Zeppelins over San Francisco Bay

Operating out of Moffett Field, near Mountain View at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, Airship Ventures has announced that it has inked a deal with Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH of Germany (the successor of the same firm who made the Hindenburg and the zeppelins that bombed London in World War I) to acquire a modern, 12-passenger zeppelin.

The $8 million airship will be sent to California in September, where it will be used mostly for sightseeing excursions. Being much smaller than the passenger zeppelins of the 1920s and 1930s, it will have to cross the Atlantic on the deck of a ship.

From MSNBC. This airship is a semirigid, so while in one sense it is a zeppelin, in another it is not -- the essential characteristic of the zeppelins of old being that they were all rigid airships.

Further links: Airship Ventures, Zeppelin NT.

Dambusters commemoration

A service and fly-past has been held to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II Dambusters mission.

A Lancaster bomber flew over Derwent Reservoir in Derbyshire, which was used by the original pilots to train ahead of their famous raid.

In 1943, the RAF's 617 Squadron set out to destroy three dams in Germany's Ruhr valley. They managed to breach two, giving a boost to Britain's war effort.

The service remembered the eight aircraft and 53 crew who were lost.

Read more here and here. More information at the official Dambusters website.

Growing population woes

Maybe the problem isn't just too many people, but also too much people:

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated the obese consume 18% more calories than average.

They are also responsible for using more fuel, which has an environmental impact and drives up food prices as transport and agriculture both use oil.

The result is that the poor struggle to afford food and greenhouse gas emissions rise, the Lancet reported.

How's that for a guilt trip? Another fine Lancet study.

Ave, Caesar

Divers in France have found the oldest known bust of Roman dictator Julius Caesar at the bottom of the River Rhone, officials have said.

The marble bust was found near Arles, which was founded by Caesar.

France's culture ministry said the bust was from 46BC, the date of the southern town's foundation. . .

It said other items had been found at the same site, including a 1.8m (6ft) marble statue of Neptune from the first decade of the third century AD, and two smaller statues in bronze.

Divers taking part in an archaeological excavation made the discovery between September and October 2007.

From the BBC.

Ned Kelly shootout excavation

Archaeologists believe they have found more evidence of the 1880 gun battle between Ned Kelly's gang and police at Glenrowan, in central Victoria.

Bullet fragments were uncovered during excavations at the former Anne Jones Inn site earlier this month.

Now archaeologists have revealed that two bullet cartridges from a Martini-Henry rifle were discovered in the northern section of the site on Friday afternoon.

Article here.

The Martini-Henry mention started me looking at online references to this old British breechloader. Prices have certainly gone up since my friends were collecting them back in the early '80s -- though not nearly so much as gas, real estate, and much else. There is one Martini I owned back then that I do rather regret selling: a Providence-made Peabody-Martini originally sold to the Ottoman Empire, and bearing marks indicating later Japanese military ownership. There's a well-researched article on this model and the history behind it available online here; I read it when it was first published in 1979, but it means much more since I've moved to Providence. Here's an example of some local color:

After traveling to and from Providence Tool as a group on a trolley car, the Turkish inspectors would gather in the bar of a Providence hotel for drinking, gaming, arguing, and, not infrequently, brawling. (One inspector had even shot a woman in a Providence boarding house!) Their antics provided a continual source of embarrassment for the tool company and harrassment for the Providence Police Department. Were it not for Anthony's influence and the importance of the Turkish arms contract to Providence Tool and thereby to the economy of the city (the company was now the largest employer in Providence), many of the inspectors would probably have spent a number of sojourns in the city's lockup. The Porte, however, was not as understanding. One inspector was recalled to Turkey for some infraction and went before a firing squad armed with rifles he had probably inspected. When another inspector received a summons to return, he chose to commit suicide by leaping from the Crawford Street bridge. A third inspector refused to return home and married the daughter of a Providence innkeeper. As the years passed, his bizarre appearance and demeanor became a conspicuous element of the checquered Providence landscape.

More on the present status of the old RI Tool building off River (the armory on Wickenden is long, long, gone) at Artinruins.

US Immigration reform still long overdue

Clearly, plenty of people who don't belong in the USA are still managing to get here. Meanwhile, those who should be made welcome are being treated like this:

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. . .

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit -- meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon -- eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

Even a senator couldn't get the bureaucrats to let go; what of those who don't have any connections at all?

Ten days after he landed in Washington, Mr. Salerno was still incarcerated, despite efforts by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, and two former immigration prosecutors hired by the Coopers.

Salerno's girlfriend was savvy enough to get the NY Times to take an interest, which finally did the trick:

Less than 24 hours later, immigration officials intervened and arranged to deliver Mr. Salerno to Dulles, where last Friday he flew to Rome.

Loving Day is coming

There was an NPR broadcast recently about the celebration of Loving Day; today's NY Times has this column with further background:

Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on learning that 40 states once had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The Supreme Court struck down the last of these statutes in the 1967 case of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested and banished from Virginia for the crime of being married.

The couple became celebrities after the landmark ruling known as Loving v. Virginia. But Mildred and Richard wanted nothing to do with fame. They returned to the tiny, backwoods community of Central Point, in Caroline County, Va., and shunned publicity. Richard died of injuries sustained in a car accident in 1975. Mildred, who died this month, was quiet and self-effacing and maintained all along that they married because they were in love, not to fight a civil rights battle.

But it seems that segregation in Central Point was not really as straightforward as all that:

Many of the mixed-race men and women in Caroline County settled in and around Central Point. They were already thriving by the early 20th century. Their church, St. Stephen's Baptist, was, as one historian noted, "the largest and most costly house of worship in Caroline, white or colored." People in the congregation and community were "as a whole, very nearly white," the historian wrote, "and, out of their community, could not be recognized or distinguished as colored people". . .

By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships.

Some accounts suggest that Central Point already had many other interracial unions -- both legal and common law. So why were Mildred and Richard singled out for arrest? It is possible that someone who held a grudge against the couple complained to the sheriff. Such a complaint could have come from one of the local white men who had taken a black lover and used the law as an excuse not to marry.

Record price for living artist

Move over, Midas:

A life-sized Lucian Freud painting of a sleeping, naked woman has set a new world record price for a work by a living artist.

The 1995 portrait, titled Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold for $33.6m (£17.2m) at Christie's in New York.

The previous record was held by Jeff Koons' Hanging Heart, which fetched $23.5m (£12.1m) last November.

From the BBC.

Microsoft does online astronomy

Can't wait to show my kids this when they get home from school:

Twirling galaxies, exotic nebulae and exploding stars are now just a mouse click away for amateur astronomers.

Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes.

Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.

From the BBC; note that the application has to be run with Windows. The article also mentions other online astronomy sites, including Google Sky and Stellarium. The NY Times also has a writeup, that notes:

There are many online astronomy sites, but astronomers say the Microsoft entry sets a new standard in three-dimensional representation of vast amounts data plucked from space telescopes, the ease of navigation, the visual experience and features like guided tours narrated by experts.

Medieval shipwreck find in Barcelona

The wreck of a 13th or 14th century ship has come to light on a construction site in Barcelona's Barceloneta district -- beside the Balaurd del Migdia and behind Francia train station -- that used to be under water.

Full article here.

Coyote attacks

Zoicks! A spate of attacks on children in Los Angeles' eastern suburbs:

An increase in coyote attacks on humans in the past decade is most evident in Southern California, where bedroom communities have quickly pressed into wilderness, allowing the canine scavengers to roam backyards for food.

Since the 1970s, more than 100 coyote attacks on humans in Southern California have been recorded, with half the incidents involving children age 10 and younger.

And coyotes are everywhere now: we've got 'em here in Providence, right on College Hill -- hardly a community recently "pressed into the wilderness". I've not heard of any attacks on humans locally, but this should certainly shake the neighbors' complacence.

Spotted via Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, who expresses skepticism about the LA authorities recommendation that desert suburbanites refrain from coyote hunting themselves. He's certainly right that throwing rocks and shouting won't do much to drive the critters out of one's neighborhood, but as long as there's a concerted ongoing official effort to hunt and trap them, I don't see that it's such a bad thing to discourage private coyote hunts. His concern that coyotes, unhunted, will become increasingly bold and unafraid of humans seems entirely apropos, however, for those more urbanized areas where no official coyote abatement measures are being taken at all.

ADDENDUM: Interesting tidbits from Wikipedia on coyotes:

Researchers studied coyote populations in Chicago over a seven-year period (2000-2007), proposing that coyotes have adapted well to living in densely populated urban environments while avoiding contact with humans. They found, among other things, that urban coyotes tend to live longer than their rural counterparts, kill rodents and small pets, and live anywhere from parks to industrial areas. The researchers estimate that there are up to 2,000 coyotes living in "the greater Chicago area" and that this circumstance may well apply to many other urban landscapes in North America.

And I wonder if this is part of why we don't see many cats running loose in our neighborhood:

Approximately 3 to 5 pets attacked by coyotes are brought into the Animal Urgent Care hospital of South Orange County each week, the majority of which are dogs, since cats typically do not survive the attacks. Scat analysis collected near Claremont, California revealed that coyotes relied heavily on pets as a food source in winter and spring.

For more Rhode Island coyote information, there's the Narragansett Bay Coyote Study website. This page is of particular interest, noting that the packs studied were growing in size and boldness because people were giving them so much food. Some was unintentional -- roadkill left unburied, deer shot by hunters but not recovered, open refuse piles, leaving food in the open for other animals -- but a surprising amount was deliberate:

Invariably people feeding coyotes have good intentions and do not realize it is a really bad idea. For example, one person was feeding coyotes dog food in a neighborhood woodlot with the hope of distracting the resident coyotes from pursuing the neighbors cats which were being left outdoors at night.

Unfortunately it had the opposite effect -- the dog food caused coyotes to be attracted to the neighborhood and the woodlot became a favorite hangout (day and night) greatly increasing the risk to the neighborhood cats. Other people we have spoken with feed coyotes because they enjoy watching them. This too causes coyotes to make regular visits to the feeders' yard. They may take neighborhood pets en route or appear frighteningly bold to neighbors unaware that the coyotes are being, basically, trained to expect food in the neighborhood.

Think of it this way -- if there are four coyote packs on Jamestown and six packs on Aquidneck island it only takes 10 people feeding (one in each coyote pack territory) to tame and train all the coyotes in Newport County to expect food near humans.

As the study group concludes, the management of coyotes appears to be inextricably tied to the management of people. It might be different out West where human settlements are moving into coyote territory, to be sure, but in the long-established urban areas in the East and Midwest where coyotes have made such a dramatic recent arrival, control measures may not be as difficult to implement as all that.