Oh, to be a Brooklyn Dodger!

The baseball team was at one time called the Trolley Dodgers (and before that the Bridegrooms; see here) because of the dense network of trolley lines that traversed Brooklyn a century ago, some of which lasted into the 1950s (see photos here). The trolleys pictured above sit forlornly on track between the water and the nineteenth century Red Hook warehouse building that now houses a Fairway market. The two nearest cars, which are of the PCC type actually used in Brooklyn before the last of the Borough's trolley lines shut down, were acquired as surplus from the Boston MTA's "Green Line", but have been repainted to match the color scheme worn by their erstwhile sisters in Brooklyn. The white car at the rear is of German manufacture and is on lease from the City of Oslo.

These cars were acquired by Bob Diamond, whose plan to restore trolley service along the Red Hook waterfront was thwarted by city bureaucracy. You can read the story here.

Update: Topazz says that, if a movie is made about the Red Hook trolley story, I should get the Jeff Goldblum part. I see that Jeff and I are both natives of western Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, he has a lot more hair than I do.

A note to a reader in San Francisco.

To whoever got here via a Google search for "sea level rise and Brooklyn Heights Promenade": believe me, if all the arctic and antarctic ice were to melt, the Promenade would still be above water.

This isn't to say we're not concerned about climate change here. After all, most of us work in lower Manhattan, which lies much closer to sea level. Moreover, we'd hate to lose the piers that will support much of the new park planned below the Promenade.

Incidentally, the Heights are a product of the last Ice Age. We sit on the lower boundary of the continental glacier at its maximum extent, and the high ground consists of debris pushed southward by the glacier as it grew, then left behind as it melted.

Red Sox 7, Yanks 6

That almost makes up for the Mets losing to the Braves.

4/21 update: Perfect baseball (and perfect spring) day today, as Mets and Sox win and Braves and Yanks lose.

4/22 upchuck: I can sense Ray Glier's keystrokes as he pounds out his piece procaliming the restoration of proper order to the planet; the rightful NL East champions once again rule, the unworthy upstarts are relegated to ruin. (Yeah, I know, it's a long season ... )

When I saw the Braves ahead 9-6 in the bottom of the ninth with one out, I heaved a great sigh. My daughter asked if I was all right. "No," I said, and told her why. "Oh, get over it, Dad," she said. "It's just baseball, a game guys get paid millions to play while kids are starving in Sudan." OK, I'll go to my room and sulk.

Any hope for salvaging this day now rests on the arm of Kaibutsu. (Thanks to Twiffer for letting me know Daisuke's Japanese nickname, which is so much better than Dice-K.)

4/22 uplift: Sox sweep!

At least no pundit will be crowing about the restoration of the proper pecking order between New York teams.

Palms in the Catskills?

No, this isn't a global warming alarm. It seems that there were palm-like trees growing in that region in the Middle Devonian, some 380 million years ago (see here).

Update: Geology maven Twiffer points out that, in the Middle Devonian, the bit of tectonic plate on which the Catskills now sit was at a latitude comparable to the present-day Caribbean, so the presence of palms, or something possibly ancestral to them, is not surprising.

Although I'm confident that Twiffer is right about this, statements about ancient geological dispositions bring to mind a quotation from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, which he presented as a critique of scientific speculation, but is actually an attack on simple-minded extrapolation:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.

Fearful symmetry.

The image is of the Red Square Nebula, recently discovered in the constellation Serpens by astronomers using the Palomar and Keck telescopes in California and Hawaii, respectively. Credit for the photograph, which I downloaded from AOL News, goes to Peter Tuthill of Sydney University and Palomar/Keck; James Lloyd of Cornell University is credited as co-discoverer of the Nebula.

Like the Helix Nebula featured in an earlier post, the Red Square is debris from a dying star; however, it's very neatly distributed debris. You can read more about it in New Scientist here.

More confirmation of the Mets/Red Hook augury.

As I've noted before, some time ago I thought I noticed a positive correlation between victory for the Mets and the presence during the game of at least one ship docked at the Red Hook container port, visible from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade just a few steps from where I live. There was a ship there Friday, but none yesterday.

Another great subway ad.

Honest to God, I'm not shilling for Manhattan Mini Storage (but if they happen to see this and give me a concession on my rent, I certainly won't object).

Anyway, whoever's doing this ad campaign should get an award.

Department of intriguing headlines.

Here.

Unfortunately, the story is a bit of a letdown.

Update: The link doesn't work any more, but since you're dying to know, the headline was "World Bank's Wolfowitz admits erred on girlfriend," which kinda brought to mind Phil Rizzuto's baserunning narrative that accompanied Meat Loaf's and Ellen Foley's duet on "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".

Extra! Rundeep takes my reference and runs with it, giving us this paraphrase of "Paradise":

STOP RIGHT THERE!
I wanna know right now,
before we go any further
will you fire me, will I be
there forever, will you need me,
will the bank never leave me
Well, I've made it such a big part of my life
I could never leave just to become
your wife:

Let me sleep on it,
baby, baby
Let me sleep on it.
I'll have a nap
and I'll send them a memo in the
morning.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; 1922-2007

He survived the fire-bombing of Dresden because his German captors had him, and other POWs, working in an underground meat locker when the raid started. That experience was the basis of his novel Slaughterhouse Five, and no doubt contributed to his pessimistic world view (that, and being brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church, which he described as "a very tough church, indeed.").

My favorite of his works is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, about a saintly eccentric who sprang from the same southern Indiana milieu as did my father. It has a deliriously happy ending, concluding with the words, "Be fruitful and multiply." This is in stark contrast to Cat's Cradle, which ends with the extinction of life on earth because of a military experiment gone awry.

He and I used to take the waters at the Lion's Head, though I never met him. I guess, however, that makes us both members of a granfalloon.

TenaciousK has a nice tribute on WikiFray, with a link to the New York Times obit. ("Kilgore Trout" was a fictional sci-fi writer who was a character in several of Vonnegut's novels, and whose masterwork was a novel called Venus on the Half Shell. In 1974, another writer, Philip Jose Farmer, published a novel with that title under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut was displeased with this, as it was widely assumed he was the author, so Farmer had it republished under his own name. I assume, though I don't know, that "Kilgore Trout" was a play on the name of another sci-fi writer, Theodore Sturgeon.)

Imus: flame under the pot or valve on the pressure cooker?

Your thoughts, please.

El Duque can hit.

In tonight's game against the Cards, he contributed two hits and two runs batted in to the Mets' 4-1 victory, which assures a series win over the defending World Series champs.

Imagine the frustration he must have felt during those seven seasons in the Designated Hitter League. He did manage to bat .333 in inter-league play during a couple of his seasons with the Yanks.

Update: ... and John Maine surely can pitch, as the Mets complete a sweep of the defending champs at Nuevo Busch Stadium. According to the AP story, this is the first time the Mets have had a 3-0 start since 1994. Ah, yes, the "strike-shortened 1994 season", which the Mets ended with a 55-58 record.

I'll continue to be a worrywart until the Mets either (a) clinch, or (b) are mathematically eliminated.

For August: I root for the Orioles, too ... whenever they play the Yanks.

The right reporter on the beat.

Today's New York Times lead article on the Supreme Court's decision concerning carbon dioxide emissions is by ... Linda Greenhouse.

Must I give up backing the Florida Gators now?

After all, I've always had this thing for underdogs.

Mets win opener.

They win it, 6-1, on the road, against the Cards, their nemesis in last year's NLCS. It wasn't as easy as the score indicates, with both Glavine and Heilman having to pitch out of bases loaded jams. In Glavine's case, the escape was aided by a great Beltran throw from center and a LoDuca tag-out of Eckstein at the plate. Wagner pitched the ninth in a no-save situation, and gave up two hits before closing the deal.

I feel a little less nervous than I did during most of spring training, but I have this sense that, for the Mets, losing the opener is a good sign (I believe they lost opening games in both 1969 and 1986).

Tim Marchman nailed it: "Mets fans, by nature, are fusspots."

The Battery Park turkey lives!

Late last November, I was surprised to find a large, healthy looking turkey calmly enjoying the sun in Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan, just a few days before Thanksgiving. Today, I was walking past the Coast Guard building, between the eastern edge of Battery Park and the Staten Island Ferry terminal, when I saw what seems very likely to be the same bird nonchalantly perched on a wall next to the sidewalk. The bird didn't budge as I walked by a few feet away.

Could the Coasties have made this bird their mascot, perhaps in reaction to being put under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security?

Hmmm ... lotsa posts about birds, lately. Should I add an "ornithology" classification?

7.18.09 update: Still alive, as Chicken Underwear attests, with photo. He says her name is Zelda.

Best subway ad of the year, so far:

"Duck!" "Where?"

Flying over the North Cove, Battery Park City breakwater:


Splashdown:

Right! The lizard-fish conversion. Very easy.

We have good clues about how fish evolved into land-dwelling animals, but how about those great aquatic reptiles of the Mesozoic, the ichthyosaurs, mososaurs and plesiosaurs? How did they evolve from landlubbers to seafarers?

When I saw a story a few days ago of a fossil primitive crocodilian, of the species Thalattosuchia, found in Oregon, I noted how much the artist's rendering looked like an ichthyosaur, despite the lack of a dorsal fin. This made me wonder: Did the ichthyosaurs evolve from primitive crocodilians? Evidently not, since the earliest thalattosuchian fossils found so far are from the Jurassic, while ichthyosaurs appeared as early as the Triassic, though they are believed to have evolved from more primitive diapsids that may also have been ancestral to crocodilians. That raised another question: Could crocodilians have evolved from ichthyosaurs, thus providing an example of evolution taking one group of creatures from land to sea, then back to a semi-terrestrial existence? Again, the answer seems to be no, as fossil crocodilians (but not thalattosuchians) have also been found in Triassic strata.

So, the superficial resemblance between thalattosuchians and ichthyosaurs (long beaks; vertical, fish-like tails) may be an example of convergent evolution.

Update: On the subject of Triassic crocs, Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague (if a newbie to the team may be so bold) qfwfq kindly gives me a link to a piece about an early croc, Effigia okeeffeae, "discovered" in a collection of unclassified fossils at the American Museum of Natural History. This critter ran on two legs and bore a strong resemblance to ornithomimid dinosaurs that didn't appear until the late Jurassic, about eighty million years after Effigia. Ornithomimids are themselves cited as examples of convergent evolution with ratite birds (for example, ostriches), so adding Effigia to the mix gives us an example of triple convergence.

Three cheers for Joe Queenan.

From his op-ed, "Life in the Mean Seats", in today's New York Times, discussing proposals to ban booing (I'm not making this up) at sports events:

First, no booing high school teams. Then no booing the Fighting Irish. Before you know it, Mets fans will be getting ejected from their own stadium for booing the Yankees. And if Mets fans can't boo the despicable Yankees, why go on living?

Update: Twiffer asks, rhetorically, who would want to make A-Rod cry?

In my experience, more likely Yankees than Mets fans.

Harbinger

A few days before tonight's equinox, I saw this fellow above my path through the small wooded area adjoining the South Cove at Battery Park City.

One galaxy, over easy.

This image, taken from Astronomy Picture of the Day, is of a nearby (only 60 million or so light years) group of galaxies called Hickson 44, in the direction of the constellation Leo. There are four galaxies in the picture. Three of them lie roughly in a row extending diagonally from just to the right of the bottom center to the upper left. The lower two of these are spiral galaxies similar to our own; the other, which looks like a slightly misty bright star, is an elliptical galaxy (the bright, bluish object at the upper right is a star in our galaxy).

What I find fascinating is the galaxy that is just above and to the right of the largest spiral galaxy. It looks like it's doing a backflip in space. Perhaps this contortion is caused by the gravity of the other, nearby galaxies.

Is blogging like baseball?

There's an interesting parallel between this post on blogging and marketing by Kathy Sierra (found through a link posted by bEnder on WikiFray) and this New York Times column on baseball by David Brooks (linked to helpfully by sydbristow on Iraqwarit).

Note especially Sierra:

You must be willing and able to turn off (temporarily) The Voice inside that says, "We'll never get away with this. People will hate it." ... [T]his is somewhat like The Inner Game approach or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or any of the other approaches to creativity that get your logical "talking" mind out of the way so all the more useful but non-speaking parts of your brain can get on with the important things you're trying to accomplish.

and Brooks:

[B]aseball has accomplished [an] ... important feat. It has developed a series of habits and standards of behavior to keep the conscious mind from interfering with the automatic mind.

Baseball is one of those activities in which the harder you try, the worse you do. The more a pitcher aims the ball, the wilder he becomes. The more a batter tenses, the slower and more tentative his muscles become.

So, I suppose I need to approach each post with the same insouciance with which Jose Reyes regards a split-finger fastball or a Baltimore chop. But, perhaps more importantly, a la Sierra, I need to find a way to make you hate me.

Chicken soup for the universe.

We may have been taught that the universe is 99.99...% hard vacuum, but according to this New Scientist article, which I found through a link in Alan Boyle's ever-helpful Cosmic Log, some physicists at Stanford, MIT and Harvard believe that "vacuum" may be a "string-net liquid" that could be analogized to noodles in chicken broth.

What's particularly interesting about this article is how it shows the interplay among theoretical, experimental* and applied physics, as well as geology. It has been proposed that a mineral called herbertsmithite, found in the Chilean Andes, may be an example of a string-net liquid. The possible application, being explored by a group at MIT, is to quantum computers, which would be much faster and more capacious than silicon-based ones.
__________

*The late Nobel physics laureate Richard Feynman explained the difference between theoretical physicists, like himself, and experimental physicists with this anecdote: He was giving a lecture at one of the Lawrence laboratories in California, where his audience consisted mostly of experimentalists. He referred to a fairly recently discovered particle, and said, "Let's assume its spin is two and one half." He was immediately interrupted by a voice from the audience with a heavy Brooklyn accent, saying, "Hey, it ain't two and a half, it's tree. Dey measured it."

It's looking grim for the Mets.

OK, they were split squad games, but losing to the Nats 13-1 and the Orioles 9-0 looks awful in any event. I'm not so worried about Park and Sele getting hammered; neither is likely to make the starting rotation. What's really scary is that Messrs. Beltran and Delgado, more than halfway through spring training, sport batting averages of .216 and .227, respectively.

Silly science Saturday redux.

Bad Astronomy links to a "snarky celebrity site" (and I link to Bad Astro linking thus; so does the Great Chain of Being advance by another link).

Anyway, it's good to know that Eva Longoria is not a gnome, and that Marcia Cross and I are exactly the same height.

Someone in Alameda, California asks ...

... "how to get along with a self-absorbed man".

I'm sure s/he left this site just as perplexed as when s/he arrived.

A Dutch subject, but in a French style.

This photo of Holland America Lines' Noordam, making her way at twilight past Staten Island towards the Narrows and the ocean, taken from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and severely cropped, brings to mind the pontillism of Georges Seurat (click on the photo to enlarge and get the full effect).

Sal's retired, but the Erie Canal still hauls freight.

I've got a mule, and her name is Sal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
She's a good ol' worker an' a good ol' pal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
We've hauled some barges in our day,
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay,
And we know every inch of the way
From Albany to Buffalo.

(Lyrics courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Social Studies - "A More Perfect Union")

Last year I posted a piece about Red Hook, Brooklyn, in which I explained how the Erie Basin, an artificial harbor there, got its name from its use in the nineteenth century as a transshipment point for grain from the Midwest that had been carried by barge from the Great Lakes, across the Erie Canal, then down the Hudson to Brooklyn, where it was loaded onto oceangoing ships for far away destinations. I had assumed (yes, I know the derivation) that railroads and trucks had long ago put an end to any carriage of goods on the New York State canal system, and that these historic waterways were now used only by pleasure craft, including the tourist boat on which my wife, daughter and I made our way through the locks at Lockport, New York (see photo below, as the gates of Lock 34 open and the World's Widest Bridge looms ahead) the summer before last.


So, I was delighted to find this NPR piece, which shows that there is still cargo traffic on the canal system, and that it is increasing. Note: I've updated this link to replace one from 2007 that had expired.

The headline is comforting ...

... but the story beneath it is a bit unsettling.

Consider how fortunate was the Tunguska event. If the most likely thing had happened, that is, the asteroid had landed in an ocean, there might have been catastrophic tsunamis. If it landed in a populated area, thousands or even millions of people could have died from the force of the impact. Instead, it landed in a vast, largely unpopulated land area.

Postscript to "Silly science Saturday"

As a follow-up to my earlier post about the Fair Education Foundation and its argument concerning the "Kabbalistic" foundations of evolution, I strongly recommend this entry from Niles Eldredge's blog, in which Dr. Eldredge imagines a very amusing correspondence between himself and Darwin on this subject.

Update: While we're on the subject of state legislators meddling in scientific matters, there's this news from New Mexico. (Not for nothing do they call it the "Land of Enchantment".)

And yet more: Bad Astronomy gets their dig in at FEF's anti-Copernican campaign.