Figure 1 – a colorful photograph by Infrogmation (from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain under GNU attribution license) from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras showing a child’s wagon. decorated as mini-float entitled: “Going to Hell in a Handbasket.”

Yesterday I talked about how we are going to hell in a handbasket and this led to one of my tangents on space travel.  Sorry.  But I did want to return to the very curious phrase, “going to hell in a handbasket,” itself.  To make this photographic, I include, as Figure 1, a colorful photograph by Infrogmation, from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras showing a child’s wagon decorated as mini-float entitled: “Going to Hell in a Handbasket.”

I did some searching of the phrase, and the origin seems clouded in obscurity and there are many proposed possibilities.  I have a favorite that appeals to the antiquarian in me, but first want to point out that therein lies a major problem with the internet.  Misinformation is self-propagating on the worldwide web; so if this is wrong, well…

You may remember from world history Charlemagne (748-814), who founded, in what is now Germany, the Carolingian Empire.   Charlemagne fought a guerilla war (an affront to true guerillas for sure) with the teutonic goth tribes.  He was suspicious that his generals were exaggerating the enemy casualties (like this has never been done before or since). So he ordered that the right hand of his enemies be chopped off and sent to him as a kind of census.  It was an early form of digital counting.  They were sent in what came to be known as “handbaskets.” Yuck! The obvious result was that his generals also started sending the hands of their own fallen soldiers to inflate the numbers.  Isn’t this a lovely story?  And so much for the term “handbasket.”

Now as for “going to hell in a handbasket” it is said that the goths believed that if you were not buried intact, in particular if you did not have a hand, that the gate of Heaven would not open for you, and you would go to the other place with all due haste.  Hence, the expression.

I promise to return to the topic of photography for my next post.

I thought rather poignant was a photograph on the BBC by Guillermo Legaria of the AFP showing a crane carrying weapons that had been seized from Farc and ELN guerrillas in Colombia. The crane is being used to transport nearly ten thousand weapons for disposed. They will be melted down and reforged as rods to reinforce the foundations and columns of schools and hospitals in areas of armed conflict.

The image is both incongruous and reminiscent of the biblical verse from Isaiah 2:4 “They will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer fight against nation, nor train for war anymore.”

Figure1 – Image of Jovian moon Europa, reprocessed and released on November 21. Credit NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute

Last week NASA released the stunning reprocessed image of Figure 1 from 1990’s photographs taken  by the Galileo spacecraft in orbit around the planet Jupiter.  This was reprocessed because of new image processing techniques developed since the image was first released in 2001. So we may now stare down at the moon of ice and wonder.

What we are wondering about is whether beneath the surface of Europa there is liquid water, and we imagine extrapolating the rule on Earth that where there is water, there is life.  Wonder?  Extrapolate? These are key functions of photography, and key functions of science.

Since men and women first pondered the sky, we have sought to understand what Thomas Huxley called “Man’s Place in Nature,” which we may extend to Man’s Place in the Universe.  There are moments of great epiphany: the discovery of the origin of species, the discovery of the Higgs boson.  They are often unheard against the cacophony of human stupidity, but they are there just the same. And this beautiful picture reminds us of our capacity to marvel.

Back in the seventies, I attended a lecture by Cornell physicist Edwin Salpeter on Jovian life.  This was pure fantasy.  But I remember being captivated and wondering.  And more recently I have become haunted by the quote from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park  – yes more fantasy! “… the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.“

You might well ask whether I am a bit touched. How is it possible that such a cold and far away place as Europa could possibly have liquid water?  Europa, it seems, gets its energy not from the sun but from Jupiter.  The gravitational field of Jupiter is emense and this can be expected huge tidal friction on Europa.  Enough to create liquid water and life?  I wonder.

There is a fun photograph by Marsel van Oosten that won “The People’s Choice” wildlife photography award from the Natural History Museum.  It was taken at the Jigokudani Monkey Park in Japan and shows a Snow Monkey “chillin’” out in his hot spring and surfing with an IPhone. Thanks to a reader for alerting me to this.

The story, according to van Oosten is that a tourist was photographing the macaque and just kept getting closer and closer until the monkey suddenly snapped the phone away, headed out to deeper water, and begin playing with it.  He even managed to fire off the flash a couple of times and tried some underwater photography.  But, of course, Oosten knew what was coming and snapped the primate at this most human of moments.  The award is not without some controversy however.  Because the “People’s Choice” award involved internet voting, there is some concern that the monkey may have voted for himself, indeed perhaps multiple times.  This, which, of course, brings into question whether the vote should still be called “People’s Choice.”

The other awards are really worth looking at as well and can be found at the NHM website.