[OBSCURA] Tarantula Nebula, Large Magellanic Cloud

Via io9 I found this remarkable Hubble shot of Tarantula Nebula, one of the most visible features of our Milky Way Galaxy's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus, or NGC 2070) is an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It was originally thought to be a star [hence the Flamsteed name 30 Doradus], but in 1751 Nicolas Louis de Lacaille recognized its nebular nature.

The Tarantula Nebula has an apparent magnitude of 8. Considering its distance of about 49 kpc (160,000 light years), this is an extremely luminous non-stellar object. Its luminosity is so great that if it were as close to Earth as the Orion Nebula, the Tarantula Nebula would cast shadows. In fact, it is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of galaxies. It is also the largest such region in the Local Group with an estimated diameter of 200 pc. The nebula resides on the leading edge of the LMC, where ram pressure stripping, and the compression of the interstellar medium likely resulting from this, is at a maximum. At its core lies the compact star cluster R136 (approx diameter 35 light years)[4] that produces most of the energy that makes the nebula visible. The estimated mass of the cluster is 450,000 solar masses, suggesting it will likely become a globular cluster in the future.

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The closest supernova observed since the invention of the telescope, Supernova 1987A, occurred in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula.

I also touched on briefly last summer on the discovery in the Tarantula Nebula of the most massive star to date, blue hypergiant R136a1 with the mass of 265 Sols.

All of this is here.

[CAT] Two Maneki Neko shots

Maneki Neko--Japanese good-luck ceramic statues of cats, briefly defined--featured recently in a post in the lj_photophile community by hanmichi.



I received permission from hanmichi in the comments to post this, and given the URL to another photo of the same set with a larger--knit?--cat behind the seven.

[LINK] "Enable the https setting in your Twitter account now for improved security"

This is for my use as it is for yours. Thanks, Lifehacker!

Twitter just added an option to turn on HTTPS encryption for every connection.

It's easy to do:

1. Go to your Twitter settings page.
2. Tick the Always use HTTPS checkbox.
3. Click Save and re-enter your password when prompted.

Going forward, Twitter will always send data back and forth using the considerably more secure HTTPS protocol, and you can open up Twitter in any coffee shop without worrying about some Firesheeper stealing your cookies and masquerading as you on Twitter.

[LINK] "Hearings could trigger contempt charge against Harper government, Oda"

A brief Canadian Press article, this. This may not trigger an election, if only because the Conservatives' opposition is so fragmented and ineffectual as to want to avoid a Conservative majority government. But then, maybe the Conservatives might want it for just that reason.

Hearings have kicked off into whether the Harper government and a cabinet minister are in contempt of Parliament.

The politically charged Commons committee hearings come as all parties prepare for an election that could be triggered as early as next week — either over Tuesday’s budget or a Liberal confidence motion.

The hearings follow last week’s unprecedented double rebuke of the minority Conservative government by the Speaker of the Commons.

Peter Milliken ruled that the government breached parliamentary privilege by refusing to fully disclose cost estimates for its tough-on-crime agenda, corporate tax cuts and plans to purchase stealth fighter jets.

He also ruled that International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda breached parliamentary privilege by misleading MPs about an altered government document.

The Commons procedure and House affairs committee is holding three days of hearings on whether to uphold Milliken’s ruling and to decide what, if any, sanctions to impose.

[LINK] "Government close to facing contempt charge"

Canada may yet have an election after all.

The Canadian government's uncertain hold on power looked less secure on Wednesday when opposition legislators said they were leaning toward slapping it with a formal contempt ruling.

That could pave the way for a nonconfidence motion next week, when the minority Conservative government is already looking at three separate parliamentary votes that could bring it down.

[. . .]

Last week, House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken issued a rare rebuke to Ottawa for refusing to say how much it would spend on new prison cells as part of a tough-on-crime agenda.

A parliamentary committee grilled two cabinet ministers about the case on Wednesday and opposition legislators, declaring the answers to be unsatisfactory, said they were closer to ruling the government was in formal contempt.

"They're deliberately not telling us what we need to know about the whole cost of their crime agenda ... we're incrementally, hour by hour, getting closer to a finding of contempt," said Pat Martin of the left-leaning New Democrats.

[. . .]

The first vote on the budget is likely to come next Friday, the same day that the House is due to vote on separate government spending plans. The Liberals, the biggest opposition party, could also present a nonconfidence motion on Wednesday.

If the government loses any of the votes it will fall and a five-week election campaign would start. The Conservatives won election with a minority government in early 2006 and retained power in the October 2008 election, with another minority.

[. . .]

On Friday, the committee will discuss a separate rebuke that Milliken delivered to International Aid Minister Bev Oda for misleading legislators.

This week police were called in to investigate allegations of political interference by a former aide to one cabinet minister. Last month, four senior Conservative officials were charged with violating financing rules during the 2006 election campaign that brought the party to power.

[CAT] On the cats of Tashirojima

Back in January I blogged about the Taiwanese village of Houtong, a declining post-industiral commune that experienced renewed fame via its cat population. Livejournal's kittypix community has just had a post pointing to a similar community in Japan, Tashirojima.

Tashirojima (田代島?) is a small island in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. It lies in the Pacific Ocean off the Oshika Peninsula, to the west of Ajishima. It is an inhabited island, although the population is quite small (around 100 people, down from around 1000 people in the 1950s[1]). It has become known as "Cat Island" due to the large stray cat population that thrives as a result of the local belief that feeding cats will bring wealth and good fortune. The cat population is now larger than the human population on the island. (A 2009 article in Sankei News says that there are no pet dogs and it is basically prohibited to bring dogs onto the island.)

[. . .]

Since 83% of the population is classified as elderly, the island's villages have been designated as a "terminal villages" (限界集落) which means that with 50% or more of the population being over 65 years of age, the survival of the villages is threatened[2]. The majority of the people who live on the island are involved either in fishing or hospitality.

[. . .]

There is a small cat shrine (neko jinja (猫神社?)) in the middle of the island, roughly situated between the two villages. In the past, the islanders raised silkworms for silk, and cats were kept in order to keep the mouse population down (because mice are a natural predator of silkworms). Fixed-net fishing was popular on the island after the Edo Period and fishermen from other areas would come and stay on the island overnight. The cats would go to the inns where the fishermen were staying and beg for scraps. Over time, the fishermen developed a fondness for the cats and would observe the cats closely, interpreting their actions as predictions of the weather and fish patterns. One day, when the fishermen were collecting rocks to use with the fixed-nets, a stray rock fell and killed one of the cats. The fishermen, feeling sorry for the loss of the cat, buried it and enshrined it at this location on the island.

There are at least ten cat shrines in Miyagi Prefecture. There are also 51 stone monuments in the shape of cats, which is an unusually high number compared to the other prefectures. In particular, these shrines and monuments are concentrated in the southern area of the island, overlapping with the regions where silkworms were raised.

As you may have noticed from the initial description, Tashirojima is located in the area affected by the massive earthquake. Fortunately everyone's all right--the island wasn't razed by the tsunami--but supplies are running short and donations are being requested.

An extensive blog post on Tashirojima is here.

[LINK] On the Emishi of Tōhoku

The region of Tōhoku struck by the recent earthquake--the northernmost part of the largest Japanese island of Honshu, "Tōhoku" being Japanese for "northeast"--is a relatively marginal area of Japan, located far outside of the metropolitan core in western Japan and traditionally marginal economically, culturally, and politically. The Tōhoku region was incorporated into the Japanese state at a relatively late date, in the 9th century CE, on account of the presence of the Emishi, indigenous peoples thought to be descended from the hunter-gatherer Jomon of early classical Japan and perhaps related to the Ainu of Hokkaido but separate. This source seems to have it.

There were three races in ancient Japan: Japanese, Emishi (later Ainu) and Ashihase (possibly Okhotsk). Historical literature supports the theory that the Emishi were considered rebels by the Japanese, and therefore potentially subjects by way of conquest. Consistently, the Japanese divided them into those who had submitted themselves to Yamato rule as allies and subjects, and those who were outside their authority. Those outside imperial authority were seen as "barbarians" beyond the frontier. Michinoku, the name the Yamato Japanese had given for the Tohoku, literally translates as "deepest road" with the connotation of a far away place: the Emishi were seen as inhabitants of this far away land, beyond the frontier. The Ashihase were thought of as a foreign people altogether, and it is not clear who they were; however, in the latest research there are tantalizing clues that the relationship between the Ashihase and the Emishi mirrored the relationship between the Japanese and the Emishi . That is, just as the Japanese were completing their conquest of the Tohoku region, Emishi began to consolidate more of Hokkaido. The Ashihase were most likely an Amur river people who were definitely East Asian hunter-gatherers who moved south from Sakhalin into Hokkaido and were either absorbed or conquered by the Emishi of the Satsumon culture. The Satsumon consolidated their hold about the same time that the Tohoku Emishi began to migrate into Hokkaido (see especially Yamaura 1999:42-45, and the in-depth discussion by Crawford implying that the Tohoku Emishi may have actually created the Satsumon culture. Satsumon is a name of a culture that is ancestral to the Hokkaido Ainu.

According to archeological findings from the fifth to the seventh centuries AD, the northern half of Tohoku (roughly extending from northern Miyagi prefecture to Aomori) and the western part of Hokkaido formed a single cultural area, and many Ainu place names are left in the Tohoku. It is beyond the discussion of this introduction to go into the Jomon, Epi-Jomon and Yayoi cultures as they affected the Tohoku region, but to simplify this discussion, it is now believed that evidence points to the Emishi tie in with the Tohoku Middle Yayoi pottery culture that is heavily influenced by Jomon forms--almost as if these peoples were gradually adopting Yayoi culture from the seventh to the eighth centuries.

[. . .]

The place where the Emishi fit into this picture follows in the descriptions given about them in the historical period. They are known as mojin or kebito (hairy people) by their Japanese conquerors, and contemporary Chinese court historians of the T'ang. And this is where history begins to corroborate physical anthropology. The Ainu are known for their abundant hair, both on the torso and limbs, and mostly in their heavy beards. It is absolutely certain that people ancestral to the Ainu lived in northern Honshu in this time period. The cultural area of the Emishi coincides with the areas that used to be under Ainu control. The very word Emishi is probably a Japanese derivation of the word "emchiu" or "enjyu" which translates to "man" in the Ainu/Emishi language. The kanji characters for Emishi are identical to Ezo. Before Ainu came into usage in the Meiji period they were known as Ezo.

Even if we accept these arguments plenty of questions remain. What were the differences between the Ainu and the Ashihase? What happened to the Emishi who migrated to Hokkaido, and how did they influence the development of Satsumon culture? What is the relationship between the Hokkaido and Tohoku Emishi, and when did the Ainu emerge? One thing is certain: we shouldn't even think of Ancient Japan as being composed of a single ethnic group like it appears today. Racial or ethnic affiliation did not determine who were or were not Japanese subjects: the connection between culture and blood came after centuries of political unity. For example, ethnic Korean and Chinese immigrants migrated to Japan at this time to help consolidate the bureaucracy and form artisan groups.

Even if we answer the earlier question about Emishi ethnic affiliation as positively Ainu, they were different culturally from both Japanese and Ainu. They cannot be seen as either one or the other. First of all, as you will begin to see in the following web pages, the Emishi had a distinctive culture that differed from that of the Ainu. Like the North American Indians, there were different cultural groups among the Jomon tribes, and the primary difference was that the Emishi were horse riders, and much of their culture and style of warfare were adapted to the use of the horse. Second, the Emishi had a profound influence on the emerging Japanese Yamato state: they basically forced the Yamato to adopt much of their style of warfare, and even the title of Shogun came out of warfare against them. Historically, they certainly rejected affiliation with the Japanese. Further, to complicate matters, many Emishi became subject to the Japanese state and eventually disappeared as a separate ethnic group, becoming intermarried with other ethnic Japanese. It is almost certain that this intermixing took place in different degrees according to the time period and location. The western side of the Tohoku (towards Akita) probably has seen less due to the mountains making the western side less accessible, whereas, the Pacific side has seen to more thorough assimilation because of the broad Sendai plain, but even here not until the modern period when movement has been aided by economics (job concentration in Tokyo, for example) and transportation has the mixing become more complete.

The Emishi seem to have eventually assimilated via Japanese settlement and intermarriage between the two aristocracies. The wider website on the Emishi comes recommended with some caveats--the emphasis on a Caucasian racial origin of the Ainu is obsolete. Still, the way in which an outlying area of Japan was assimilated is described apparently accurately and evocatively.

Much earlier, during the Nara and early Heian period, the Tohoku (northeast Japan as a whole was seen as the frontier in the same sense [as early modern Hokkaido]. That is, the area was described as michi-no-oku or "deep road" meaning an area that lay beyond Japanese culture, ethnicity and norms: an area that lay outside the known world. It was considered to be foreign territory when Taga fort was constructed close to what is now Sendai in 724 as a frontier outpost of Japan in its attempt to take the territory from the Emishi. This region looked to its cultural and trade ties with northeast Asia, to the Matsukatsu, a sinified Tungus power, that controlled the Amur river trade, and to the Okhotsk of Sakahlin and Hokkaido. The fur trade flourished in this region at the time, but its culture contrasted from the Japanese who were more influenced by the Korean and Chinese states to the south.

By the Early Modern period the Ezo in Hokkaido had become sharply contrasted to the Japanese on the main island, but this was not always the case. This of course has lead to the reification or static view of both societies that does not seriously take historical change into account. Truth be told, there were two cultural directions that met, struggled and contested what became Japan, one influenced by a northern cultural tradition that was influenced by native peoples of Siberia, Sakhalin and the Amur river valley. The other, Yamato, was influenced by the centralized states of Korea and China. The winning side eventually became the Japanese state. However, we cannot forget the shadow of the past when a competing people and culture held sway in northeast Japan, one that was as different from what came after as can be imagined.