Wallpaper Monday

Remember two months ago, when I posted a fantastic photo — taken by an Earth-bound astronomer — of Atlantis grappling with the Hubble telescope, right in front of the sun?

Well, Thierry Legault has done it again. This time he photographed Atlantis on its final (scheduled) mission, docking to the International Space Station. (Be sure to watch the full-speed video of the transit, to appreciate just how little time Legault had to snap his photo.)

Inspired by that breathtaking image, digital artist Vlad Gerasimov produced a wallpaper that’s a must-have for all space geeks, photography geeks, and general cool-image geeks.

I can tell you that it looks really, really good in 1680×1050.

Saturday picture show

The picture show this weekend is a day late, due to pressing engagements yesterday (namely, sunshine and a bicycle).

For today’s picture show, I will direct you to the NASA Earth Observatory, which is featuring side-by-side comparisons of satellite photos taken a decade or two apart.

For example, Mt. St. Helens in 1984, four years after its eruption:

And again 15 years later:

Scientists have been studying the recovery of this area since practically the day after the eruption, but no amount of ground observation can render the big picture view that a satellite is capable of. Considering the vastness of the original devastation, it’s cheering to see just how much recovery has occurred in a relatively short period of time.

Another example is Dubai’s beachfront zone, before the artificial islands were created:

…and ten years later.

These are false color images, in which the red is vegetation. Where there is vegetation in a desert like this, there are yards, parks, golf courses and homes. As you can see, in the last ten years a significant amount of water has been poured onto the sands of Dubai — and a significant amount of sand has been dredged up from the water. Palm Jumeirah, one of two palm tree-shaped collections of artificial islands, was built from dredged sand and populated with high end homes.

The World of Change exhibit features many more of these comparisons and is well worth a look. It can be a time suck, though, because each comparison on the main page is just a teaser, showing the first and last images of that particular series. Click on it and you’ll be taken to the page for the specific comparison, with a longer description and links to all of the interim satellite photos. The photos are perfectly cropped and oriented, enabling a viewer to click through and easily see the changes year to year.

I should probably also warn you that several of the comparisons, such as the Amazon deforestation, West Virginia mountaintop mining, and the shrinking Aral Sea, are truly depressing. When you think about it, it’s remarkable that humans are altering their planetary surface so profoundly as to be visible from space.

Oh, THAT’S how you say it

One of my friends was recently telling me about the trauma she experiences driving her young son and his two buddies to school. “He’s in a growth phase where he stinks,” she said, and added that with three boys that age all trapped together in a car, she tends to drive with her head hanging out the window.

Having had some experience with this (my stepson went through a phase last year where I honestly thought something had died in his shoes), I asked her if the car smelled like a fart. But she just looked at me blankly. Thinking that perhaps I hadn’t said the word correctly, I headed for the English/Portuguese dictionary and looked it up. Whoops, I had a vowel wrong, which is kind of critical. I showed her the entry.

“OH!” she said, laughing. “That’s the polite way to say it.” So she taught me the alternative words, which she assured me are in far greater usage. There are two terms, one for the “silent but deadly” variety and one for the more audible type. I looked them up in my dictionary — they aren’t there.

How am I supposed to learn proper Portuguese when my dictionary withholds critical words like that?

Portuguese body culture

Do you know what I have never yet seen in Portugal? This:

I was thinking about it the other day during an email conversation with a friend regarding, of all things, the specialty food we buy for our cat. I’d told her it was labeled “for sterile cats,” and she wrote back asking what the heck that meant. I explained that it was a low-calorie food for cats that had been spayed or neutered, and were therefore more likely to gain weight. She answered:

So, another cultural difference. Of course we have low-cal pet food too, but since American pets, like American people, all tend to pack on pounds, it’s just called “light” or “reduced calorie” food. Nothing special designated for the spay/neuter crowd.

Which got me to thinking about the cultural tendency to pack on pounds (or kilos, as the case may be). Certainly Portugal has its share of overweight people, but what it doesn’t have are morbidly obese people. On the other hand, there also aren’t very many stick figures. The American ideal of a woman with toothpicks for legs or a man with ripped abs and bulging biceps does not translate into the Portuguese ideal. (That said, I’m aware that the average Portuguese woman would sell her soul for a night out with Cristiano Ronaldo, and the average Portuguese man would sell his soul for a night of being Cristiano Ronaldo.)

Over here, people who live a rural lifestyle tend to be lean. Not toothpick lean, but wiry lean. While age often brings weight, it never seems to cross the line from “plump” to “obese.” The city folks are often what Americans would consider overweight, except that it really amounts to having a little belly. And women here happily wear short shirts that expose their soft, fatty bellies without a gram of self-consciousness. It is not uncommon to see very fashionably dressed young women trotting down the street in stilettos (on cobblestone sidewalks!) and tight, short shirts that leave their small bellies swelling out over their waistbands. American young women would die at the very thought of it. Here it’s considered normal, and not an exclusion to attractiveness.

Certainly the Mediterranean diet has a lot to do with the lack of morbid obesity here, but that isn’t the only factor. I think the body culture is a major part of it. When people are not judged by their weight, and a little fat is considered normal, then weight becomes much less emotionally or psychologically charged. The “eat/feel guilty for eating/eat more because of guilt” cycle never gets started.

So, that’s what I was thinking today as I poured a serving of “Sterilised 37″ into my cat’s food bowl. She, by the way, is not morbidly obese either. But she is pleasantly plump.

They’re not listening to you

From the New York Times:

Mr. Obama announced on May 14 a moratorium on drilling new wells and the granting of environmental waivers.

“It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies,” Mr. Obama said. “That cannot and will not happen anymore.”

“We’re also closing the loophole that has allowed some oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews,” he added in reference to the environmental waivers.

Time for one of your erudite, high-impact, stop-the-presses speeches, Mr. Obama, because your regulation agencies are not listening to you. Since your moratorium announcement, they’ve issued seven new drilling permits and granted five environmental waivers. Since the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion, those numbers are 17 drilling permits and 19 environmental waivers.

In testifying before Congress on May 18, Mr. Salazar and officials from his agency said they recognized the problems with the waivers and they intended to try to rein them in. But Mr. Salazar also said that he was limited by a statutory requirement that he said obligated his agency to process drilling requests within 30 days after they have been submitted.

“That is what has driven a number of the categorical exclusions that have been given over time in the gulf,” he said.

Perhaps I am just terribly naive, but wouldn’t a better response to such a statutory requirement be, “You haven’t sufficiently convinced us that this is safe, so our answer is no,” rather than, “Well, we haven’t got time to look at this properly, so we’ll take your unbiased word for it that this is perfectly safe and all possible environmental concerns have been anticipated and addressed. Go ahead”?

Oh, I forgot. The first response would not bring money into the federal coffers, while the second one will. Well then, if we’re going to sell off our environment to anyone who bothers to apply for a permit, shouldn’t we at least be charging a hell of a lot more for it? According to a May 2007 Government Accounting Office report:

Based on results of a number of studies, the U.S. federal government receives one of the lowest government takes in the world. Collectively, the results of five studies presented in 2006 by various private sector entities show that the United States receives a lower government take from the production of oil in the Gulf of Mexico than do states—such as Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Louisiana—and many foreign governments.

Other government-take studies issued in 2006 and prior years similarly show that the United States has consistently ranked low in government take compared to other governments. For example, a study completed in 2006 for MMS showed that the U.S. federal government take in the Gulf of Mexico deepwater and shallow water was lower than 29 and 26, respectively, of the 31 fiscal systems analyzed.

We’re getting screwed, Mr. Obama. The BP oil spill is just the most recent — and visible — sign of it.

Wallpaper Monday

I’ve often wondered — why are so many people terrified of snakes but not of lizards?

It seems to be much the same reason why some people are terrified of rats but not of squirrels. There’s nothing logical about it — full awareness of the animals’ anatomical and taxonomical similarities makes no difference to the amount of fear some experience. The emotional response seems to be built in at a DNA level.

I’m one of those who loves snakes and lizards, and found this wallpaper to be a delight, both for the photography and the subject. The lizard and its rock are in such crisp focus that it seems possible to feel the skin of one and the rough edges of the other, while the rest of the photo is nicely blurred, making it ideal for those who keep numerous icons on their desktop.

But my biggest reason for enjoying this wallpaper is that every time I look at it, I want to reach out and pet the lizard. That response seems to be built in at the DNA level, too.

Want.

My favorite map maker, Raven Maps and Images, just sent me an email alert regarding their latest release: a map of Crater Lake. What timing, considering my recent posts about this magnificent place.

I have five atlases from this company, plus their gorgeous map of Oregon, which proudly takes up the wall space over my desk. They are old school cartographers, meaning they consider their work to be art. I would have many more of their maps, if not for the minor issue of available places to hang them. (They are not small.)

But for this one, I might have to find room.

Unfortunately you can’t embiggen that, because Raven Maps doesn’t offer bigger images on their web site. It’s poor marketing on their part, I think, because it’s not until you see these maps on a larger scale that you can appreciate the breathtaking artistry (and technological expertise) that goes into making them.

They do, however, offer little close-ups:

What I love about Raven Maps is their use of relief shading to make their maps three-dimensional. This is almost miraculous for a person like me, because I have a hard time translating two-dimensional maps into a three-dimensional mental image. (I am incredibly bad at reading topo maps, and am saved only when the numbers indicating elevation are glaringly obvious.) This is never an issue with Raven maps, because a quick glance instantly indicates elevation.

Here’s a detail from their Landforms of the World map…

…which would not be out of place framed and hung in a gallery.

I’ve long drooled over their world maps, the North American map, and the US map. But the Crater Lake map might do me in. Want.

Snails!

Ah, spring, when a young person’s fancy turns to thoughts of…snails. Best served with fresh bread and cold beer.

This is the time of year when cafés will have signs outside declaring, “Temos caracóis!” (We have snails!) The café in our apartment block had just such a sign last weekend, so we bought a big bowl and brought it back to our kitchen for a major slurpfest.

Before moving here, the only snails I’d eaten were prepared the French way, with lots of butter and garlic. Here they’re prepared in a thin broth with olive oil and salt and a few other spices — a completely different flavor. They’re also prepared in the shell, making their removal something of a learning experience.

The easiest ones are fully extended from the shell (though it does take a little getting used to, seeing them with their eyestalks still sticking up and looking very much alive). Then you can just suck them out. Slurp! Simple.

The tougher ones are back in the shell, requiring judicious use of a toothpick to prise them out. Once you can get part of the body out, though, you can usually slurp the rest. But sometimes their bodies block the shell too perfectly, and slurping doesn’t work. In that event, you can use your teeth to knock a little hole in the center of the shell, breaking the vacuum. After that, the slurping is easy.

For Americans who have not been raised in the tradition of eating snails, it’s best not to look too closely, but to just focus on the flavor instead. For my stepson, however, snails are an eagerly-awaited spring tradition. He’s only nine, but he ate more snails than my wife and me put together.

I do wonder if the rarity of socially acceptable slurping, dripping, and otherwise terrible table manners isn’t part of the attraction…

Is the Pope Catholic?

My family used to toss out the above phrase as a pat response whenever anyone asked a question where the answer was patently and transparently yes. But lately I’ve been wondering if that hasn’t outlived its time. Living in a Catholic nation and speaking with my Catholic friends, I’ve come to the conclusion that the true Catholic Church is not the one represented by the Pope.

The latest disconnect between the two churches came this past week, and can be illustrated with these quotes:

”Initiatives aimed at protecting the essential and primary values of life, beginning at conception, and of the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, help to respond to some of today’s most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good.”

– Pope Benedict, using a May 13 mass at Portugal’s holiest shrine as a platform to influence the nation’s politics, and to label equal marriage an insidious and dangerous threat to society.

“This is a historic moment in Portuguese society. In the past, our nation was a pioneer in such decisive human rights issues as abolishing the death penalty…Portugal can also be a pioneer in the defense of human rights, such as human dignity and the evolution of the individual, and in fighting discrimination, namely that based on sexual orientation.”

– Official statement from the Portuguese government, upon the May 17 passage of equal marriage into law.

I once asked my Portuguese tutor, who is a very devout Catholic, what her thoughts were on equal marriage. If anyone were against it, I believed it would be her. She responded with a snort. “God is love,” she said. “Marriage is a celebration of love. If two people love each other enough to commit to marriage, it is not our place to say they cannot.”

Another friend of mine, who is not Portuguese but is a lifelong and devout Catholic, said simply, “God created us all, and Jesus never turned away from anyone.”

These are not the messages we hear from the Pope, the Vatican, or the hierarchy of the Church. They are, however, the messages offered by many of the parish clergy. They are the messages that are instinctively understood by many of the laity, who base their lives on the Christian ideals of love and acceptance, rather than dogma.

The Vatican has historically stumbled along several hundred years behind the rest of the world, accepting new concepts centuries after everyone else. (It waited 359 years before admitting that Galileo was right.) I wonder, then, why we still think of both the Vatican and the Pope as the leaders of the Church? They are not. The real leaders of the Church are those priests and nuns who devote their lives to offering aid and comfort, and those members of the laity who live by the tenets of love.

If the Pope is Catholic, then his church is not the same church my friends and family belong to. Those Portuguese who celebrated their nation’s stand for equality and human dignity — they are the true Catholics.

Same rationale, different decision

image by *kilroyart

Dennise Casey, spokesperson for Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, speaking on why the governor planned to veto the equal marriage bill passed by the Vermont Legislature in 2009:

“[The governor] believes this bill is a distraction from the important work the legislature needs to do to pass a responsible budget and get our economy going again.”

President Cavaco Silva of Portugal, speaking on why he chose not to veto Portugal’s equal marriage bill, instead signing it into law:

“In the face of the grave [economic] crisis the nation is passing through, and the complex challenges that are ahead, it is important to promote the union of the Portuguese and not divide them; to adopt a strategy of compromise and not of rupture.”

Which is a slightly more elegant way of saying, “We’ve got serious economic issues facing us, so let’s get rid of this divisive distraction and focus on the important stuff.”

Governor Douglas, who personally opposes equal marriage rights, vetoed the distracting bill — requiring legislators to put aside all their other work in order to override the veto. Equal marriage became law in the state of Vermont on April 7, 2009.

President Cavaco Silva, who personally opposes equal marriage rights, signed the distracting bill — immediately freeing Parliament to focus on the important work of dealing with the economy. Equal marriage will become law in the nation of Portugal as soon as the bill is published in the state newspaper.

Same rationale — equal rights for a minority is a distraction from much more important matters of state — but completely opposite decision. One was rooted in division, the other in union.

In its official statement, the Portuguese government (meaning the ruling party of Parliament) said, “This is a historic moment…This law will create conditions in which discrimination will be abolished in Portuguese society, and Portugal will join the nations which, by example, respect the dignity of the people and free the evolution of the individual.”

Portugal just became the eighth nation to offer equal marriage rights to all. I am truly proud of my adopted country. As for my country of birth — what the hell is taking you so long? The developed world is leaving you behind.