The Bear Minimum

Especially on the moon!

I find this a fascinating discovery, that there is actually water up there on that satellite of satellites. We’ve thought it a dry and baron rock, if a pretty one, for the last four decades, so it’s a rather large discovery that it’s not so dry. Still baron, though.

Scientists are now thinking that, when a Mars sized item impacted with the earth, roughly 4.5 billion years ago, there was a great deal of molten debris orbiting around the Earth, which eventually coalesced into the moon as we know it. At this point, most of the water contained in that molten debris was pushed out of the moon in fire fountains, and subsequently eroded on the surface, but there was still significant amounts of water molecules left in the rocks both internally, and superficially, of the moon.

Since obtaining new data, scientists revised their notion from earlier this year of just how much water was on the moon, and are now saying it could be as much as 100 times the amount they previously thought there. Scientists are saying there could be as much as two and a half times the volume of water contained in the Great Lakes of North America on and within the moon.

This, of course, isn’t water as we know it. These scientists are talking about the structural form of water, hydroxyl, which is one oxygen atom with one hydrogen atom, rather than our normal, liquid, water which is one oxygen atom with two hydrogen atoms. Very similar, and yet that one little atom makes all the difference between this solid form and the liquid form of water.

This could mean that things like permanent stations could be built and maintained on the moon, with the aid of a continuing water supply. Sure, that might not happen for a very long time, but now it’s far more of a possibility than before hand!

I’d like to share another post based on my fondness for the natural world.

Today, for instance, I found an article on the National Geographic website, which, by the way dear reader, I recommend highly to everyone. The website, that is. Anyway, on this particular day I noticed a small article on Fireflies. These intriguing little insects, which are actually winged beetles, are known for their delightful ability to glow.

There’s not all that many creatures in the natural world which glow, so it’s a pretty special little group of insects (well, around 2,000 species, really) that we’re looking at here, dear reader. Basically, fireflies have a special organ, located under their abdomens, which they take oxygen into, and combine it in special cells with a chemical in there called luciferin, and the combination of which forms light with almost no radiant heat.

These little critters also manage to turn the light on and off, and each subspecies has their own type of blinking pattern, and large groups of fireflies have on occasion been known to blink in unison.

Scientists don’t yet know how or why fireflies blink, or how they can blink in unison, and that, to my mind dear reader, adds to their beauty. That mystery, so quiet and simple, in such an unassuming little bug. A bug that only tends to live for about two months, yet one that produces such displays as to enchant many world wide.

I do appreciate that about the animal kingdom, that there lives are often quite brief, and yet there’s often such stunning displays that coincide with those short lies. Take the butterfly for instance. A creature which has a life span of about 48 hours, and yet is the source of great admiration world wide!

I think I’m going to go and sit and watch my local wild life this evening, dear reader, and I hope you do too! Perhaps I’ll leave some food out for the local foxes and badgers, as well.

A house that we’d let out, of course.

I ask because it is something my wife and I are considering for our future. We both have good jobs, earning rather well, and we’ve often thought about semi-retirement earlier than is typically the norm. Something else we’ve thought about is buying small houses to let, as a means of perpetuating income without having to do much.

When my wife and I first moved in together, some twelve years ago now, we moved into a very snug little unit. It was one of six little snug units, and one of a handful of unit blocks our landlord owned throughout the town. You see, the man owned a business, and during his life he’d bought up unit after unit in order to have a very, very substantial income after retirement.

Now that my wife and I are in a position to think about such things, it’s an interesting idea. We’re in a position where mortgage lending issues wouldn’t exist, as we’d be able to buy a small house or unit outright with money we’d put away, so no remortgages from Nationwide or some such, either. There’s also still a fair bit of people doing the “selling your property or home quickly for cash”, thing, which is dreadful, but if one knows someone going down that path they can offer to take the house off their hands for more than those horrid companies would have given them which works out better for all involved, in my opinion.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I didn’t peruse a mortgage forum or two, as they’re invaluable for getting first-hand perspectives from people who’ve done just what we’re considering doing. I suppose I’m leery of being stuck with bad tenants who’ll damage the house, and that it will become a source of irritation, expense, and drama when it’s supposed to be a nice, neat little nest egg.

It’s a sad time for Poland, there’s no doubting that, but it also must be such a terrible shock for them too.

I personally feel that each and every person is special. That we all have an intangible effect on those who’re in our lives, or affected by our lives, and often we’re not aware of how great that effect is. When a public figure dies, there’s a large ripple that brushes across many, many people. If you imagine your country just lost their President as well as his wife, and chiefs of the army and navy… It would be a huge shock to the Polish people.

It’s also so sad to me that they were all on their way over to Russia for a memorial service dedicated to a Russian perpetrated war atrocity in which 20,000 Polish POWs were killed. Call me paranoid, but one does have to wonder about all this… The world knows that Putin is an untrustworthy and unscrupulous man who is not above having any opponents killed. This is fact. So I’m betting that Polish officials are going to be in the thick of the investigation as much as possible.

Mr Kaczynski, who was a contentious figure in Poland, was brought back to Warsaw yesterday, and now rests in the Presidential Palace. When his coffin arrived at the Palace the gathered crowd softly began to sing the Polish national anthem. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that to me is heart achingly sad. I know that Kaczynski wasn’t a saint, that he had is own set of issues, but he was still respected and obviously trying to better his nation.

We’ve seen throughout history the effect of having a leader taken early in life. It scares the nation to an extent, and I think this will be no different. I sincerely send my condolences to the Polish people and the families of those who lost their lives in the crash.

In the Cradle of Life, to be specific.

Let me set the scene for you. A palaeoanthropologist and his son have set out on the very first day of their trip to the South African region known as The Cradle of Life: A place known for being a repository for many, many ancient human fossils. A few minutes into an area that they’d designated as a likely ‘hot-spot’ using the Virtual Globe software in Google Earth, the son turns over a rock to see what he thinks might be a length of white antelope bone. He calls over his father, and within a few minutes the father is swearing. The son asks “What is it? What did I do?” The father replies, “Nothing! Nothing, you found a Hominid!”

The boy had found the clavicle of the newly named Australopithecus sediba, a formerly unknown ancestor in humanity’s family tree. Before the finding of A. sediba there was almost no known fossil examples from around 1.8 to 2 million years ago in our evolutionary history, which is why these two skeletons, of a mature female and a juvenile male, are so important.

What’s also very interesting about this case is that the scientists who discovered the fossils have grouped them in with the Australopithecus rather than the Homo group of ancestors. What this means is that they think these Hominids are further away from us in terms of evolution, yet there are Homo species in other parts of Africa which have been dated as living longer ago than this new A. sediba.

Another fascinating aspect of the A. sediba is that the skeleton shows us a different version of evolution than scientists had previously speculated. The legs are long like ours, and the pelvis is highly developed, which means that A. sediba walked on their hind legs like us, however their arms are comparitively very long, like that of an orangutan, which means they would have been very able in trees, also. The brain cavity is small, too, like that of the Australopithecus, but it seems that that trait alone is what is holding it up from being considered closer kin, and therefore of the Homo species. In my personal opinion it won’t be too long before the Australopithecus sediba is re-named as the Homo sediba, but is just my take on the situation.

When police are in the ’sites’ it’s nice to know that justice still won’t waver.

It’s an interesting case, and one that I’m quite pleased to see play out like this. In 2008, Pc Jason Hanvey was investigating an assault which Amy Keigher, who was 19 years of age at the time, was the lead suspect. During an interrogation with Keigher, Hanvey became overly aggressive to the point of bullying her. He was shown in CCTV footage to have pushed her head onto the table and held it there, told her he would “rip her scull off”, held her hair, and cuffed her only to then hold her arms up over her head for over a minute, whilst telling her to say “pretty please” to have her arms let down.

This was all witnessed by Sgt Andrew Kennedy, who was the other officer charged, and whom the judge in the case, Judge Anthony Gee QC, was also quite scathing of. He called them bullies, and stated that Kennedy’s culpability was no less than that of Hanvey’s in spite of his not physically being the aggressor in this case. Both officers haven’t had spotless careers before this, with Hanvey being convicted of punching a suspect in the face during an interrogation 12 years ago, and Kennedy facing disciplinary hearings in both 1999 and 2000 for neglect of duty.

The lass who was assaulted by Hanvey was tried and convicted of the assault for which she was a suspect, which is partly why I’m mildly surprised to have seen this result. I believe the judge was entirely right when he sentenced the two to 18 months in jail each for their part in the incident, but nonetheless, it’s still nice to see that even when abuse of power is directed at criminals it’s taken as seriously as if it’s directed at the common person. Both officers have also lost their jobs, quite obviously, and their pensions.

The judge also commented that neither of the police officers had shown anything like remorse, and in fact they’d tried to justify their actions in what he saw as an arrogant fashion. You know they’ve irritated the judge somewhat to receive such words, which makes me wish I could have seen their faces whilst they stood in the witness box.

This all just makes me glad that those CCTV cameras are in interrogation rooms nowadays, and that certain standards are still expected of our police.

I find the NDE phenomena very interesting, so I though I would report on this recent small-scale study out of Slovenia.

I’ll give a brief run-down of what an Near-Death Experience (NDE) is before I go into the rest of my piece here today. An NDE occurs when a person has died for a short time and has returned by themselves or been resuscitated, and has had some sort of experience during this time. This can range from seeing some sort of tunnel with a bright light at the end, or a feeling of peace and happiness, or being free from one’s body and being able to move about the room and see things and hear things that they have no physical way of seeing or hearing, or going on an immense journey and meeting all sorts of figures from family to Angels, to Jesus and in some cases a God-like figure. Often these experiences will contain a ‘life-review’ where you look over the effects you’ve had on all the people you’ve come into contact with. No two NDEs are precisely the same, and some of them are amazing to read, and I heartily suggest everyone read a few of these: some are really quite profound.

Okay so now that you’ve an idea of what these are, I can talk about this study. To sum it up briefly, the University of Maribor in Slovenia has been researching into NDEs, and found that in the 52 cardiac-arrest patients they studied (a very small-scale study, indeed) the 11 who had reported having some form of an NDE had also had higher levels of carbon dioxide in their bodies than the other 41 patients.

On the one hand, that’s mildly interesting, and it would be great to understand the correlation. You can also see how those who don’t want to believe in NDEs for one reason or another may latch onto yet another ‘biological’ reason why people have these experiences.

On the other hand, the study is very limited, and it frustrates me somewhat that the content of the patient’s NDEs is left out entirely from the paper submitted by those doing the study. I find the content far more intriguing than the why of these phenomena, but I do see that it would still be beneficial to know why these events occur.

A study I’m more looking forward to seeing the results from is one conducted by Southampton University into whether or not cardiac arrest patients do have out-of-body experiences and to test this the researchers will be leaving images up on high shelves that can only be seen from above. When so many studies are looking to attribute the phenomena to a malfunctioning, dying brain, it’s nice when a study takes it a little further.

As far as re-enactments go, this one here, brought to me by a friend in Australia, is rather crass, in my opinion.

On Saturday afternoon in the small beach-side city of Geelong, Victoria, Australia, a group from a church decided to have a re-enactment. The paster of this church, Heaven on Earth, decided that they needed to get out and ’spread the word of God’ as the Bible told them to do, and they thought the best way to do this was to show people what Easter was all about.

So they dressed a fellow in a loin cloth, and two ladies in black as mourners, and had the fellow doused in fake blood and stand up on a crucifix, whilst he was mourned by the two women. They also played instrumental music through an amplifier. The paster, Sarah Kenneally, defended their decision and called the ‘demonstration’ a ’silent display’ and that they weren’t trying to ‘preach to people’.

First off, that’s just a lie. There was music coming through the amplifier, and the person acting as Jesus was moaning audibly and crying out ‘Why, why?’ which, of course, terrified children and many of them were crying leading parents to request police to put a stop to the display, which they did. Quite unceremoniously, too, from what I hear. Secondly, how is could this pastor thing she’s not preaching? You don’t have to be speaking to be preaching, and this was sending a very clear message.

I think it’s the carelessness that aggravates me about this. The group chose a busy shopping district on the day before Easter to put on this performance, knowing that many children would be in the area. I think that’s extremely inconsiderate of those children and of the parents who’ll now have to explain to their child that no, the man wasn’t really in pain, and he’s alright, and why these people would want to do this.

Apparently the pastor is looking to do this again next year, but probably without the fake blood. Well that’s something, at least.

Well, I didn’t really, but that particular line from that particular song seemed apt considering my topic today.

Yes, it has happened. The earth has moved a 8 centimetres off it’s previous axis due to massive earthquake in Chile last week. It’s a very strange thing to contemplate, but those in the know over at NASA have calculated and said that yes indeed, that massive quake has altered how the earth sits on it’s axis ever so slightly, which has shortened the day by a tiny 1.26 microseconds.

There are some more obvious affects to the earth after this devastating quake, including the island of Santa Maria, just off the Chilean cost, having risen approximately 2 meters out of the ocean! I do find all of this fascinating on an intellectual level, however I’m also very, very aware of how those in Chile will be feeling right now. It feels like only a short while ago the world was rallying to aid Haiti, and now Chile is facing similarly grim times ahead. I do hope people are still in a giving mood, as both of these nations will not be able to recover quickly - or at all - without the aid of the rest of the world.

It does seem to me that the world is facing more and more extreme weather and geological events in these modern times. Oh I’ve no doubt that events with tremendous and terrible repercussions occurred in the past - the eruptions which buried Pompei and the palace at Knossos come to mind - but we seem to be getting these devastating seismic events more frequently in the past decade or so.

Perhaps, dear reader, I’m just getting old, and ruminating on such tragedies a little more. I do love this big blue world of ours, and hope she continues to safely ensconce all her children for yet a few more millennia.

Today I am going to write of Mr Michael Jackson, and the media frenzy that has occurred since his passing. It is sad to me, that there has been such a staunch out-poring of love and respect for Michael, now that he isn’t here to witness it. One hopes that those who believe he is nonetheless able to see what effect his passing has had on the world, are right.

There have been two autopsies so far, but still Joe Jackson is unsatisfied and has requested a third. With no evidence to substantiate his claim, he has nonetheless been going from one media group to another, claiming that Michael was deliberately poisoned. My personal interpretation of Joe’s behaviour is that he is just trying to remain in the spot-light for as long as he can, shamelessly promoting his new record label. Multiple times in the past week, when Joe was asked about his son, he has not said much on Michael, no, instead he has turned the talk to his ‘great news’, which is of course that he has a new record label. I think, dear readers, that this man is most assuredly a schmuck!

Along with that particular issue, there has also been a great deal of media coverage on Jackson’s will, as he has made his mother executor of his estate and the legal guardian of this three children. Joe Jackson, thankfully, has been entirely omitted from the will. As has Jackson’s ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, who has declared that she will be filing for custody of the two children she bore Jackson. Of course, there is also the ongoing saga that is the memorial service, and all the media rigmarole that has surrounded it. Thankfully all seemed to go off without too much trouble.

My personal favourite from the rumour mill has to be the ’sighting’ of Jackson’s ghost at the Neverland Ranch, on an interview with Larry King on CNN, along with the barrage of fake celebrity death reports that this event has, for one reason or another, sparked. As for the ghost, it seems pretty clear to me that it is a shadow of a person on a balcony on the floor above that caused that ‘apparition’ to be seen, and the rumours of celebrity deaths just seems odd.