geology deathmarch!!
Yaquina Head, Oregon. A whole beach made of black basalt cobblestones.
(And the BLM wanted seven bucks to let us go there. Who do they think they are, the National Freaking Park Service?)
And a Spitfire:
(The model-airplane-building adolescent trapped within — help! I'm trapped in the body of a balding middle-aged man! — just ate that stuff up.)
One thing that really struck me about the Museum – it is huge. We entered from the parking garage, descending steps into a vast underground lobby / ticket desk that doubles as exhibit space for several trains. From the lobby, we ascended back into the museum proper and wandered through several of its wings, following a mazelike set of passages to eventually end up in the presence of the Apollo 8 command module, and through another mazelike set of passages to end up at the bow of the U-505.
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The U-505 was abandoned in such haste the crew did not scuttle her properly, and as a result she was captured intact, Enigma machine and codebooks undamaged. The body and keyboard of the Enigma is on the left, above; a set of rotors for encoding text is on the right (poor quality images – sorry!) Those were such a prize that her capture (and the existence of her isolated and imprisoned crew) was kept secret until after the war. As far as the German navy was concerned, the ship was lost with all hands, and the crew was presumed dead.
Well, no more! I've resolved to get back in the saddle (again) and crank out them posts (again) and here comes Sue the Tyrannosaur to kick my ass back into action.
This is the real Sue, not some mere copy, occupying pride of place in the Field's great lobby. Well, almost the real Sue – the skeleton is the real deal, but Sue's head, Jeremy Bentham- like, is kept separately from her body, because such a massive block of stone simply weighed too much for the armatures to support.It is displayed separately on a second-floor balcony.
I'd never been to the Field Museum before, but I certainly knew it by reputation as arguably one of the three best natural history museums in America, along with the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. Certainly in terms of research activities, rather than just displaying items crammed in dusty dark hallways, the Field is probably second to none. Back in my previous life as a biologist, I knew a number of very sharp people who ended up working for the Field Museum.
However, the afternoon we spent at the Field wasn't taken up with its animal collections, past or present. (In fact, given the prominence of Sue in the main hall, I was surprised at how little fossil material seemed to be on display. Maybe we were just in the wrong part of the museum.) Rather, we turned our attention to the human exhibits, especially the Egyptian and Amerindian collections.
Because of the low lighting conditions needed for preservation, getting pictures was tricky, and there were a lot of hold-breath-and -stand-very-still shots, most of which were disappointments. Still, some of them came out... well, passably.
At left is a small statue, about a foot tall, that the Museum itself says is one of its best pieces of Egyptian art (it's kept in a case along with four other sculptures, and the caption says, "These are the museum's five finest pieces of Egyptian art", or words to that effect.) It's Osiris, while he was still in one piece. Osiris is a fashionably dressed god-on-the-go sporting his trademark crook and flail, no-nonsense atef crown (with cobra accessory) and ... what look kind of like horns sticking out of the sides of his head. The ram was apparently associated with Osiris, and I've seen a few paintings showing him with ram's horns. Or maybe they're part of the crown – it's hard to tell.
On the right is one of those pictures that I wish had come out better, but the very low light and my unsteady hands conspired against it. I have long been fascinated by the Faiyum funerary portraits as some of the oldest known, fairly* realistic images of humans. The Field Museum has one, but to be honest it's not a very good one, and it's not in good shape either. To prevent further deterioration, it's kept in very low light, which called for a degree of steadiness these old palsied hands can't manage anymore. (*There's some evidence, according to Wikipedia, that the portraits are much more 'stock' than I thought – the painters may have had a certain assortment of standard faces, noses, eyes, facial hair, etc, and just combined as necessary, like someone assembling a police I.D.)
Coming out of the Egyptian exhibits, we wandered past the Man-eaters of Tsavo and Bushman the gorilla, ending up in the Northwest coast exhibits.
Moira had once mentioned to me how much of an effect the totem pole room had on her as a child – I can attest that it is still ominous and creepy, but in a good way.
Some of the pole figures looked almost polynesian in design, but all are from the Northwest coast. Trolling through Wikipedia, I learn that poles are erected for a variety of reasons: as mortuary structures, to commemorate people or events, or display clan lineages. There are also, apparently, "shame poles": "Poles used for public ridicule are usually called "shame poles", and were erected to shame individuals or groups for unpaid debts."
To finish, here is a Moche vessel, from what is now Peru – this piece is notable for both the realism and the unusual good humor of the figure portrayed.
Finishing off our tour through the bowels of the Adler Planetarium, I'll mention a few things in passing that I can't really say much about.
For instance, I don't know what this is, and the good folks at the Adler don't either.
It's round and brass and covered with Arabic, but beyond that, no one seems to know what it was meant for, even though they appear to know the name of its maker. It's not even very old (1864?) but even in that fairly short span of time, the knowledge of whatever this was meant to be used for apparently has been lost.
The Adler has a wide representation of instruments made throughout the Islamic world, which for the most part differ little in their fundamental technology from the instruments of Europe – most of the differences appear to be matters of style.
The Adler wants us to be very clear about how good dhimmis had it under the Caliphate:
Prospered, got that? All right then.
I'm afraid I have nothing, intelligent or otherwise, to say about either of these objects, other than "Hey! Look at these cool objects!" The explanatory material at the Adler was sometimes a bit on the sparse side, and I compounded the problem by not having any way to take notes.
Finally, here is a copy of Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, in which he states a number of things that later got him into hot water, printed as a miniature book. I'm not sure what the rationale behind the tiny book was – was it a way to keep a banned book easily hidden from prying eyes? Or was it just a technical feat for the printer?
Back to the Adler's collection of antiques, including an impressive collection of personal, portable sundials. None of them are wrist-sundials, cool as that would be, but many are quite tiny and would easily slip into a pocket.
Ivory was a popular material, as was brass.
To use a sundial effectively, you have to know where north (or south) is. And not magnetic north, but true, celestial north.One thing that wasn't clear to me based on the displayed materials was how your standard portable sundial user kept track of that – did they use a corrected compass bearing? Or have some other way of calculating it? Or just guess?
These aren't all strictly timekeeping pieces – some of the items in this bottom row are more for determining the elevation of celestial objects. In the bottom right is a universal ring dial, a sort of three-dimensional, adjustable sundial, or stripped-down armillary sphere, about which more coming up.
Inside, the Adler is much more than your standard planetarium; oh, sure, it's got the big room with the dome and the fantastically complex projector – but it also has several floors of exhibits and additional theaters. There was an Apollo-related exhibit going, to which Jim Lovell seems to have donated half his Apollo paraphernalia (spacesuits, watches, writing pads, etc.); and a history of telescopes, which we somehow happened to miss; but the principal draw for us was the Adler's collection, way down in the basement, of antique astronomical devices. This is, apparently, the best display of such instruments anywhere in the world. (Interestingly enough, I can't even find a reference to this collection on the Adler's main web page.)
Unfortunately for you, I didn't take any notes, and my memories of just what most of these objects were used for is getting hazy, fast. Below is the best image I got, out of all of them; my strict no flash! policy, combined with the relatively low lighting, meant that the exposure times were often longer than my shaky hands could manage. This is an astrolabe, of northern European design and construction (I think; hazy memory alert!), made sometime in the 1600's. Astrolabes are, essentially, projections of the sky overhead onto a two-dimensional plate; the various parts can rotate to represent the position of the sun or stars at any time of night or day, for a given latitude.
The background plate, or tympan, with all those carefully scribed lines, is (among other things) a coordinate grid upon which can be mapped the positions of celestial bodies as they appear to travel across the sky. The grid's lines converge at the zenith, the point directly overhead. "Wait," I hear you ask, eyebrows cocked with skepticism, "The position of the sun, stars, planets, etc., in relation to the zenith is going to vary depending on your latitude. How do you take THAT variation into account? Huh?" Well, astrolabe makers were way ahead of you, and handled that problem in one of two ways: they made their astrolabes for a specific latitude only (probably not that big a hindrance in an age when people traveled less frequently and less far), or, when you ordered the super-deluxe executive model, you got a version that came with multiple interchangeable tympans, each ruled for a specific latitude. If you look very closely at the image above, you will see, slightly to the left and below the pivot point of the rule (the thing that looks sort of like a watch hand) two numbers, either "46" or "48" – I can't tell for sure – so this tympan is designed for use at approximately those latitudes (Paris is at about 48°, for what that's worth).
Rotating freely on top of the tympan is the rete, a bit of brasswork that shows the relative positions of certain bright, easy-to-see stars, and contains a ring that represents the ecliptic, the plane through which the sun and planets appear to move. The names of the indicated stars are engraved on the rete; Spica (the brightest star in Virgo) and Cor Scorpii (a.k.a. Antares) are clearly visible on the left and bottom of the rete.
The ecliptic is subdivided into the 12 regions of the zodiac (the names helpfully spelled out on our example astrolabe) and each region is further subdivided into 30 degrees.
(Tangential note: even though I guessed the manufacture date was around 1600, the symbol representing the number '5' on the ecliptic ring – 
– was apparently most commonly used in Europe hundreds of years before that.)
(Doubly-tangential: The modern Devanagari symbol for '5' is similar.)
From their ancient Hellenistic origins, the theory and technology of astrolabes spread into both European and Islamic worlds. Here is a rather poor image of an astrolabe manufactured in Baghdad at approximately the same time as the one above. You can't tell much, but you can see that the basic elements are the same. Curse my shaky hands!
So, you ordered your super-deluxe executive model astrolabe, you waited a year or so for it to get made, a pox-ridden courier delivers it to your scholarly abode – now what?
Well, if you were a scholar of ancient times, you'd better hope there was somebody around to show you how to work the thing. (In brief, find the elevation of the sun or a star, look up the zodiacal position for that body for the appropriate day, and spin the rete until things line up.) For those of us in the modern age, though, we have the Internet, and we can quickly look up the instructions at, say, Keith's Astrolabes. Or, for all things astrolabic, James Morrison's astrolabe site. As a double bonus, both of these sites have astrolabe-simulation programs available, either as a Java applet or a DOS-mode program. If you download Morrison's program, you will also get a 100+ page user's manual which also happens to contain extensive information on the theory and history of astrolabes.
Now, how much would you pay?
UPDATE: Moira calls my post title needlessly obscure and effete. Fine. "Astro" + "labe" roughly translates as "star-taker".
After days of crappy weather in the region, our first, last, and only full day in the city (Oct. 4) was a beautiful one – brisk temperatures, sun, fluffy clouds, and a steady but not annoying breeze. Above is the city skyline from the back of the Shedd Aquarium, somewhat distorted by being the product of three separate images mashed together. The Sears Willis Tower is of course the tall black pile of blocks to the left. I don't know what the bright red building is, though I seem to remember some bank's initials stamped upon it somewhere. The John Hancock tower, which is the only Chicago building I remember from my one previous visit to the city some 30 years ago, is hidden behind the mass of high-rises on the right.
There's that big red thing again... Despite being well past what I would think of as the tourist season, downtown was packed with Chicago Bears fans celebrating the Bears' trouncing of the Detroit Lions at Soldier Field. As it happened, our leaving the Field Museum happened to coincide with a mass migration of giddily inebriated fans heading northward on Lakeshore. We took a left at Monroe Street and headed for the Building Formerly Known as the Sears Tower. A fair number of, shall we say, carefree fans seemed to be following suit. We found our way to the Skydeck elevators (carefully segregated away from the elevators for people who had actual business in the tower) and were whisked 103 ear-popping stories up in about a minute.
The Skydeck was crowded, and we often had to wait for spaces to open up at the windows. To while away the moments waiting for the crowd to thin, we read the extensive historical material that wrapped around the interior walls of the floor.
On one side, the interior walls enclosed a small snack/souvenir shop, selling things like "I'm with stupid ... at the Skydeck!" (ok, no, they didn't have that exactly, but they did have your basic generic tourist-kibble, rebranded just enough to be relevant). Of passing interest were the Barack Obama chocolate bars, which looked like they had been sitting there since last November. I discussed them with the Ranting Spawn, a keen fancier of chocolate.
"I bet those things are stale."
"Probably terrible chocolate to begin with."
So we left them and their companion geegaws behind as we attempted to get at the views.
One thing the Skydeck doesn't have is any sort of open-air rooftop experience; perhaps as a consolation prize, it does have three windows on the western side that project out into space, enough that you can walk into them and be surrounded on five sides (front, left, right, top, bottom by glass. All three windows had pretty considerable lines in front of them, and we decided we didn't need the experience that badly.
I think they need to wash the windows a little more frequently.
(Click on picture for more U-boat).
The Arch is very big, and quite unlike its surroundings, which adds to its visual impact. Its shape is an inverted catenary curve, the shape a chain makes when suspended from its two ends and allowed to hang down freely. (According to Wikipedia, the exact formula for the Gateway Arch is y = -127.7 · cosh(x/127.7) +757.7, and it is displayed somewhere on the premises, but we didn't see it.) This is apparently the strongest form an arch can take, which explains why the 2000-year-old vault of Ctesiphon is still standing, barely.
The Gateway Arch is so big that it becomes hard to get pictures of the thing when close up to it. In consequence, I have many pictures of parts of the arch, or the arch at funny angles.
Sometimes you just have to go for color and shape:
Freaky, dude.
I don't have many pictures from the top of the arch, because, St. Louis just isn't that visually interesting of a city; the arch is a lot more interesting to look at than look from. I was going to add a picture of ice floes drifting down the Mississippi, but then I thought, why?
Having just a long weekend to work with, our choices were limited. Nevertheless, six hours of driving brought us to this city:
Neither Moira nor the Ranting Spawn had been to Saint Louis, and I'd only been there briefly (well, ok, drove past on I-70), so it was an obvious choice.
Saint Louis has a nice public resource in Forest Park, an extensive chunk of greensward just west of downtown. The park is stuffed full of goodies like a zoo, an art museum, a history museum, a "science center" (what passes for a museum in this iron age), miles of trails, forests, fields, and much else besides. And most of it free, too, which is pretty cool.
We spent a whole day in and around the Park, walking from our motel room to the zoo in the balmy twenty-degree-plus air. The zoo we had largely to ourselves; apparently St. Louisians don't consider the depths of January to be proper zoo-attending weather. The cold prevented our seeing some of the animals, and we had to jostle someone at 'Guest Services' to get the doors to the herpetarium unlocked, but on the whole it was definitely worth more than the price of admission.
After the zoo, we hiked to the Science Center, which had banners up advertising an exhibit of Sue, the Tyrannosaurus. Like the zoo, the Science Center is free, but specific exhibits, such as, say, visiting carnosaurs, have separate admission fees. After paying our money, we trekked labyrinthine passages to end up in a big inflated bubble containing Sue's replicated remains, bathed in red spotlights.
Dubuque is the only major town in Iowa's portion of the Driftless Area, a portion of the upper Mississippi Valley that escaped glaciation during the most recent ice ages. The glaciers had a tremendous dullifying effect on Iowa's topography, planing off the tops of hills and filling valleys with gravel and ground-up rock, resulting in the monotonous rolling hills that predominate much of the state today. But in the northeastern corner of the state, the Mississippi was left free to cut its valley into the bedrock, resulting in unusually steep topography, unique microclimates, and the oldest rocks in the state. In addition to the lure of hills! and rocks! was the pull of Iowa's only National Park unit, Effigy Mounds National Monument, and the reputation (around here, anyway) that the northeastern portion of the state has for good fall leaf color.
So we headed off for a three-day weekend, and arrived in Dubuque a little before sunset. We had a little bit of difficulty finding our lodgings, because the Google Map directions we printed out were a monstrous pack of lies as far as the actual street location of our motel was concerned – the directions spun a tall tale of streets that did not exist, or travel against the traffic on one-way streets, that sort of thing. But we overcame the map in the end, and wandered over to the city's spiffy new waterfront promenade to watch the barges go by.
The promenade was pretty and nicely designed and all that, but it has one big problem; there's nothing to do there. It's a beautifully crafted brick walkway along the top of the levee, but it starts nowhere and goes nowhere. Well, it kinda sorta starts near the parking lot of the local casino (insert Sideshow Bob-like exclamation of defeated disgust here), then runs under the prow of the town convention center, then sputters out behind a defunct brewery that's trying to make a comeback as a tasting room for a local winery. But we had assumed that there would be a multitude of restaurants, bars, life. There was only one, and at that one a live band was doing the worst possible rendition of Peaceful, Easy Feeling that could exist in this, or any theoretical, universe. We could not eat there.
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