Northern tip of Labrador. Location of WFL-26

At the outset of World War II, Germany could no longer receive important weather information from the Arctic from international weather services, and so began a program of installing manned and automatic stations across the region. These were important for planning air missions over the Soviet Union and northern Europe.

U-537 anchored in Martin Bay, Hutton Peninsula, Northern Labrador

In order to disguise the purpose of the station should it ever have been come across, the crew scattered packs of American cigarettes and labeled the equipment for the (non-existent) "Canadian Weather Service." They apparently needn't have worried as the station was completely forgotten about. Its existence was not rediscovered until a historian for Siemens Corporation, who had built the equipment, found it in the company archives. An expedition to the site was then undertaken in 1981.

Location of WFL-26

For a full description of the mission to install this station, see "U-Boats Against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters", by Michael L. Hadley, pp. 163-167.

Nun at Phallus Tree. BNF fr. 25526, 106r

This single image is part of a series on pages 106r and 106v showing a nun and a friar engaged in erotic play. These same figures appear again on pages 111r and 111v.

Interestingly in her book, “Roman de la Rose and its Medieval Readers”, Dr. Sylvia Huot of Pembroke College, Cambridge points out that all of these images are part of a single bifolium; that is, a single double page that is folded in half and sewn into a quire. From the perspective of the illustrator working on the bifolium, all eight individual images form one extended series:

111v : 106r

106v : 111r

Because the bifolium if folded in half, the images on the top right (i.e., 111v, Copulation; Mule with phalluses) becomes the final scene in the series:

• 106r: Nun leads monk, Monk scales tower
• 106v: Nun at phallus tree; Nun and monk embrace
• 111r: Monk kneels; Couple undresses
• 111v: Copulation; Mule with phalluses

This manuscript was produced by the professional husband and wife team of Richard and Jean de Montbaston working out of their shop on the Rue Neuve Notre Dame in Paris.

Highlight of 14th century Paris. Rue Nueve Notre Dame, center left

In their book, "Manuscripts and their makers: commercial book producers in medieval Paris, 1200-1500", Richard and Mary Rouse, show that the wife, Jean de Montbaston, was responsible for virtually all the illustrations in fr. 25526 and that interestingly, she was most likely illiterate(!). Book makers such as the Montbastons worked as speedily as possible and devoted little if any time for literary interpretations. Often in fact, their cursory view could result in illustrations that completely misrepresent the text.

Advertisement for Richard de Montbaston. BNF fr. 241

As specific and unambiguous as the tale appears to be, unfortunately, there is no known story which explicitly describes a friar and a nun as depicted in the bas-de-page images. The Rouse's remark that the best that could be said is that they reflect some “bawdy tale” that Jean had perhaps heard during the course of her work.

That actual layout of the story is even in question. Many of the illustrations in the book are temporally out of order. For example, in the interleaving stories of the Passions of Christ and St. Margaret, Montbaston seems to be aware that the left side of the bifolium will come after the right side when folded and so puts the left side image:

• Descent from the Cross : Crucifixion
• Burial : Resurrection

Here the illustrator understands that the Descent from the Cross occurs after the Crucifixion, and so puts that image to the right, thus when folded, Descent (53v) comes after Crucifixion (52r) . But then, oddly, she puts the Burial and Resurrection on the other side of that bifolium. This results in a confusing series of illustrations:

• 52r: Crucifixion
• 52v: Burial
• 53r: Resurrection
• 53v: Descent from the Cross

Passion of Christ bas-de-page images from 52r, 52v, 53r and 53v

All of the aspects of the Passion stories follow this same disjointed pattern.

Does the erotic nun and friar tale follow this same pattern? If so, the story would flow in a way that makes even less sense:

• 106r: Nun leads monk, Monk scales tower
• 111v: Copulation; Mule with phalluses
• 106v: Nun at phallus tree; Nun and monk embrace
• 111r: Monk kneels; Couple undresses

Given what is known about Jean de Montbaston's literacy and the speed with which she worked, the best I think can be said is that she managed to get the ordering "correct" this time. Still, what ultimately is the source of these strange images? Unfortunately, the answer is probably unknowable.

Images have phallus trees have appeared in other contexts, e.g., The Massa Marittima Mural, but any attempt to find meaning of them seems to result in series of circular references to the few examples that are known.

Massachusetts Population Distribution, 1810

The US Census of 1810 counted 421,040 inhabitants, with 79% of them dispersed in rural areas or in villages of under 2,500 people. Counties with the largest populations were Essex (71,888), Worcester (64,910), and Middlesex (52,789). The four western counties had a quarter of the population of the state (112,182), the greatest proportion that region ever achieved. The largest citIes were Boston—33,250 (4th in US), Salem—12,613 (7th in US), Newburyport—7,634 (12th in US), and Nantucket—6,807 (14th in US). In 1810, one in 15 Americans lived in Massachusetts.

Wilkie, Richard W. and Tager, Jack. "Historical Atlas of Massachusetts". University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

This is from page 118 of the manuscript. The Latin appears first followed by the translated OHG. Where Chaucer translated "susurrat" as "twitreþ", Notker used its cognate "zwizeron".

Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 825: Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae

The original and translated sentences are then,

Boethius: "Sylvas dulci voce susurrat."

Notker: "in uuálde uuíle er zuízerôn."

Chaucer: "Twitriþ desiryinge þe wood wiþ her swete voys."

"zwizeron", pronounced "tswitseron" shares the same West Germanic antecedent as "twitter". In fact, before the 2nd phase of the Germanic Consonant Shift (t→ts), it would have been pronounced "twiteron". Old English did not participate in the Shift and so kept the hard "t".

Chaucer undoubtedly did not coin the word "twitter" as it must have existed in Old English; it is pure happenstance that it was not attested in any other surviving document. The English "twitter" is in fact closer to the original West Germanic version of the word.

The usage in question is (in Middle English)

Boece; Book III, Metrum II

Or:

Yet nevertheless, if such a bird springs out of her tight cage, sees the agreeable shadows of the woods, she befouls with her feet her scattered food, and seeks mourning only the wood and twitters desiring the wood with her sweet voice.

Chaucer was translating Boethius's original Latin. I was interested to see what word he attempted to capture. The original sentence was:

De Consolatione Philosophiæ, Liber III, Metrum II, 21-25

The last line is "whispers to the woods with her sweet voice", so the word in question here is "susurrare", "to whisper or murmur"

Chaucer was also consulting Jean de Meun's 13th-century translation written in Old French to guide his own. Meun's translation was:

Other than "douce voiz", i.e., "sweet voice" there is nothing there alluding to the timbre of this voice. It seems to be an affectation that Meun ignores and Chaucer retains.

The next most recent attestation to "twitter" according to the OED is from John Trevisa's translations of Ranulf Higden's Prolicionycion (1387)

Or:

In town as it longes (lounges)
The osel (blackbird) twitters in merry songs
At night for dread
Truly no song does he grede (cry out)

The original Latin here reads:

Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, p. 236

So, "pulchris zinzitat"; or "chirps beautifully". So Trevisa was translating the rarer word "zinzitare".

It's interesting that "susarrare" and "zinizitare" both have a dual constant sound "s-s", "z-z" similar to "twitter", "t-t". In all cases they are onomatopoetic. Also, recent scholar ship has Chaucer writing 'Boece' in ~1380, not 1374 as the OED lists, and Trevisa started writing is translation in 1385 bring the dates of their usage closer together. It's impossible to say if Chaucer actually coined the word and Trevisa made use of it, or if it was in usage during that time.

The OED gives the etymology of "twitter" simply as: "Of imitative origin: compare Old High German zwizirôn , -erôn". There's no indication of any Latin derivation, but I can help but noticing the similarity between "zwizerôn" and "zinzitare". Ultimately it may be that Chaucer simply was groping for a more poetic word with avian connotations given the context and chose one with both a direct influence from the low countries and had a close analogue in Latin.

A diagram accompanying the announcement shows the orbit of both S0-102 and S0-2, the star with the previous shortest known period (as well as the orbit of various other stars buzzing around the black hole.)

To provide a sense of scale, I added a small sub-diagram showing the relative size of the orbits of Sedna and Pluto. Sedna has the largest known aphelion of any body orbiting the sun other than some long-period comets; still, this shows that the neighborhood of Sagittarius A* is comparable in scale to that of the Sun, though of course with far greater gravitational intensity.

Some basic trigonometry indicates that the .2 arc seconds shown on the diagram represents about 8.8 light days. Which is amazingly compact given the usual distances associated with stars. (Or course, that is over 140 billion miles, so it is only relatively compact.) Computing the relative sizes of Senda's and Pluto's orbits are equally straightforward, coming out to .1277 arc seconds and .0103 arc seconds respectively.

To get a sense of the enormity of the Milky Way's black hole, consider that Sedna orbits the Sun in about 11,700 years. Sagittarius A* pulls S0-102 through its orbit in only 11.5 years. S0-102 reaches over 1% the speed of light at perihelion.

There is an incident in David Foster Wallace's "Infinity Jest" (1991) that is a direct reference to Thomas Pychon's "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973). I believe though that this is actually part of a chain of references going back to Goethe.

In this scene from Infinite Jest, two characters on a mountain top are making shadows in the rising sun:

Marathe watched a column of shadow spread again out east over the desert’s floor as Steeply got a hand under himself and rose, a huge and well-fed figure tottering on heels. The two men sent together a strange Brokengespenst-shadow out toward the city Tuscon, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply’s wig becoming uncombed in his descent.

Infinite Jest, p. 89

The allusion is to this scene from Gravity's Rainbow ¹:

... Here are Slothrop and the apprentice witch Geli Tripping, standing on top of the Broken, the very plexus of German evil, twenty miles north by northwest of Mittelwerke, waiting for the sun to rise. ...

As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the peal cloudbank; two gigantic shaows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser. … “By golly,” Slothrop a little bit neros, “it’s the Specter.” You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts its is known as the Brockengespenst.

... They are enormous, dancing the floor of the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath her dress. She twines a leg around one of his. The spectra was red to indigo, tidal, immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it's as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 335

A few pages earlier there is this bit of conversation between Geli and Slothrop:

"Have you been up to the Brocken yet?"
"Just hit town, actually."
"I've been up there every Walpurgisnacht since I had my first period. I'll take you, if you like."

Gravity's Rainbow, p. 326

In the introduction to his book of short stories, "Slow Learner" (1984), Pynchon mentions the book, "The Berkshire Hills" (1939), which was produced as part of Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts. That book contains a mention of the Brockengespenst:

Thirty years ago, at the end of the summer season, a Berkshire man was bringing down the piano from the little recreation house atop the mountain. Suddenly he saw himself, his horse and wagon and the piano standing upright, outlined in monstrous design against the sky. Unable to decide whether he had quaffed too much from the "cup that cheers," he is said to have fled in haste from the mountainside to the minister, and taken the pledge at once.

The phenomenon of a gigantic shadow of an object reflected in a cloud is so well known as to have a German name, the Brockengespenst (Specter of the Brocken) from Brocken, the highest peak of the Hartz Mountains. As Greylockgespenst would be a bit unwieldy for Berkshire, here it is simply called the Specter. C. H. Towne tells more about it in his Autumn Loitering. ²

The Berkshire Hills, p. 42

It's clear that Pynchon initially found the reference to Brokengespenst from his fascination with Berkshire book, but note the occult aspects he introduces: Geli being a witch; satyric entwinings; Walpurgisnacht, etc. These elements are not part of the Berkshire Hills background story.

Pynchon is known for his wide-ranging references, so it's impossible to say exactly where he was introduced to the German mythology surrounding the mountain. I believe there is a connection to Nabokov however.

There is a oblique reference to The Brocken in Nabokov's "Pale Fire" (1961):

During the fortnight that I had my demons fill my goetic mirror to overflow with those pink and mauve cliffs and black junipers and winding roads and sage brush changing to grass and lush blue flowers, and death-pale aspens, and an endless sequence of green-shorted Kinbotes meeting an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives, I must have made some awful mistake in my incantations, for the mountain slope is dry and drear, and the Hurleys' tumble-down ranch, lifeless.

Pale Fire, p. 141

Here the protagonist, Kinbote, is in essence comparing Shade's wife - a rival for his affections - to a witch.

As a student at Cornell, Pynchon attended Nabokov's lectures while he was teaching Russian and European literature. There is speculation that his character Blodgett Waxwing from Gravity's Rainbow is a reference to the famous opening line of Pale Fire's poem ³. Could Nabokov's reference to The Broken have induced Pynchon to dig deeper into its inherent paganism?

Nabokov was obviously aware enough of The Broken to produce such an arcane neologism with its biting implication of witchcraft. It is understood that this is a direct reference to Goethe's "Faust". Even the use of the word "goetic" (~Goethe) in the same paragraph referenced above hints at this.

Goethe described the Brocken in his "Faust" (1808), as the center of revelry for witches on Walpurgisnacht.

Now to the Brocken the witches ride;
The stubble is gold and the corn is green;
There is the carnival crew to be seen,
And Squire Urianus will come to preside.
So over the valleys our company floats,
With witches a-farting on stinking old goats.

Note: I was tempted to try and find a link to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" (1924), and its references to Walpurgisnacht, through there was nothing obvious, it is easy to imagine that it influenced Pynchon or even Nabokov, despite his noted criticism of him.

¹ Wallace himself confirms this in an interview from 1997:

"That thing in Infinite Jest where two representatives (Steeply and Marathe) of two countries are on a cliff-side and are making enormous shadows and playing with it -- and there's even the use of the word Brockengespenst, which comes out of Slothrop and Geli Tripping (from Gravity's Rainbow) fucking on the Brockengespenst-- that's an outright allusion."

² I could find no reference to this book anywhere.

³ Pale Fire, Canto 1:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,

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.

Mt. Asgard, Baffin Island, 1994

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.

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!

Orbital Dynamics of the Moon (via Wikipedia)

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.

An anecdote from David Graeber's new book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"

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.

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.

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.

Miss Louisa Fletcher, 1925

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.

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.

This short book by the Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken is a darkly comic novel about the interior life of an elderly couple, Edwin and Erna Mortens, trapped together by their own neuroses and physical ailments. Edwin, who has become blind, spends his days confined to a rocking chair in his bathroom, chewing gum and screaming at his wife. His body has decayed to the point of total dependence on his wife, who has become hard of hearing.

Each chapter alternates between a narration from Edwin and Erna forming a continuous point/counter-point of their obsessions. The scene never leaves their small apartment and even there mostly stays in the gum-wrapper strewn confines of the single bathroom itself. It makes for an extremely claustrophobic (and scatological) atmosphere.

When not raging at his wife, Edwin turns his wrath on himself:

Sometimes I think my brain has a brain of its own, it can't just be me who's sending myself all of these messages, who's ordering my thoughts away on these pathetic missions, who's regaling me with these idiotic impressions, stranding me in all this confusion, really, it can't all be coming from me, can it?

What do these endless speculations have to do with me? Who is it I think I am? What influence do I have over what's said? I don't know the difference between a period and a comma, a question mark or exclamation point ... I can't see whether one or the other is being used ... Maybe that little extra brain of mine also has a brain of its own? Even smaller but all the more powerful for that, a tiny little devil brain, furrowed and hard like a dried pea ... and, in reality, it's the one behind everything ...

and of course, it too has a brain of its own, the smallest and evilest of all...

This bit of black poetry, captures the self-obsession of the neurotic brilliantly. The book clearly isn't for everyone...

Early twentieth century anthropologists built on the ideas of climatic determinism developed by Yale Professor Ellsworth Huntington. It remains a controversial topic having arisen during a time of eugenics and social Darwinism, but was still being concidered in the 1970s as evidenced by the graph below.

The leadership in world civilization is inseparably linked with climate. With advance in culture it has been transferred toward colder lands, and when extant culture has declined, leadership usually has retreated southward. [1]

From Lambert[1]. Click for full-sized image

The above graph is based on an earlier one by GilFillan (1923) who explicitly invoked Huntington (and which can be seen here.)

Scandinavia has in recent decades shown great cultural activity, as if preparing to lead the world next. Russia is rousing herself from a sleep of ages. In I914 the most virile architecture was that of the apartment houses of Berlin. In 2000 it will perhaps be found in Detroit and Copenhagen, in 2100 in Montreal, Christiania and Memel.

Farther we need not go. There is no necessity for civilization to be driven into Arctic snows; the law of coldward progress could be restated in such terms as would hold true for the past yet not require northward journeying indefinitely in the future. But that will require strange new houses and industries that cannot be discussed here. I see no reason to think that this 5ooo-year-old process will be altered within the 20th century.[2]

These ideas provided some, such as the controversial explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson with evidence for what he saw as a kind of northward Manifest Destiny. He attempted to supplant romanticized notions of a desolate Arctic, approachable only through heroic effort, with a resource-rich one which could flourish if approached with wisdom.

Click for full-sized image

I've always been interested in the extremes of scale, so I put together a similar graphic for the world's smallest sovereign state, Vatican City, a country of less than a square kilometer in area.

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

For years it was a given fact that humans had 24 chromosomes; e.g., as late as 1954, cytologist L. Sachs stated, "the diploid choromosome number of 48 in man can now be considered as an established fact."

But in 1956, Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan discovered that there were in fact only 23 chromosomes. They even went back to look at old photographs in books and counted 23 pairs even though the captions said there were 24.

From their paper: "For instance, we think that the excellent photomicrograph of Hsu published in Darlington's book (1953) is more in agreement with the chromosome number 46 than 48, and the same is true of many of the photomicrographs of human chromosomes previously published."

The "established fact" was making scientists blind to what was before their eyes. Perhaps part of the reason why this belief was held on to for so long is that all the other great apes have 24 chromosomes. Man being the only one with 23. That may have clouded the initial judgments, and once established, no one thought to question it.

Lake Forms on Top of West Iceland Glacier

A lake has formed in the top crater of the glacier Ok in west Iceland due to climate change, as expeditioners on behalf of the Natural History Museum of Kópavogur confirmed yesterday. The lake is a few hectares in size and 3-4.5 meters deep.

One proposal is to name the new lake Kringluvatn (“Circle Lake”) in the honor of Snorri Sturluson, who's epic Heimskringla is so-named from its opening words, "Kringla heimsins, sú er mannfólkit byggir, er mjök vágskorin": "The earth's circle, which the human race inhabits."

Russian Yacht Circumnavigates the North Pole

The Russian sailing yacht Peter I has wrapped up its one-season trip around the North Pole in what became the world’s first such voyage without an icebreaker.

First high-tonnage tanker through Northeast Passage

The 100,000 ton tanker “Baltica” left Murmansk on Saturday loaded with gas condensate for China.

The Northern Sea route is open for less than two months in the late summer when the ice is at its minimum. The period of possible sailing along Siberia’s northern coast is however increasing due to the rapid ongoing climate changes.

Norilsk-Nickel shipment arrived in Shanghai

The ice-classed vessel “Monchegorsk” is the first cargo vessel to sail the entire Northern Sea Route without icebreaker assistance.