Carnivalia — 11/12 - 11/18
The past week’s crop of (mostly) science-related blog carnival goodness awaits you:
All Things Eco Blog Carnival Volume Twenty Five
Carnival of Education, Transition Team Edition
November 19th, 2008
November 17th, 2008
The scientific tourist #47 — Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy
This week’s image is from the Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée), part of the amazing National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France:
The gallery has three levels — the first floor covers comparative anatomy, the second vertebrate fossils (seen here), and the third (where I stood while taking this picture) is essentially a balcony housing invertebrate fossils.
I think the gallery is interesting for a couple of reasons. First and most obviously, it’s a storehouse of amazing fossils as well as more-recent skeletons. You can learn quite a bit from all this material, even if (like me) you don’t know much French. But I also think it’s interesting from the standpoint of inadvertently being a metamuseum — it’s a fantastic view of what natural history museums all used to look like.
More modern museums (or at least, museums that have been renovated in the past few decades) tend to have a limited number of items on display, but each comes with copious explanatory material. Context, in this case, is king.
Compared to that, older-style museums revel in their comprehensiveness — you get just a placard explaining each item, but every single spec that was collected is out on display. I have to agree that the more modern approach is better at communicating the science behind the fossils to visitors — but I still appreciate the artistry that went into the old-style arrangements of collections.
November 14th, 2008
Casual Friday — Looking back at Phoenix
So NASA made it official this week — the Phoenix lander is dead.
It’s not as though this came as a surprise. Phoenix was solar-powered, and since it was sent above Mars’ arctic circle, everyone knew the lander would die once its landing site became shrouded in winter darkness. Still, it’s more than a little sad that this plucky little lander’s science-gathering days are over. I thought it would be appropriate to look back on its mission as a reminder of its achievements:
November 12th, 2008
Carnivalia — 11/5 - 11/11
The past week’s crop of (mostly) science-related blog carnivals:
All Things Eco Blog Carnival Volume Twenty Four
Encephalon #58 - Decision Making
Four Stone Hearth: Late Night Election Night « Archaeoporn
November 10th, 2008
The scientific tourist #46 — another step toward human flight
This week’s image is of a reproduction of a Wright brothers’ aircraft in San Diego’s Air and Space Museum:
It probably looks familiar to you, if you remember a bit of history. But did you notice what’s “missing?”
Give the image a good look-over, I don’t mind waiting for you…
Found it yet?
If you’re like most people, you may not have noticed that this craft has neither an engine nor propellers — it’s a glider! Of course, other than that, it looks much like a smaller copy of the 1903 “Wright Flyer” aircraft that would earn them a spot in history for the first powered heavier-than-air flight. But this craft has historical significance beyond just that — the 1902 Wright glider was the world’s first fully-controllable glider. Unlike previous experimenters’ craft that relied on the pilot’s shifting body weight for control, this glider used mechanically-driven control surfaces to steer it.
In sharp contrast to other aircraft pioneers, the Wright brothers built a series of unmanned gliders of increasing size before they actually got in one themselves. This allowed them to work out problems as they scaled their craft up, without risking their lives in the process (possibly with Lilienthal in mind). This approach also allowed them to integrate results from their wind-tunnel testing into their rapidly-evolving aircraft design.
The 1903 glider was the third, and last, in the Wright brothers’ series of large gliders. Built to work out control problems the Wrights had seen with their previous craft, this glider was flown between 700 and 1000 times at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in the fall of 1902. Experience they gained in these flights led directly to the first powered flights a year later.
Sadly, when the Wrights returned home to Ohio in 1903, they took their 1903 flyer with them, but left the 1902 glider in a shed at Kitty Hawk. Sometime between 1903 and 1908, the shed and glider were destroyed by coastal storms — not a scrap of the original glider survives today.
