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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| This bit has cycled out of the news by now, but I don't really care. I have something to say about it anyway. From The Guardian: Celebrities criticize all-female rocket launch: ‘This is beyond parody’  Amy Schumer, Olivia Wilde and Olivia Munn are among the famous names calling out the much-publicised space trip The all-female Blue Origin rocket launch may have received plenty of glowing media coverage – but not everyone is impressed. Oh, you mean a publicity stunt sometimes generates bad publicity? But I've been assured that there's no such thing as bad publicity. The stunt has drawn criticism from a number of female celebrities who were not keen on the Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin NS-31 mission, which included Katy Perry... Cutting off the quote there because, in reality, no one gives a shit about any of the other passengers. Also, criticism from "celebrities," female or not, is about as meaningful as astrology. Model and actor Emily Ratajkowski... ...said she was “disgusted” by the 11-minute space flight, which featured Perry serenading her fellow passengers with a cover of What a Wonderful World and advertising her upcoming tour setlist in brief zero gravity. “That’s end time shit,” Ratajkowski said. “Like, this is beyond parody.” Okay, that's about as much of the article as I can stomach quoting. Here's the thing, though: I don't blame Perry or whoever those other chicks were. Well, maybe Sanchez, but who can really blame her for wanting to marry billionaire Lex Luthor? Sorry, I mean Jeff Bezos; I always get those two confused. Point is, it was a cunning stunt, and it worked. People talked about it for weeks. I'm talking about it now, but only because the article has been languishing in the pile for a month. I'm tempted to say "I don't care," but obviously, on some level, I do. And I wanted to try to articulate why. Let's start with the definition of "space." There's no well-defined upper limit to Earth's tenuous outer atmosphere. It's not like the ocean, which has a shifting and rolling but definable boundary; air molecules just kind of get more and more rare the higher you go. Plus, if you did pick some density and say "anything above this density is atmosphere and anything below it is space," you'd find that the altitude varies depending on what spot you're above on Earth, partly because it'll be higher where the air is warmer. So "space" is defined to begin at the Kármán Line, 100 km above mean sea level. Leaving aside that it's not really a line but a (nearly) spherical shell, this launch barely exceeded that altitude. So, yes, from a technical and internationally-recognized legal perspective, they were in space. Briefly. Second, I'm going to say stuff about women in space, at great personal risk. The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, who's still alive. Kate Mulgrew, the actor who portrayed Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager looks a bit like her (I doubt that this is a coincidence). Now, if they'd sent Mulgrew up there, I might have been more impressed. But someone sent Shatner up in a different launch, and he was all jaded and shit so they probably soured on Trek actors. Anyway, my point is, Tereshkova was a trained cosmonaut. The first American woman in space, Sally Ride (which I always thought was an excellent name for an astronaut) was a physicist with a PhD. Katy Perry is a singer. I'm not ragging on singers. I'm not ragging on Perry. She's talented, though I can't say I personally like her stuff. I'm just saying that her skill set doesn't say "astronaut." Hence: publicity stunt. I remember thinking a similar thing about Shatner when they lofted him up there, except Shatner doesn't exactly have the singing chops, as anyone who's ever been subjected to his cover of "Rocket Man" can attest. We're not at the point yet where we need singers in space. And let's not forget that it's pretty routine to send both men and women up to the ISS now, people who spend months there doing... whatever they're doing. Science, research, maintenance; you know, productive stuff. there was that one Canadian dude who brought a guitar with him and made some cool videos, but he's known as an astronaut, not as a musician. These spacers do actual work. Basically, this was a passenger flight, albeit a very expensive one. So, no, the passengers don't impress me, regardless of gender. And finally, shame on the media for breathlessly covering this like it's some sort of grand accomplishment. It's not. No new science, no barrier-breaking, no frontier-pushing. We won't be getting cool space-age tech from a suborbital passenger flight. Sure, first all-female crew, but they could have lifted pretty much anyone healthy enough to handle some extra Gs. I mean, yeah, on some level it's pretty cool that we have companies doing their own rocket launches, but it's not so cool that they can afford to use their powers for advertising. Go, I don't know, mine an asteroid for rare earths or figure out a way to stop the next one from hitting our planet. More likely, they'll figure out how to make the next one hit just the right spot on our planet. Their competition's headquarters, e.g. As anyone who reads my blog should know by now, I'm not against space exploration, and that I believe that a variety of genders, races, and nationalities should be included—because it's about humanity in general, not about one government or company or culture. But this wasn't exploration. It was exploitation. |
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