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pauldrye takes a look at Dutch-American astronomer Piet Van De Kamp's disproved, but important, claims to discover a planetary system orbiting the nearby red dwarf Barnard's Star. Instrument error was key to the story.[Van de Kamp] began his observations shortly after moving to Sproul in the spring of 1937, and kept them up for 26 years before announcing that he had in fact discovered a planet around Barnard’s Star. By his calculation it was about 60% bigger than the planet Jupiter, and it orbited the star at a distance of 4.4 AU (a bit shy of Jupiter’s distance from our own Sun). His discovery made quite a splash, as being the first to see an extra-solar planet (even indirectly) was a major coup. Other scientists had a hard time duplicating his results, but this was no great surprise: it relied on the Sproul Observatory’s 24-inch refractor, a kind of photographic telescope that was being mothballed in other observatories in favour of spectroscopic ones; furthermore van de Kamp had needed more than two decades of observations to be sure. It was going to take time for anyone else to check his results.
The first sign of trouble came after van de Kamp announced planets around other stars too: Epsilon Eridani, 61 Cygni, and one he’d mooted back in 1951, Lalande 21185. Another astronomer, Bob Harrington, noticed that the shape of the planetary wobbles was the same for all three, and for Barnard’s Star too—as if it were the photographic plates that were moving, not the stars. That turned out to be the case. When it was first made the Sproul Observatory telescope van de Kamp was using had had one of its lenses inserted the wrong way, and while the effect on its operation was very small, in 1949 it had been removed and reset the proper way. The slight change in the lens had made a slight change in the way light focused on photographic plates taken with the telescope, and by bad luck the change was about the same size as what van de Kamp had been expecting to see from his planets. He agreed that all of his data prior to 1950 was now suspect, but still argued that everything taken since then still supported his discovery.
With the idea of instrument error now in the open, though, another astronomer by the name of George Gatewood published a paper in 1973 which demolished van de Kamp’s planets. The consensus is now that there was a cycle causing the image of the stars to move, but that it was down here on Earth. The telescope underwent regular maintenance, and every time it did its focus shifted ever so slightly and made any star it observed appear to have moved. Ironically, Gatewood eventually changed his mind about one of van de Kamp’s claims, Lalande 21185, but this too has turned out to be instrument error
The pews were nearly full for the early Sunday service at Joy Metropolitan Community Church, but just about everybody in the sanctuary was male and most were middle-aged.
Started in 1979, the predominantly gay Orlando church is imperiled by its inability to attract a younger generation of gay and lesbian worshippers. Only about 20 of the 250 people who regularly attend the church are in their 20s and 30s, said the Rev. Lisa Heilig, interim pastor.
"The truth of the matter is the church is either going to stretch and grow — or die," Heilig said.
The lack of young people at Joy MCC isn't unusual in itself. Only about a fourth of Americans 18 to 29 years old attend church regularly, according to the latest survey by LifeWay Research, a research organization associated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
Mainline Protestant denominations such as Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans and Methodists are dealing with the same doomsday demographic of aging congregations. But the gay church faces not only fewer young people attending church, but also a greater acceptance of gays in other churches.
Moreover, gay churches don't have the built-in ability to attract families with children, teenagers with youth programs, and young people with church services like rock concerts. There are no "crying rooms" for babies at Joy MCC or Sunday-school classrooms or a day-care center during the week.
"Joy MCC is going to have to change and adapt or they are not going to be around," said Randy Stephens, executive director of Orlando's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Central Florida.
Young people are more fluid about their sexuality and less defined by their sexual orientation, Stephens said. They neither need nor crave the sanctuary that the gay church provided previous generations.
"What I'm finding is they don't want to go to a church where they are segregated by their sexuality," said the Rev. Jenn Stiles Williams, who has about 50 young gays in her contemporary service at St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Orlando. "Their relationship with God is first, but they want a church where they can be who they are and not have to hide it."
pauldrye: how about lost lands off the Cornish coast around the isles of Scilly?Britain is lousy with towns and even entire lands lost to the sea. H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by the story of Dunwich in Suffolk: one of the most important towns in medieval England, it was progressively swept into the ocean after a storm surge hit it in 1286. A bit further east the central part of the North Sea covers Doggerland, which was above sea level during the last Ice Age and only submerged about 6500 BC; the author owns a chunk of mammoth tusk dredged up from the area. The effect of the Ice Age on Britain hit Scilly too, but in a less obvious way. The southern half of Britain is further underwater than it should be after accounting for the melting of ancient ice caps, while the north is, in places, actually higher than it was at the Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago. This is because one of the ice caps was actually on Scotland and Northern England, and the weight of the ice pressed that section of the island down. Now that the ice has been removed, Britain has been slowly rebalancing itself, and the southern reaches are subsiding as the north rebounds, like a great tectonic see-saw.
This post-glacial rebound is continuing even as we speak, so the Isles of Scilly—literally the most southern point of England—have changed well into the last couple of millennia. It’s worth looking at the British Admiralty’s depth charts for the waters around the islands. The rather small brown areas are the present-day Isles, while the green represents flats that can become exposed if the tide is low enough. The blue area is a rough approximation of what Scilly would have been like some time in the past, with a depth of four meters or less. As you can see, this produces a single large island (sometimes called Ennor after a castle on the largest of the present islands, St. Mary’s) out of most of the plural, 21st century Scillies. The main difficulty here is knowing just when this island existed. Charles Thomas, emeritus Professor of Cornish Studies at Exeter University has suggested it disappeared some time around 1600 BC, but others have suggested that it existed until more recently—possibly as late as 500 AD. It’s worth noting that the Roman name for the Isles, Scillonia insula, is singular.
If the latter is true then Ennor existed well into the Celtic period of Britain, which is interesting because there are several legends about drowned lands in Celtic mythology. Readers who know their Thomas Malory (or Jack Vance) are aware of Lyonesse, home of the Arthurian Tristan, and Lyonesse has long been associated with the Isles of Scilly. However, there are signs that the association is a 16th-century invention.
[. . .]
The Celtic legends go deeper than Lyonesse, to stories such as Brittany’s Ker-Is (or Caer Ys, if you prefer the more common Welsh or Narnian spelling to the Breton). It too is a sunken land, this time placed in Douarnenez Bay south-east of Brest. There is even a potential connection between it and Scilly: Mont Saint-Michel is not too far away on the border between Brittany and Normandy and it was the sister house of the remarkably similar-looking St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall—right where the British coast is closest to Scilly and where a drowned forest can be seen at low tide. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to suppose a Breton monk, familiar with the story of Ker-Is, being transferred to St. Michael’s Mount when it was gifted to the Norman monastery in the 11th century and him making the obvious inference when he saw what was in the water.
CNBC is right that Elaine Garzarelli forecast a stock market crash not long before the great plunge of 1987. It made her a superstar. But what about Garzarelli's other calls? How accurate were they? Was her successful prediction a typical result or was it more like the occasional bull's eye that even a chimpanzee could be expected to nail if it threw hundreds of darts at a board? The article doesn't say. The only reference to Garzarelli's record is that one spectacular hit.
CNBC is right that Elaine Garzarelli forecast a stock market crash not long before the great plunge of 1987. It made her a superstar. But what about Garzarelli's other calls? How accurate were they? Was her successful prediction a typical result or was it more like the occasional bull's eye that even a chimpanzee could be expected to nail if it threw hundreds of darts at a board? The article doesn't say. The only reference to Garzarelli's record is that one spectacular hit.
Here's what the story should have noted but did not: After Garzarelli shot to fame for calling the crash of '87, she struggled. Even though she continued to use the same analytical system that supposedly called the crash, the mutual fund she managed did poorly. In 1994, the fund was closed and Garzarelli's firm showed its former superstar the door.
Maybe Garzarelli's current prediction will prove to be bang on. I don't know. But I do know that someone who knew only what CNBC said about Elaine Garzarelli would have a lot more faith in that prediction than someone who knew more.
With the simple act of using twigs to poke a rubber spider, New Caledonian crows may have become the first birds to join an exclusive cognitive class.
Using tools in multiple ways, and not just to get food, was once considered a singularly human ability. Then chimpanzees, other primates and elephants proved able. But if flexible tool use wasn’t uniquely human, it did seem limited to mammals.
“There is no species of bird that has been recorded using tools for more than one function,” said zoologist Joanna Wimpenny of the University of Sheffield.
[. . .]
Sequential tool use in particular is considered a possible sign of high-level cognitive powers: understanding causality, analogizing, planning. Whether the birds in fact possess these powers, or happen to be instinctively good at a narrow range of tasks, is inconclusive, but flexible tool use would suggest something more than simple instinct.
“If tools are employed flexibly and for a variety of innovative purposes, then conventional combinations of inherited predispositions and associative learning are challenged and interesting questions emerge,” wrote the researchers.
According to Wimpenny, the researchers first wondered about multitool use after their crows used twigs to poke at, among other things, an especially gaudy pair of pants.
To study this more rigorously, 10 of the birds were presented with a variety of objects, from a Frisbee and a Hawaiian bracelet to a rubber spider and rubber snake.
Again and again, the crows used twigs to poke the objects. While the researchers note that the birds may have been searching for food, they acted very differently than while foraging.
“It’s very difficult to know exactly why they would use tools to contact objects, but we think the most plausible explanation is not that they saw them as a food source,” said Wimpenny.
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