[OBSCURA] Robert Prior, "Cathedral of the Transfiguration I (Photomatix)"

Cathedral of the Transfiguration I (Photomatix), a photo by etherflyer on Flickr.

In the photographer's words: "For years I've seen this from the highway and never had the time to stop. Yesterday I decided to make time, and set my alarm clock for 5:30 to catch sunrise here. Of course, with my luck there was haze blocking the sun, so the spectacular orange light I was hoping for didn't happen, but at least I got these pictures!

This rendering is a bit more like a painting than the enfuse version, and I like the sky much better, but the enfuse rendering is more like what I saw."

I like the luminous glow of the church.

The ">Cathedral of the Transfiguration is a Slovak Byzantine Rite Roman Catholic former cathedral located in the community of Victoria Square in Markham, Ontario, Canada. The cathedral was built in a rural area north of the city of Toronto and was built to serve Slovak Catholics throughout the Greater Toronto Area. The Cathedral was conceived and funded by Stephen B. Roman, a Slovak immigrant to Canada who had built up the Denison Mines corporation. Roman both funded and designed the building, modeling the structure on the church in Velky Ruskov, the Slovak village he was raised in. The cathedral was built on a donated portion of his Romandale estate.

Among its features is the world's largest three bell carillon, with the French made bells weighing 32,000 pounds, and 300 cm diameter. The mosaics are reputed to contain about 5 million pieces. The cathedral was built to hold 1000 worshipers serving a community of about 5000 Byzantine Rite Catholics in the GTA and 35,000 across Canada. The central tower rises 63 metres (about 20 storeys) and is topped by a gold onion dome. The church was designed by Donald Buttress, a renowned architect whose claim to fame is overhauling Westminster Abbey. It is a significant landmark east of the 404 highway.

A pity that the church has been closed down for the past five years on account of jurisdictional infighting.

[LINK] "A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space"

This National Public Radio item by Robert Krulwich on the Starfish Prime nuclear tests--briefly, American nuclear detonations in Earth orbit--combines factualness and incredulity in the right measures.

"Chant, Light Parade on Alexander" (Watch on YouTube)

"Samba on the Light Parade on Alexander" (Watch on YouTube)

Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled — and hopefully never will.

[. . .]

If you are wondering why anybody would deliberately detonate an H-bomb in space, the answer comes from a conversation we had with science historian James Fleming of Colby College.

"Well, I think a good entry point to the story is May 1, 1958, when James Van Allen, the space scientist, stands in front of the National Academy in Washington, D.C., and announces that they’ve just discovered something new about the planet," he told us.

Van Allen described how the Earth is surrounded by belts of high-energy particles — mainly protons and electrons — that are held in place by the magnetic fields.

There are two Van Allen radiation belts that circle the Earth (shown here in purple): an inner belt and an outer belt. The belts are contained by the Earth’s magnetic field (pictured as gray lines). Red marks a radiation-safe orbit path for satellites.

Today these radiation belts are called Van Allen belts. Now comes the surprise: While looking through the Van Allen papers at the University of Iowa to prepare a Van Allen biography, Fleming discovered "that [the] very same day after the press conference, [Van Allen] agreed with the military to get involved with a project to set off atomic bombs in the magnetosphere to see if they could disrupt it."

The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth's atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb's radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and — most peculiar — d) if a man-made explosion might "alter" the natural shape of the belts.

The scientific basis for these proposals is not clear. Fleming is trying to figure out if Van Allen had any theoretical reason to suppose the military could use the Van Allen belts to attack a hostile nation. He supposes that at the height of the Cold War, the most pressing argument for a military experiment was, "if we don’t do it, the Russians will." And, indeed, the Russians did test atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs in space.

In any case, says the science history professor, "this is the first occasion I've ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up."

The Americans launched their first atomic nuclear tests above the Earth's atmosphere in 1958. Atom bombs had little effect on the magnetosphere, but the hydrogen bomb of July 9, 1962, did. Code-named "Starfish Prime" by the military, it literally created an artificial extension of the Van Allen belts that could be seen across the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand.

These bombs also created new radiation belts in low Earth orbit which wrecked a third of the satellites then in Earth orbit.

[BRIEF NOTE] On a clash of ideologies

Newt Gingrich is no longer a libertarian, it seems.

Newt Gingrich stood before thousands of evangelical churchgoers Sunday night to deliver a dire warning that nation's Christian roots are under attack.

"I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

The former House Speaker held up his own faith (he converted to Catholicism two years ago) as proof of his undying patriotism. He lashed out at the college professors and mainstream media he says are seeking to wipe out the Founding Father's Christian values. And he targeted the judges who he charges are effectively re-writing the Constitution.

[. . .]

The evening worship was a boisterous celebration of American patriotism. A 100-person choir sang "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" between hymns. The church's orchestra struck up the anthem for each of the five military branches and a loud cheer went up for veterans and active duty members who stood up during their song.

Gingrich said he hadn't intended to fight another political battle, and was looking forward to relaxing in private life after leaving public office. But in 2002, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the phrase "under God" in the pledge of allegiance was unconstitutional (the ruling was later overturned).

Yes, the contradiction inherent in having a "secular atheist country" that could also be "one dominated by radical Islamists" is glaring, especially given the relative proportions of atheists and Muslims in the United States and the popularity of the latter and ... but, then Gingrich was speaking to a highly specific audience not inclined to question outlandishness overmuch.

Gingrich was addressing Cornerstone Church, a megachurch in San Antonio, Texas, led by the Rev. John Hagee, an influential leader among American evangelicals. Hagee's endorsement of then-presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 was plagued by controversy.

McCain ultimately rejected the endorsement over remarks Hagee had made about the Holocaust, in which he appeared to say that Adolf Hitler had been fulfilling God's will by hastening the desire of Jews to return to Israel, in accordance with biblical prophecy.

"God says in Jeremiah 16: 'Behold, I will bring them the Jewish people again unto their land that I gave to their fathers. ... Behold, I will send for many fishers, and after will I send for many hunters. And they the hunters shall hunt them.' That would be the Jews,” Hagee had said in an earlier sermon.

“Then God sent a hunter,” his sermon continued. “A hunter is someone who comes with a gun, and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter."

McCain rejected Hagee’s endorsement of his campaign after learning about the comments in May 2008. "Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them,” McCain said at the time.

I've tagged this post with--among other tags--"clash of ideologies" and "clash of civilizations". Clearly, it merits both.

[CAT] "Why is aspirin toxic to cats?"

Not Exactly Rocket Science's Ed Yong shares the latest findings on why cats--not just Felis catus, but Felidae generally--just can't metabolize aspirin.

Binu Shrestha from the Tufts University School of Medicine has found that cats may have developed their strange sensitivity because of their lifestyle as specialist hunters. Their penchant for meat could have ultimately turned aspirin into their kryptonite.

Our livers break down aspirin using a protein called UGT1A6, encoded by a gene of the same name. In 1997, Michael Court, who led Shrestha’s study, showed that the cat version of this protein is barely produced in the liver. Three years later, he found out why – the cat genome has a broken version of UGT1A6. The gene has been riddled with crippling mutations that prevent it from producing a working protein, like a recipe with missing and garbled steps. In technical terms, it’s a “pseudogene”.

This is an old problem. Shrestha looked at the gene in 18 species of cat, from cheetahs to servals to tigers, and found that all of them shared the same four crippling mutations. Several lineages had accumulated more. The common ancestor of all modern cats must have been just as sensitive to aspirin (or more realistically, similar natural compounds) than our house cats.

[. . .]

The gene was active and serviceable in other groups of meat-eaters, including the other three hyenas, dogs, bears, mongooses and racoons. What sets the cats, the seal and the brown hyena apart? Shrestha thinks it’s their diets. These species are all “hypercarnivores”, meaning that meat makes up more than 70% of their food. By comparison, bears and dogs are “mesocarnivores”, meaning that they eat some plant food too.

Like many other “detoxifying” proteins, UGT1A6 evolved to help animals cope with the thousands of dangerous chemicals in the plants they eat. For animals that eat plants, even on an irregular basis, these genes are a boon. Individuals with broken copies would be forced into narrower diets and lose out to those with working copies.

But if an animal’s menu consists largely of meat, it has little use for these anti-plant defences. The genes are dispensable. Individuals with broken versions can survive just as well as those with working ones, so the broken genes spread through the population. In this way, the ancestral cats gradually built up mutations that disabled their UGT1A6 gene. Evolution is merciless that way – it works on a “use it or lose it” basis.

UGT1A6 isn’t the only gene that’s gone through this fate. Cats also have low levels of amylase in their saliva, and enzyme that starts breaking down carbohydrates. And unlike many other mammals, they don’t have a sweet tooth because their copy of Tas1r2 – a gene involved in taste –is also a pseudogene. Both events might also have been the result of their move away from plant foods.

Cats may have gone through a near-extinction event which meant that rare mutations, like the faulty version of UGT1A6, got passed on.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Principal takes over first gay alliance meeting, group says"

More Globe and Mail coverage from Tamara Baluja on the presence of gay-straight alliances in publically funded Roman Catholic schools.

A Mississauga high school principal faces the ire of students after she drew an umbrella on a blackboard at the launch of their first gay-straight alliance group meeting.

Leanne Iskander, one of the founders of the St. Joseph’s Secondary School group, said she was shocked the principal drew an umbrella to symbolize their GSA would have to be a part of an all-encompassing equity group.

[. . .]

When the 16-year-old first approached principal Frances Jacques to start a GSA, she was quickly turned down and referred to other equity options with a Catholic spin. Bruce Campbell, spokesman for Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, said that the response by the St. Joseph’s principal was one “the board wholeheartedly supports.”

[. . . That means there is effectively] an unwritten ban on GSAs at the Catholic school board, argued Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, spokeswoman for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“It’s unconstitutional to deny these students the right to express themselves,” Ms. Aviv said. “It goes against their Charter Rights. At the end of day, yes, it is a Catholic school, but it is also a publicly funded Catholic school that is required to respect these students’ rights.”

Ms. Aviv attempted to join the GSA launch meeting on Friday, but was not allowed entry on school property. In spite of the hostility the students face, more than a hundred came to the group’s meeting, Ms. Iskander said, adding several students were left without seats and piled into the hallway.

“We’ve definitely got the support of so many students,” she said. “In fact, students from another [Mississauga] Catholic school also came to support us and they want to start their own GSA. Believe me, this isn’t going away.”

[LINK] "The Netherlands Is No Longer a Low Country: Conundrums of Geopolitical Classification"

At GeoCurrent Events, Martin Lewis points out that the arbitrariness of national frontiers as enclosing discrete categories can sometimes become particularly arbitrary. What is a "constituent country" anyway?

The modern Netherlands forms the heart of the so-called Low Countries, a historical region composed of the flat and watery delta formed by the Rhine, Meuse, Scheldt, and Ems rivers. As the name suggests, the Low Countries have no mountains. On WikiAnswers, the second-highest-rated response to the question, “What is the highest point in the Netherlands?” is simply, “Nope, we don't have mountains. Large hills is the best we can do.” The first return, however, is strikingly different, referencing Mount Scenery, a precipitously sloped volcano that reaches 870 meters (2,800 feet) in elevation. Mount Scenery became the Netherlands’ highest point on October 10, 2010, when the Caribbean island of Saba, which essentially is Mount Scenery, was transformed into a “special municipality” of the Netherlands.

The incorporation of Saba, Bonaire, and Saint Eustatius into the Netherlands transformed the basic parameters of the country in several regards. The demographic change was relatively minor; the Netherlands’ population jumped by 18,000. More significant were shifts to the country’s geography; its southernmost and westernmost points were suddenly relocated by thousands of miles. The Netherlands also became, in part, a tropical land.

Such changes may seem trivial, but the reformulation of the Netherlands’ Caribbean holdings opens a fascinating window onto some surprisingly tricky issues of geopolitical conceptualization. What does it require for a formerly separate area to fully become part of a country—not just in legal terms but also in the popular imagination? No one doubts that Hawaii is fully part of the United States. Likewise, the French overseas departments, including Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, are by all accounts integral portions of France. But Saba, Bonaire, and Saint Eustatius are “special” municipalities of the Netherlands, and remain distinctive in a more profound sense than that of sheer distance from the mainland. While the use of English as the language of public school instruction in Saba and Saint Eustatius is odd enough, it is the official status of the US dollar that really sets the three islands apart. The relationship maintained by the Netherlands proper with Saba, Bonaire, and Saint Eustatius is in some ways similar to that between China proper and its “special administrative regions” of Hong Kong and Macao, both of which have their own currencies. Although Hong Kong certainly falls under the umbrella of Chinese sovereignty, whether it is an integral part of China is another matter. It is not treated as such by the CIA, the World Bank, and other many other international agencies, and is instead accounted as a separate though subordinate unit.

Similar conundrums of geopolitical classification are posed by a number of other European outliers, starting with the Dutch anomalies of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. Legally defined as “constituent countries" of the Kingdom of the Netherlands,” these three islands are too autonomous to be counted as integral parts of the Netherlands (whose westernmost point is said to be Bonaire, not the more westerly island of Aruba.) Greenland is treated in a similar manner. Denmark is never regarded as including this “constituent country;” if it were, Denmark would jump to thirteenth rank in the standard list of countries by area. Yet the relationship between the United Kingdom and its “constituent countries” – England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland – is completely different, entailing much tighter linkages. Geographers would never think of excluding Scotland from a depiction of the United Kingdom the way we habitually exclude Greenland from Denmark.

Go, read.

[LINK] "When is an Asteroid Not an Asteroid?"

When it's my favourite asteroid dwarf planet Vesta, of course. This NASA press release makes the case.

Vesta is most commonly called an asteroid because it lies in the orbiting rubble patch known as the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But the vast majority of objects in the main belt are lightweights, 100-kilometers-wide (about 60-miles wide) or smaller, compared with Vesta, which is about 530 kilometers (330 miles) across on average. In fact, numerous bits of Vesta ejected by collisions with other objects have been identified in the main belt.

"I don't think Vesta should be called an asteroid," said Tom McCord, a Dawn co-investigator based at the Bear Fight Institute, Winthrop, Wash. "Not only is Vesta so much larger, but it's an evolved object, unlike most things we call asteroids."

The layered structure of Vesta (core, mantle and crust) is the key trait that makes Vesta more like planets such as Earth, Venus and Mars than the other asteroids, McCord said. Like the planets, Vesta had sufficient radioactive material inside when it coalesced, releasing heat that melted rock and enabled lighter layers to float to the outside. Scientists call this process differentiation.

McCord and colleagues were the first to discover that Vesta was likely differentiated when special detectors on their telescopes in 1972 picked up the signature of basalt. That meant that the body had to have melted at one time.

Officially, Vesta is a "minor planet" -- a body that orbits the sun but is not a proper planet or comet. But there are more than 540,000 minor planets in our solar system, so the label doesn't give Vesta much distinction. Dwarf planets – which include Dawn's second destination, Ceres -- are another category, but Vesta doesn't qualify as one of those. For one thing, Vesta isn't quite large enough.

Dawn scientists prefer to think of Vesta as a protoplanet because it is a dense, layered body that orbits the sun and began in the same fashion as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, but somehow never fully developed. In the swinging early history of the solar system, objects became planets by merging with other Vesta-sized objects. But Vesta never found a partner during the big dance, and the critical time passed. It may have had to do with the nearby presence of Jupiter, the neighborhood's gravitational superpower, disturbing the orbits of objects and hogging the dance partners.

Go, read!