Asgard

Even though I probably know better, I can’t help but view the Arctic romantically. So, while some of the hooting, “extreme sport” carrying-on in this clip from The Asgard Project is a bit annoying, the visuals look great:

The film has won several awards, so I really want to see it eventually.

The views of Asgard shown in the clip don’t really do justice to just how dramatic the mountain can appear. It looks like something you imagine could only be located in Mordor.

I set up my camp in a snow storm and didn’t have any real idea where Asgard was when I settled in. In the morning the skies had mostly cleared and this is the sight before me when I opened my tent. Awesome.

Swell

My friend Cory Ericson’s debut novel, “Swell” is finally (!) available today. The publisher has put together a pretty comprehensive web site with all the details here.

It has been receiving some great press, but this comment from the head buyer at City Lights Books in San Francisco captures the book as well as anything else I’ve read:

“This is a book about whales, in much the same way that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book about a travel guide. It riffs on the Norse sagas while creating more of its own, myths so convincing I even wikipediad them. It subverts the shared histories of the peoples of the American northeast and of northern Europe in exactly the same way a William Vollmann book wouldn’t. It is a masterpiece of the comic novel: sarcastic, self- deprecating, Candide-esque, with an absolute love of the English language, especially its poor American cousin. If you’ve ever hoped there would be just one more Douglas Adams novel….”

Cory is the guest blogger at Powell’s Books this week. You can get a feel for his style in this tale of his bare-assed abutter.

I’ve seen a few early drafts, but am looking forward to reading it again in its final form. Good luck Cory!

The Lunar Arctic Circle

Is there such a thing as a “lunar” Arctic Circle? The short answer is “yes”, though it is a much more dynamic one than the more familiar solar Arctic Circle. Unlike most moons, the orbit of our Moon is inclined relative to the Earth’s elliptic, the plane of its orbit around the Sun, as opposed to being relative the the Earth’s equator.¹ The lunar inclination is approximately, 5° 8′. So, given the tilt of the Earth’s axis, 23° 26′, this puts the lunar Arctic Circle at 90 – (23° 26′ + 5° 8′) or 61° 28′. Given the right circumstances the Moon would thus be visible due north at that latitude; any further south and it would dip below the horizon.

This however is only the maximum southern limit of the lunar Arctic Circle; it does not account for the procession of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth itself. The points where the moon crosses the elliptic process counterclockwise around the Earth every 18.6 years. (See the points labelled “ascending node” and “descending node” in the diagram above.) This means that the lunar Arctic Circle oscillates ±5° 8′ relative the solar Arctic Circle over that period. Once every period the point of maximum deflection of the Moon’s orbit above the elliptic is in line with the Earth’s axis; 9.3 years later it is out of phase and thus, 5° 8′ below the elliptic making the latitude at which it would be visible due north that much higher.

So, while the limit of the lunar Arctic Circle is 61° 28′, it only reaches that latitude once every 18.6 years.

¹ This is in fact one piece of evidence that the Moon was formed by an impact of Earth by a Mars-sized planetoid early in the formation of the Solar System. If the Earth and Moon were formed at the same time, the Moon’s orbit would most likely be along the axis of the Earth’s rotation, while a planetoid, orbiting on the elliptic with the Earth would have ejected material into the elliptical plane upon impact.

All Roads Lead to “Philosophy”

There was an idea floating around that continuously following the first link of any Wikipedia article will eventually lead to “Philosophy.” ¹ This sounded like a reasonable assertion, one that makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect: any description of something will typically use more general terms. Following that idea will eventually lead… somewhere.

It also sounded like an idea that would be easily examinable with basic client-side scripting tools, using the Wikipedia API and a good graphing package. I put something together here based on JQuery and the JavaScript InfoViz Toolkit. It makes use of the HTML5 <canvas> element, so support for Internet Explorer is provided by the Google excanvas package.

I still have a lot of tweaking to do but the results so far are pretty nice.

Multiple titles can be added using a comma-separated list. JSONP requests are made to Wikipedia asynchronously, so more terms can be added while it is accumulating results.

There are some circumstances where a loop is detected up the chain. This is relatively rare. If it finds that it moves to the next link in the chain. One good example is “Telecommunication”.

¹ See the tooltip by hovering over the cartoon at xkcd which is said to be the source of this observation. Though this posting on reddit.com appears to predate that by about a month.

Evolution of the Human Head

While the title of this book focuses on the evolution of the head, it is much more than that. The first half lays the groundwork with discussions of embryonic development, descriptions of the inter-related systems that make up the head and methods of comparative biology.

This initial survey has a lot of interesting material itself; for example, studies of the teeth and jaw have revealed that most orthodontic problems such as teeth crowding and over-bites, etc., appear to be due to the softer foods of the modern diet. Several hundred years ago impacted wisdom teeth were relatively rare. Softer foods result in less bone mass in the jaw and subsequently less room for the full set of adult teeth.

A description of the deeply interrelated workings of the inner ear and the visual system leads to a discussion of how balance and visual acuity is maintained during movement, especially running. The author, Daniel Lieberman is in fact a proponent of the relatively recent barefoot running phenomenon in large part due what the evolution of the head reveals about the body as a complete system.

It’s a dense book, which even the author says is not meant to be a best seller, but still rewarding.

Poor Little Rich Girl

I came across this now-forgotten story in the New York Times achieves recently. It has some personal interest mostly because of its brief intersection with my home town:

BANKER’S DAUGHTER FLEES IN OVERALLS

Fisherman Says She Cut Hair

BOSTON, Sept. 10.—Miss Louisa A. Fletcher, the 17-year-old daughter and heiress of Stoughton A. Fletcher, a banker, manufacturer and horse breeder of Indianapolis, has vanished from the Summer home recently occupied by her parents at East Gloucester. She is said to have been seen just before she disappeared clad in a pair of overalls and with her hair clipped short.

HEIRESS CLIPS HAIR, DONS MALE GARB AND FLEES

Gloucester. Sept. 11. - Clad in a pair of carpenter’s overalls and with her hair cut short like a man’s, 17-year-0ld Louisa Fletcher, daughter of Stoughton A. Fletcher, millionaire banker, manufacturer and horse breeder of Indianapolis, rowed away from Rocky Neck shore shortly after noon Thursday and no trace of her has been discovered despite constant searching since.

She wasn’t on the lam very long, discovered only two days later “working as a boy” at Upland Farms in Ipswich, Mass., where she had been hired on as a farm hand. When approached by the police she gave the name “Willie Sullivan” and at first resisted being taken into custody. A Pittsburgh paper pointed out “SHE WAS SMOKING CIGARETTES.” which perhaps added to the sensation of the story at the time.

(Upland Farms is now long gone, but was off Fellows Lane, though a trace of it is left in the name of Upland Road.)

She had rowed the dory she stole from Gloucester up the Essex River to Rowley where she spent the next two nights in a barn, eating apples for food. She made her way to Ipswich and tried to sign onto a fishing boat but was turned away. She was reported to have said, “I was tired of being a ‘poor little rich girl’ I have had too much discipline. I wanted to make my own way in the world.”

There is some hint that perhaps she was looking to earn enough money to head to New York City. The owner of the house they had rented in Gloucester was owned by Langdon Gillette who had worked on Broadway.

Louisa Fletcher and her family appeared in newspaper archives again several times over the years. Her life ended up being short and tragic:

In March, 1921, her mother (and her mother’s mother) both committed suicide.

By 1924, the family empire was in ruins and her father was forced to declare bankruptcy.

In 1925 she declared her engagement to a Count Ernst Gottfried von Schmettow of Prussia, but upon her arrival in Berlin was rejected by the Count’s father and returned home in some shame to New York. The whole incident is shrouded in mystery as it seems that the Count may have been leading her on or she misinterpreted his intentions from the outset. She may have been trying to use her marriage to European nobility as a vehicle for her own career.

In January, 1927 she was arrested in Los Angeles after an altercation with a “Lady Diana Bathurst”. This “Lady Diana” was apparently a fraud who was trying to use her supposed ties to nobility for her own fame. This puts Louisa Fletcher’s account of her engagement to the Prussian count in to a different light.

She died July 18, 1927 in Los Angeles, reportedly of meningitis, aged 24.

Her brother, Stoughton A. “Bruz” Fletcher III, who had accompanied her to LA and became a staple on the “Pansy Craze” scene, committed suicide in 1941.

Atlas of Remote Islands

This book is an interesting artifact - I hesitate to call it an “atlas” at all, though that is very much the form it takes. In reality it is more a manifestation of the author’s own love of geography, maps, history and the nature of isolation. And these subjects just so happen to be personal interests of mine…

The maps are visually attractive and all at the same scale, which provides a certain consistency. The accompanying text for each subject island though is more an attempt to convey a sense of “remoteness” through bits of historical narrative. It goes for mood rather than raw information, which is the romantisized, artistic concete behind this whole approach to an “atlas.”

Out of my own desire to group more information about these places - and because it’s so easy to do so - I put together a “Companion Guide to an ‘Atlas of Remote Islands’” using WIkipedia’s “create a book” service. I was pretty surprised at how well it actually works. There is very little that can be done to configure the book other than to rename and group sections, but the default layout is nice.