Just wanted to start this months blog with one of my really happy pictures. Yes, that's me worshipping the beauty of nature at Calf Creek Canyon back in 1995. One of the most beautiful spots I've ever been.
Staying on the theme of beauty for a bit isn't this a stunning picture.
And not to be out
done, how about this Attalus atlas moth?
Or this Boxer crab?
With a massive clutch of bright orange eggs spilling out
from under its shell, this boxer crab (Lybia tessellata) looks like an easy—and
calorie-rich—target, but don’t be fooled. She’s got two not-so-secret weapons.
In the grasp of each of the crab’s two main claws is a tiny live anemone,
equipped with stinging tentacles. And true to the crustacean’s other common
name—the pom-pom crab—she’s not shy about displaying them.
So much beauty on this planet and we haven't even discovered (in the biological sense) a tenth of it.
More people may have appreciated all this long before us. Here's some new research which is interesting to speculate on if nothing else.
We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous
societies are fine if you’re only interested in timescales of a few thousands
of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of
millions of years, things get more complicated.
A civilization which is familiar to us but constantly provides new sites and also underscores the sophistication of these cultures is The Maya of The Yucatan of Mexico.
Cerén
was discovered entirely by accident. As grain-storage silos were constructed in
1976, one of the clay houses buried underground was unearthed by a bulldozer.
Two years later, anthropologist Payton Sheets was on an archaeological survey
in the country when a local man mentioned the uncovered buildings. After
visiting the site and discovering a thatch roof still intact, Sheets, a
professor at the University of Colorado, figured the house couldn’t be more
than a century old since thatch is usually replaced every 20 years or so due to
the hot, humid weather in the region. However, radiocarbon dating showed that
it was 1,400 years old. This was an incredible find because it “really shows
the richness and sophistication of the lives of Maya
commoners”
he says, whereas before this discovery, information was mainly about the Maya
elite.
Just a few years ago the first (only ?) white whale was sighted in Australian waters. Now it appears some reproductive activity has been going on because it appears that there may be as many as three...or have we been missing them?
And another whale rescue....HOOHAH!!
A humpback whale entangled in rope and chain in Tonga's Ha'apai Islands was successfully freed on Friday, July 27. Passengers and crew from NAI'A had to scuba dive to cut away the weighted lines that were so dangerously wound around the whale's body that it could barely stay at the surface to breathe.
"Good on ya", Whale People! And the brave human souls that are rescuing them.
We
may now be a modern and scientific people, but standing beneath a whale
skeleton in a city museum, who isn’t still drawn into a reverie of wonder and
speculation? How whopping were those tail flukes, long since decomposed? How
might it feel to be alive on that scale—to experience the world in such
stupendous dimensions of sensation and action? What dark, red secrets lie in
the cubicles of a whale’s heart? Nick Pyenson, a paleobiologist and the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian, knows well the tug of whale
remains on the imagination. In his debut book, Spying on Whales: The Past,
Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures, Pyenson sets out to
place whales within a natural history of ancient environments, and to predict
how whale species will respond to burgeoning ecological pressures. The author’s
examination of the anatomy of present-day cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and
porpoises) takes us back to the evolutionary origins of these ocean-borne
mammals. What roamed then proves to be an astounding array of real chimera, as
evocative as any marine monster of myth or fiction.
Staying with the ocean for a bit we had our first "tormenta" (storm) right on time the 7th of Aug.
A perfect cloud formation to go with it....I call it "Thor".
And a little further out to sea, the wind and rain line coming.
This next pic is not mine nor of our tormenta but trippy, no?
I would like to introduce you to a very exceptional person (my mother would admonish me for not calling her a "lady").
When Frances Perkins was a little girl, she asked her
parents why nice people could be poor. Her father told her not to worry about
those things, and that poor people were poor because they were lazy and drank.
Eventually, she went to Mount Holyoke College, and majored in physics. In her
final semester, she took a class in American economic history and toured the
mills along the Connecticut River to see working conditions. She was horrified.
Eventually, instead of teaching until she married, she earned a masters degree
in sociology from Columbia University. In 1910, Perkins became Executive
Secretary of the New York City Consumers League. She campaigned for sanitary
regulations for bakeries, fire protection for factories, and legislation to
limit the working hours for women and children in factories to 54 hours per
week. She worked mainly in New York State’s capital, Albany. Here, she made
friends with politicians, and learned how to lobby.
On March 25th, 1911, Frances was having tea with friends when they heard fire engines. They ran to see what was happening, and witnessed one of the worst workplace disasters in US history. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was devastating, killing 146 people, mostly young women and girls. Frances watched as fire escapes collapsed and fireman ladders couldn’t reach the women trapped by the flames. She watched 47 workers leap to their deaths from the 8th and 9th floors.
Poignantly, just a year before these same women and girls had fought for and won the 54 hour work week and other benefits that Frances had championed. These women weren’t just tragic victims, they were heroes of the labor force. Frances at that moment resolved to make sure their deaths meant something.
A committee to study reforms in safety in factories was formed, and Perkins became the secretary. The group took on not only fire safety, but all other health issues they could think of. Perkins, by that time a respected expert witness, helped draft the most comprehensive set of laws regarding workplace health and safety in the country. Other states started copying New York’s new laws to protect workers.
Perkins continued to work in New York for decades, until she was asked by President Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to serve as Secretary of Labor. She told him only if he agreed with her goals: 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment and worker’s compensation, abolition of child labor, federal aid to the states for unemployment, Social Security, a revitalized federal employment service, and universal health insurance. He agreed. Similar to what she had worked for in New York, this became the New Deal, and changed the country and its workers forever.
So while you may not know her name, you certainly know her legacy.
Someone with a very different reputation and yet deserving of note specifically because of his bad rep is this fellow.
Genghis Khan refused to allow anything to be
written about him while he was alive. But after his death, a “Secret History of
the Mongols” was written in Mongolian. It was subsequently lost for centuries,
and only eventually rediscovered, decoded and translated by the 20th century,
explains Jack Weatherford, a leading historian of the Mongol empire. But by that
time, history had already made up its mind about the Khan, thanks to accounts
written by European, Persian and Chinese scholars, all of whom had been “not
only defeated but humiliated” by the Mongols, whom they considered “inferior
barbarians,” says Weatherford.
Until next month, "Que les vaya bien" amigos
