Totality

1 or 2 minutes before totality

2 or 3 minutes after totality

30 minutes after totality

August has been a windfall for opportunistic amateur skygazers. Close on the heels of the Perseid meteors, we were treated yesterday to the longest lunar eclipse since the year 2000. The people on the West Coast of the US lucked out in the cosmic ballet, for in these parts, the moon was still sufficiently high up in the sky to be seen from almost anywhere. I awoke when the partial eclipse had just begun outside the window. Dressing hurriedly in the dark, I was able to slip out quietly and drive to a remote unilluminated parking lot about 10 minutes before totality set in. One cannot expect company on these mostly solitary adventures, and so I was surprised to find a gentleman who had come there with his telescope and video camera to escape from the cloudy skies of Millbrae; both of us had picked that lot on a whim. I knew that it wasn’t the best place, but if I had driven any further, I would have missed the pivotal transition.

Note the significantly richer shade of amber in the last picture; that picture is from the middle of the total eclipse phase. The Man in the Moon is more difficult to discern during the eclipse, and the surface is dominated by the Ocean of Storms, the largest of all the desert maria. The imagination runs wild at such times, and one can see anything from an embryo in an egg to the head and neck of a dinosaur in the moon. It boggles my mind to think that this has been happening for thousands of millions of years and that our ancestors must have watched eclipses with fear and curiosity from the mouths of their caves. Like insect wings and fallen leaves preserved in amber across millenia, there is most probably something preserved in our genetic code that predisposes us toward being swayed by celestial events.

The eclipse was special for another reason: it coincided with Raksha Bandhan – an Indian festival which celebrates the bond between brother and sister. A few thousand miles away in Georgia, my sister had set her own alarm clock and had awakened to watch the eclipsed moon swimming low in the West. It is nice that, many years removed from our first frustrated attempts at seeing things in cloudy skies, she is still zany enough to do that sort of thing.

Why do children resemble their parents? (Except those that resemble the milkman)

I went to the University library to borrow The Selfish Gene, the book which brought a lot of fame, and more than a few headaches to Richard Dawkins. In defiance of the electronic record which, five minutes ago, had said that it should be in the stacks, the book was nowhere to be found. A few books to the right of the void where The Selfish Gene should have been, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics showed a picture of an mRNA molecule emerging out of a grotesquely misshapen blob (which, I later discovered, was the enzyme RNA polymerase) which was doing its best to hold two strands of DNA apart. It is a weird picture, especially if you have come with expectations of reading a popular, controversial and landmark book on genetics. After only a few happy, drawing-filled pages in which prehistoric women wonder whether sex has anything to do with babies, you find this:

Several other Greeks, thinking more deeply than Xenophon developed the first real theories of heredity – in other words, they addressed the question, “Why do children resemble their parents?”.

“Except,” says a sly man wearing a toga and carrying a pitcher, “the ones who resemble the milkman.”

The book is a part of an outstanding series by Larry Gonick, a San Francisco-based cartoonist who has written cartoon guides to Statistics, Physics, History of the Universe, Chemistry, Sex and some others that I have yet to discover. This particular book on genetics is co-authored with Mark Wheelis, a lecturer of bacteriology at UC Davis. Gonick, who refers to himself as an Overeducated Cartoonist, has an amazing gift for explaining very difficult things using weird analogies, ridiculous jokes and awesomely funny cartoons. From the early history of genetics and a few welcome jibes at Aristotle and his male chauvinistic theory of how babies are made, the book takes the reader on an exploratory tour – from Leeuwenhoek’s observations of animalcules under his primitive microscope, to Mendel’s experiments with pea plants, to dominant and recessive genes. Did you know that you cannot inherit baldness from your father, because the allele for baldness is on the X chromosome only? But you could inherit baldness from your maternal grandpa. (Alas! Mother tells me that I have little hope. It is only a matter of time. 😉 )

The second half of the book is even more captivating, in which Gonick and Wheelis explain cell division by Mitosis and Meiosis, and then proceed to explain chromosomes and DNA, genes and enzymes. Somewhere, in the part that explains haploid and diploid cells, a female bee tells a drone, “Will you listen to me? I swear Buster, it’s like you’re only half there sometimes.” How can one keep from smiling at that? Enzyme action is explained with a great flourish, and you see cartoons of enzymes snapping RNA into two, sewing it together, editing junk DNA, reversing gene sequences, assembling proteins, shepherding modelcules to and fro, and being workhorses in general. The machinery of nature is beautiful and, coming from a digital communications perspective, I was delighted to see that there is quite a lot of redundancy built in, just in case the instructions in the gene sequence have errors or are incorrectly transcribed. For example, the sequences CCA and CCC and CCU and CCG all generate the same amino acid, thus protecting against minor discrepancies. Ocassionally though, bad things happen.

It is amazing that so complicated a thing as protein formation can be explained by a few well-drawn cartoons. The book is a riot and like the others in the series, a wonderful precursor for someone looking to do a more detailed study later. Read and be entertained. Any knowledge accrued along the way, and there will be quite a lot of it, is almost incidental. Now, if only there was a cartoon guide to multi-user information theory….

[EDIT: In the comments, mandarine points to a funny collection of cartoon works titled Savoir Sans Frontières. There are comics on Computers, Relativity, Euclidean Geometry, Topology and more. The cartoons were conceived by Jean-Pierre Petit and are available for free download. They are being translated from French but many are already available in a language of your choice. Further, please do not blame mandarine for some of Jean-Pierre Petit’s more bizarre notions 😉 .]

Birding with Simon Barnes

When winter sends a day of unexpected brightness, of unseasonable warmth, then a great tit finds his juices stirring, and instead of giving his usual contact calls and alarm calls, he will burst into a song. It is not a great song as these things go, but it is bright, strident and optimistic, and it comes wonderfully early in the year. It is winter’s death knell: and though winter takes a long time in dying, its fate is sealed from the moment the great tit sings. – Simon Barnes, How to be a (Bad) Birdwatcher.

If you read the Times of London, chances are that you have come across the name of Simon Barnes. He was once referred to as England’s “most colorful” sportswriter. When the Times solicited a thoroughly idiotic tennis article from a writer I do not want to name, Peter Bodo of Tennis Magazine castigated them for looking elsewhere when they had the services of “Simon friggin’ Barnes”. Barnes is a great sportswriter: one who writes with a genuine passion for sport, and one who values, like few others in the machofied universe of sports writing, the aethetic appeal of a sportsman on song. I have enjoyed reading his work without having the slightest idea that he is a writer of books on nature. So, it was with surprise and delight that I purchased How to be a (Bad) Birdwatcher at the bookstore inside the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. I could not have found a better memento of my short visit to the little sister’s city.

Partly autobiographical and partly instructional, it is an ode to birds and birdwatching that put me immediately at ease. Barnes quickly and summarily dispenses with paraphernalia such as field guides (“the more local the better”) and binoculars (“Ah, shut up – any old pair, cheapest you can find..”). No harping about whether a 7 x 35 is better than a 8 x 20. What he is really interested in, is the great pleasure of birdwatching. And by birdwatching, he does not mean the obsessive compulsive habit of keeping lists, shushing your fellow birdwatchers in the field, and such. Birdwatching, according to Barnes, is simply the act of opening oneself to the ordinary, day-to-day lives of birds. He writes enthusiastically of a couple of his great and eccentric birdwatching mentors, has witty descriptions of the best places to watch birds (landfills and garbage dumps get an honorable mention) and talks about the relevance of understanding the rhythms of birds, of trying to see how their lives are bound by time and place.

Rubbish tips and landfill sites are also honeypots: you see gulls in fantastic numbers; one thing that always stirs the heart is lots and lots of birds. The sight fills you with the feeling that humans haven’t, after all, buggered up the entire planet quite yet. And if you can feel that sort of emotion at a rubbish tip, what might you feel at a seabird nesting colony?

Needless to say, I loved the little book and read it everywhere – in the airplane, in bed, in the Subway line. It was funny, it was calming, and I felt lighter and happier for it. It was extremely gratifying to find out that I, less than a novice among birdwatchers, have had some experiences that Barnes considers valuable and attractive enough to include in this book. I have seen avocets in their dozens on the California shoreline and was surprised to read that their European cousins once faced extinction. In March 2005, shortly after seeing a change in the color of house finches that frequented my dorm balcony, I went to the southern tip of San Francisco Bay and discovered that the avocets changed color too! – abandoning their ashy grey to a more ostentatious orange-brown for the mating season. That visit, probably because of its timing, changed everything. Since then, I have seen pelicans, willets, sandpipers, skimmers, great egrets and snowy egrets one of which stood still long enough to give a decent photograph (below).

I have seen Forster’s terns hover over shallow water around mealtime and then suddenly, dive vertically into the water and emerge with a little fish in their beaks; Barnes reckons that watching this is one of the great experiences of bad birdwatching. Its not all that rare either. If you live in the Bay Area, you can head over to Shoreline Lake in Mountain View an hour before sunset and be treated to dozens of spectacular dives in less than five minutes.

As an immediate consequence of the book, I took Mr. Barnes’s advice and called up the local Audubon Society chapter. Astonishingly enough, the person I talked to not only told me which birds I should expect to see, she also offered to fax a comprehensive list of species that frequent the area. It so happens that there is a field trip at Charleston Slough on Sunday and I might get to meet the avocets again.

The travails of Gaia

Last night, I attended a lecture by James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, and author of the recent book The Revenge of Gaia. Briefly, the Gaia Hypothesis proposes that the earth functions like a single organism consisting of a number of subsystems which interact in a sustainable way. On Thursday, Lovelock was talking about the problem of global warming and measures to slow down the inevitable escalation of the earth’s temperature in the approaching century – matters he discusses in detail in his book. I am guessing from the title that, the book additionally talks about how the earth (Gaia) is trying to cope by means of occurrences such as forest fires which release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in an effort to reach equilibrium at a hotter global temperature. Lovelock didn’t elaborate on this “revenge” of Gaia, focussing instead on what it may mean for the human race.

Three graces

Groups of two or three of these grand trees are often found standing close together, the seeds from which they sprang having probably grown on ground cleared for their reception by the fall of a large tree of a former generation. These patches of fresh, mellow soil beside the upturned roots of the fallen giant may be from forty to sixty feet wide, and they are speedily occupied by seedlings. Out of these seedling-thickets perhaps two or three may become trees, forming those close groups called “three graces,” “loving couples,” etc. For even supposing that the trees should stand twenty or thirty feet apart while young, by the time they are full-grown their trunks will touch and crowd against each other and even appear as one in some cases. – John Muir, The Mountains of California.

My sister took this picture in King’s Canyon National Park exactly one month ago, somewhere close to the General Grant tree. It is a strange thing, that even when faced with a large number of these bizarrely large trees, the experience never becomes repetitive. Each tree – and this is especially true of the sequoias in the monarch stage – gives one an impression of incredible stillness. It was sobering for me to think that these trees were around when Ceasar lorded over Rome, when the Benedictine monks were beginning to aggregate the wisdom of the world, when even the words I employ to think about them had not yet been spoken.