Mythos

Been watching a great series of lectures by Joseph Campbell called Mythos (actually a two volume set of lectures titled Mythos I and Mythos II).  I've been watching it streaming from Netflix but I'm sure many public libraries would have it as well.

[By the way, as an aside, my wife and I received a great gift from her brother this Christmas.  It's called a Roku and it allows us to watch streaming Netflix movies on our TV.  Took about 5 minutes to set up, works with our wireless router, and has other neat content available as well.  I love it!]

Anyway, Dr. Campbell (1904-1987) was a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York for 38 years and was widely recognized as a world expert in comparative mythology publishing many papers, articles, and books (including the four-volume The Masks of God).  The phrase "Follow your bliss" is attributed to Campbell.  He often made Christians uncomfortable by pointing out similarities between Biblical stories and mythological themes in other, more ancient, cultures.  You can get more information about him from the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

These are not flashy presentations and, for that reason, are unlikely to ever be aired on regular television.  They're videos of Campbell lecturing in a room full of students with some slides to illustrate.  It's really like taking a class from Campbell on mythology and I've been watching each episode separately on different nights.  It's been a great education and I've learned a lot of interesting things (some of which I may follow up here with later blog posts).  Here's a list of the episodes on Volume I:

   1. Psyche and Symbol -- The psychological impulse for and response to myth.
   2. The Spirit Land -- How myths awakened American Indians to the mystery of life.
   3. On Being Human -- The emergence of myth in early hunter-gatherer societies.
   4. From Goddess to God -- The gradual shift from the Goddess to male, warlike deities.
   5. The Mystical Life -- Non-biblical mythic strains hat helped shape the Western spirit.

Highly recommended if you're interested in mythology - not as quaint stories from the ancient past that our non-scientific ancestors believed in, but as powerful beliefs all cultures, including our modern culture, still share.

Feeling warmer?

Short post since I drove home from near Washington, D.C. today and I'm a bit tired (but happy to be in my own home again).  There was an important astronomical event today.

Believe it or not, the Earth is closer to the Sun today (January 3 around 2:00 pm EST) that it has been since last January.  The Earth, and all of the planets, orbit the Sun in ellipses, not circles, as discovered by Johannes Kepler around 1605 with his First Law of Planetary Motion.

 As you can see, the difference between perihelion (from the Greek peri or "near" + helios or "Sun") and aphelion (from the Greek apo or "away" + helios or "Sun") is only 3 million miles given the average distance of 93 million miles or about a 3% difference.

It's not enough to make a difference in temperature here on the surface (the reason we have seasons is the TILT of the Earth's axis, not our distance from the Sun) but a size difference can be seen in a telescopic image (view here).

One consequence of Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion is that the Earth moves faster in its orbit near perihelion than it does at aphelion (here's an animation).  It's not much of a difference, 18.8 miles per second versus 18.2 miles per second for maximum and minumum orbital velocities.

Sometimes people claim crazy shit about the Earth's orbit.  P.Z. Myers at Phyrangula recently posted an example.

Finally, pop your head out tonight and look up.  The Quadrantids meteor shower will be peaking after midnight (early Tuesday morning, January 4).  Look to the northeast.

Capitalsaurus

Since I was down in Washington D.C. the other day, this article caught my eye - “Capitalsaurus,” A D.C. Dinosaur at Smithsonian.com. 

Now I know there are dinosaur fossils and trackways in the East in places like the Connecticut Valley in Connecticut and Massachusetts and the Newark Rift in New Jersey.  There are no dinosaur fossils in New York, but there is a famous set of therapod tracks excavated from Rockland County (the northern end of the Newark Rift) which now resides in the lobby of the New York State Museum in Albany.  Pennsylvania likewise has trackways, but no fossils thus far from the Gettysburg Rift.

These tracks and fossils are from Triassic-aged rift basins on the East coast (specifically those labeled 14-18 in the image at left).

The Triassic Period (around 200-250 million years ago) was the time the supercontinent of Pangaea began rifting apart.  Prior to this, the continent of Africa was connected to eastern North America.

The rift basins, shown in red at left, are essentially fossil "stretch marks" in the crust.  Further to the east, the crust broke, seafloor crust formed from ascending basaltic magma, and eventually opened up into the Atlantic Ocean as Africa drifted away.

 The figure at right shows how Pangaea rifted apart, formed an ocean basin as the two continents drifted away from each other, and left behind a rift basin (to the left of the ocean).

Since these rift basins are places where sediment accumulates, they are areas where fossils can be preserved and the Triassic Period was the initial time of the dinosaurs (which arose, lived, and died in the Mesozoic Era - a time consisting of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods).

Anyway, that's why we have some dinosaur trackways and fossils here in the eastern part of the U.S.

What I had not known, was that a dinosaur was once discovered in the heart of Washington, D.C.  It's not from a Triassic rift basin, but from significantly younger 100 million year old Cretaceous sediments formed when the area was swampy lowlands.

This dinosaur, informally dubbed Capitalsaurus, was discovered in 1898 when sewer workers were excavating at First and F Streets SE (see map) - the corner is now called Capitalsaurus Court.  What was found are a few vertebrae and bone fragments of a therapod (two-legged, meat-eating dinosaur).  The Smithsonian article, linked above, discusses some of the confusion about its correct classification.  Capitalsaurus is an informal name, not a scientific one, since it was not officially described in a peer-reviewed journal.  The District of Columbia, in the Official Dinosaur Designation Act of 1998, made Capitalsaurus the official dinosaur of D.C. (January 28 is Capitalsaurus Day).

This dinosaur is also supposedly described in the book Dinosaurs of the East Coast  by David Weishampel and Luther Young (The Johns Hopkins University Press , 1998) which is now on my "to read" list.

I should learn more about dinosaurs here in the east - I'm sure there are many interesting things about them I'm unaware of at present.

Below is an artist's conception of Capitalsaurus.  Take it with a big grain of salt given the fact that it's known from only a few vertebrae!

Happy New Year!

I'm visiting relatives in Maryland at the moment. 

Yesterday, since I can't just sit in a house all day, I took my daughter into Washington D.C. and we did the tourist thing and walked around the Mall a bit in the wonderful 50+ F weather and then spent a little time in the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.  When I asked my nine-year-old daughter what area she wanted to see, she said "ancient sea life" so we looked at fossils of trilobites, crinoids, brachiopods, eurypterids, mollusks, etc.  We also looked at Burgess Shale fossils and she knew the name of a lot of them (opabinia, anomalocaris, etc).  From there we went upstairs to see the mineral gallery, skipped the gemstones where everyone else goes and instead gawked at the beautiful mineral specimens (I'm so proud of her, she likes fossils and minerals).

Then we walked up to Chinatown for lunch, found a little gelato place for desert, and then walked back down to the Mall and around the Capital building (we took a tour there last year).  Then up to Union Station to see the train set they have set up there and the metro back to the father-in-law's house.

A good day.