing and another, folks at Intuitive Machines had to rewrite some of their lander’s programming: and worked out a process for updating the Odysseus computer without giving the system fits.2
Normally, I’d go back and check my sources for that; but I’ve been sharing the household’s flu experience. If I’m wrong about the laser altimeters, I’ll come back and insert a correction. That’s the plan, at any rate.
Odysseus: On Target and “Still Kicking”
Odysseus landing near the Lunar south pole. (February 22, 2024)
All things considered, the IM-1 mission’s landing went rather well.
Granted, it was moving downwards at around six miles an hour, and traveling across the Lunar surface at about two miles an hour —
When it should have been descending straight down at two miles an hour.
Excess speed and moving sideways may be why part of a landing leg broke, and why Odysseus tipped over.
But, and I think this point is important: on its side or not, Odysseus landed.
Intuitive Machines now has a pretty-much-intact vehicle about 1.5 kilometers, less than a mile, from the point they’d had Odysseus aim for — not an extremely expensive crater.
I gather that Odysseus sent back useful data, and that Lunar sunset this week may not be the end of the IM-1 mission.
“Odysseus continues to operate on the lunar surface. At approximately 11:00 am CST, flight controllers intend to downlink additional data, and command Odie into a configuration that he may phone home if and when he wakes up when the sun rises again.”
A key phrase there is “if and when” — the Intuitive Machines Nova-C isn’t designed to survive Lunar nights. It gets cold during those two weeks.3
First Successful Commercial Flight, Farthest South Landing
Lunar south polar region. Map by USGS, IM-1 Odysseus landing site marked by me: Brian H. Gill.
The IM-1 mission is a big deal for quite a few reasons.
But one of them is not that it’s “NASA’s First Landing On The Moon in 50 Years”, as a video headline said.
The “first U.S. moon landing” in upwards of a half-century, yes. “NASA’s first landing … in 50 years”, no.
Odysseus carried four payloads for NASA, and one for a NASA/University of Colorado Boulder project. But six payloads were for other clients.
The mission itself was run by Intuitive Machines.
NASA was heavily involved, since NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program was footing quite a bit of the bill. But again, this was not a NASA mission.
Besides being the first successful commercial flight to the Moon, Odysseus landed farther south than any other mission. So far.
Lander
Landing Site
Chandrayaan-3
69.373°S 32.319°E
Chang’e 3
44.1214°N 19.5116°W
Chang’e 4
45.444°S 177.599°E
Chang’e 5
43.0576°N 51.9161°W
Odysseus
80.13°S 1.44°E
SLIM
13.31°S 25.2510°E
Recent Successful Lunar Landings
SLIM is Japan’s (JAXA) Smart Lander for Investigating Moon. I’ll get back to that.
Folks at NASA had the folks at Intuitive Machines shift IM-1’s landing site from the Oceanus Procellarum to the Malapert craters —
“…to learn more about terrain and communications near the lunar South Pole, which is expected to be one of the best locations for a sustained human presence on the Moon….” “Intuitive Machines Lunar Landing Site Moves to South Pole“, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, NASA Blogs (May 25, 2023)
The area includes Malapert Mons, Malapert Mountain, which should be a good spot for communications towers and solar energy collectors.4
Malapert Mons doesn’t seem to be an official name. The mountain may also be called Malapert Massif, but that’s a rabbit hole I’ll save for another time.
The Lunar south polar region is, apparently, a big deal because the odds are good that we’ll find water there. Frozen water, near the surface, in low and permanently shaded spots.
And that’s another topic.
SLIM: Another Good Lunar Landing
JAXA’s SLIM Lander, image taken by the LEV-2 (SORA-Q) rover. (January 20, 2024)
The LEV-2 Lunar rover didn’t walk away from January’s landing near Shioli crater, mainly because it’s got wheels: not legs.
But I’ll call JAXA’s SLIM landing a good one: upside down or not, their vehicle came down in one piece and deployed its rovers: within a hundred meters of the intended spot.
That’s impressive precision, and the lander ‘woke up’ the next Lunar day. There’s more to say, but it’s late Friday as I’m writing this: so I’ll put links in a footnote.5
NASA News Conference: In Case You’re Interested
That’s it for me this week, apart from the usual links:
TRAPPIST-1 planets: orbital rhythm from SYSTEM Sounds.
A musician who’s also a scientist found music in TRAPPIST-1 data. Meanwhile, 3D models help folks ‘see’ galaxies: and I found a Lenten connection in all that.
TRAPPIST-1 location marked by red circle. ESO/IAU, Sky and Telescope, via Wikipedia,From NASA’s interactive 3D interactive visualization of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
I’d planned on geeking out over music, mathematics, and Kepler’s Musica Universalis.
But you’re in luck. Along with the rest of this household, I’ve been experiencing a week of ‘nothing serious’. I’ll share a music video, some images and text from SYSTEM Sounds (the folks who made that music video), and let you visit their website for more details.
Then I’ll talk about why scientists have been turning sights in to sounds. And occasionally into shapes.
TRAPPIST-1: A Planetary System With Resonance and Rhythm
The last time I checked, the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system’s inner two worlds lack significant atmospheres. Probably.1
So the odds of finding life on any of those seven planets, let alone folks like the Star Wars cantina musicians, is — very low. Again, probably.
But, thanks to musician-scientists here on Earth, we do have music from that not-so-distant star and its planets.
“Seeing the Universe Without Sight” Isobel Swafford, Sky & Telescope (March 2024)
“Creative minds are finding ways to explore and share the wonders of the cosmos without visual aids.
“Look up at the night sky and then close your eyes. The twinkling stars and distant worlds disappear.
“Now imagine you hear a repeating piano note. Rhythmic and regular, it tolls like a bell.
“A new note interrupts the drone, adding itself to the noise. Higher in pitch, it comes in at a slightly faster tempo. A few beats later more notes chime in, each higher in pitch and speed. Finally, the last note arrives a staccato pings, beeping like a metal detector over hidden treasure.
“The instruments making this cacophony are the Trappist-1 exoplanets, a system of seven alien planets orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years away from us….”
That Sky & Telescope article describes how Matt Russo, astrophysicist/musician and Andrew Santaguida, musician, looked at data from the TRAPPIST-1 system and realized that they were looking at music.
“…’We didn’t even know what sonification was at that time,’ says Santaguida. ‘Matt just saw that the resonances of the planets made music.’…” “Seeing the Universe Without Sight” Isobel Swafford, Sky and Telescope (March 2024)
I think it sounds cool. Your experience may vary.
“TRAPPIST Sounds : TRAPPIST-1 Planetary System Translated Directly Into Music” SYSTEM Sounds (2017) via YouTube
SYSTEM Sounds: “Sound waves with frequencies determined by scaling the planets’ orbital frequencies into the human hearing range. We set the outermost planet to a C note (130.81 Hz) and let physics do the rest….”SYSTEM Sounds: “The rhythmic subdivisions of the conjunctions of TRAPPIST-1 planets with each pair of neighbouring planets assigned to a different drum….”
Here’s some of what SYSTEM Sounds had to say about “TRAPPIST Sounds”.
“TRAPPIST-1“ SYSTEM Sounds “…To assign a pitch to each planet we scaled the orbital frequencies into the human hearing range so that TRAPPIST-1h completes its 18.76 day orbit 130.81 times each second (130.81 Hz). This is equivalent to speeding up time by about 212 million times and the resulting note is known as C3. Since the frequencies of the interior planets are related to this ‘fundamental’ frequency by simple whole number ratios, they create a consonant harmony of stacked musical intervals. In fact, the orbital frequencies are not exactly whole number ratios and this discrepancy causes some notes to sound slightly out of tune, giving TRAPPIST-1 its own distinctive signature….”
“…The gravitational tug between planets is greatest when they reach mutual conjunction, i.e., when a faster inner planet overtakes its outer neighbour. TRAPPIST Beat is created by assigning a different drum to conjunctions of each adjacent pair of planets. This rhythm is related to the pulses of TRAPPIST Melody but is more sparse since the proximity of the planets to one another, and thus their similar orbital speeds, means that each planet may complete several orbits (and transits) before passing one of its neighbours. Resisting the urge to use trap-style drums, we assigned each pair of planets to a different element of a standard drum kit, starting with a kick drum for every conjunction of planets g and h….”
As far as I know, “TRAPPIST Sounds…” is mainly fun listening.
But converting visual information into sound — or shapes — can help scientists study large data sets in new ways.
Scientific Sonification and the Cocktail Party Effect
Humans are very ‘visual’ creatures. But we have, and use, other senses.
For example, we pick up a broader frequency range than we see. That’s comparing apples and kumquats, but I’ll let it stand. The point is that, in some ways, our ears ‘see’ better than our eyes.
For one thing, our hearing is better than sight at spotting quick changes or patterns in time: rhythm, in other words.
We’re also better at focusing on something specific in a garble of background noise, than we are in picking out something specific with our eyes. Scientists call this knack for pulling a meaningful signal out of static the cocktail party effect.
I think science and scientists have become much less stuffy over the last few generations, and that’s another topic.
Back to sonification.
Formatting data as sound isn’t new. It goes back at least to 1908, when Geiger counters clicked faster when exposed to more radiation. Or 1928, when Geiger counters became practical tools.
Scientific sonification often isn’t as melodic as the SYSTEM Sounds piece and other ‘outreach’ examples. But it can be very useful.
Particularly for folks like Wanda Diaz-Merced, astronomer; and Garry Foran, astronomer and physicist. They both deal with distinctly sub-par vision.
Astronomer Chris Harrison has good-enough vision. But he learned that sonification makes parsing very large amounts of data easier. His ears don’t get tired as fast as his eyes.2
Tactile Perception: Making Mental Maps With 3D Models
Touch is another previously-overlooked sense for astronomical studies.
Until very recently, folks with insufficient vision — or whatever the proper term is — could read astronomical texts in braille: which is arguably better than nothing.
But a verbal description of a galaxy can only go so far.
Nicolas Bonne, astronomer, and his colleagues made 3D prints of astronomical objects — mainly as outreach media, letting folks get acquainted with astronomy through their fingers.
Maybe building mental maps through touch will help scientists ‘see’ objects and phenomena in new ways.
Then there’s Noreen Grice, who’s made books with 3D printed tactile (images?) of astronomical phenomena:3 including “Touch the Stars” and “Touch the Universe”.
A Grain and Galaxies: Comparing the Incomparable
Galaxy NGC 4848, with thousands more in the distance. (Hubble/ESA/NASA image)
I’m a Catholic and this season is Lent. Besides my daily and weekly routines, I should be getting ready for our celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection at Easter.
So how come I’m reading and writing about resonating planets and 3D ‘images’ of stars and galaxies?
For one thing, that’s part of my weekly routine. When I’m not writing about something else, that is.
For another, this magnificent universe reminds me of how unimaginably — well, unimaginable — God is.
Which very likely explains why folks have compared the more impressive parts of this creation to God, who creates and sustains them. And us, for that matter.
“Indeed, before you the whole universe is like a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth. “But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook sins for the sake of repentance.” (Wisdom 11:2–23)
“The heavens declare the glory of God; “the firmament proclaims the works of his hands.” (Psalms 19:2)
“Terrible and awesome are you, stronger than the ancient mountains.” (Psalms 76:5)
“Yours are the heavens, yours the earth; you founded the world and everything in it.” (Psalms 89:12)
“The one who is enthroned above the vault of the earth, its inhabitants like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a veil and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in,” (Isaiah 40:22)
Burnsville, Minnesota: East Burnsville Parkway. (May 2023) Google Street View, used w/o permission.
Sunday morning’s incident is more than three hours down the road, but still registered as ‘my part of the world’.
Among the very few ‘up’ sides is that, so far, local and regional news has paid more attention to the folks who were doing their jobs, and less on the person who caused their deaths.
This isn’t what I’ll be talking about this week, not even close. But the multiple killings feel like they happened ‘just down the road’. So I’m whipping this off Monday, making a few points before moving on to something more interesting.
News and Views
When a town that’s not one of my country’s major cities makes international headlines, it’s seldom good news. That said, this BBC News article focused on one of the folks most of us will miss.
“…State authorities said officers were called at about 01:50 local time (07:50 GMT) to the address in Burnsville, a city about 15 miles (24 km) south of central Minneapolis.
“They were responding to a ‘report of a domestic situation’ involving an armed man, said Supt Drew Evans from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
“The responders later learned seven children, aged two to 15, were also ‘barricaded’ in the property. They went on to spend ‘quite a bit of time negotiating with this individual’.
“The attacker then opened fire, killing the three victims and inflicting non-life-threatening injuries on a fourth policeman, who was named as Adam Medlicott….”
Another breath of fresh air was that a Burnsville representative talked about “three of our neighbors who dedicated their lives to service and keeping our community safe”.
She also said that “Burnsville is a place where we take care of each other, lean on our neighbors in times of need, and act together to make our city the best it can be.” — and urged support for “our law enforcement and first responders, who show their heroism and strength of spirit every day in their line of work”.
And she didn’t once denounce the technology used by the person responsible (in my opinion) for those deaths.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors statement, however, did the conventional virtue signaling in regards to “the scourge of gun violence”. And, to the credit of that national organization, stated that “America’s mayors are heartbroken” at the deaths.
Statement by U.S. Conference of Mayors on Burnsville Shooting U.S. Conference of Mayors President Reno (NV) Mayor Hillary Schieve on this morning’s shooting in Burnsville (MN) that took the lives of two police officers and a fire department medic (February 18, 2024)
Cultural Quirks and Obsessions, Remembering Malthusian Angst
My own views are — well, a bit counter-cultural.
I think technology matters.
For example, doing research and writing is a great deal easier now than it was in my youth. But I was writing and digging facts out of archives long before word processors and the Internet came along. I still use skills developed then.
And I’m not writing now because my desktop computer makes me.
My native culture’s obsessions could be worse.
I could be seeing headlines denouncing “computer crimes” in my news feed, along with impassioned pleas for tougher computer control laws.
And ‘decent citizens’ could be striving to control what we’re allowed to post and read. Well, striving harder: and getting more traction in their efforts.
I’m also moderately pleased that the seven children, presumably part of the household involved in the domestic incident, have not been cited as contributing factors.
Back in the day, when “The Population Bomb” and Malthusian angst were in fashion, I’d have seen at least mention of people who have ‘too many children’.
At Least Four Families are Hurting
I’m very sad that four families have been directly hurt: those of the two police officers, the firefighter/paramedic/medic; and those who, for whatever reason, were not eliminated by the person who killed the first three — and is also dead.
I’ve seen nothing about whatever reason or unreason set off Sunday morning’s slaughter. That’s arguably good news. Looks like law enforcement is doing a careful investigation. And local media, at least, aren’t indulging in — I’ll stop now.
As for why I think human life matters, and related topics; I’ve talked about that before:
Something new each Saturday.
Life, the universe and my circumstances permitting. I'm focusing on 'family stories' at the moment. ("A Change of Pace: Family Stories" (11/23/2024))
I was born in 1951. I'm a husband, father and grandfather. One of the kids graduated from college in December, 2008, and is helping her husband run businesses and raise my granddaughter; another is a cartoonist and artist; #3 daughter is a writer; my son is developing a digital game with #3 and #1 daughters. I'm also a writer and artist.
I live in Minnesota, in America's Central Time Zone. This blog is on UTC/Greenwich time.
Support this Blog:
More Perspectives From the Catholic Laity:
Blog - David Torkington
Spiritual theologian, author and speaker, specializing in prayer, Christian spirituality and mystical theology [the kind that makes sense-BHG]
