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Saturday, October 14, 2023

Sideline: Dropping in on new social networks.

Well, I've spent some time on Mastodon and put up a BlueSky profile last night to see what they were like.


I'll keep visiting Mastodon, though I don't spend much time there. There are some interesting people, though the interface is clunky even after a few months on the platform and there's no encrypted private messaging.
https://writing.exchange/@mattbille
BlueSky? Pluses: 1) it looks like, works like, and is a simpler, cleaner Twitter, which it used to be part of; 2) A lot of refugees from Science Twitter - I had friends the moment I landed. Minuses: the writing community looks much smaller and less active, experts say the data-selling rules are really bad, and I haven't found whatever the connections / circles / networks features are. But it's still in beta, with 1 million people total, so I will drop in to see how it is developing. I just spotted a third-party app for encrypted messaging.
@mattbille.bsky.social
I have not tried Threads, which I understand has the worst privacy/data rules ever invented.
I'm moving away from X, which a man I used to admire is driving into a Xesspool and to eventual Xtinction. I'm still active because there are so many writers and writer events, but it's only a matter of time.
MattWriter

 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Happy National Fossil Day!

 Can you guess mine? 




 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!



Wednesday, October 04, 2023

Sputnik 1 at 66

On October 4, 1957, the 84-kg Object PS 1, as the Soviet Union called it - or Sputnik 1, as everyone else called it - rode a modified R-7 ICBM into space and into global headlines. 

What happened next? Many momentous things.



R7 and Sputnik display at Museum of Flight (Matt Bille)


The Sputnik program's creator was Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, leader of Soviet long-range missile and space programs. Despite having done an undeserved and almost fatal stretch in a gulag for "sabotage," he was a Russian patriot who, like his counterpart Wernher von Braun (of whom he once wistfully said, "We should be friends"), had one eye on missiles and one on spaceflight. (No one outside the USSR knew who Korolev was.)

Korolev had an explicit commission to beat the United States to the first satellite. He was spurred on by a belief that a US Jupiter-C reentry vehicle test flight was a failed satellite attempt. When the initial satellite design, "Object D," was initially too big and unreliable to launch in 1957, Korolev's right-hand man, Mikhail Tikhonravov, suggested they instead fly the simplest possible satellite. The lead designer of the satellite itself was Nikolai Kutyrkin. The launch was a success, and Sputnik 1's famous "beep" - described by LIFE magazine as "a cricket with a cold" - was heard worldwide. (Object D later become Sputnik 3.)

As Korolev congratulated his comrades, saying, "The road to the stars is now open!"

Radio operators around the world tuned in and millions scanned the night sky. The satellite was too small to be seen with the naked eye, but the core of the R-7 booster had followed Sputnik into orbit and was spotted easily. This visual proof magnified the satellite’s impact. Reports that Sputnik caused panic in Western nations were exaggerated. However, influential American media outlets, most notably LIFE and US News and World Report, published alarmist critiques, which succeeded in raising the public’s concern.

Sputnik 1 sent shock waves through U.S. and allied governments. Missile experts correctly deduced the launcher was a powerful ICBM. The Soviet Union had announced the first flight of Korolev’s ICBM a few months earlier, but U.S. intelligence had been unsure of the announcement's validity. Now there was no doubt.  If the little sphere caused consternation among governments, it also excited scientists who knew that the Earth satellite concept, long a theoretical possibility, had at last been proven feasible. British author and space visionary Arthur C. Clarke recalled that it was "...a complete shock, but I realized it would change the world." The international impact of Sputnik was unexpected even by the Soviet leaders. At first, the official newspaper Pravda gave the launch only a brief mention. Only after it became clear Sputnik had caused a global sensation did the satellite earn banner headlines. A CIA assessment stated that Sputnik had immediately increased Soviet scientific and military prestige among many peoples some governments. Soviet diplomats and politicians made the most of the resulting admiration.  President Eisenhower reassured the public that the U.S. satellite program had not been conducted as a race against other nations and Sputnik raised no new security concerns. In private, he called his advisers on the carpet for an explanation of why the "backward" USSR had gone first. Ike refused demands from some Congressional and media alarmists for an all-out crash program in space, calling only for $1 billion in extra funding for American missile programs.  A consequence the Soviets didn't foresee was the effect of Sputnik on international law. Before Sputnik, the right of transit through space above a nation’s territory was an unsettled question. Donald Quarles, Eisenhower’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, pointed out that the Soviets had done the United States an unintentional favor by establishing the concept of freedom of international space. Not one government protested the overflight of Sputnik. "Freedom of space” was eventually enshrined by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.  Sputnik's success gave Korolev vast resources to devote to his dreams of spaceflight. The price imposed was the need to keep the successes coming to maintain leadership in this new field. Korolev responded with new satellites, lunar probes, and in 1961 the launch of the first human into orbit. Sputnik also galvanized the lagging U.S. space program. With the official U.S. satellite program, the Naval Research Laboratory's Project Vanguard, still struggling, the Army missile team headed by Wernher von Braun was given approval to launch a satellite. After a frantic effort, Explorer 1 was orbited in January 1958. The Pentagon created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to lead its space programs and the post of Director, Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E). Civilian space programs, Eisenhower decided, should belong to a new agency. On 1 October 1958 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) came into existence. It began pursuing numerous space endeavors, including science and applications satellites and its own human-in-space program. Sputnik’s launch was the beginning of the journey to the Moon.






Want to know more? Read The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites


 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!


Review of a Marvelous Modern Bestiary

The Modern Bestiary: A Curated Collection of Wondrous Wildlife

Joanna Bagniewska 

Smithsonian Books, 2022, 256 pp.


Happy World Animal Day: October 4, birthday of Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals.  

As a sometime writer on zoology, my first thought in browsing through this book, was, “Damn, why didn’t I write this?” Fortunately for readers, Dr. Bagniewska, a zoologist who is, among other things, a science comedian, does it better than I ever could. This is an animal book you will browse, devour, keep, and use to pose zoological trivia questions no one will answer. She writes that a classic bestiary should reflect a sense of wonder, and she delivers.

On the question of what species to include in her 100 subjects, Bagniewska took an unusual approach. First, she determined to include animals from every branch of the kingdom. There are some “stars” like the panda and the platypus here, but most of the two-page essays concern animals the general public knows little about or hasn’t even heard of. Then she applied the “Marie Kondo rule” – did writing about it give her joy?

The result is fascinating, Her writing is superb, both technically precise and funny. Bagniewska anthropomorphizes quite a bit and spends a lot of time on animals’ bizarre reproductive habits, which reduces the chance of this being adopted as a textbook but makes it the most enjoyable animal book of the year  A few times, this very well-read animal aficionado had to stop and grab the Oxford Dictionary of Zoology. Then you hit the end of the essay and she closes with the kind of bad animal pun I always appreciate – the way frog-to-frog predation is “a classic case of cold-blooded murder” or (I wonder how long this took her)  the dictatorial queen of a naked mole rate colony, whose subjects eat her feces, has shown that “a combination of bullying and crap meals is an effective way of running an underground organization.”

I never knew that female Giant Australian cuttlefish who are not in the mood create a highly visible white stripe on their fin. (A human equivalent would save a lot of hurt feelings.) Or that an Australian musk duck learned to imitate its keeper; just imagine hearing “You bloody fool!” from a duck. Or that some pangolins effectively have scales lining their stomachs as well as their backs. Or that velvet worms form territorial packs, with the dominant female having first dibs on food. They somehow hunt together at a speed of 4 cm per minute. Or how fish gather around a "Bobbit worm" and annoy iit until it until it retreats under the seafloor. And I certainly didn’t know a coconut crab, member of a species prone to talking off with odd objects, once stole a gun from a military guard. (OK, that's "alleged," but I don't care.)

The good doctor walks us through complex processes like the multiple survival mechanisms of the Saharan silver ant, which moves as fast as a human even when it’s 46.5 degrees (115 if you like your degrees in Fahrenheit). You’ll learn how herring communicate by farts, how the Mary River turtle breathes through its rear end, and Common swifts build muscle for their intercontinental journeys by doing push-ups with the tips of their wings.

 There’s a surprise on every page, and Bagniewska has done a monumental job of research. Extensive sourcing information for each essay and an index (which should not be a big deal, but some publishers no longer pay for it) complete a wonderful book. 


 Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com.

Read Matt's Latest book, Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist's Library. This unique reference offers a friendly skeptic's 400 reviews of books on cryptozoology, zoology, related sciences, and cryptozoological fiction. Your search for the world's new and undiscovered animals begins here!