Slowly they pass

 

I was old enough, though still young, to remember when Apollo 8 went into orbit around the Moon, just before Christmas in 1968.  

Now one of the three crew members, Frank Borman, has passed away. Remarkably, both James Lovell (95 years old) and William Anders (90 years old) are still alive.

Frank Borman dead: Astronaut who commanded Apollo 8 has passed away at age 95 - decades after leading first manned mission to orbit the moon and return safely to Earth

Lassen Volcanic Park recovery from Dixie Fire

 

Though there was lots of damage and destruction of the forests, The Guardian reports that Lassen Volcanic Park is recovering from the effects of the Dixie Fire in August 2021.

‘There’s still beauty’: a national park bounces back after California’s biggest single fire

"The blaze, California’s largest ever single fire, burned almost 70% of Lassen. A third of the burn area saw the sort of high-severity fire that kills most trees and bakes the nutrients from topsoil.

However, there is evidence of resilience among the devastation – sprouts emerging from the scorched soil and the black and green mosaic of the mountains. The recovering ecosystem in this off-the-beaten path national park serves as a reminder of the threats to the US’s wild places and offers lessons about how to protect public lands in an era of climate crisis."

A note on nihilism

 

Looking back a bit, but not too far, this op-ed by Peter Wehner in the New York Times has some pithy truth to tell.

Republicans have chosen nihilism

Referring to Trump: 

"No other president has been as disdainful of knowledge or as untroubled by his benightedness. No other has been as intentional not just to lie but to annihilate truth. And no other president has explicitly attempted to overturn an election and encouraged an angry mob to march on the Capitol.

In other words, no matter how much wrongdoing Mr. Trump engages in, however outrageous and brutish his conduct, he remains wildly popular. His indecency and sulfuric rhetoric are a plus; his most loyal supporters are galvanized by the criminal charges against him, which they consider political persecution."

And about conservatives, especially the far-right ones:

"Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”

OK, so now it's my turn. Those "alternative facts" are dangerous. Not only do people believe things that are wrong, they act on those beliefs. And Trump and all of those who surround him KNOW this. They are using lies and misinformation to organize their followers behind them.

I'm not the first to say that democracy is in danger.

Lighthouse of the Week, December 3 - 9, 2023: Ra's Serani Range Rear Light, Kenya

 

I checked back in my history of posting Lighthouses of the Week, specifically for Africa, and determined that I had featured lighthouses from South Africa (several) and Senegal (1).  So I focused in on Kenya. Kenya has several lighthouses, but only one classic style lighthouse. That one is this one.

The lighthouse is the Ra's Serani Range Rear Light, in Mombasa. Mombasa is a fairly famous place in Kenya, as it's the only significant coastal community on the Kenyan coast. It's been mentioned more than once in movies and books. 

It's not too hard to find; this is where it is. 

The Lighthouse Directory has this information about it:

"Date unknown (1920s?) (station established 1902). Active; focal plane 45 m (148 ft); white flash every 5 s. 33 m (108 ft) round stone tower with lantern and gallery, painted with black and white horizontal bands."

In addition to the Lighthouse Directory entry, World of Lighthouses also has a page for it.

Most of the pictures of it are from either of those two sources. So don't be surprised if you've seen these if you have visited the links.

Postcard view from Huelse, noted and linked in the Lighthouse Directory.

Because this is the lighthouse that looks the most like a lighthouse in Mombasa, by searching with "Mombasa lighthouse", I found a couple of others.

The third one is from this TikTok video.

It's not like it's going to blow anywhere

 

Yes, since they and their space-machines got there, humans have   been leaving stuff behind. This article goes into detail about the nature of that stuff, so I will be discreet.

But this is what has happened everywhere humans have gone. Antarctica and the Arctic, Africa and the bottom of the oceans. There are molecules of Earth-based machines that have burned up in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.  We began exploring the Moon by crashing things into it.  Then we left behind machines, and refuse, as well as some science experiment instrumentation. 

Fortunately, as least on the Moon, it will stay right where we left it. So, in the distant future, we could go back and clean up what we probably should clean up.  After all, it's possible to envision future tourists visiting the first places humans landed on the Moon.  We wouldn't want them to step on something.

What we left behind: how human activity has already littered the Moon

Well, we left footprints too.

This is a LOT (but fortunately less than thought before)

 

A short science article puts the amount of plastic in, and going into, the oceans in a fascinating and frightening perspective.

A new census of plastic debris entering the ocean

"On the basis of observational data of the amount of plastics entering the ocean each year and model predictions of the rate at which that debris disappeared over time, Kaandorp and his collaborators concluded that about 500 million kilograms of initially buoyant plastic debris are entering the ocean each year. That’s less than a tenth of some of the most extreme previous estimates, the researchers noted. “We come up with quite different numbers,” Kaandorp said."

So let's be clear on this;  all that plastic of many different colors in the ocean is a major problem.

Lighthouse of the Week, November 26 - December 2, 2023: New Cape Henry Lighthouse, Virginia, USA

 

First of all, after I posted the LoTW for last week, the Old Cape Henry Lighthouse, I discovered that I had featured both of the lighthouses (in a single post) several years ago.  

Lighthouse(s) of the Week, January 1-7, 2017: Cape Henry, VA, old and new

Given that I included both of them in one post, I didn't cover either of them with a lot of information, so I think this revisit is justified.

To review, the Cape Henry Lighthouses are located on Cape Henry, Virginia.

So now I'll provide more information on just the new Cape Henry lighthouse. According to a public television show about the lighthouses of the Chesapeake Bay, the light from this tall structure can be seen 20 miles out to sea.

From the Lighthouse Directory:

"1881. Active; focal plane 164 ft (50 m); three flashes every 20 s: two short flashes followed by one long (7 s) flash; red sector covers dangerous shoals. 164 ft (50 m) octagonal cast-iron-clad brick tower, original 1st order Fresnel lens. Unusual daymark: alternating black and white vertical bands; lantern is black. The 2-story brick principal keeper's house and two 1-1/2 story wood assistant keepers' house buildings are all standing; one is currently in use as an Army residence."

The striping is a bit disconcerting. But it's unique.

To show where the Old Cape Henry Lighthouse is