Trudy Myers's Blog, page 25

Municipality of Anchorage

It isn’t just a city, it includes suburbs, the urban core, a joint military base and most of Chugach State Park. It is the 4th largest city in the US by area, and larger than Rhode Island.
In 1867, US Secretary of State William Seward brokered a deal tp purchase Alaska from Russia for $7,200,00, about 2 cents an acre. The idea was lampooned by his political rivals, but in 1888, gold was discovered along Turnagain Arm, just south of modern-day Anchorage.
Alaska became a US territory in 1912. Anchorage started as neither a fishing nor mining camp.There were a number of indigenous settlements along the Knik Inlet (north of Anchorage) for years. By 1911, the families of ‘Bud’ Whitney and Jim St Clair lived at the mouth of Ship Creek (on the south side of the Knik Inlet). There were joined there in 1912 by Jack and Nellie Brown.
In 1914, the Alaska Engineering Commission chose a site near the mouth of Ship Creek for a railroad construction port. The area quickly became a tent city, while a townsite was mapped out on higher ground to the south. Anchorage was incorporated on November 23, 1920.
On March 27, 1964, an earthquake of magnitude 9.2 struck Anchorage, killing 115 people and causing $116 million in damages. It was the world’s 2nd largest earthquake in recorded history. Because much of the city was built atop glacial silt, there was much soil liquefaction, leading to massive cracks in roads and the collapse of large swaths of land. Dozens of house that were originally 250 to 300 feet above sea level sank with the land they sat on, coming to a rest at sea level.
Although there have been many attempts to move the capitol to Anchorage or to a location closer to Anchorage, they have all ultimately been defeated. Even so, Anchorage has over twice as many state employees as Juneau, and is to a considerable extent the center of state and federal government activity in Alaska.
Cities often grow where they have easy access to trade routes, whether by water or land. Even Anchorage follows that stereotype, starting where an ocean inlet gave access to a creek from inland. And it continued by becoming a railroad hub, making (rail)roads where there hadn’t been any before. It currently has an international airport, which is fitting, since it is only 9.5 hours or less to most large cities in industrial countries.
We didn’t get to Anchorage when we went to Alaska; we took a cruise, and it didn’t go that far north. We may have to try again.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorage,_Alaska

Good Ol’ Saxons

The Saxons were a group of early Germanic peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large country near the North Sea coast of what is now Germany. According to one proposal, the Saxon’s earliest area of settlement is believed to have been Northern Albingia, which is close to the probable homeland of the Angles. During the late Roman Empire, the name ‘Saxon’ referred to Germanic coastal raiders. Later, they were associated with settlements along the coast of Normandy.
Later still, the Saxons, Angles, Frisians and Jutes settled in England and became known as Anglo-Saxons. These were no longer raiders. The political history of the continental Saxons is unclear until the time of the conflict between their legendary hero Widukind and the Frankish emperor Charlemagne. Charlemagne won the conflict, and organized the Saxons into a Frankish province. Although the continental Saxons are no longer a distinctive ethnic group or country, their name lives on in the name of several regions and states of Germany.
But as I stated earlier, the Saxons, Angles, Frisians and Jutes either invaded or migrated to the island of ‘Great Britain’ around the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. For centuries before that, Saxon raiders had harassed the eastern and southern shores, and some had been granted permission to settle in these areas as farmers.
Tradition says that the Saxons (and others) were brought in to protect the Britons from raids by the Picts (of Scotland), Gaels (of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man) and others. The Saxons were allowed to settle on the Isle of Thanet (eastern Kent) in exchange for their services as mercenaries. (Thanet is no longer an island, but is connected to the English mainland.) For whatever reason, more land was granted to the Anglo-Saxons, and more of them arrived to settle it. It is uncertain whether this was a peaceful process or not.
Eventually, in about the 6th century, the Anglo-Saxons took over all of the southeastern portions of Britain and formed 4 realms: The East saxons created the Kingdom of Essex; The Middle Saxons created the province of Middlesex; the South Saxons created the Kingdom of Sussex; and the West Saxons created the Kingdom of Wessex. Between the reigns of Egbert to Alfred the great, the kings of Wessex gained sway over the other realms and unified the country. They eventually organized it as the Kingdom of England in the face of Viking invasions.
One has to wonder if they saw the irony of becoming victims of coastal raiders, when that was how their own people started out?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons

Our Sister Planet

What did you learn about Venus - sometimes called our sister planet - when you were in school? Unless you are still in school, chances are that at least some of those ‘facts’ have changed.
Venus has been called Earth’s twin, because it is similar to Earth in size and mass. Venus’ diameter is 7,520.8 miles, only 396.7 miles smaller than Earth’s. Its mass is 81.5 % of Earth’s. But in other ways, they are not very alike at all.
Venus is still the second planet from the Sun, it is still named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. It orbits the sun in 224.7 Earth days. A Venus day is 243 Earth days, so its day is longer than its year. It also rotates in the opposite direction as Earth, so on Venus, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. It still does not have any moons.
Venus has the densest atmosphere of the 4 inner planets, which consists of more than 96% carbon dioxide. At Venus’ surface, the atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of Earth, or roughly the pressure found at 3,000 ft underwater on Earth.
Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, with a mean surface temperature of 863°F. Mercury is closer to the sun, but Venus is hotter. It is shrouded by an opaque layer of clouds of sulfuric acid. It may have had water oceans at some point in the past, but they would have vaporized due to a runaway greenhouse effect. That water vapor would have photodissociated, and the resulting free hydrogen swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind because Venus doesn’t have a planetary magnetic field. It is postulated that the surface of Venus is a desertscape interspersed with slab-like rocks and is periodically resurfaced by volcanism.
In my youth, I remember reading books and short stories that postulated that Venus weather included perpetual rain, and that Venus was a water planet. In both cases, humans from Earth had colonized Venus. But given the updated information on Venus’ atmosphere and surface, colonization may have to wait until some type of reclamation can happen. Perhaps remove some (a lot!) of carbon from the atmosphere, and set up some type of artificial field around the planet to keep the solar wind from removing any more of the lighter elements from that atmosphere. If we can lessen the green-house effect, then maybe the volcanism will also settle down a bit.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus

QuetzalcoatlusIf you think the name looks a lot like the ...

Quetzalcoatlus
If you think the name looks a lot like the name of the Aztec feathered god, you are right. the fossils of this winged reptile were named after that god. This type of pterosaur is the largest known example of flying animal. The artist’s rendition that was intended to give some clue as to size showed a standing quetzalcoatlus just as tall as a giraffe (with a neck just as long), and a wing span of about 36 feet (11 m). The human man in the picture was not quite as tall as the back legs were long.
As I read the article, I was reminded again and again of the ‘airplanes’ in the Flintstones cartoons, where a small cabin sat atop a huge flying reptile. Not very feasible, as even this huge creature would probably be able to carry only 2-3 humans on its back. And I don’t know if it could fly with that much extra weight.
The skeleton pictures showed a skull that was mostly beak, with a bony crest on the forehead, between the large eyes. It doesn’t have any teeth, and its wings are depicted as looking quite a bit like a bat’s wing. It is also depicted as folding its wings in half and possibly using its wings as support when standing or walking. Most of the known fossils of this creature were found in Texas.
Several feeding patterns have been suggested for the Quetzalcoatlus, but the most recent one is that they stalked small vertebrates while on the ground, similar to the modern stork.
There has been much argument among scientists about Quetzelcoatlus’ ability to fly. The latest thought is that they would use powered flight to get to a point where they could use thermal gliding. The wing muscles were found to be quite robust, which they would not be if the animal were purely a terrestrial animal.
There are potentially 2 species of Quetzelcoatlus. Measurements I’ve given are for the larger specie, there is possibly another specie that is about half as large.
So, if this extinct species comes back to life, that could make life difficult for the human population. While adults might be too large for the smaller Quetzelcoatlus to attack, children would probably be seen as ‘fair game’. And even adults might have to watch out if the larger variety is around.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus

Eye of Newt

Quick, what do you know about newts?
About the only thing I knew was that witchly recipes always seem to call for an “eye of newt”. But what are they? Why are they so treasured by witches and sorcerers? Well, their eyes, anyway. What could possibly be so ‘magical’ about their eyes?
Whenever a newt is depicted in a movie or ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ tv episode, I always think they look like a lizard. But research says they are not lizards, they are a type of salamander, which makes them amphibians. They have 3 distinct life stages; aquatic larvae, terrestrial juvenile and semi-aquatic adult. The adults return to the water to breed, then back to their homes on land. But they do have a ‘lizard-like’ body, so there!
Newts are found all across the northern hemisphere.
Newts have the ability to regenerate limbs, eyes, spinal cords, hearts, intestines, and upper and lower jaws. This certainly must have seemed pretty magical to humans in earlier time periods, since humans can’t do any of that. Once you have a live newt in your supplies, you are pretty well set for newt parts for whatever ‘recipe’ you want to use.
In addition, many newts have a toxicity in their skin, which they have developed to protect them against predators. Some have a strong enough toxicity to kill a human. Although this is only in their skin, if it was thought to be throughout their entire body, an eyeball might be considered a fairly easy method of measurement and transportation of that toxic substance. Hence a potion meant to cause harm to someone might well call for the toxic properties of a piece of newt.
I really didn’t expect to find any particular reasons why a newt might be prized by witches and sorcerers, but there you have it. The ability to regrow some pretty important parts of themselves and the ability to poison other creatures would have seemed pretty remarkable to man, some of whom may have tried to harness one or both of those abilities through magic.
These days, newts are often kept as pets, so don’t get out your pitchforks and torches just because your neighbor keeps a newt in their aquarium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt

Hadean Eon

Unless you have a degree in geology or paleontology or something similar, you are probably as confused by the various Ages, Eons and Periods that get named when you look anything up about the History of Earth. I decided to take a look at one of them, and see if I could get it figured out as to when it happened, what major events happened during it... that sort of thing.
So, I had a list of these names, and I picked one at random: the Hadean Eon.
Turns out, I had picked the very first of Earth’s Eons; it started with the formation of Earth about 4.6 billion years ago and ended approximately 4 billion years ago. Other names for it are the Priscoan Period and the Pre-Archean Eon.
Obviously, since we are looking at the very first half billion years of the world, we won’t be talking about dinosaurs or super continents. What could there possibly be to discuss? Well, let’s dig in and see what turns up.
First, there’s the name, which gives us a clue about what was going on. ‘Hadean’ comes from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. And that describes the conditions of what Earth was going through: The planet had just formed and it was very hot due to a number of factors, including frequent collisions with other Solar System bodies.
One important collision happened about 4.5 billion years ago, when a Mars-sized planetoid smashed into the infant Earth. The collision sent quite a lot of material into orbit around Earth, while the planetoid and the rest of Earth merged and tried to settle down. The orbiting material probably took less than a century to form the moon.
The big collision didn’t melt all of the Earth, but a fair fraction of material was vaporized, which created a rock vapor atmosphere around the young planet. But that rock vapor would have condensed out within 2,000 years, and left behind an atmosphere heavy in CO2 with some hydrogen and water vapor.
Apparently, there was a sizable quantity of water in the material that formed the Earth. After the moon was formed, the surface temperature was about 230C (446F), but even so, oceans of liquid water existed. That’s because the atmospheric pressure was over 27 times what it is today, because of the heavy CO2 atmosphere. As cooling continued, most of the CO2 was removed from the atmosphere by subduction and dissolving in ocean water, but the levels oscillated wildly.
One theory posits that between 4.4 and 4.1 billion years ago, the Earth’s climate was relatively cool, allowing for liquid water to be present at leastthat long. It was even suggested that the Earth may have been pretty much like it is today, except for the absence of flora and fauna.
One of the articles implied that life may have been getting started by the end of the Hadean Eon. But that was almost like a throw-away at the end of the last paragraph, so I’m thinking , one celled organisms? Maybe?
So as far as stories go, what if a spaceship gets too close to a forming star system and gets clobbered by tiny planetoids until it is forced to crash land on the nearest planet, which just happens to be vaguely Earth-like, but the only life it has are some quasi-amoebas swimming in the oceans. Maybe they have plants or seeds aboard, so they can grow some food. What about the stuff they don’t realize they’re carrying? Cockroaches, mice, fungal spores... What would those things evolve into, once there was enough food on the planet for them to successfully venture off the ship? There would be a whole lot of niches in the food chain for them to fill!



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean

Giraffe Evolution

I’ve known for some time that giraffes and okapi are related. But in looking up giraffe evolution, I’ve discovered that giraffes are also (distantly) related to pronghorns, deer, musk deer, cattle, goats, sheep, wildebeests, and antelope. What a wide-ranging family! However, the opaki are their closest relative, so close that a 7-million year old fossil had a neck that was a blending of a giraffe neck and an opaki neck.
Giraffe and opaki ancestors once roamed all of Eurasia, but in modern times, they are only found in Africa. Giraffes live in the savanna grasslands, while okapi live in the rain forest.
One possible early ancestor of giraffes is the Canthumeryx, which lived in Libya. No one is sure when it lived; guesses range from 25 million years ago to 14.3 million years ago. It was a medium-sized animal, slender and antelope-like.
About 15 million years ago, Giraffokeryx appeared in the Indian subcontinent. It may have resembled an okapi or a small giraffe. It showed some definite lengthening of the neck.
The Sivatherium ranged throughout Africa and to the Indian subcontinent about 1 million years ago, and may have gone extinct as recently at 8,000 years ago, as ancient rock paintings greatly resemble them. The picture of a reconstruction of one show a pair of horns that look rather like the horns of a Texas longhorn, but only about a foot long each. The neck wasn’t as long as a modern giraffe, and the spots are depicted as being not quite so regular. It stood 7.2 feet tall at the shoulder, with a total height of 9.8 ft and a body weight of up to half a ton. Its shoulders were very strong to support the neck muscles required to life the heavy skull.
There was another giraffe-type animal that ranged from India to Turkey called the Bramatherium, which was closely related to the Sivatherium.
The Shansitherium was a superficially moose- or antelope-like giraffe from the Shanxi province in China. They were closely related to the Samotherium, which was rather like a half-way point between a giraffe and an opaki, as far as size goes.
Giraffes have horns! They are actually called ossicones, being made of bone and covered in furry skin. Some of their ancestors had 2, like modern giraffes, and some had 4. Sometimes they stuck up, or stuck up and curved back, or maybe they stuck out vertically. The Sivatherium horns as I described looked like small longhorns, did not look to be covered in furry skin, but they also had a pair of ossicones above their eyes.
So, if I ever want to make up a giraffe-like alien creature, I now know there is plenty of leeway for using my imagination!


https://evolution-institute.org/how-giraffes-evolved-such-a-large-neck/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffidae

Extinction Event 1

We all know the dinosaurs went extinct. Okay, most of them. But that was not the first ‘Great Extinction Event that Earth has suffered. Since I’m really only aware of that one and its possible cause, I decided to investigate the first one, just to see what I could find. Apparently, it was caused by oxygen!
I know, right? Something we think is a good thing, yet it caused a massive die-off! How could this be? Let’s take a look.
First, let’s be sure we understand what an extinction event is; it is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Estimates of how many extinction events we’ve already had range from 5 to as many as 20.
Most life on Earth is microbial and thus difficult to measure. Therefore recorded extinction events are those that affected the easily observed, biologically-complex component of life on Earth. Normally, extinction of various lifeforms occur at an uneven rate. An Extinction Event is when a lot of different lifeforms go extinct at pretty much the same time.
The Oxygenation Crisis occurred around 2.45 billion years ago, but technically, as I studied it further, it is not considered one of The Great Extinction Events. Maybe because it’s hard to find fossils from that long ago, so they can’t be sure what died off and in what numbers, but it was big enough that the fossils they have found indicate something happened.
From what I understand, Earth’s atmosphere at the time had next to no free oxygen in it. But then photosynthesizing cyanobacteria (which some call blue-green algae) evolved in the shallow sea that covered most of Earth. The cyanobacteria did what it does, and in the process, released free oxygen into the water. Eventually, the water couldn’t hold any more of it and released free oxygen into the air. All this free oxygen (which was a mere pittance compared to what we currently have in our atmosphere) played havoc with the metabolism of most of the living organisms at the time and a great deal of them died.
And the cyanobacteria continued putting out more oxygen.
Which opened the gates for more complex biolife forms.
So, extinction events are not always a bad thing... if you aren’t a species that is going extinct. But they do tend to create ‘bottle-necks’ of survival, which are followed by much evolving and diversification to fill all the empty niches that result.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

Dinosaurs

Like most kids, I had a steady interest in dinosaurs when I was young. I never truly outgrew that interest, and the science magazines I read don’t have much to report on them very often. How disappointing. I long to learn all the new stuff they’ve learned since I was a kid. Can you imagine my surprise a few decades ago when I discovered Fred Flintstone’s powerhouse Brontosaurus never actually existed? It was the result of a few bones that did not necessarily belong together and a scientist’s active imagination while trying to put them together.
One of my school science projects was on dinosaurs. I bought several giant bars of Ivory soap and tried to carve them into various dinosaurs. The T-Rex didn’t want to stand up, the stegasaurus’ back plates were difficult to carve without breaking them off. The easiest to carve was the brontosaurus, which way back then still had a place on the dinosaur family tree.
I can’t do justice to dinosaurs in a few hundred words. After all, they were around - in one form or another - for millions of years. So I plan to look around, pick some interesting versions and report on them over the course of several months.
What do you think you know about dinosaurs? Were they all cold-blooded? Covered in reptile scales or simply skin similar to our own? Did they do any parenting of their young, or simply lay their eggs and move on through the countryside? Did they really evolve into birds? How big did they get? What was their smallest representative? Are there any ‘dinosaurs’ alive today, or maybe animals that look very similar to their ancient ancestors?
I remember a story - I don’t remember if I saw it visually or read it - where a group of hadrosaurs (That’s what I remember their type being, but I may be completely wrong.) had left Earth in some fashion back in the Long Ago, and established a home on another planet in another system. And now their descendants were space travelers and meeting humans in the vastness of space.
Wouldn’t that be something?
Well, since we’re approaching that point where we may be space traveling in a few generations (meaning, outside our home system), maybe we should be considering what evolved dinosaurs might be like. And to do that, we should start by learning what dinosaurs were actually like.
Any suggestions you want me to look at?

Get It Done!

Did you ever go to your favorite department store with a long list of things to pick up, only to find that almost every department was under construction? Perhaps the entire front of the store and half the garage was included in the make-over so that you had to park several blocks away and make your way down a fenced serpentine walk-way to a tiny entry on the side. Once you got inside, you were still confined to fenced-in paths, just like everybody else. Maybe the escalators and all but one elevator were fenced off. And it turned out the only departments that were open were Ladies Socks, Pickles & Relish, and Toys for Children 100+. I suppose that would be fine if all you needed were socks, pickles and a birthday present for Great-Grandma. But would it be fun...?
Okay, I exaggerated a little, but that disappointed, claustrophobic feeling is what I’ve been feeling this past year whenever we go to DisneyWorld for the day. First, large swatches of Hollywood Studios were blocked off as they built Toy Story Land and Galaxy’s Edge... and rebuilt the security measures at the front gate. That meant a long walk from the greatly expanded parking lot around all the fenced off area to get passed through security so you could line up like sardines in a tin to go through the gate. They still don’t have the Chinese Theater open again.
Now they are working on TomorrowLand in Epcot. ALL of the central section of TomorrowLand is under construction. The rides around the edges are... supposedly... open, but when we went there the other day, ALL the attractions in The Land Pavilion had ‘technical difficulties’ until 9:45. When we got out of there, there was no way to walk across the central section to get to the rides on the other side. (You had to walk around the edges of the ‘donut hole’, either back to the front gate and up the other side, or around the lagoon side and down the other side.) Happily, it was 11:00, so we walked around the lagoon so we could say we had at least walked a mile that day.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but when I want to go someplace fun, a major construction zone is NOT the first place I think of. Why can’t they do one building at a time, get it done, and then move on to the next piece of the project?
And what’s up with the Guardians of the Galaxy ride? It’s been under construction for what, 2 years now? And still another year to go? Sheesh!