FROM SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Plus LA County Wildfires and Girl Scout Cookies

The most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles County history remains today totally uncontrolled.  Five have been killed, at least 1000 structures destroyed, with another 13,000 buildings being threatened.

• Being fought by 110 fire engines and over a thousand firemen.
• More than 16,000 acres burned just in the Pacific Palisades area, approaching 20,000 acres when you add the other three sites.

• 
  There were periods of my life when I lived in Oxnard, which is about 44 miles to this wildfire, and is also under warning.  I don't ever in those days remember anything like this.  Global warming?
• The city of Los Angeles is only about 20 miles from Pacific Palisades.
• This area is memorialized by the Beach Boys 1960s hit, Surfin' USA.
• 
  Wind gusts of 100 MPH.  A hurricane is 75 MPH.
• Fire hydrants are using more than four times the normal.
• Of course, Donald Trump blamed Governor Gavin Newsom.

• 
  Air quality in the Los Angeles area is at a hazardous level, well over an air quality index of 300.
• President Joe Biden was in Santa Monica to observe yesterday.

• 
  When things go bad, it can get worse, for Veep Kamala Harris' Brentwood neighborhood has been evacuated.
• This wildfire will only get worse.

Looking ahead to next year, I'm now reading the January issue of Scientific American.  There are several articles of particular interest:

• Take the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is important because it controls many functions in the body, including:

• 

  Digestion: The vagus nerve regulates the release of digestive enzymes, gastric acid, and bile, and controls stomach and intestinal contractions. 
• Heart rate and blood pressure: The vagus nerve helps regulate heart rate and blood pressure.

• 

  Immune system: The vagus nerve modulates inflammation, which is a factor in many diseases. 
• Mood: The vagus nerve can help with mood. 
• Breathing: The vagus nerve controls breathing. 
Reflexes: The vagus nerve controls certain reflex actions, such as coughing, sneezing, swallowing, and vomiting. 
Sensation: The vagus nerve provides somatic sensation information for the skin behind the ear, the external part of the ear canal, and certain parts of the throat. It also provides visceral sensation information for the larynx, esophagus, lungs, trachea, heart, and most of the digestive tract. 
Taste: The vagus nerve plays a small role in the sensation of taste near the root of the tongue. 

This is a meandering nerve that could cure you of ailments.  More later.

A couple more topics to come:

• Why are bats almost always a transition species for our pandemics.
• NASA's Europa (one of Jupiter's moons) Clipper mission launched on 14October2024 toward Jupiter will look at Europa's seas as a source of life.  Involved is science writer Nadia Drake, daughter of the legendary Frank Drake.

I did complete the feature article about the hunt for Planet Nine.  You too can read it, but to summarize.

• The villain and star of the show is Mike Brown of CalTech.
• He is known as the Pluto Killer.

• 
  His area of study is the Kuiper Belt (KB), for stuff beyond Neptune.
• The KB was only discovered in 1992.
• There are countless objects in the KB, and many have moons themselves.

• 
  Says Brown, we didn't lose a planet, we gained a belt.  
• I might mention that there is a nearer asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.  Ceres is the only dwarf planet in this belt.

• 
  Pluto is now a dwarf planet, there might be 200 of them in the KP, with over 10,000 in the region beyond.
• I could define what a dwarf planet is, but I'll let Scientific American do this:  must have "sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid-body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape.

• 
  But back to Brown.

His 10-year old daughter told him to find a new planet after he killed off Pluto. She said, Daddy, you know what we should do? You should find a new planet, and then people will stop being mad about Pluto.

• So that's what he did.  With Konstantin Batygin, also from CalTech, they used mathematical modeling and computer simulations to discover evidence of Planet Nine.
• So, in 2016, Brown and Batygin published their "Planet Nine hypothesis," which has captured the public's imagination ever since.

• Earlier Brown had discovered Eris, a dwarf planet larger than Pluto.

So what about this Planet Nine?

• Neptune was discovered in 1846.
• A big, and partly defamed, name in all this was Percival Lowell, who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894
• In 1906 he began an extensive project to search for a trans-Neptunian planet, which he named Planet X.

• 
  He wanted to re-establish scientific credibility, for in 1894 he confirmed the existence of Mars canals made by intelligent life, which proved to be embarrassing, for soon thereafter, this was shown to be wrong.

• 
  Lowell later concluded that Planet X had a mass seven times that of Earth, at 43 AU.
• He passed away in 1916.
• But his brother Abbott Lawrence in 1925 provided funds for a further search.
• Hired was 22-year old Kansas farm boy Clyde Tombaugh, who in 1930 found what turned out to be Pluto, at 39 AU.

• 
  The naming of Pluto came from 11-year old Venetia Burney of Oxford.  Tombaugh liked the name because it started with the initials of Percival Lowell.  She lived to the age of 90 and saw the New Horizons mission set off for Pluto.  In 2017, the International Astronomical Union approved Burney Crater on Pluto in her honor.

• 
  Turns out that Lowell was right on another matter.  He suggested that any new planet would be 7 times larger than Earth.  While Pluto was subsequently found, it is 450 times smaller than Earth  What Lowell was suggesting was another planet, the current Planet Nine, because all the latest data indicates it to be around 10 times the size of Earth.
• 
  When Pluto was demoted in 2006, our solar system dropped to eight planets.
• The search for planets way out there has been ongoing since Pluto was found, but in 2014 astronomers hypothesized that there might be another planet 2 to 15 times the mass of Earth, and beyond 200 AU, with an inclined orbit.  Neptune is 30 AU and Pluto 39 AU.  An AU stands for astronomical units, and is the distance of Earth from the Sun.
• 
  "It's been a roller-coaster! I've gone from thinking it was 90% there to 10% and all around," Sean Raymond, a researcher at the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory in France, told Live Science in an email. "I'm rooting for it to be there, but I'm still agnostic on whether I believe it's there."
• 
  Optimism is growing, that the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, with first sight planned for late this year, has  the capability to find this Planet Nine.
• Formerly called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, it is located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, an 8,799 mountain, located 62 miles from the city of La Serena.
• Why Vera Rubin?  She and her colleagues probed the nature of dark matter by cataloging billions of galaxies through space and time.  Much of the funding came from the U.S. government.
• 
  The eye is the Simonyi Survey Telescope with a very wide field of view, named after private donors Charles and Lisa Simonyi.  Gave $20 million.  Bill Gates provide $10 million.
• For the record, here is a comparison of primary mirrors of optical telescopes.

• Note that you can hardly find the telescope in the Vera Rubin Observatory.  However:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is special because it houses the world's largest digital camera, allowing it to capture an incredibly wide field of view and repeatedly survey the entire visible sky, creating a detailed time-lapse record of the universe over a decade, which will be crucial for studying phenomena like dark matter and dark energy, and for cataloging objects like asteroids and distant galaxies with unprecedented accuracy; essentially, it will revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos by providing an unprecedented level of detail about how the universe changes over time. 

• Vera Rubin passed away in 2016 at the of 88.  The New York Times said she "ushered in a Copernican-scale change in cosmological theory.

I'll close with Girl Scouts cookies:

• Began selling in 1917, just five years after Juliette Gordon Low (in the middle below) established the organization, so now for 108 years.  Her inspiration was Robert Baden-Powell, who a year founded what became the Boy Scouts.  Only sugar cookies were made by one troop in Moskogee, Oklahoma, and revenues went toward sending gifts to soldiers fighting World War I.  Then sold for 25-35 cents/dozen.
• 
  In 1936, the organization began working with commercial bakeries for nationwide sales.  Went up to 29 of them.  Today, only two:  Little Brownie Bakers in Louisville, Kentucky and ABC Bakers in North Sioux City, South Dakota.

• 
  Annually sell 200 million boxes/year, generating about $800 million.
• These are the top-selling cookie in the USA.
• Early on, they baked their own cookies at the troop level.
• This will be the final season when S'mores and Toast-Yay! flavors will sold.  Nothing new. 51 flavors have been discontinued.  Which ones?  Click here.
• This year there will be 13 varieties.  Thin Mints, Do-si-dos and Trefoils are the only cookies that won't be eliminated from the lineup, with Thin Mints the best-selling.  However, the #1-tasting is said to be Samoas.
• Forget about those rumors.  There will be no merger of the Boy and Girl Scout organizations.
• Began integrating in 1956, and was described by Martin Luther King as a force for desegregation.
• More than one in three women in the U.S. were once Girl Scouts.
• 56% of women in the 117th Congress are Girl Scout Alums, with 71% of current female senators former Girl Scouts.
• Five of the nine current female governors are alums.
• Every female secretary of state in the U.S. belonged to the Girl Scouts.
• 
  Queen Elizabeth II, Taylor Swift and Venus Williams were Girl Scouts.  47 other famous females.
• Welcomes transgender girls to joins.
• There are girl scout organizations in 146 countries, but they are not linked.
• Now officially called the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.
• 
  A female starts as a Daisy in Kindergarten, become a Brownie in the second grade, Junior in the fourth, Cadette in the sixth, Senior in the ninth and Ambassador in the 11th year.
• There are today 3.7 million Girl Scouts, with 78% from kindergarten to 12th year, and the remainder adults who provide guidance, etc.
• More than 50 million American women have participated in history.

Gluten free? Try Toffee-tastic and Caramel Chocolate Chip cookies.

Vegan? Try Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Patties, Lemonades, and Toast-Yay! cookies.

Kosher? Halal? Try them all! Every flavor variety is kosher and Halal certified.

Questions? Check the FAQs.

The season runs now through April. However, local timing for cookie sales can vary. You can either buy boxes from a Girl Scout in your life or by supporting a local troop near you via girlscoutcookies.org and if you order on or after February 21, you can have the cookies shipped directly to your home asap.

Want even more info? GSUSA says you can also text COOKIES to 59618 for all the latest information on how to purchase Girl Scout Cookies. 

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PLANET EARTH AND HUMANITY INDEX

Various internet fora I interact with all agree that global climate change itself is not necessarily the only indicator of the Planet Earth's health and well-being of Humanity.  We need an easily understandable and compelling INDEX of meaning.  

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has had their Doomsday Clock since 1947.  They initially set it at 7 minutes to midnight for nuclear cataclysm.  The hand jumped to 2 minutes in 1953 when the Soviet Union and U.S. exploded Hydrogen Bombs.  Since 2007, though, they added global warming and "new science" to the concern, and the clock is now at 5 minutes to midnight.  However, they lack the credibility for the world to take their clock too seriously.

This blog will someday arrive at a Planet Earth and Humanity Index (first, of course, I will need to change that name, and second, develop some graphics to grab the reader).  Three organizations of some noteworthiness are attempting to address this larger picture, and doing poorly at it.  

The Stockholm Resistance Centre presented their case in Nature of nine limits for our planet:

  -  ocean acidification

  -  thinning of the ozone layer

  -  nitrogen and phosphate cycles

  -  conversion of wilderness

  -  extinctions

  -  chemical pollutants

  -  particulates in the atmosphere

They gave numbers for the first seven and are working on the latter two.

You've got to give the United Nations some credit for trying under almost impossible conditions, much of this internally, as it is not easy to herd 193 cats.  Anyway, Their High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability is attempting to place planetary boundaries.  They held an international conference this past Spring in London, Planet Under Pressure, with an unfortunate acronym, PUP, focusing on solutions to the global sustainability challenge.  They made a move at Rio+20, but that was partly to offset the anticipated embarrassment of the inaction for carbon dioxide control.  The case was presented that the world is threatened by a lot more than this simple gas.  

Third, the Breakthrough Institute (BI), to quote from their web page:

...is a paradigm-shifting think tank committed to modernizing liberal thought for the 21st Century. Our core values are integrity, imagination and audacity. Our goal is to accelerate the transition to a future where all the world's inhabitants can enjoy secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling lives on an ecologically vibrant plan

Much of their philosophy is presented in Break Through.  While the Scandinavian effort does have international representation, this is an American think-tank focusing on energy and the environment.  In summary, BI argues that aims to return to the Holocene (when Mankind came of age) Period might well be obsolete, and we should optimize for this Anthropocene (age of Man) Period.  In any case, the tipping point factor underscored by the Stockholm Resilience Centre has considerable merit.

While they are similar in general philosophy, GRIST seems to consistently rail against BI.  The point I make is that all four organizations are right in their own way.  They all want to help Planet Earth and us.  How, now, to optimize the process to do something real?

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VENUS

Some good news first.  The S&P 500 has looked terrible the past month, but gained 117.42 or 2.13%, on Friday.  Monday?

I've had a melody rolling around in my head since yesterday.  Not a particularly memorable tune, but I thought I'd today focus on that song, Venus.  First, let me go back to that ancient Greek marble sculpture created between 160 and 110 BC.  

• Venus de Milo or Aphrodite of Melos was rediscovered in 1820 on the island of Milos, Greece, by a farmer, 
• A lot of intrigue, but the French eventually bought the statue, where Louis XVIII had it displayed in the Louvre in 1821.  

• 
  In 1964, she was exhibited in Tokyo and Kyoto, the only time she left the Louvre.
• Now visited by 7 million people annually.
• The Greek goddess of love is Aphrodite, whose Roman counterpart was Venus.
• Made of Parian marble, the statue is probably larger than the reality, for it is 6 feet 7 inches tall.  Missing are both arms.  However, found alongside was a marble hand holding an apple, and scientific analysis showed that it was hers.
• Controversially, said to be made by Alexandros from Antioch on the Maeander, or Turkey today.
• More than 70 poems about the Venus have been published.
• Here, a 1928 photo of Joan Crawford posing as Venus, for their measurements were very similar.

The next Venus of historical prominence is the seven-movement orchestral suite The Planets by English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1917.

• The motivation was astrology.
• He was troubled by neuritis in his right arm, and the full score was 198 pages long.
• Mars came first, Venus, then Jupiter, followed by Saturn and Uranus, Neptune and finally Mercury.
• Holst's biographer Michael Short calls Venus one of the most sublime evocations of peace in music.

About the planet itself, Venus:

• It is the second planet from the sun.  In order:  Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

• 
  Closest in mass and size to Earth, which is planet #3.
• Has an atmosphere of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen, with a cloud cover of sulfuric acid.
• Mean surface temperature of 867F.

• 
  Ultraviolet image to the right.
• Surface pressure 92 times that of Earth.
• There is active volcanism.
• Takes 224.7 Earth days to orbit Sun, but this is accomplished only in just two Venusian days.
• Is the third brightest object in the sky, after the Sun and Moon.
• Why do we always see Venus around sunrise or sunset?  Because it orbits closer to the Sun, with clouds that make it very bright.  Watch this orbit dance.

• 
  Only two planets have no moon, Mercury and Venus.
• In 1961 became the target of the first interplanetary flight, but radio contact with Venera 1 was lost before arrival on Venus.  First soft landing on another planet was Venera 7 in 1970.

• 
  How did the atmosphere of Venus get that way?  Most likely a runaway greenhouse effect.
• Venus has been identified by scientists such as Carl Sagan as a warning and research object linked to climate change on Earth.^[32] Therefore Venus has been called a greenhouse planet,^[94] a planet under a greenhouse inferno.^[95]

• 
  I am writing a docu-novel on The Venus Syndrome.  Read my short Huffington Post article.  Another one of Venus Syndrome Revisited.  The key gas in my speculatiion is not carbon dioxide, but methane.

Well, all the above is background for my topic of the day.  There is, of course, the 1959 Venus by Frankie Avalon, written by Ed Marshall.  Reached #1 on Billboard.  Then Venus in Blue Jeans in 1962, sung by Jimmy Clanton, written by Howard Greenfield and Jack Keller.  But there is another Venus repeating in my head.  

• 
  Ten years after Avalon came Venus, by the Dutch rock band, Shocking Blue, written by Robbie van Leeuwen, guitarist for the group, topping the charts in nine countries, including the U.S.
• Hard to believe, but this song is a lyrics modification of Oh? Susanna, by Stephen Foster in 1848, which originally was a racist tune.

• 
  An English pop trio, Bananarama, covered Venus in 1986, which also reached #1 on Billboard.  Interestingly enough, they hold the Guinness World Record for highest number of chart entries by an all-female group.  They had 32 singles reach the Top 50 of the UK Singles Chart.

• 
  Also in 1986, Yoko Oginome of Japan covered Venus.
• There is too, in 1990, Don Pablo's Animals re-mix of Venus.  Somewhat risque.  Or this group in concert.

So which of these Venus songs are in my head?  Not sure, they all sound similar.

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