A stunning image from Mars

August 8, 2012 • 8:47 am

Do not worry—my fixation with the Rover landing has nearly passed.  But I couldn’t help posting this picture, found by alert reader Rixaeton, that shows all five components of the entry vehicle in one frame.  Do go to the original NASA site to see it in full size (or click on the image below):

The details (resolution is 39 cm/pixel):

The four main pieces of hardware that arrived on Mars with NASA’s Curiosity rover were spotted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image about 24 hours after landing. The large, reduced-scale image points out the strewn hardware: the heat shield was the first piece to hit the ground, followed by the back shell attached to the parachute, then the rover itself touched down, and finally, after cables were cut, the sky crane flew away to the northwest and crashed. Relatively dark areas in all four spots are from disturbances of the bright dust on Mars, revealing the darker material below the surface dust.

Around the rover, this disturbance was from the sky crane thrusters, and forms a bilaterally symmetrical pattern. The darkened radial jets from the sky crane are downrange from the point of oblique impact, much like the oblique impacts of asteroids. In fact, they make an arrow pointing to Curiosity.

The Curiosity rover is approximately 4,900 feet (1,500 meters) away from the heat shield; about 2,020 feet (615 meters) away from the parachute and back shell; and approximately 2,100 feet (650 meters) away from the discoloration consistent with the impact of the sky crane.

You can find more images related to the descent here.

Oh, and reader “gravelinspetor” found this photo:

Again: Is there poetry in the Old Testament?

August 8, 2012 • 5:03 am

UPDATE: Over at Choice in Dying, Eric MacDonald has his own take on the Bible as literature. He finds other passages of literary merit, but pronounced the book like a “curate’s egg,” i.e., good in parts. As a former Anglican priest, he is far more familiar with the Bad Book than I am, and his essay is worth reading.

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I am pleased to announce that I am halfway through the King James version of the Bible: p. 554, which contains Psalm 76.  (I am painfully aware, as I slog through the text, how far I am from the end, and always have in mind that there are 1108 pages.)  Things have improved a bit, but I still don’t find it great literature: that is, if someone found this in a used bookstore as an undiscovered text, it would not be touted as a work of ineffable beauty.  To me, its significance rests almost entirely on its huge role in Western culture, not on the beauty of its prose.

That said, I have found bits that are stirring, but only bits. Here are a couple from Job:

  • “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” (Job 5:7)
  • Chapter 38 of Job, which includes “Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth. . . whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it has issued out of the womb?”
  • “Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox, Lo, now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.” (Job 41:15-17).  [Note: the placement of italics in the Bible seems idiosyncratic to me, though I’m sure scholars have an explanation.]

But really, these are cherry-picked among a gazillion more dreadful verses, and aren’t all that lovely.  The tedious bits predominate.

I know that other readers have pointed out passages of “beauty” that I’ve ignored, and perhaps I can’t see that beauty in light of the dreadful message imbued in every book.  Job, for example, is a horrible chapter about how Satan gets God to test an upright man by killing his kids, taking his livestock, and then afflicting him with boils.  This is an abusive relationship between Job and God: a man is made to suffer for no reason other than to test his faith. What kind of God would do that? If anyone finds morality in that book, let her speak!

My point is that it’s hard to appreciate beauty imbued in such a horrible message, just as it would be harder to appreciate Shakespeare’s prose had he also written Mein Kampf. But maybe that’s only me.

And the Psalms are no better. With the exception of Psalm 23 (and I’m not sure I would have appreciated it had it not been the most familiar Psalm), they take the following form:

  1. Praise to God for his power and benevolence
  2. Affirmation that the psalmist is a sinner and a worthless worm
  3. Request that God smite and confound the psalmist’s enemies
  4. Request that God give favors to the psalmist
  5. More blessings to God and promises that the psalmist will be a good boy from now on.

Psalm after psalm after psalm—150 of the bloody things! I’m hoping matters will pick up when I get to Proverbs.

A week ago, Peter Mullen, and Anglican priest and rector of a church in London, wrote a piece in the Telegraph defending the beauty of the Old Testament: “The Old Testament isn’t hogwash, Jeremy Paxman. But Newsnight often is.” (It’s a response to a quote by Paxman that children were being indoctrinated by “religious hogwash,” even though Paxman was apparently goading Richard Dawkins to clarify his ideas.)  At any rate, Mullen defends the beauty and inspiration to be found in the OT:

No – the Old Testament is not all hogwash, religious or not. It is one of the greatest examples of human creativity and inspiration.

He then points out to Paxman some of its beauty:

But, come off it Jeremy, even such a sophisticated secularist as yourself must admit that there are whole sections of the OT possessed of a rare and strange beauty:

“And Adam heard the voice of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day….”

Not only is that not beautiful, but it’s grammatically incorrect.  There’s an unclear antecedent here: was God’s voice walking? The proper prose would be, “And Adam, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, heard God’s voice.”  Mullen goes on:

And passages of numinous spiritual insight, making the hairs stand out on the back of your neck:

“Take off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the ground whereon thou standest is holy ground…”

Mullen must have unusually erectile neck hairs. That’s supposed to be beautiful? Give me John Donne over that any day.  Mullen goes on:

And such combinations of pity and love as this:

“And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.”

That one is okay, though hardly world class prose.

Or visionary poetry:

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Then said I, Woe is me for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips and dwell among a people of unclean lips…”

That’s from Isaiah, and I haven’t gotten to it yet. It is okay, but again, only one sentence out of 845 pages.

There are boring bits. But there is the matchless musicality of the Psalms – “Like as the hart desireth the water brook” – and the erotic beauty of The Song of Songs . .

Again, I haven’t gotten to it, but I’m prepared to believe that the Song of Songs could be lovely. But if that’s the best one can glean out of the huge Old Testament, it doesn’t speak well for its beauty.  The Dead, by Joyce, contains far more beauty in a longish short story than I’ve read in the first half of the Bible.

At least regarding that half, then, I’ll have to disagree with Professor Dawkins that it is “a great work of literature.” Really, if this didn’t have iconic status in Western literature, would anybody pick it up at the bookstore?

h/t: Kevin

Dawkins on Drosophila (my 4,000th post!)

August 8, 2012 • 4:00 am

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Richard talk publicly about my favorite group of animals—Drosophila, of course—but this newly posted  three-minute clip, about the Hawaiian Drosophila, is music to my ears. YouTube describes the filming:

During Richard Dawkins’ 2009 American tour, we visited Judy Diamond’s “Explore Evolution” exhibit at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln. This exhibit has now been replicated in six museums around the country. While visiting we filmed a collection of short unrehearsed and unscripted videos—just inspired by the “Explore Evolution” exhibit.

The Drosophila of Hawaii, though not as well known as the finches of the Galapagos or even the honeycreepers of Hawaii, are one of the best studied “adaptive radiations” in animals. As Richard notes, much of the “adaptation” involves sexual selection, which produces spectacular courtship displays and morphological ornaments and colors in males.  As I note in WEIT, the Hawaiian islands contain nearly half of the world’s 1500-odd species of Drosophila—I use the term warily since it looks as if the genus Drosophila is paraphyletic: i.e., contains species of flies that are more closely related to other groups than to species in the genus—even though the Hawaiian islands make up only 0.004% of the Earth’s land surface.

Here’s a famous species: Drosophila heteroneura, which lives—or “lived,” since it may be almost extinct now—on the “big island” of Hawaii.  Compared to females, males have much elongated heads and eyes. They’ve presumably evolved this via male-male competition for females. Males battle for territories, and do so by literally going head to head, butting each other and pushing each other back and forth. Presumably the males with larger heads win the territories and the females—and get to leave offspring. That is one of the two forms of sexual selection: “male/male competition.” The other is “female choice”, in which females choose whether to mate with a single displaying male, though in some cases the two classes may not be distinct since females can  choose to mate with a male who has a territory or wins a battle.

Chi-town is Jam Town

August 7, 2012 • 2:50 pm

by Greg Mayer

Yesterday was the Golden Jubilee of Jamaican independence. Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake presented the nation with an Olympic birthday present, finishing one-two in the 100 meters, with Bolt’s dominating, record-setting performance solidifying his reputation as one of the great Olympians of all time. Jubilee celebrations were held not only in Jamaica, but in outposts of the Jamaican diaspora around the globe. Chicago was no exception, and events have been, and will be occurring, throughout the summer and into the fall.

Washington Park, Chicago, July 22, 2012

I was able to attend one of the celebrations, the Golden Jubilee Picnic, Football Cup, and Cricket Match on July 22 in Washington Park. While Jamaica is a sporting nation, and especially so now, I know what WEIT readers really want to see: the food! It was fabulous. A combination of Jamaican home-cooking and catering provided a day long feast of Jamaican specialties (see this earlier WEIT post for more on Jamaican food). Here’s fried grouper with seasoned rice.

Fried grouper and seasoned rice.

The grouper is “finger food”– you have to use your fingers or mouth to separate the meat from the bone (fish have lots of ribs!). The seasoned rice is a meal and a history lesson in itself. The main ingredient is, of course rice, and the herbs are quite visible in this serving. But there is also mixed in to it portions of the national dish of Jamaica, ackee and saltfish. Ackee is the fruit of a tree brought to Jamaica from tropical West Africa, as were most of its people by the Atlantic slave trade. Improperly ripened or prepared, it’s poisonous. Properly prepared, the yellow flesh is delicious, with the consistency and appearance of scrambled eggs, and served in Jamaica as a vegetable. You can see a bit of ackee on the left of the serving pictured. Saltfish is traditionally salted cod from Canada, harkening back to the days of empire when British planters imported the abundantly available and transportable fish during the period of slavery in Jamaica. You can see the wisps of fish throughout the rice. Both the ackee and saltfish are now highly esteemed by people throughout Jamaica, and deservedly so.

My favorite, and another Jamaican classic, was jerk chicken. The chicken in the tray below I didn’t actually try, because I had filled up on chicken from a different tray.

Jerk chicken.

The chicken I had was from Jamaica Jerk Villa, and was superb, and the extra sauce was deliciously flavored and spicy. The chicken was cut in the cleavered Jamaican style, but, perhaps in a concession to American tastes, was all white meat. I highly recommend a visit to one of their locations for those in the Chicagoland are.

Jamaica Jerk Villa

There was also rice and peas, jerk ribs, Red Stripe, and brats (the Wisconsin contribution!). Not all Jamaican food is spicy, and I enjoyed sweet corn bread and the distinctive hard dough bread (which is dense, not hard, and came from a specialty Caribbean bakery in Chicago, the Caribbean American Bakery).

Hard dough and corn bread

The day was also full of West Indian music– reggae, soca, dancehall, calypso, etc.– provided from the music tent.

The music tent, Washington Park, Chicago, 22 July 2012

The sporting event in which I participated was a one-day, three-team round robin tournament for the Golden Jubilee Football Cup, in which my team, Everham United F.C. of Racine, Wisconsin, had been invited to compete. The other teams were Jamstar F.C. and West Indies Jets S.C., both of Chicago’s National Soccer League. (A fourth team, from Michigan, did not show,  so we were assured of the bronze!)

Everham United F.C., Racine, Wisconsin

In the first two games, Jamstar handily beat both us (10-1) and the Jets (7-1), clinching the Cup. The last match was for second place and was closely fought. Halfway through the second half we led 3-2, but superior skill on their part, and exhaustion on our part, finally prevailed, with the Jets winning 6-3. The Jamaican Consul presented the Cup to Jamstar.

The Jamaican Consul presents the Jubilee Cup to Jamstar F.C.

The other sports were cricket (it was like baseball in the round, with two batters; I thought of an old 10 CC song– this is a cover)

Cricket batsman. Note the ball he is juggling with his bat.

and that other Jamaican favorite, dominos.

Domino players.

Thanks to Chicago Concerned Jamaicans for inviting us, and to them, the Consul, Jamtsar, the Jets, and all the attendees for hosting us at such an irie fete. Happy Birthday Jamaica!

New graphics on Mars rover

August 7, 2012 • 9:21 am

These nice pictures are from today’s New York Times, and accompany an article about Curiosity by Kenneth Chang. The captions below are from the article:

The size of a small car, Curiosity is much larger than previous Mars rovers and carries 10 science instruments.

POWER  Dust can cover solar panels on Mars, so Curiosity generates its own power. Eleven pounds of plutonium dioxide generates heat, which is converted to electricity and used to recharge two lithium-ion batteries.

VISION  Extending 7 feet above the ground, a mast holds Mastcam, a pair of high-definition cameras, and ChemCam, which can measure the composition of rock after shooting it with a laser.

DRIVE  Each of the 20-inch aluminum wheels has its own motor.

REACH  The rover’s 7-foot arm carries several tools, including a camera, an X-ray spectrometer, and a drill, brush and scoop for collecting samples.

ANALYSIS  The rover’s body holds experiments for detecting ground water, measuring naturally occurring radiation and analyzing soil and rock samples delivered by the robotic arm.

And the landing site and path of Curiosity’s planned peregrinations (red line):

Where does morality come from? A demonstration with monkeys

August 7, 2012 • 8:22 am

UPDATE:  I wrote Frans, who has read this post and many of the readers’ comments, and he said this (quoted with his permission):

Funny that some commentators think that obviously all animals (e.g. hamsters) would do the same, because when we first published this study no one believed that this reaction was possible in animals. In fact, it has never been demonstrated in rodents, only in dogs, corvids, and primates thus far. The reaction is clearly related to what the other one is getting, not the availability of grapes, as we showed in another study.

He also mentioned that his forthcoming book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, deals primarily with the issue I discuss below: that God is unnecessary for humans’ moral sense.

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This video is about as powerful a refutation I’ve seen of the notion that our morality is given by God rather than either evolved or a product of our culture.  This is taken from a wonderful TED talk by Frans de Waal, primatologist and author of several popular books.  His talk is called “Moral behavior in animals”, and is witty and full of insights (you can also watch it here if you don’t have the right Flash player).

Do watch the whole talk, as you’ll learn a lot about “morality” in our mammalian relatives, and there are several nice videos. In the one I show below, two naive capuchin monkeys display what looks for all the world like a reaction to “unfairness” (the video appears about 3/4 of the way through de Waal’s talk).  As de Waal notes, cucumbers are okay food for the monkeys, but they really like grapes (de Waal claims that monkeys like food in proportion to its price at the supermarket).  A pair of capuchins can see each other getting cucumbers and grapes (they have to give the experimenter a rock before they get a piece of food).

See what happens when one of them is given a grape for his rock, and the other a cucumber. Remember, this is the first time these monkeys have been subject to this procedure:

Now I’m pretty sure that some rudiments of human morality are shared with our primate relatives, and thus evolved in a common ancestor, and also that other moral qualities of humans evolved after we’d branched off from the ancestor of our closest relatives, the chimps.  And some elements of human morality, like “true” altruism, in which you risk your life for nonrelatives without much hope of gain—my examples are usually volunteer firefighters and soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save their buddies—seem to me byproducts of our culture. (See Peter Singer’s wonderful book The Expanding Circle to see how this could happen.) We don’t know how much of our moral sentiments derive from evolution, how much from cultural overlay, and how much from a combination of these factors, but it’s clear that we can see building blocks of morality in primates and other species (de Waal gives an example from elephants). This view, of course, originated with Darwin.

What I am absolutely sure of is that people’s morality does not come from God.  I may not be 100% sure that there isn’t a benevolent, omnipotent god (I’d put myself as a 6.999999 on Dawkins’s 7-point scale of disbelief), but I am 100% sure that our morality was not a divine gift.  It can’t have been: the Euthyphro argument of Plato shows on first principles that this can’t be true.  And it’s manifestly clear that nobody takes the morality of the Bible as their guide—not even William Lane Craig, who believes in the “divine command theory” (i.e., if God said it, it’s right).  Presumably Craig, although he says that the Israelites were perfectly justified in decimating the Canaanites because God ordered it, wouldn’t go along with God’s killing 42 children because they made fun of the prophet Elisha’s bald head—or maybe he would.

No reputable theologian, or rational believer for that matter, adheres strictly to Biblical morality. As everyone knows, believers pick and choose their morality from a smorgasbord of divine commands, both good and bad, in scripture. And doing that shows that you have a sense of right and wrong that doesn’t come from the Bible or God.  Ergo, it comes from evolution and culture.

What kind of computer does the Mars rover use?

August 7, 2012 • 4:57 am

Although we never talk about computers here, I’m absolutely sure that many readers are into them.  And even I was curious to know what kind of computer was onboard the Mars rover Curiosity.  Well, it turns out that, much to my delight (I’ve always been an Macintosh man), it’s an Apple “Airport Extreme”.  The description of both hardware and software are at Extreme Tech, which says this:

At the heart of Curiosity there is, of course, a computer. In this case the Mars rover is powered by a RAD750, a single-board computer (motherboard, RAM, ROM, and CPU) produced by BAE. The RAD750 has been on the market for more than 10 years, and it’s currently one of the most popular on-board computers for spacecraft. In Curiosity’s case, the CPU is a PowerPC 750 (PowerPC G3 in Mac nomenclature) clocked at around 200MHz — which might seem slow, but it’s still hundreds of times faster than, say, the Apollo Guidance Computer used in the first Moon landings. Also on the motherboard are 256MB of DRAM, and 2GB of flash storage — which will be used to store video and scientific data before transmission to Earth.

The RAD750 can withstand temperatures of between -55 and 70C, and radiation levels up to 1000 gray. Safely ensconced within Curiosity, the temperature and radiation should remain below these levels — but for the sake of redundancy, there’s a second RAD750 that automatically takes over if the first one fails.

The piece also describes the instrumentation of Curiosity and how it communicates with Earth (remember that 7-minute delay).

Reader Michael, who found this piece, notes that “the base price for the BAE Systems RAD750 single board computer was $200,000 10 years ago, so I assume it’s nearer $750,000 today. Very tough. Very precisely made.”

The Wikipedia link in the previous paragraph describes the computer:

The RAD750 is a radiation-hardened single board computer manufactured by BAE Systems Electronic Solutions. The successor of the RAD6000, the RAD750 is for use in high radiation environments such as experienced on board satellites and spacecraft. The RAD750 was released in 2001, with the first units launched into space in 2005.

The CPU has 10.4 million transistors, nearly a magnitude more than the RAD6000 (which had 1.1 million). It is manufactured using either 250 or 150 nm photolithography and has a die area of 130 mm². It has a core clock of 110 to 200 MHz and can process at 266 MIPS or more. The CPU can include an extended L2 cache to improve performance.

The CPU itself can withstand 2,000 to 10,000 gray and temperature ranges between –55 °C and 125 °C and requires 5 watts of power. The standard RAD750 single-board system (CPU and motherboard) can withstand 1,000 gray and temperature ranges between –55 °C and 70 °C and requires 10 watts of power.

The guts:

Credit: Peter Vis

Original photograph from Peter Vis’ site here.