Category: National Geographic

National Geographic, November 2015, Part 1

So, no sooner did I start getting my act back together on posting than my hard drive went out.  So here I sit with my brand-new hard drive, which has a one-year warranty, so I should be set for a while. While I was gone, I read one (November 2015) and two halves (April 1889 and September 2013) of National Geographic issues, so now I just have to recap the one that I’m done with and finish the other two issues and recap them and I’m in business.

We set up a new password for our National Geographic account, so I can continue reading the issues online, rather than having to balance a magazine on my lap while I type.  That’ll help me get this done a lot faster. Now on to November 2015, which is the Climate Change issue.

The Will to Change, by Robert Kunzig, photographs by Luca Locatelli

The Will to Change is about what Germans refer to as the energiewende (should that be capitalized or not?  It’s a noun, and German nouns are capitalized, but I’m writing in English.  Kunzig and his editor opted not to capitalize it, but that seems wrong to me).  After the Fukushima power plant disaster, Germany increased its commitment to renewable energy. Angela Merkel promised to close all of Germany’s nuclear reactors by 2022 and she seems on track to do just that.  Germans are picking up the slack left by the nuclear power plants with wind farms and what what is known in the United States, at least, as net energy metering.  “Net energy metering” is when entities other than the power company generate their own power and sell any excess to the power company.  Generally, credits are issued and used to pay back the power company for any power drawn from the grid.  I’ve heard of some ambitious individuals who end up owing nothing to the power company and it is even theoretically possible to make a little profit at it.

There is a downside to the energiewende (still sticking with Kunzig’s choice here), however.  Since Germany is shutting down their power plants, the needed energy that is not generated by energiewende projects have to come from somewhere. And that “somewhere” is coal-fired plants.  The energiewende is driving down the cost of power, so they have priced themselves out of hard coal entirely and are left with lignite coal, the cheapest fossil fuel there is.  Lignite coal is dirtier than hard coal, meaning that it produces more carbon dioxide than hard coal.

Hopefully, over time the energiewende will reach a point where the lignite coal can be phased out, but even if it can never be completely weaned from coal, Germany is definitely on its way to a cleaner future.

A Blueprint for a Carbon-Free America, by Craig Welch, graphics by Jason Treat

I’m not overly fond of the term “carbon-free.”  Recently, Domino launched “carbon free” sugar, which is, um, well, water, since table sugar is C12H22o11.  Take out those 12 carbon atoms and what you have left are twice as many hydrogen atoms as oxygen atoms, which is water.  A carbon-free America would be one with no life left in it, since all Earth-based life forms are more or less made from carbon. A lot of dirt is carbon, as well. We’d have some metal left — iron (but not steel, since steel is iron and carbon), calcium (which is what is left over when you take the carbon out of limestone), a lot of sand and other silicon-based things like quartz (but no diamonds because, well, carbon).

I know that’s not what “carbon-free” really means.  “Carbon-free” is a shorthand way of expressing the idea of ending carbon dioxide emissions from coal, natural gas, and oil.  It’s imprecise, though, and that irks me.

This is just a short little blurb about replacing things that have carbon dioxide emissions with hydroelectric, solar and wind power.  The graphs are nice and show, among other things, how much wind could be generated by both onshore and offshore wind farms.

Power to the People, by Michael Edison Hayden, photographs by Rubén Salgado Escudero

Throughout the developing world (India, Uganda, and Myanmar are the examples given here), people are enjoying new freedom through the use of portable solar lights.  At the moment, one of the biggest players in the field is a company called Simpa, which charges around $0.35 per day to rent the light.  That can be a lot of money for someone who makes only a few dollars a day, but it also, for example, allows shopkeepers to stay open later to get more customers and, thus, more money.  And the solar lights are more convenient for the people using them than the old battery-operated lights some had before.  When the battery ran down they would have to travel to get a new battery. With the solar lights, when the battery runs down, they just put it in the sun for a few hours, which saves time and wear and tear on their shoes and joints.

Sorry I’ve Been Quiet for a Few Weeks

I had a few posts written ahead of time, then a few things happened to throw off my groove:

  1. One of my coworkers took a couple of weeks off. During that time, others had obligations that meant that they had to take a day or two off.  This led us to being short-handed and to my boss scheduling me for the early shift pretty close to every day.  I was used to working one of our later shifts except for, generally, one day a week (Wednesday), which means that my brain is used to going to sleep much later than was comfortable and I don’t write so well when I’m sleep-deprived.
  2. I was feeling kind of under the weather.  I developed some kind of rash on my neck (the doctor says it looked like some kind of allergic reaction) which itched all the time, so even when I was asleep, I didn’t actually get any rest (see point 1 above about sleep deprivation and my writing skill).
  3. I just hit the November 2015 issue of National Geographic.  When Netflix first became a thing (back in the days when they’d send you a DVD in the mail), my now-ex and I watched at least one episode of The X-Files a night.  Watching it like that brought some of the weaknesses of the show into sharper relief than might have been obvious to the viewers who watched it as it was broadcast (don’t get me started on Samantha Mulder).  I am having a similar problem with reading this many issues as quickly as I am.  In this case, though, it begins to get kind of monotonous — unrest in Africa, global warming, global warming, unrest in Africa, here’s some pictures of Norway, unrest in Africa, global warming . . . .  The November 2015 issue is entirely dedicated to global warming and I just needed a break. Oh, and my dad’s subscription seems to no longer allow me to access the issues online, so in order to write on the issues, I will need to hold them on my lap while I type, which seems like it will be kind of a challenge.

At any rate, I am working my usual schedule tomorrow and have Thursday off, so I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be able to get back to writing soon.

And I’m almost back to where I was when I lost my external hard drive, so I’ll be back to counting the pictures I’ve scanned in soon, as well.

National Geographic October 1888, Part 3

After only a year and however-many days, I finally finished this issue on January 27, 2016.  I did the first article while getting in almost four miles of walking at the Leon Creek Greenway.  I had a few minutes left on the second article when I finished walking, so I listened to it in the car on my way to my next errand.

The Survey of the Coast, by Herbert G. Ogden

We start this article with a history lesson about the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was authorized by Thomas Jefferson in 1807.  When Jefferson authorized it, it was called “The US Survey of the Coast,” at the time this article was written, it went by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and since 1970 it has been known as the US National Geodetic Survey. This is one of the hazards of writing on articles written over a hundred years ago.

We get entirely too much technical information, which is great for the original intended audience, but seems a bit much for the casual reader.  I did find interesting, however, that the survey, however named at the time, were put in charge of defining our measurement system. The final data had to be understandable by anyone who read it, so the Survey defined all measurements, not just the ones that they were using, including the pound.

The Survey and Map of Massachusetts, by Henry Gannett

The Survey and Map of Massachusetts begins inauspiciously with the text of the law authorizing the survey and pretty much stays in that kind of dry mode until the bitter end. If you want to know how many square miles of Massachusetts were surveyed using the traverse method, this article’s for you.

Next up in the gripping world of National Geographic in the 1800s, (possibly I will begin listening to this one on January 30, but I might not, since I have a bit of a sore throat and might be coming down with something), Volume 1, Number 2, from April 1889, which includes National Geographic’s first trip to Africa.

National Geographic October 1888, Part 2

So, with the aid of Librivox, I knocked out another three articles from this issue during my lunch hour on three consecutive days.  I have since decided that my store is too noisy for me to really hear the articles to make this a worthwhile long-term plan.   I’m going to try to continue to listen to the articles on LibriVox, only in a not-so-noisy environment.  I am off this coming Wednesday, so while Alex is in school, I’m going to try to get some walking done on the Leon Creek Greenway.  If I have sufficient time and energy to do so, I hope to listen to one article on the way out and another on the way back.  On to the articles.

The Classification of Geographic Forms by Genesis, by W.J. McGee (no photographs, since this is 1888)

The Classification of Geographic Forms by Genesis is a stupor-inducing look at the state of geomorphology (the study of how forces affect the forms and structures of geographic features. In addition to lists of forces and their effects, we also get vague references to people (presumably men, since this is 1888) who were apparently well-known in geographic circles back in the 19th Century.  Perhaps Lyell, Powell, Gilbert, Lesley, Richthofen, and Dana are prominent enough that today’s geographers will know the reference just by the surname, but McGee apparently thinks that his Victoria-era target audience should know these people, as we never get any more information than just the surnames and their opinions.  Also, in the case of Richtofen (uncle of the “Red Baron,” from what I can tell), we get the German-language terms he used.

The Great Storm of March 11–14, 1888: A Summary of the Remarks Made by Brigadier-General A. W. Greely, Chief Signal Officer of the Army

The best thing I can say about this article is that at least it’s short. Greely talks about the path of the storm and lists lots of barometer pressure readings.  From what I can tell, this storm, which hit the northeast between New Jersey and Boston. Over 400 people died and it is still one of the worst blizzards in United States history.

This article concludes with the confidence-inspiring sentence, “These remarks are necessarily imperfect, as my official duties have been such as to prevent any careful study or examination of the storm apart from that possible on the current weather maps of the Signal Service.” So that’s exciting.

The Great Storm Off the Atlantic Coast of the United States, March 11th–14th, 1888, by Everett Hayden

This article has more detail on the formation of the storm and the effects when the storm finally hit.  The article actually does have illustrations, perhaps the first ones in the magazine’s history.  Well, charts, at least, but they were in color. The presence of these charts made the LibriVox reading interesting because the references to the charts did me no good.

We’ll be back to 1888 perhaps on January 30, if I can get two more articles done on January 27.  If not, I’ll go on to November 2015 on January 30.  The weekend of January 30 is my weekend off and Alex’s weekend with his dad, so I’ll try to walk-and-listen my way through the second article sometime that weekend.

National Geographic October 1888, Part 1

I finally got back to “reading” the October 1888 issue (thank you, LibriVox!) and so I’ve decided that it’s time to move this over here from my old blog.  We’ll be moving on to the next three articles in this issue, probably on January 26.

Announcement

This is the only title this piece is given. No author is identified, either. A blurb at the end of this piece says that correspondence should be addressed to “Mr. George Kennan,” so perhaps the announcement was written by Kennan. On the other hand, perhaps not.

The announcement is about the formation of the National Geographic Society and their intention to publish a magazine “at irregular intervals.” Interestingly, the announcement says up front that the magazine will publish articles by people from all walks of life who are interested in geography. The National Geographic Society has chosen Washington, DC as the home of the society to further the notion that it is a national organization and not a local one.

One thing that I found interesting is the statement that the National Geographic Society membership was, at the time, around 200 “persons,” which seems to me to indicate that the National Geographic Society had female members nearly from its inception.

I wonder what George Kennan, or whoever wrote this announcement, would think about the National Geographic Society in the 21st century.

Introductory Address by Gardiner G. Hubbard

The introductory address of Gardiner G. Hubbard, the first President of the National Geographic Society, took up eight pages of this issue. Hubbard begins by saying how pleased he was that the National Geographic Society would elect a non-geographer as its first President. Hubbard was an attorney and businessman (and one of the founders of the Bell Telephone Company). He also was father-in-law to the man who would one day become the second President of the National Geographic Society, Alexander Graham Bell.

Hubbard says that he wants the National Geographic Society to continue to include non-geographers and makes reference to using the organization to unite “the scattered workers of our country” with geographic researchers. I am uncertain whether the workers in question are field workers in geography or workers in other fields who are interested, but not professionals, in geography.

The address goes on to cover the history of geography in a very European-centric manner, which is about par for the course of the era. He refers, for example, to Columbus as the discoverer of the Americas, totally ignoring the people who were already there.

Hubbard mentions some other geographical organizations at work in the world, including the Royal Geographical Society of England and urges the geographers of the United States not to be left behind.

Hubbard ends the address with a discussion of the organization of the society, including a department devoted to the “geography of the oceans,” which sounds like oceanography to me, and another that studies the “geography of the air,” which sounds like a combination of meteorology and climatology.

Geographic Methods in Geologic Investigation, by William Morris Davis

Well this was every bit as gripping as I expected it to be.  Apparently, in 1888, schools didn’t have geography courses as we know them today.  Also, apparently, the intended audience for National Geographic was men (judging by the assumption that the people who attend school are boys).  Also, thank heavens for Librvox.  I was able to listen to this article as I scanned in photographs from my family’s 1988 vacation to New York City.  I made a good 1,000 steps according to my pedometer in the process, as well.

The basic premise is that by studying how things look now, we can draw conclusions about what happened in the past. One of the examples that Davis gives (relatively late in the article, to my mind) is that we don’t need to watch the acorn sprout in order to know that that’s where the oak tree came from.  We spend a lot of time in New England here, from discussing the age of the Appalachians to talking about lava sheets in the Connecticut Valley.  Much of the rest of the article discusses examples from the United States.  This may be due to the fact that the publication is named “National Geographic” and not “International Geographic,” but also Davis makes the point that the United States is the first nationt to make a detailed description of the topography of the country.  In fact, Davis says “the systematic study of topography is largely American,” due to studies of the topography of the United States done in the period from around 1840 to around 1870.  This study was not done by the United States Geological Survey, however, since the USGS was not formed until 1879.

Davis goes into how to tell a young landform from an old one and by his argument, the Himalayas are much younger than the Appalachians.  And, indeed, that is still the current theory. The Himalayas are likely the youngest and the Appalachians are likely to be the oldest.

The article ends with a plea for more geographic instruction in schools and offers the idea that models be used rather than maps.  Davis’s first idea was definitely implemented; my son and I both had geography courses our Freshman years of high school.  At least in my course, however, we didn’t use so many models.  We still relied largely on maps.

Originally published on January 18, 2015 and June 10, 2015

National Geographic October 2013, Part 3

Visions on Earth, by Tom O’Neill, photographs by Abelardo Morell

Morell has decided to take photographs of the National Parks of the Western United States with a camera obscura.  I’m not sure exactly how the science works, and I’m sure that if I tried it, it would fail miserably, but apparently somehow, if you make a room completely dark and then poke a hole in the object darkening the room, it somehow turns the light outside into a projector and you can see an upside-down version of the view outside on the wall of the room.  I’m sure that if I tried it, I would just get a pinhole of light on the wall.  I can make even the simplest things unbearably complicated.

But apparently this technique works for Morell.  And so Morell, with the help of his assistant, C.J. Heyliger, has designed a completely dark tent with a pinhole in it.  Morell takes this tent out to National Parks and uses it to take camera obscura photos of the parks projected on the ground under the tent.  The result is photographs of, for example, Old Faithful and the people surrounding it on a background of rocks and twigs.  The images that result are beautiful and worth the time to look at.  If you don’t have a subscription to National Geographic, some of these photographs (including others taken in cities including Rome, Florence and New York City) are available at Morrell’s website (my one criticism of the site is that the caption shows up for a fraction of a second and I cannot make them show up long enough to read).

Building the Ark, by Elizabeth Kolbert, photographs by Joel Sartore

Building the Ark is about the role of zoos in preserving threatened and endangered species and also about the perception that only the big mammals will bring people, and thus money, to the zoos. This is particularly important since most of the threatened and endangered species in the world are amphibians.

Onnie Byers, of the International Union for Conservation of Nature suggests that zoos should gradually phase out species that are not yet in dire need of preservation in favor of ones that need the help more urgently.

Kolbert gives us the example of the Kihanzi spray toad of Tanzania (I had the worst time trying to type “Kihanzi” and I’m not entirely sure I have it right yet). The toad was discovered during the construction of a dam. The government of Tanzania realized that the dam project would likely wipe the toad out and so 499 toads were captured.  Half were sent to the Bronx Zoo and half to the Toledo Zoo. Soon after the toads were brought into captivity, a fungus wiped out the population in the wild. This meant that the survival of the species depended on less than 500 individuals left in the zoos.  Fortunately, the zookeepers were able to induce the frogs to reproduce and in 2010 a hundred were sent to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.  In 2012, some of the toads were released into the wild.

Then there is the “frozen zoo.” The San Diego Zoo has a room dedicated to saving the few living cells of species that are about to go, or have just gone, extinct.  Those cells are not necessarily reproductive.  One example given is the po’ouli, a Hawaiian bird, the last example of which was sent to San Diego after his death. The only cells that the zoo  was able to culture were from the bird’s eye, so they were frozen in liquid nitrogen against the day that science could resurrect the bird.

The Visual Village, by James Estrin

We’re back to the one of the themes this issue started with, that everyone has his or her own camera today and thus the nature of photography is changing. Pictures of unfolding events can be shared on the spot, rather than having to wait for a professional to arrive. This one has less of the dismissiveness than I sensed from Draper’s writing and more hope. In particular, Estrin acknowledges that many of the photographs being taken by average citizens are very good and that it is an excellent way to expose things like the abuses of those in power to the light. This will perhaps lead to less of the abuse of the powerless by the powerful.

manipulated photograph of Abraham Lincoln
Manipulated photograph of Abraham Lincoln. The body is of John Calhoun.

There is one comment that Estrin makes that I have to comment on, however.  Estrin says, “Before digital images most people considered photographs to be accurate renderings of reality,” and then goes on to say that with digital image manipulation, now “the average viewer” cannot trust the pictures they see unless it comes from a trusted “news organization or photographer.”  I guess that citizen photographers could be considered that kind of photographer, if, for example, they know the photographer personally, or have a friend or acquaintance in common.  But photomanipulation goes back before the days of digital computing.  A famous photograph of Lincoln (see image above) is actually a photograph of John Calhoun with Lincoln’s head pasted on. And one of the first manipulated photographs was also a selfie.  Hippolyte Bayard felt slighted over not being named one of the inventors of photography by the French government, so he took a picture of himself looking like he’d drowned and then darkened his feet and hands to look like decomposition.  Bayard lived another 47 years after his apparent suicide.

National Geographic October 2013, Part 2

The Changing Face of America, by Lisa Funderberg, photographs by Martin Schoeller

This article opens up with the assumption that all humans will find people of a mixed-race ancestry somehow unsettling. Even the most benign among us, we are told, will be curious about the mix of ancestry that led to, as Funderberg put it, “those eyes with that hair, that nose above those lips.”  I have to admit that I’ve never felt that way. I look at a mixed-race person and see, sometimes, a friend, or a patient, or a coworker, or a stranger (who may eventually become a member of one of those three groups). I also have had the experience of looking at a mixed-race person and seeing Alex’s cousin.

After Funderberg shakes off this rather curious opening the rest of the article is about the practicalities of mixed race, particularly when it comes to the United States census. There have, so far, been only two censuses in which respondents were allowed to choose more than one race, and this is the largest category of growth in the intervening ten years.

The article ends on a hopeful note that perhaps we can put aside this assumed discomfort and accept that people can fit into more than one box.

Now You See It, by Tim Sullivan, photographs by David Guttenfelder

Sullivan and Guttenfelder were part of a small group of journalists who were allowed to visit North Korea repeatedly over “the past year.”  Since there is no indication when this article was actually written, and it was published in an issue dated October 2013, I assume that “the past year” was 2012, more or less.

In Now You See It, we see some of the things that Sullivan and Guttenfelder saw during their visits to North Korea, including things that they shouldn’t have seen, such as a potholed street with darkened buildings. We also hear the questions that Sullivan was unable to ask, such as inquiries into whether North Koreans have freedom of religion and whether the couple that they meet who were given a luxury apartment for the wife’s productivity at work actually live in that apartment.

I kind of eat up stuff on North Korea.  I do, after all, want to go everywhere, and North Korea truly is “somewhere.”  And, being an American, I know that even if I am granted entry into the country, my stay will by necessity be a brief one.  So, I read what I can, and look at pictures, and try to understand their lives as best I can.

National Geographic October 2013, Part 1

The Power of Photography, by Robert Draper

This isn’t so much of an article as just the text to go along with the fold-out pages of photographs for the cover story.  It’s mostly praise for the hard work that National Geographic photographers do, but there’s a side-order of “hey you kids get out of my yard” that makes this slightly uncomfortable reading for me.  Then there’s the line “global cacophony of freeze-frames” that me wonder what my high school sophomore year English teacher would say about it.

The Price of Precious, by Jeffrey Gettleman, photographs by Marcus Bleasdale

The Price of Precious chronicles the travel of Gettleman and Bleasdale into the Congo, where they investigated the ongoing war and the way that trafficking in precious metals has been supporting that war. It is likely that some of the precious metals in my computer, and in whatever device you are reading this on is, and probably the server that will host this file once I finish writing it, came from the Congo.

Thanks to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, some manufacturers of electronics are weeding the conflict out of their precious metals.  At the time this went to print (over two years ago now) some of the groups that were funding violence with precious metals had seen their profits drop 65% and the Congolese government were starting to inspect mines to ensure that they were not funding violence.

Meltdown, by Robert Kunzig, photographs by James Balog

This is another short page-length bit of text to accompany photographs, this time Balog’s photographs of glaciers of Alaska and Iceland.  Kunzig discusses glaciers in Montana, Switzerland.  And in the years since this was published, the glacier in Switzerland, the Rhône, has retreated so far that the Belvedere Hotel, which used to be open to house visitors to the glacier has closed.

I’m Still Working on National Geographic Issues

Keeping with my established schedule, I should have made a National Geographic post today, but my current issue is October 2013, which is the one with the words “The Photo Issue” in big letters on the cover.  And there are a lot of photographs in the issue — several fold-out pages of them.  This means that I spend about a quarter of my reading time wrestling with the magazine, and since the fold-out pages are the thickness of several individual pages, it also took me a while to find my place, until I figured out that I should probably use a bookmark.

I worked on the introductory pages for several days and have just finished the first actual article, which is not to article-y.  Well, you’ll see what it is when I make my post, which should be right on schedule for my next National Geographic post, on January 6.

National Geographic October 2015, Part 3

Sea Wolves, by Susan McGrath, photographs by Paul Nicklen

Sea Wolves is about, well, wolves that live near the sea. Apparently, scientists generally considered the wolves that they saw on the beach of the coast of British Columbia to be ordinary forest-dwelling wolves that were searching for food at the beach.  But recently, scientists have begun studying the wolves that they see near the shores and they have discovered that the wolves never really leave the shoreline. They live on barnacles and dead whales, but during spawning season, salmon can make up to 25% of their diet. The shore-dwelling wolves also mate pretty much exclusively with other shore-dwelling wolves, so the populations are totally distinct from one another and are likely to become more so.

Of course, the local residents had known most of this for years.  It just took a little longer for the scientists to catch up, apparently.

Abstraction Finds Beauty in Beasts, story and photographs by Michael D. Kern

Yep, that’s the title.  Don’t ask me.

Kern is a photographer who has always has liked reptiles and invertebrates and other “icky” animals.  He first takes a photograph of said animal and looks for patterns, colors, shapes, and so forth.  Then he uses that to build an abstract photograph of the animal in order to show off the beauty of the animal.

In this article, we see Kern’s original photographs and his abstract art based on those photographs for a bird, a snake, a tarantula, a millipede, a mantis, and two different species of chameleon. I think the millipede is my favorite.  The original animal has red legs and black-and-white stripes on its shell.

I have a very high tolerance for bugs and things.  I’m the only person I know who, when asked, “Would you like to (hold/touch) (name of “icky” creature)?” almost always says “yes.”  I’ve been able to hold, touch, and/or pet several species of snake, a tarantula, and a bat, among others.  For anyone reading this who is worried about my rabies status, the bat had been confiscated from traffickers and it was impossible to repatriate it, so it was given into custody of a trained professional bat-handler.  She had had custody of it for several years by then, so I knew that it wasn’t infected with rabies or ebola or anything. The fur was, by the way, incredibly soft.