ICM Conference, final day

Day 3

January 6

Today included two presentations followed by a tour of Marineland and the approximate area where the 1896 “giant octopus”  beached.  I wasn’t able to make the afternoon activities, but the morning had plenty to offer. 

First off was an important bit of business. Loren Coleman announced the kickoff of the International Cryptozoology Society, with an online peer-reviewed journal and regular conferences.  I asked him to describe how the ICS would be different from existing organizations – what new value would it bring? He answered that, while the ICS mission statement is still being written, its intent was to carry on the work of the International Society for Cryptozoology, which tried hard to put scientific principles to work in cryptozoology.  The will be headed by Dr. LeBlond as the first President, while an advisory panel including several PhD’s is being set up but is not yet announced (Coleman added that the scientific world won’t listen to you unless you have several PhD’s around, and he has a point.) Loren and the ICM Deputy Director, Jeff Meuse, will do the day-to-day work of running the ICS. The first conference is planned for Portland, Maine, site of the new/expanded museum, in 2017. 

Loren described the ICS as being strictly scientific and said that “true believers and debunkers” were not welcome. I understand what he’s aiming for, but this statement is fraught with problems that will have to be worked out.  Does “true believers” count all the people who think sasquatch is an apparition or assign it psychic abilities? (There’s no way to avoid framing questions in terms of sasquatch, despite the large number of potential cryptids all over the world: Bigfoot is the predominant topic in most of cryptozoology these days, and the one that attracts significant money from the TV world.) Even more difficult, what qualifies as a “debunker”?   I assume it encompasses people who think the whole field is a pseudoscience, but those people usually make some points worth considering if cryptozoology is to shed the “crazy” label.  Does it include people who think the field has some value but are heavily critical of its methods and findings? How does one differentiate between reasonable and unreasonable "debunking?"

If it were me trying to define these terms, I’d let all but the most closed-minded "debunkers"in (assuming they’d want to join) but make it clear on the other end of the spectrum that there will be no publications or leading roles for anyone who thinks the solutions are to be found in the paranormal. As a Christian, I believe by definition that the material universe is not all that exists, but cryptozoology is trying to establish itself as a science and needs to leave all matters outside the material to the parapsychologists.  I think Loren is sincere in his desire to create a reputable organization, and I'll provide my input in as a member and see what Loren and LeBlond and other leaders work out as guidelines.

OK, presentations:

Jerome Hamlin, one of the world’s leading coelacanth experts and founder of the Dinofish.com site, reported on his adventures in search of new populations. He began by chronicling the known history, returning to this topic later to describe the numerous failed attempts to make some kind of tank that would keep the deep-dwelling fish alive after a catch.  While the lungfishes and not the coelacanths are the fish in our direct line of ancestry, the coelacanth remains a much sought after scientific prize. Particularly sought are juvenile examples: Hamlin mentioned only one he knew of, and ichthyologists don’t know where the fish grow up.

The original discovery off East London, South Africa, has been followed by new populations as far north as Kenya and Tanzania and as far east as Indonesia.  Following an email alleging the fish was known in the Solomon Islands, Hamlin made four trips to islands in the Solomons, other nearby chains, and Papua New Guinea to the south and west.  One aspect of this with lessons for all of cryptozoology is how carefully he tried to avoid cuing people to tell him what they thought he wanted to hear. He classed the responses he got into three groups:

   1.       Trying to please him

   2.       Truthful but inaccurate

   3.       Both accurate and true.

The results were less than he’d hoped for. One some islands, no one had ever seen a similar fish: one islander got his hopes up but brought him specimens of a kind of jack, although the fit wasn’t very close. The stories Hamlin heard of caught coelacanths seemed straightforward, but didn’t lead to any new populations. Fishermen who had seen one, or heard of one, all emphasized this was a very rare fish, and no one had caught one in the last couple of years: many catches were distant memories.  If truthful, these men were probably referring to stray individuals, as no one knew of a good place to catch them regularly. One man did tell him the fish was blue in life but turned brown in death, a fact Hamlin had avoided mentioning, so he was encouraged to think there were at least occasional catches. After his expeditions, a Japanese team did discover a new population off Biak, an island just north of Papua.

 I asked whether his visits to fishing villages and surveys of fish markets had led to any new species of fish, but he said no: the fish being brought in and/or sold looked pretty run of the mill.

Lyle Blackburn made the day’s Bigfoot presentation. Lyle, a Texan, has spent many months in neighboring Arkansas researching the Fouke monster, famous due to the 1972 film The Legend of Boggy Creek (most of the events in the original film were reported as true, although the funny scene of a guy minding his business on the toilet and having a giant furry hand reach in through the window was invented.) Lyle emphasized the area was still almost as undeveloped as it had been in 1972, and that sighting records stretched from 1908 to 2015.  

I pointed out that a common critique of cryptozoologists (hammered at repeatedly in the influential book Abominable Science) is that they already have their solution in mind and consciously or unconsciously cue witnesses to tell them things that fit the preconceived narrative.  I asked how he tried to avoid this. Lyle’s response was that he went after the story thinking of himself as an investigative journalist who wants to solve the mystery, saying “I’m not out to prove Bigfoot,” although he certainly believes the creature exists. He lets the witnesses tell their story without interrupting before he starts questioning. He always asks whether the subject could have been a person in costume (and is usually told the witness thinks not.)

Closing thoughts
First and foremost, the Conference was valuable: I learned a lot. I didn’t change my mind on any major cryptid, but as I said yesterday, I have a much better understanding of the people who endorse those North American primates and other creatures and why they endorse them.  I will join the new ICS and wish it the best of luck. 

The Conference could have added someone from the Florida wildlife departments to talk about local creatures and activities of interest, such as the Florida panther, the known and suspected colonies of escaped monkeys (and reportedly apes), and the persistent reports that other out of place mammals, like the jaguarondi, may have become established. This should be standard practice wherever future conferences are held: take advantage of the local wildlife and the expertise available to discuss it, such as getting someone from Maine in to talk about what they think happened to the state's panthers and why they think recent reports are erroneous.   While I know Loren tried to get quite a few people who could not make it, the meeting also could have used a speaker or two more skeptical of the major cryptids.   

I would have like an anthropologist to review the ideas about possible ancestors and routes of travel for sasquatch ancestors’ arrival in North America, a topic none of the sasquatch-related speakers addressed. This was the conference’s most significant omission, scientifically. I should have pressed more on it, but the presenters were talking about what they think IS, rather than how it came to be.   

Overall, though, I’d like to say again that this meeting was valuable, and that people who think cryptozoology is a complete waste of time should come to the next one and listen and discuss and debate: we’d all be better off for that. From my experience with this crowd, such a person would generate a lot of discussion but wouldn't have to fear being ostracized or dunked in a river: certainly I didn't get anything but polite argument when I expressed concerns about the science.  I was impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge on display, even if I disagree about some of the conclusions.  I had a great time.  See ya’ll in Portland, I hope!

ICM Conference, Day 2 (updated and completed entry)

International Cryptozoology Museum Conference

Day 2

January 5, 2016

Today was the full day of presentations here at the ICM conference. Not to throw in a plug, but the Casa Monica is a great old hotel, updated with all the amenities, and Loren Coleman of the ICM did a great job in picking the hotel and getting everyone an affordable rate at the height of tourist season.

I’d forgotten how touristy Florida was: the tackiness is so assertive that a kind of grandeur creeps into it.  It’s different from the tackiness you see in most tourist spots, though: in Florida, it’s an affectionate kind of tacky, where everyone, locals and visitors, is in on the joke and no one takes it too seriously.  This is the first European city in the Americas, and there’s a lot of real history showing its face amid the T-shirt shops. 

Anyway, today was all about presentations. I am a skeptic of most cryptozoolgical claims: it would take more than we have now to make me believe in huge unknown American primates or Mongolian death worms.  But the level of science in the presentations was frankly higher than I’d expected, and I came away understanding much better WHY the convinced people are convinced.  People who are sure cryptozoology has nothing to offer science should spend more time with these folks.  At the very least, their work tells us more about folklore, beliefs, and the way we view nature. At the most, it may yet point the way to some major discoveries. (BTW, these are in the order I wrote them up, not exactly the order they were presented in.)

My presentation on bears was very well received. I pointed out mysteries that still exist with bears (the reported giant black variety of the Kamchatka brown bear) while arguing that other questions, such as the identity of the odd grizzly known as MacFarlane’s bear, can be put to rest. Bears offer many lessons for cryptozoologists, from the ways they are tracked and studied to the attitudes of officialdom toward inconvenient reports.  I gave the presentation to Loren and will share it with anyone who asks.

My day: photo by Michelle Souliere of the ICM (I'm having some trouble downloading images from my phone, but will get it done.) 

French cryptozoologist Michael Raynal couldn’t attend in person or by Skype, so Loren Coleman did his presentation on the giant octopus of St. Augustine. It was a fascinating presentation, with a lot of old news clippings and photos, with Dr. Paul LeBlond (see below), a Canadian, helping out by translating some verbiage from the French. The carcass that came ashore in 1896, was, very probably, a sperm whale’s blubber/skin/connective tissue, but as long as we’re not absolutely certain, some mystery – and some fun – remains. (Or I hope it does: personally I write this off now as a whale. As usual, I hope I'm wrong.) Terry Cullen, a herpetological genetics expert in attendance, suggested the newest tests should be done on the bits of tissue that still remain as samples. Loren made the interesting point that the tourist mecca of St. Augustine has somehow missed making any financial hay out of this event: indeed, local shops hold nothing about it at all.  

Dr. LeBlond, a physicist and oceanographer whose curiosity drew him into the “Caddy” business some years ago, opened by describing two recurrent “sea monster” motifs of First Nations people in the British Columbia and adjoining areas. What’s come to be called “Caddy” is also well known locally, and LeBlond has amassed a large collection of sightings which he believes make the two most important criteria: 1) Clearly an animal, and 2) not a KNOWN animal. Plotting these by length from 10 feet (noting that 10-footers could be seals), to 100-footers (mistaken whales?) yields a cluster at 40-59 feet.   He notes that sighting areas do not stay static over time: that is, you can have a run of sightings in one area, then a gap of several years before that area produces another sighting. On the complex issue of the Nash video of numerous animals which appear to be harassing a pod of belugas, he notes the animals turned back when they neared a fishing boat’s nets, and, while features like flippers were never seen, the front ends seemed to have a profile something like a Boeing 747 with its bulbous nose section. At one point, in a video segment which is either lost or taped over, LeBlond and cryptozoologist John Kirk (viewing it separately) saw a head, a bit like a seal’s but much more oval in horizontal cross-section when seen from the front and with a smaller neck, pop up and look toward the camera. I discussed with him afterward the question of how sure he was that a drawing of this, circulated widely in the cryptozoological community and in his latest book, was accurate. He was cautious about it: it matched what he remembered, but with he and Kirk contributing what they thought the tape showed at a considerable distance to an artist, the final drawing is “about five steps removed” from what the actual animal looks like, and there is some margin for error. 

Archaeologist/anthropologist Kathy Strain gave a very thought-provoking presentation about the prevalence of Sasquatch-type creatures in Native American lore.  I knew there were a lot of legends, stories, and, supposedly, history about such creatures, but I had no idea how ubiquitous it was. “Hairy Man” type creatures exist in art, basketry, songs, dances, totem poles, and oral histories, much of it pre-Columbian.  While there are many variations, a common and amusing one was that females carried baskets and swept up bad children to take them away to eat, while males, often half-human, sort of blundered around eating mostly nuts and shellfish.  Strain showed old films of dances, showed pictographs of Hairy Man people weeping (because humans were afraid of them), and played back a haunting song from one tribe that only women were allowed to sing (it asked the Hairy Man to come take away the spirits of the dead at a funeral.)  Since many Western stories are about real animals endowed with fanciful characteristics, she argues, these kinds of beliefs don’t mean the animals are not real. When I asked how a non-expert could differentiate between spiritual and physical creatures in Native American tales, she explained that a creature could be either or both, just as Christians and others believe we are both body and spirit/soul. The art object she showed that stuck with me was a centuries-old Haida mask decorated with horsehair that looks so much like an ape that she is  stumped to suggest what else it could be, and I had the same reaction. While many cultures can tell visitors what they want to hear, either to please them or to pull their legs, Strain believes the unbroken continuity of countless tribes’ beliefs across ages indicate that recent additions don’t detract from the essential point that those who lived here before Columbus widely believed such creatures were real, and many believe they are here still. (Native Americans believe that, however their own ancestors arrived in North America, the hairy ones were already here just as all the other animals were.) None of this adds up to hard evidence of existence, but collectively it's a bit challenging to just dismiss as myth.

Cliff Barackman gave a very good tutorial on footprints, focusing mostly on mystery primates but with other examples. He stressed that a footprint is not an image of the foot: it is an image of the damage the foot did to the ground, which may be quite different.  Indeed, two footprints made in succession by the same animal can look different, and footprints' origin can be disguised by various forces: for example, overlapping bear tracks can look surprisingly human.  A common trait in fake sasquatch feet is the lack of flexibility: Barackman argues the real primate he believes exists has very flexible feet (some experts say there is a mid-tarsal break, essentially an extra joint, but Cliff doesn’t go that far). He dismisses three- and four-toed impressions as hoaxes.  He argues several sets of “real” tracks have very clear dermal ridges, although he did not really address how wide the variation is in what are deemed by various researchers to be authentic five-toed sasquatch tracks.  On the rarity of apparent juvenile impressions, he and others at the conference have noted that genuine juvenile footprints might be taken for bare human feet.  Whatever one thinks of sasquatch, he imparted a great deal of useful information, especially for us suburban folk trying to understand technical discussions over footprints. He has collected some 50 impressions of Sumatra’s orang-pendek and, while he believes this is a real animal, doesn’t believe it’s related to the Flores “hobbits” – the widely separated big toe is distinctly ape-like.

I asked him about one of the most puzzling footprints of all time, that photographed in the snows of Everest by Shipton and Ward, and he felt this was not related to sasquatch-type creatures or the orang-pendek: if it was a genuine print, it belonged to some other species.

Biologist and TV host Pat Spain of the series Beast Hunters stood up, and I'm glad he was late in the day because following his act would have been impossible. Funny, personable, and persuasive, he explained how a biologist who started by studying shellfish (he once submitted a paper subtitled  "Sprat Pain by Pat Spain" ended up chasing cryptids all over the world. Along the way, he discovered that watching a Westerner use the latrine is entertainment in a remote Cameroon village and that young female orangutans are capable of molesting a human male in the most intimate, uncomfortable, and embarrassing ways possible.
He felt at least two animals, mokele-mbembe and the Mongolian death worm, were cultural constructs, and explained what purpose each legend served in its respective culture. He noted that with mokele-mbembe, looking at pictures of different animals has been gamed by local entrepreneurs: people looked to the guides for nods on whether they should say a certain animal lived in their area.
Spain didn't see an orang-pendek but is convinced they exist. The local people he worked with in Sumatra not only seemed truthful but a bit awed by the animal's humanlike locomotion: while it may be a type of gibbon, it walks bipedally by nature, without the usual gibbon arm-balancing. He emphasized the people he talked to knew every detail of the lives of gibbons, orangutans, and other local primates.  Most memorably, he reported a conversation with Dr. Mike Morwood, the discoverer of the 18,000-year-old Flores "hobbits," who told Spain he had hard evidence, which he planned to publish, showing that species was alive into the 1920s! The evidence was apparently lost or misplaced with the scientist's premature death of cancer in 2013, although it may lie somewhere in his archives awaiting rediscovery. Someone really needs to push this hard and find out what he had.
Likewise, the certainty of a tribe Spain befriended in the Amazon (by going through an incredibly painful ritual involving gloves filled with huge stinging ants) about the mapinguari made him feel some kind of ground sloth was a distinct possibility.  He also thinks some form of large sea creature exists within the "Caddy" data. He doesn't know what it is, but the number of sincere witnesses he  talked to, given the fact that "every marine scientist believes there are some large animals left undiscovered," makes him fairly certain something is afoot.
Spain argued hard that cryptozoology and "mainstream" biology are mutually supporting: his work on Caddy included looking at the oarfish as a candidate and funded the first-ever CAT scan of an oarfish, producing a trove of data on that very strange creature.
I asked Spain about the use of cryptozoology in science education, something I've proposed a panel on for the June 2016 Denver ComiCon. He thinks it's very valuable and described how he's gotten young people to learn about the woods by suggesting they look for Bigfoot and along the way studying animal tracking, ecology, and the food chain. Loren Coleman asked him if mokele-mbembe might be, not a reptile, but a semi-aquatic rhino: Spain is certain, though, that the area he examined houses nothing exceptional. (The geology of the area, he noted, ruled out any underground or underwater caves, although he did not go to one other site, Lake Tele: it's unreachable due to conflicts. )

We ended up at a theater watching Revenge of the Creature, the slightly inferior but still impressive sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Lagoon films remain surprisingly effective and affecting: the creature's loneliness and his torment at being shocked by scientists studying his learning capability come through well, and the suits remain superb even on close examination.

 And so ended a very, very interesting day.

International Cryptozoology Museum Conference, Night 1

International Cryptozoology Museum Conference

Night 1

January 4, 2016

I like cryptozoologists.  Even though I don’t use the term for myself anymore (too much TV baggage), I like the people I meet in the business.  I like their stubborn optimism, their enthusiasm, and their determination. Except for the hoaxers, they’re a great bunch to hang out with.  I critique the field a lot for its collective habit of endorsing particular “crypids” before the evidence justifies it, but science needs optimists, even wild-eyed ones.

So here I am at the inaugural ICM Conference in St. Augustine, FL.  Loren Coleman, founder of the ICM in Portland, Maine, ably seconded by his effervescent wife Jenny, has gathered some of the most active people in the field.  He hoped for 100+ attendees to create one of the leading conferences on the subject, but it’s the first year, and maybe half that have gathered. What they lack in numbers, though, they make up for in energy, and the white-bearded Coleman is as enthusiastic as they come. 

I wish I could describe all of Night 1, but I spent the opening social on the road after a two-hour delay in Atlanta to fix a fuel pump in the airplane and re-top the tanks. This was annoying but ok with us passengers: a retired Navy pilot sitting next to me commented that the only time a plane can have too much fuel is when it’s on fire. 

So what I missed was the awarding of the Golden Yeti, a rather intimidating-looking statuette that went to the Cryptozoologist of the Year. The awardee was Jeremy Efroymson, a film-maker, attorney, writer, and philanthropist who I honestly hadn’t heard of, but he’s been important: as Loren wrote, “Jeremy is bestowed this honor for his quiet but steady support of serious cryptozoological pursuits. Jeremy and the Efroymson Family Foundation have awarded grants and funds since at least, 2012, to such grantees as the Virtual Footprints Archive at Idaho State University, the Ohio Bigfoot Conference, and the International Cryptozoology Museum.”  Cryptozoology doesn’t exactly top the list for National Science Foundation grants, so the field is fortunate to have Jeremy.

The Golden Yeti

I did make the presentation on the Florida Skunk Ape, a subject of interest since I grew up down the coast from here in Vero Beach.  I heard only rumors of sightings as a kid, but I knew what it was, or was supposed to be. 

(Quick aside: I was volunteering on a political campaign in 1976 when a newspaper from the town of St. Cloud headlined a "900-lb Hairy Creature Stalking Reedy Creek Area." I pinned it to the wall with the note that we now knew where our opponent was campaigning. It was funny at the time.) 

Tonight’s presenter was Rob Robinson.  I’ve used the word “enthusiastic” a lot, but I had to use it again here.  He was an infectious speaker, weaving a great story with bits of humor like the time he was scared out of his wits by a large nocturnal animal that turned out to be a cow. He debunked some recent photo and video hoaxes but showed some images no one present had seen before. (Still too distant, too dark, etc., although a video of a dark figure gliding easily through swampy areas where human would normally walk with great difficulty was interesting despite the poor quality of the image.  )  When I asked him the standard question – why isn’t there better evidence, when we have roadkills and photos of the extremely rare Florida panther – he replied he thinks the evidence is mounting, even if mostly “blobsqatch" imagery and footprints so far – as people become more aware. He thinks a small population of smart primates very wary of humans could hide in Florida wilderness a long time. Despite my skepticism on all things squatch-related, I can’t really say that’s impossible, although there's still the huge problem of how a large primate got to North America, when, and from where..  His belief Florida supports two anomalous primates, Bigfoot and the smaller (and smellier) Skunk Ape, is even harder to accept, but his belief there is SOMETHING going on is intriguing.

On the subject of another cryptid, or near-cryptid, Rob commented on my mention of the Florida panther by reporting he and his wife watched a black Florida panther walk right in front of their car in daylight. There aren’t supposed to be melanistic panthers in Florida, but there aren’t supposed to be any in Maine, either, and my dad is pretty certain about the one he saw 60 years ago. Mammologist Jeff Corwin described his own Florida panther sighting thus: “It was darker than the panthers I'd seen in photos, more charcoal than sage.” So I’ve never ruled out black, or at least dark, panthers, although Florida wildlife authorities blew Rob off when he said “black.” 

There was an interesting documentary showing after that meeting, but I had work to do for my day job and had to beg off. But I enjoyed Night 1, as brief as it was, and look forward to Day 2, including my own talk on bears. 

It’s all off to a howling good start. 

The Giant Squid Appears

The giant squid Architeuthis dux  isn't a new discovery: it was described in 1857. However, it was ignored by most learned men before that time and, in large part,  for many years thereafter.  The kraken was a fable, tales of real giants were sailors' tales, etc.  It wasn't until 2005 that the first images of a live giant squid were obtained, and until 2012 there was no video.
Now we have amazing footage from Japan of an encounter between humans and squid. The encounter was peaceful, even beneficent: as the 3.7-m squid circled under fishing boats in Toyama Bay, a dive shop owner named Akinobu Kimura dove into the water next to it. It explored him with its tentacles but made more aggressive moves, and he tried to urge it toward the open sea, to which it eventually returned.
We don;t know how many squid there are, where they congregate, or how they spend their lives. Modern science continues to strive to fill in the blanks, but the blanks are enormous. It's a creature of mystery - which is pretty cool.

Fixing history

Someone once wrote, "History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there." All of us, amateur and professional, who call ourselves historians work hard to make sure this anonymous person was wrong. We can't do anything about not being there, but we can ensure we write about what happened. (I reject the "post-modernist" school of thought which says we should give up on acquiring objective knowledge of the past. The Japanese either attacked Pear Harbor on 7 December 1941 or they didn't.  If you want to know what Admiral Yamamoto had for breakfast that morning and find no sources, you just say that detail is lost to history: it doesn't affect the truth or objectivity of the details you CAN document.)

Sometimes writing history means fixing our own mistakes.

Where do mistakes in history come from?  I can think of four examples.

In The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites, 499 endnotes and six years of work didn't prevent us from being wrong about a test launch of the Viking sounding rocket. I had used a single source, an interview, and I'd written a comment down wrong and never went back to check. So this is a case where the historian (me) wasn't careful.

Other times, we just miss something. I'd written that the model of the US Explorer 1 satellite displayed at a post-flight press conference was black and white, based on a photograph. It wasn't: in all that research, co-author Erika Vadnais (nee Lishock) and I never learned that there was a color version of the photo which showed the model was colored copper and blue.  Another way to miss something is not to talk to the original sources if available: all museum models of Explorer 1 are black and white, but the payload engineer, then (1999) still alive, told us the flight article was bare stainless steel with white striping, and historian John Bluth at NASA JPL dug out a previously unpublished photograph that demonstrated that recollection was right. (The museum models, all of them, are still wrong, and we've made no headway in getting that fixed.)

Explorer 1 (shown here with Sputnik 1) as it did NOT appear. 

Third, a historian can publish the best available material only to have future material declassified or discovered after publication. This isn't the historian's fault, but it needs to be fixed whenever possible. (alas, First Space Race didn't sell well enough to get a second edition. I have covered all the mistakes and new information in this blog and elsewhere: you may think that's not really adequate, but I've done the best I can.)

Fourth, historians can repeat something without checking. The memoir of Wernher von Braun's US Army boss, General Bruce Medaris, said that the first orbit of Explorer 1 was verified by the announcement "Goldstone has the bird." This seemingly authoritative quote went into every subsequent book that touched on Explorer 1, including William Burroughs' 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner ...the Heavens and the Earth.  But no one had ever checked the quote, and we found that Medaris, despite being a principal actor in the Explorer 1 drama, was wrong: the tracking station at Goldstone in California did not yet exist.  So we discussed this in The First Space Race, theorizing that Medaris accidentally ascribed an announcement from a later mission to Explorer 1.

Richard Easton points out in this column in The Space Review that two authors, both of whom could have accessed the right information easily (as in Wikipedia-easily) misstated the origin of the GPS satellites, including conflating them with the earlier Transit program. Transit was the first satellite navigation system, developed by the Navy for use in ship and sub navigation, but it wasn't technically related to the Air Force's later GPS. Easton notes that Stephen Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From, gets this wrong. It's ok to make a mistake if you correct it, but Johnson blew him off when he pointed out the error, and that's inexcusable.  Likewise, Annie Jacobson's The Pentagon's Brain, about DARPA, makes a hash out of the origins of GPS, including giving DARPA a role it never had.  I already distrusted Jacobson for some ridiculous pseudoscience crap in her book about Area 51 and many errors in her Operation Paperclip. The trouble is that her books sell very well and the errors will likely carry into the future.

These seem to be cases where the writers didn't do enough research and self-checking: they may have seen something incorrect in a source, or read but misremembered something, and just went with it.  I get it: I've done all that: but you have to be willing to fix it.  I don't have a solution, except to remind all writers of history that they have a responsibility to get it right.  We can't draw the right lessons from history of we don't get history right.

Aviation History: My Dad and the Piper Enforcer

I like aviation history and, like many others, enjoy the tales of oddities, one-offs, and planes that never quite made it..

My dad had a hand in one such bit of history.  The P-51 (later F-51) was the dominant U.S. land-based fighter of World War II: indeed,  it stayed in service into the 1980s, and the Dominican Republic have retired the last operational Mustangs in 1984.  Not bad for a plane built in a tremendous hurry and rushed into production: the most famous model, the P-51D, could escort bombers to Berlin and was vital to the US air offensive. (It also starred in the well-meaning but historically and technically screwed-up movie Red Tails).

Anyway, when my father was working for Piper Aircraft in the early 70s, Piper developed a ground support plane for a USAF competition (PAVE COIN) for a cheap export aircraft (the USAF was doing a separate program for its own needs, which led to the superb A-10 "Warthog").  Dad worked on it at Piper in Vero Beach, FL, where we lived, and I remember him going to the "fly-off" at Eglin AFB to support it in competition.  The PA-48 Piper Enforcers were heavily modified P-51 airframes, armored and fitted with Lycoming turboprop engines.  Alas, they never caught on with the USAF or anyone else, and one was destroyed in a crash into the sea off Vero Beach.  Dad had a lot of fun on that project (and worked a ton of overtime).

Dad told me that, even with the addition of more weight including wingtip tanks and underwing stores pylons, the Lycoming gave it so much power the Enforcer consistently outran the P-51 being used as chase plane, and Piper had to rent a T-33 jet to do the task instead. One pilot told him the tests were being monitored by, of all people, British intelligence, one member of which said they found it odd Piper didn't scramble its radio messages. This program was a departure for Piper anyway, since the company had never built an armed aircraft and hasn't since.  Florida's representatives continued to push for it, even claiming it was better than the A-10.  (I have a memory for these things, and I read a mid-70s headline in the paper that said, "Air Force Overlooks Enforcer; Better, Cheaper Plane.")  The program did have a sort of coda, with two new planes built by Congressional direction in the early 1980s, though Dad had left Piper at that point and was not involved.

According to the Aviastar website, the surviving plane Dad worked on (known as PE-1) is in storage somewhere.  He hopes it joins the 1980s airframe that's currently on display in the Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH. If the plane is ever properly displayed, Dad hopes someone opens it up and looks at the job he did wiring it. Not only is the wiring precise, it's completely clean, not a drop of solder out of place.  He hopes someone says, "The SOB who wired this thing knew what he was doing."

Aces, Dad.

Great Planes: the B-36 and the Albatross

On FaceBook, we have one of the most fun groups I've ever run across: The Greatest Planes That Never Were.  There's all kinds of information on airplanes that were never built, never passed the prototype stage, etc.  
There's a wealth of expertise among the group members, too, so I tapped that to examine the feasibility of a plane I designed in my head for a novel.  

"I was playing with a fictional adventure set in 1959 that uses the next development of the nuclear NB-36H: the NB-61X Albatross, a larger twin-fuselage aircraft, the reactor set in its own streamlined pod around the CG, with an endurance of weeks without ground support and months with occasional touchdowns for food, engine oil, etc. the intent was to build a superbomber with a large suite of defensive and offensive weapons that could maintain constant air alert, but the Albatross was too slow and too costly, and only one was built. (For the story we get into circumstances where a patriotic crew has to steal it to stop a traitorous politician' plot, and all sides want to destroy it....) I know the climb rate would be terrible (thinking of emergency boost rockets to escape from attack), but what else would be a consideration? Could you build a wing that would handle the mass? Enlarge the wings? Enlarge the tailplanes? All thoughts welcome. (This is a Young Adult adventure, with a bit of the old Mike Mars vibe, so not everything has to be as accurate and detailed as it is in, say, Flight of the Old Dog, , but I'd like to make it ring true.)"

Surprisingly, the real experts thought it was pretty good. They suggested different engine configurations (the original B-36 was underpowered with its six piston engines, though it improved when jet pods were added.)  So I plan to revisit the Albatross!  

The B-36 was pretty amazing, still, with its  230-foot wingspan and 10,000-mile range.  I've seen a couple at museums: the size exceeds that of its its replacement, the B-52.  It was used for a variety of tests that provided curious-looking one-off versions. Herewith some views of a great plane. 

From top: B-36D with "six turning and four burning:" test aircraft with attachments to tow two F-84 fighters on the wing tips: and NB-36H, testbed for a nuclear-powered bomber (the reactor was not tested in flight).  Then we have the YB-60, an atempt by Convair to build a swept-wing version to compete with the B-52. Only one was built.  Below all these: the fictitious  NB-61H. Photos USAF.

The Great Sperm Whale - in the sea and in the media

The sperm whales are, and were, a fearsome bunch.  The modern species  (Physeter macrocephalus), is the largest predator on Earth, now or ever.  It reached at least 68 feet (this exceptional individual was corralled by Russian whalers in 1950), while some scientists have backed up whalers who claim it reaches, or used to reach, 80+ feet.  It sunk two whaling ships, most notably the famous Essex now depicted in the movei In the Heart of the Sea, and probably sank more which had no survivors.  The ancestral Livyatan melvillei, whose fossils were found in Peru in 2008,  ruled the seas 12-13 million years ago. It was almost as large as its descendant had a full set of teeth, as opposed to the current whale's lower-jaw-only set (which it doesn't even seem to need to slurp down squid.  An ever earlier sperm whale, perhaps the first of the line, was announced in 2015 as belonging to a new genus, Albicetus ("white whale," although we have no idea what color it was in life).  It was announced after fossils found in California in 1925 and originally assigned to a prehistoric walrus  were re-examined. 
Everything about this whale is bizarre. Seen from the front, the animal looks like one of those over/under rifle/shotguns, with the smaller rifle barrel underneath. It has the most powerful and unique weapon ever discovered in nature, a sonic cannon that can stun prey like the giant squid. It can weigh 57 metric tons, maybe more.  It has the largest nose that has ever existed, but can't smell.  A big bull's skull may be over 5.4m long, the same size as the Ford Freestyle SUV in my garage. They are, surprisingly, preyed upon by the smaller pack-hunting killer whale. Rather than bite, the sperm whales go into defensive rosettes where they wave their massive tails or try to push the orcas away with their giant bodies, neither of which seems to work very well. 

The Essex whale was claimed by sailors to be 85 feet long, although exaggeration is to be expected when the whale is sinking your ship. One paper (McClain 2015) accepts 84 feet, and the Nantucket Whaling Museum has a 5.5-m lower jaw ascribed to  an 80-foot specimen: both figures are disputed. Cameron McCormack has a good dissection here.   Richard Ellis suggests they don't get much over 62 feet (19m). The claim of Amos Smalley, who said he killed a solid white whale 90 feet (27.4m) long is universally rejected as an attempt to get (or give) publicity related to the 1956 film version of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. However, white whales have been killed on one occasion and photographed on another. 
The novel has been made into umpteen movies and television specials, including some really weird ones where Moby Dick is a giant prehistoric whale or a white dragon.  Here's a great list.  (The most interesting of the post-Peck efforts was the 1998 two-part TV film starring Patrick Stewart, who was mesmerizing as Ahab but undone by cheap, silly-looking whale effects. An interesting 2011 two-parter had good sea action, but the superb actor William Hurt misfired as Ahab - while I praised his performance in an earlier post, thinking back on it he seemed more cranky than unhinged, and adding his wife (Gillian Anderson, always good) served only to distance him a little more from Melville's iconic Captain.
So that in a nutshell is one of the world's greatest predator, and some of the attempts to capture it.  The animal is so exceptional that it doesn't seem blasphemous to cite Simon the Zealot's line about Jesus in Ezra Pound's poem The Goodly Fere, "They'll no get him all in a book I think  / though they write it cunningly." Melville wrote it cunningly, spectacularly so, and several authors, most recently Richard Ellis, have attempted to write its real life (Ellis, I think, gives us the best nonfiction portrait), but the great whale is still out there, a mystery in many ways despite modern satellite tracking, mass slaughter, and the fascination of scientists, laypeople, and whalers. 

I'll be back after I see the new movie!

(All images from US government sites)

The definitive modern reference is:  Ellis, Richard (2011). The Great Sperm Whale: A Natural History of the Ocean's Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creature. Zoology University Press of Kansas. 

Stomping on Newsweek's Bigfoot special

I knew I was in trouble then the first photos showed a trail of yeti tracks we KNOW are goat tracks - indeed, this trail was never claimed by cryptozoologists to be the yeti's.  I knew we where in more trouble when the next photo showed a "yeti scalp" we KNOW from direct testing is from an animal called a serow.  Despite some good quotes and short interviews  (the bits with Les Stroud and Drs. Bindernagel and Meldrum are interesting) and great photography, this issue overall is not worth your money.  UFOs? "Savant abilities?" "Permission" from a scientific meeting to describe a new species? There's no such thing.  You submit your description to a peer-reviewed journal, and it's accepted or it isn't.
Seriously, who wrote this mishmash? Surely not scientists or qualified science writers.
Sasquatch is a large upright primate, no more and no less.  It either exists or it doesn't, and silly mentions of "a new (read: unscientific) way to do science" or mystical contact or whatever are laced all through this publication.  If Bigfoot uses toilet paper, he can have my copy of this.

Review: The Story of Life in 25 Fossils

• The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil-Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution
• 408 pages
• Columbia University Press; 2015

I'm almost through reading Donald R. Prothero's The Story of Life in 25 Fossils.  It's a genuinely excellent book, focusing mostly on  the key transition fossils between groups but also including some crowd-pleasers like T.rex.  He includes very well-written accounts of the human beings, like Mary Anning, who did so much to bring the past to life.  For the cryptozoologists, he takes a swipe at Loch Ness (a bit too harsh on the witnesses, but his scientific points are valid) and another at the supposed African sauropod mokele-mbembe (again, right on the science, harsh on the people),  He visits the endlessly interesting question of how big certain animals, like everyone's favorite giant shark C. megalodon, got to be. He is very insistent that the maximum sizes accorded in popular media are exaggerated, sometimes hugely: examples include pliosaurs, plesiosaurs (except for the long-necked elasmosaurs, he doubts any marine reptiles exceeded 13m), and fishes like Leedsichthys, which was once accorded a length over 25m but now seems about a third that size, placing Meg as the largest fish of any type ever in his reckoning. He does not include gigantopithecus, which I thought should be here on account of its displaying the size limit for primates, but there's plenty in this book for the paleontologist, the cryptozooloogist, and the general enthusiast of all things zoological.   The section of fossils, presented in timeline order, explains how each major group we know today (and some no longer with us) evolved, and how strong the transitional fossil record is - half-turtles, half-snakes, half-plesiosaurs, etc. abound in these well-illustrated pages.  Everyone, even those of us laypeople who think ourselves well-read,  will learn a few things: I didn't realize that the idea of feathers as modified scales had a competing theory.

A few nitpicks: the icthyosauyrs certainly did not have a speed limit of 1.2 km an hour - some kind of misprint there. And Loch Ness was searched by sonar, not radar - a very different thing.  When talking of sauropods, he doesn't address the recent attempt to resurrect Brontosaurus as a proper name.
This is a great Christmas present for any natural-history lover on your list.

The Martian and much more

Well, I finally saw The Martian, and, as someone who devoured the book, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It's hard to make a movie like this, where one character has three-fourths of the screen time: the actor has to be perfect. Fortunately, Matt Damon was exactly right for Mark Watney. The movie's many omissions compared to the book were generally well-chosen, given that so much material had to be edited out, There were only a couple of oddities (Wouldn't his first question to NASA have been "Is the crew alive?" Wouldn't NASA have brought his parents in once communication was established?).
Unlike most space films, there are no imperious bureaucrats on Earth: Jeff Daniels as the NASA Administrator has to make hard choices and does his best.  My favorite moment, though, is when he decides not to risk a rescue because the program is bigger than one person: the Mars mission  chief says, "No, it's not."  Exploration is still about PEOPLE.
The astronauts and the rest of the cast are multiethnic and international,but a crew voting without hesitation to extend their voyage and risk their lives to get Watney back is a distinctly American film moment. Not that people in every nation don't risk their lives for each other - they certainly do - but the willingness to  do so in this fashion appears throughout American culture and history, be it fact or fiction, until it became rarer in in our cynical age. Shoot me if you want to, I liked seeing the archetype's return.
The science is sound, although the explanations are necessarily brief. The rendezvous at the end has a vanishingly small chance of working, but this is a movie that earns its triumphant ending.The whole cast is great and the NASA dynamics as believable as Watney's gardening.    (I knew the hydrazine bit wouldn't end well, but... well, you have to see it for yourself.)
NASA, not surprisingly, loves the film.  A search on www.nasa.gov for "Watney" (I figured that was the most distinct single term) turns up a couple of dozen hits - mostly images, but with some good articles and clips, including Damon talking to NASA people about making the film. You can even follow Watney's journey on the surface on the MarsTrek portal. (Although it's perturbing to see what's on NASA's main site about growing plants on Mars like in the movie - a single image (seriously, that's IT) with a link to a YouTube video of plant growth on the ISS.)  I'd give the movie 4.5 out of 5 stars, and a bit lower grade to how well NASA's capitalized on it.

The Bagnold Dunes of Mars (NASA)

It's a heck of a time to be in space, especially in the United States. You could write a scorecard for this past wee..
UP:
 - United Launch Alliance announces it will give free launches to student CubeSats. Access to space has been the only thing holding back even wider use of the most popular "form factor" ever for satellites.
 - SpaceX and Beoing received contracts to carry astronauts to the ISS. This will be the first time contractors directly launch US astronauts, although all crewed rockets have been built and operated with contractor assistance.
 - Blue Origin successfully tests its reusable suborbital rocket. The instrumented capsule came down on parachutes while the rocket state landed safely.
DOWN:
 - Elon Musk, who I admire, does a weird Twitter bit putting down Blue Origin.

Not a bad week at all.

Where did whales come from?

Not so many years ago, whales were the favorite taxon of young Earth creationists (YECs) who were quick to point out the lack of transitional forms and the apparently very rapid appearance of whales (that is, nearly modern whales like Basilosaurus (formerly Zegulodon) just sort of popped in without much in the way of ancestry. 
Whales, in the 21st century, are among the best documented of evolving mammalian lines. It's technically not possible to have every transitional form - you'd need the fossil of every individual that had a beneficial mutation - we have a better lineage for whales than palentologists even hoped for a half-century back.  There's a good description and diagram here.  Whales are much better documented than, say, chimpanzees or gorillas, which is interesting given their habitat: the entire collection of modern chimp and gorilla fossils could fit in a file drawer despite there being hundreds of thousands of them walking around. The saving grace for whales has been the transition of ancient seas to modern land masses. Whale paleontologists have been both lucky and good. The book to read is Hans Thewissen's The Walking Whales: From Land to Water in Eight Million Years. I gave it a five-star Amazon review, also featured on my blog here. (I still like the author's illustration of the evolutionary process: he compares the changes involved by asking readers to imagine the Batmobile being given to a group of engineers with orders to use its parts to build the Beatles' Yellow Submarine.) One of the "walking whale" species, Pakicetus, achieved a unique kind of fame by appearing in bestselling author James Rollins' enjoyable thriller Ice Hunt.  (Rollins had to fake the science allowing for mammals to be frozen in ice for millions of years, and the animals are bigger and nastier than we'd expect, but hey, it's fiction.) 
Whales get several chapters in each of my books on animals. One of my favorite bits was reporting mammologist Karin Forney's description to me of her sighting of an unidentified beaked whale in Rumors of Existence (1995) and reporting on the identification of said whale (Perrin's beaked whale, Mesoplodon perrini) in Shadows of Existence (2006).  
One of the most recent finds of an ancient whale was announced in the 2008 publication concerning a new species, Georgiacetus vogtlensis, the Georgia whale. The story of this 3- to 5-meter protowhale is told here. It was the most advanced whale of its time and may have been the ancestor of every modern cetacean. Its nostrils were halfway between the tip of the snout and the location of modern blowholes: the "movement" of the nostrils had been a bone of contention among YEC advocates. An even more spectacular find is the enromous toothed ancestor of the sperm whale, Leviathan melvillei (2010). It has its own documentary, although not yet its own book, unless you count novelist Steve Alten's use of the species in his most recent novel, Vostok. More authors will no doubt use it in fiction: I might do it myself some day.  
Whales are among my favorite animals, and I'll visit them again in my next book.  Until then, enjoy the marvels of whales past and present - in a book, on a whale-watching trip, or in videos and documentaries. They never get boring. 

Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology issue featuring the Georgia whale

(Copyright JVP, educational nonprofit use)

A thought on finding unknown animals

How does one find unknown animals, and do stories/anecdotes help?
Zoologists follow many lines of evidence - folklore, reports by local hunters, the finding of physical evidence (always the goal, but sometimes this just happens out of the blue (Dr. Alan Rabinowitz found at least one new species after seeing horns on display in a hunter's home in Laos)) ,  Ancillary evidence like footprints can also be involved, although not by itself definitive (when Dr. Grover Krantz described sasquatch as a known fossil species, Gigantopithecues blacki, very few of his fellow scientists saw value in it: he named, based only on footprints, a species of which we had no fossils except jaws and teeth.)
The hardest things to evaluate are stories told by individuals. Anecdotal evidence can't support a paper in NATURE describing a new species.  But that doesn't mean anecdotal evidence has no value.  
An individual's story (whether fresh or handed down) can be important to the search for unknown animals in two ways: 1) Stories can point to an animal that might be discovered if physical evidence is searched for as a result of the stories: Rabinowitz found evidence for some animals that way, and so did Dr. Marc van Roosmalen when he found the largest new species of land mammal of the 21st century so far, Roosmalen's tapir. . 2) On the other hand, if an animal is reported in a given area, if there are NO stories about it by indigenous people, that is highly suspicious and important negative evidence. It's the reason the chupacabra can be rejected out of hand - the animal just sort of appeared in the 1990s, Attempts to dig out old, fragmentary, and vague stories that might refer to it are unconvincing.
So listen to stories. Or lack of stories. Either might be important .

Dr. Marcus van Roosmalen, who has found several new monkeys as well as his tapir by using local stories as the starting point for a search. 

Book Review: Discovering Cadborosaurus

Discovering Cadborosaurus

Dr. Paul LeBlond, John Kirk, Jason Walton

Hancock House, 2014

172pp.

LeBlond and his colleagues are quite convinced there’s a large unidentified marine animal off the coast of British Columbia and points north and south.  They don’t quite convince me of that in this book, but they do argue strongly that there’s a puzzle here.

The authors open by emphasizing (correctly) that marine zoologists expect many more species from the sea, though most will be tiny invertebrates. The evidence for Caddy is mostly anecdotal, and the authors list sightings from 1791 to 2013 they consider valid.

What are people seeing? To put my skeptic glasses on, some of the sightings they consider good may be mistakes: the head in Alan Chikite’s 1987 sketch looks like a swimming moose (indeed, a lot of Caddy descriptions and the best-known illustrations show a rather moose-like head: even the 1937 Naden Harbor carcass LeBlond and Ed Bousfield considered their type specimen for Cadborosaurus willsi has bit of that look in its downturned snout, although it’s obviously not a land mammal.)   Horns or ears are commonly reported. Another item reported several times is Caddy chomping, or trying to chomp, on birds either on the surface or flying.

The authors start with Native American traditions of sea creatures (several to choose from) and take the story through the 1930s, when “Caddy” became famous (and named), thanks in large part to newspaperman Archie Wills. They continue through the modern era of books and TV specials and more sightings, including John Kirk’s own in 2010.

A lot of the Caddy evidence is discussed in the context of the Naden Harbor carcass. While the item fished out of a sperm whale’s stomach has been dismissed as a fetal baleen whale (clearly wrong, as the authors demonstrate with a photo of a real one) and a basking shark, it is odd how well it held together under the circumstances, and it’s not certain anyone has ever found a basking shark in a sperm whale. (Richard Ellis mentions a case in one of his books, but only in passing without a reference.) The authors imply the carcass suffered only the slight decomposition caused during the time between the whale’s being caught and its stomach being opened to search for ambergris, although it could have been in the whale considerably longer.  

They also look at the controversial Kelly Nash video from 2007.  The video unquestionably shows a number of living creatures, but their identity is not clear, and the best part – the part that Kirk and LeBlond insist shows a definite camel-like head with bulging eyes on a long neck – has been taped over since they saw it. There’s no reason to doubt the authors’ veracity, but the “missing evidence” thing pops up so often in cryptozoology that we’re all jaded about it. In this case, it reduces what might have been definitive evidence to effectively another sighting report, albeit with good witnesses.

Some of the sightings, taking into account the human inability to be precise about distances and object sizes over water, could be swimming moose or deer, others otters or seals. Two photos included from Cameron Lake look like nothing more than wave/wake action to me. But there’s a core here that remains intriguing. 

The authors wisely don’t attempt to assign a zoological identity, saying correctly that the animal needs to be proven first. They do think the saltwater and freshwater accounts from the region may collectively point to more than one animal. (If I’d been writing this, I would have excluded the freshwater accounts, given that large unknown animals in lakes are even less likely than similar creatures in the ocean, but it’s their book and their call.) You need more than one animal, though, if you accept most of the sightings here as accurate: the solid-body animal with a humped back and the “coiled” animal so slender that daylight can be seen under the “arches” are not compatible.  I’m inclined to think the solid animal is more likely and the coiled one a series of mistakes: the thermoregulation and locomotion of a coiled animal are highly problematic to me, even if you set aside the question of what they might have evolved from. 

Is it possible such a large, striking, and unique creature has evaded science? there are strong reasons to doubt it (see Loxton and Prothero, Abominable Science), but it's not impossible, and the authors try hard to steer the conversation toward there being a real mystery. They do a good job of buttressing the anecdotes with maps, photographs, and drawings.  They provide references and a good bibliography. They have, in short, assembled the best case they currently can for a large unknown “monster.” If that case is not proven, it’s also hard to lock it away as “solved.” 

A Veterans Day Salute to the men and women of Titan II

The Titan II was a remarkable bird. The two-stage rocket, over a hundred feet tall and using storable hypergolic propellants (meaning automatic-igniting - don't try this for you hobby rocket)  was designed as a missile and served 20+ years as a bulwark of cold war deterrence. But it also had two other lives. It was tapped early on the split of a "man-rated" version that carried Gemini spacecraft to orbit. No operational Gemini launch ever failed.  At the end it its career, it was converted into a launcher for DoD satellites - and again, it never failed.

I knew it intimately as a missile crew member, so herewith my Veterans Day salute.

TITANS OF THE WATCH

by Matt Bille, formerly Captain, USAF, Titan II Missile Combat Crew Commander

They called them the Titans

Like the giants of old

And giants they were

Standing deadly and cold

They in their silver

And we in our blue

Alongside them we watched

And the enemies knew

We were there

We felt oft-ignored

Without glory we served

We relied on each other

And we stood by our word

In a life without rhythm

Lived by the clocks

Let it never be said

That we failed on the watch

So we passed the long hours

In silence we watched

No silhouettes painted

No gunbelts to notch

No medals or trophies

No break to the night

But the oath-keepers’ vigil

Let others have light

In the core of the Earth

In the armored command

Power undreamed of

In our keys and our hands

They called it a cold war

And cold it was kept

We knew that behind us

The citizens slept

They didn’t think of us

Or they wished us away

But we kept the watch

To give them the day

We still know each other

Hair silver and grey

The Titan’s proud comrades

We are to this day

We know what we did

We know what it was worth

And brothers we are

Until we return to the Earth

No more the sirens

Or the tick of the clocks

Let it read on my tombstone

“He kept the watch.”

Large, colorful new fish species: the "Blue Bastard."

New fish pop up all the time, and sometimes it turns out we knew about them for a while and scientists hadn't had the time or inclination to think about them. The shoal bass of the United States (Micropterus cataractae, described 1999) is an example.  Another, must more distinct from the related fishes, is the blue bastard.  Australian fishers had tales for a long time of a blue fish up to a meter long that was rare and hard to catch. Finally, someone sent good photographs to the Queens Museum.  It turns out 17 specimens were in museums already, labeled as other members of the so-called "sweetlips" family, which do indeed have big rubbery lips.  As Queens Museum scientist Jeff Johnson explained, the fish is now formally named Plectorhinchus caeruleonothus. “Careleo is blue. And nothus is bastard." he said. 

(Photograph Queens Museum, Presumed available for nonprofit/educational postings.) 

Super Strypi - latest small launch vehicle (UPDATED)

Our newest launch vehicle will fly at 8 PM Eastern from Hawaii:

http://www.24liveblog.com/live/1307947

Super Strypi is the latest attempt to build a smaller, more responsive satellite launcher (although it was proposed in 1998 and just flying now.. but that's bureaucracy, not rocket science.) It has 13 tiny university satellites on board. It will fly south into a 94 degree inclination. It's the first American attempt (the first anywhere I know of) to launch a spin-stabilized, unguided rocket into orbit since NOTSNIK/Project Pilot in 1958.  It's a project of the University of Hawaii, the Air Force's Operationally Responsive Space office, and other agencies. Go Strypi!

A sad update: complete loss of vehicle. That's hardly unusual for the first flight of a new booster, but depressing nonetheless. I always feel bad for the student experimenters who have worked years on their satellites.