Jasper Morello and the Lost Airship

This 26-minute Australian animated short film is one of four parts of The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, nominated for an Academy Award in 2006. 

The short films are set in a world styled after mid-Victorian England with Steampunk style, iron dirigibles and steam powered computers, where giant mechanical airships are the main mode of transport. The characters are animated in the style of Wayang (Indonesian shadow puppets) best described as silhouettes.

I haven't had time to watch it yet; just storing it here for future viewing.

Congressional seat changes based on new 2010 census results

More data and analysis will undoubtedly be forthcoming in the weeks ahead, but the map above shows the expected changes in seats in the House of Representatives.  Looks like gains for the historically "red" states and losses by the "blue" ones.  Source.

Julia butterfly

Perched on the tendril of a Passiflora plant, the egg of the Julia heliconian butterfly may be safe from hungry ants. This species lays its eggs almost exclusively on this plant's twisted vines.

And here's the butterfly:

Upper photo credit Martin Oeggerli, National Geographic.  Lower photo credit me.

They shoot pets, don't they?

From an article at Audubon Magazine about the increasing popularity of "canned hunts."

In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild. Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas...

There have been major changes in canned hunts since I last wrote about them 19 years ago. For one thing, they’re vastly more popular... One of the club’s most prominent members is rock star Ted Nugent, who runs his own canned-hunt operation in Jackson, Michigan. Five of Nugent’s kills have made it into the club record book, including a feral boar he shot during a canned hunt in Texas and a bison he shot on, of all places, Alaska’s Kodiak Island, where they’re being raised to be crossed with cattle for “beefalo.” “Lunatic fringe” is how Nugent describes people who think canned hunts “degrade the heritage of American hunting.”

Another big change in canned hunting since 1992 has been the composition of its critics, which now include more fair-chase hunters. Because the general public has scant understanding of canned hunting, it frequently doesn’t differentiate it from real hunting. “If we don’t protect our image, we may not have a heritage,” says the Colorado Wildlife Federation’s treasurer and board member, Kent Ingram, a leader in the recent well-fought but failed battle to ban canned hunts in the state.

He reports that he was informed by a Denver taxidermist that half the elk coming in to be mounted had tattooed lips, which identify captives. Ingram also said he had reliable information that one canned-hunt customer had flown into Colorado and paid $40,000 to kill a Minnesota-raised bull that had been trucked in for the one-day shoot...

Not all product is shot. What’s considered “best” for canned-hunt production is sold to other breeders. Russell Bellar of Peru, Indiana, paid $100,000 for Xfactor, a yearling whitetail with a freakishly large rack. Some bucks are plied with antler-growing concoctions and as they age are kept on life support with meds and surgeries. Their function is to produce semen for other breeders who buy it for as much as $28,000 per standard unit, or “straw.” A prime buck might produce 500 straws a year. And there’s additional income from photographers who sell phony wildlife images to outdoor magazines and calendar publishers. Old, decrepit males with waning semen and antler potential are sold to canned-hunt operations as shooters...

Finally, there’s the disease issue. Game farms and the canned-hunting operations they supply are spreading bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, chronic wasting disease (the wildlife version of mad cow), and brain worm (carried by white-tailed deer and fatal to ungulates that didn’t evolve with it, such as moose, elk, caribou, and pronghorn). So far the worst epidemics have been in Canada, but they apparently were touched off by animals imported from the United States...

So terse and tight is the prose of Montana’s fair-chase hunters that they were able to pack everything I’ve been trying to say in this column into a single sentence. Maybe you’ll read that sentence this month on one of their trucks, if you venture into Montana’s wild, beautiful deer and elk country, because MADCOW adopted it for a slogan during its ballot-initiative campaign. It goes like this: “Real Hunters Don’t Shoot Pets.”

More at the link, via The Daily Dish.

Leonardo da Vinci's bicycle

The photo above depicts a modern model based on the drawing (inset below left), in Milan's Codex Atlanticus, which contains the drawings of da Vinci.

[Augusto Marioni] published his discovery in 1974 in a paper delivered precisely in Vinci, the birthplace of Leonardo. Subsequently the bicycle of Leonardo run a brilliant career, it has been also modeled in life size for the Florentine exhibition in honor of the millennium traveling all over the world. Its only fault was the impossibility of being steered. Apparently this minor problem did not excite the master.

It was only in 1997 that Dr. Hans-Erhard Lessing pointed out in a detailed study that the design was a forgery, and a quite recent one at that, drawn into the codex (!) after its restoration in the 60s, more precisely between 1967 and 1974. No trace of it can be seen on the photos made before and during the restoration, only some circles and lines appear through from the other side of the page, and these were complemented into a bike by the forger.

There's more on this subject at Poemas del rio Wang.

Muslim students find acceptance at Catholic colleges

Excerpts from an article in the Washington Post:

In the past few years, enrollment of Muslim students such as Shabnan has spiked at Catholic campuses across the country. Last year, Catholic colleges had an even higher percentage of Muslim students than the average four-year institution in the United States, according to the Higher Education Research Institute. The influx has astonished and sometimes befuddled administrators. Some Catholic campuses are creating prayer rooms for new Muslim students and hiring Islamic chaplains to minister to them. Others are unsure how to adapt...

Muslim students say they enroll at Catholic schools for many of the same reasons as their classmates: attractive campuses, appealing professors and academic programs that fit their interests. But there is also a spiritual attraction to the values that overlap the two faiths.

"Because it is an overtly religious place, it's not strange or weird to care about your religion here, to pray and make God a priority," said Shabnan, a political science major who often covers her head with a pale beige scarf. "They have the same values we do."

Georgetown University, whose Muslim student numbers have also been climbing, has a prayer room, student association and an entire center devoted to Muslim-Christian understanding, and the school hired a full-time Muslim chaplain in 1999. Catholic administrators at colleges that have added similar features say they haven't perceived the efforts as a challenge to their religious identity.

"We're not going to take down the cross or change our name. We're proud of who we are," said Marco Masini, associate vice president of student life at Benedictine University in Illinois. "Hospitality is a part of the Benedictine philosophy, so it's important we welcome individuals of all faiths."

Basiri said his Islamic faith has grown and matured in the past four years while studying in buildings named after Catholic leaders, in classrooms adorned with crucifixes, and with classmates often named after saints.

"The face of my prophet and my God has changed," he said. "It is even more beautiful now."

More at the link.

The Oracle of Delphi

Hon. John Collier : Priestess of Delphi (1891)

In the painting, “Priestess of Delphi” by The Honorable John Collier, a priestess - the Pythia - is depicted in a trance state, seated over a fissure in the rock through which vapors rise from the underground stream. In her left hand is a sprig of laurel - in Greek mythology, Apollo’s sacred tree - and in the other hand a bowl meant to hold some of the water from the stream containing the gases.

Image via marinni and Uncertain Times.  More information from Wikipedia:

Apollo spoke through his oracle: the sibyl or priestess of the oracle at Delphi was known as the Pythia; she had to be an older woman of blameless life chosen from among the peasants of the area. She sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth. When Apollo slew Python, its body fell into this fissure, according to legend, and fumes arose from its decomposing body. Intoxicated by the vapors, the sibyl would fall into a trance, allowing Apollo to possess her spirit. In this state she prophesied. It has been postulated that a gas high in ethylene, known to produce violent trances, came out of this opening, though this theory remains debatable.  While in a trance the Pythia "raved" – probably a form of ecstatic speech – and her ravings were "translated" by the priests of the temple into elegant hexameters. People consulted the Delphic oracle on everything from important matters of public policy to personal affairs. The oracle could not be consulted during the winter months, for this was traditionally the time when Apollo would live among the Hyperboreans. Dionysus would inhabit the temple during his absence.