Good Japanese Nuclear Crisis Source

For the past week, geology Ph.D. candidate Evelyn Mervine* has been interviewing her father USN Commander (Ret.) Mark Mervine, a nuclear engineer, about the rapidly developing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plants in Japan.

I've been frustrated by the media coverage and have found Ms. Mervine's interviews with her father to be some of the best explanatory sources of information about what's going on at the Fukushima complex.

Below is the latest interview she and her father did on the afternoon of Friday 18 March 2011. If it sounds interesting, a week's worth of previous interviews and segments answering listener questions can be found at Ms. Mervine's Geology blog Georneys.

Interview 8 | 3/18: Nuclear Engineer on Japan Nuclear Disaster from Evelyn Mervine on Vimeo.

If you have comments or questions, I'm sure they'd appreciate hearing them.

* She's also a friend of Dr. Phil Plait the skeptic, prominent science and astronomy blogger, and Discovery Channel show host--which is not bad company to keep.

Hey, I've been there before II !

I had a similar feeling of recognition in Spring 2009. I was listening to a pop station on my car radio and heard a part of a song*. Googling some lyrics when I got home led me to the song "Sober" by Pink. (Video has some weird horror imagery and some lingerie-clad Pink-on-Pink action.) Then watching the video on youtube, there were images of buildings that seemed very familiar, such as this one from 8 seconds in:

I paused the video and after a minute of puzzling remembered where I'd seen those buildings before: Stockholm! Here's a shot of mine of the same building from a different angle from my first night of wandering around the city center:



Or a view from the water from one of my boat tours:




Later in the bridge, this picture is shown:

I think it's a photoshopped version of this single spire:




* Incidentally, I really like Googling to identify songs I hear on the radio; all I have to do is memorize a few characteristic words and I can find out what it is. I remember one time I heard the very end of song, wrote down some lyrics and put "McCartneyesque" by them. I was amused later when I looked them up and realized I'd forgotten Paul McCartney (and Wings) had done the song "Listen to What the Man Says". :)

Hey, I've been there before!

For over a year, I've enjoyed looking at the daily "View From Your Window" entries over at Andrew Sullivan's blog; usually, I'd scroll carefully to hide the caption and try to guess where the picture was taken. It's fun to see how inaccurate my guesses are and the subtle clues I look at to classify a location.

Apparently so did a lot of his readers: this summer, he's expanded it into a weekly contest every Saturday. The last two or three have been so hard I didn't have a clue, plus readers have been going all out to win, e.g., finding the place, going there, and taking their own picture during the contest's three-day duration!

This Saturday I forgot to even look; so, I was surprised on Sunday when I saw the latest contest entry. I immediately recognized the orange roof and the church spire as being in the medieval city center of Tallinn, Estonia.

The View from Your Window Shot (courtesy Andrew Sullivan):


Going back to my pictures, it didn't take long to find my own shot of the spire:




Since I took often pictures randomly while wandering around a new city, I didn't have a label or an accompanying picture of an identifying plaque. But searching Google images for churches in Tallinn gave me my answer quickly: it's the Tallinn Niguliste church spire.

I entered the contest and sent him one of my own pictures. I imagine, though, since it's such a prominent feature of the Tallinn skyline that a lot of people can identify it and find it readily in Tallinn and take more recent pictures that better match the angle. Wish me luck. If nothing else, the contest motivated me to identify my photo.

September 11, 2007

Two years ago today, I spent my last partial day in Stockholm and in the evening boarded my first overnight cruise for Helsinki, Finland.

For a review, see these posts, all written about six weeks after the fact.

Walkin' In Memphis

After lunch on the day we visited the Pyramids, we drove the 10 miles or so south of Giza to the ancient town of Memphis. Memphis was likely founded 5000 years ago upon the unification of the two kingdoms of Upper (Southern) and Lower (Northern) Egypt*. It was the capital of Ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom (roughly 2630 BC - 2150 BC), during which the Great Pyramid Pharaohs reigned, and for periods during the New Kingdom a millenium later.

Evidently, a Memphian temple to the God Ptah gave us our name for Egypt. The Ptolemaic Egyptologist Manetho transliterated the Egyptian phrase for "Place of the life-force of Ptah" into the Greek syllables "Ai-gy-ptos", and that name stuck for the country as a whole.

The main site we visited in Memphis was an open air museum. It has many statues, including a sphinx. The big draw, however, is the 30 ft. alabaster Colossus of Ramses II, found in 1820, which is located in a small building on the site. For more of my pictures of the open air museum, click here.

*"Upper" and "Lower" Egypt are in reference to the flow of the Nile. The sources of the Nile -- the Ehtiopian Plateau (Blue Nile) and the Central African highlands (White Nile) -- are south of Egypt. So Upper Egypt is south of Lower Egypt (the Nile Delta).

I, Sphinxster

Right after the camel ride, we got back on the van and went to the edge of the Giza necropolis to see the Sphinx. The Sphinx is somewhat of a historical mystery it seems. First, "Sphinx" is somewhat of a misnomer; we still don't know what contemporaneous Ancient Egyptians (that is, Egyptians roughly of Khufu's era, around 2500 B.C.) called it. "Sphinx"* is what much later classical Greeks called it. They had their own story about a lion-human hybrid. In the Greek myth, the Sphinx had wings and a women's head, whereas the Egyptian Sphinx has a male head with Pharaonic headdress and no wings. But close enough, I guess.**

Anyway, no one has been able to determine when the Sphinx was built. The consensus is that it was built by Khafre, the Pharaoh who built the second largest of the Great Pyramids. But there is no direct mention or evidence of the statue that links it to that period. This lack of evidence is why we don't know that Egyptians of that era named it. Some past and present Egyptologists have claimed that the Sphinx predates Khufu's era and may have been excavated/restored around 2500 B.C., rather than constructed then.

Over a millennium later in 1400 B.C., it was buried up to the shoulders in sand, and the Pharaoh Thutmose IV restored it during his reign. Ramses II may have restored it again during his reign over a century later. It may be during this era that the ceremonial Pharaonic beard was added, which later fell off.

The Gizan Great Sphinx may be superlative in a few senses, but it is not the only sphinx in Egypt. In fact, at some point sphingine imagery became somewhat common; there's a roughly mile-long road between the Luxor and Karnak temples whose sides were lined with hundreds of smaller sphinges, many of which still survive.

Oh, and about the Sphinx's missing nose: I've always heard it was blown off by Napoleon's troops, who used it for target practice. But evidently that's a myth, since sketches from the mid-1700's show the nose already missing.

For more of my pictures from the Sphinx, click here.

* Sphinx comes from the Greek verb to strangle, the Greek Sphinx's method of dispatching those who could not answer her questions. As such, it's etymologically related to the word sphincter.

** And no worse than Egypt, essentially the Greek name for the country, which has little resemblance to the terms the ancient or modern Egyptians used for it.

Camel Ride: The Sequel

Background: earlier in November in a parking lot outside the Roman theater at Aspendos, fellow Turkey tourer Brian and I paid to take camel rides; we each took pictures of the other during our few-minute rides in circles on a level parking lot.

That was before I knew that each person on the Egypt tour got to take a camel ride by the Pyramids. So, on the way from the Pyramids to the Sphinx, the tour stopped to take a group camel ride.

This time, the trip was significantly longer; the handlers led us a hundred yards or so down a small dune and then back up again for a trip of 10-15 minutes. Before Turkey, I'd never ridden a large animal. This time, I noticed that the saddle only had one stirrup; that led me to think of the severe ankle damage I'd likely sustain if I fell off. The inclined path didn't help either. The desert is somewhat rocky and uneven and it seemed that my camel kept stumbling and lurching a little as it went up and down, which made me more nervous. Much of the time, I had one hand on the reins and another hand on the post of the saddle behind me to secure myself. This awkwardness amused some of my fellow riders.

Another portion of camel rides that are somewhat disconcerting is that camels are too tall to easily mount or dismount while they are standing; so they have to crouch down for the riders. A standing camel, though, doesn't really want to go back down on the ground. So the handlers have thick sticks with which they strike the camel behind its front knees. This induces the camel to quickly kneel on its front legs and then more slowly lower its back legs. So the beginning and end of the rides are somewhat lurchy and I was never sure how the camel was going to react to this method of correction.

Here are some more pictures from my Giza camel ride.