First photograph of life on Mars?

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Figure 1 - Signa of life on Mars? MarsDepositsA picture snapped by Spirit near Home Plate shows silica formations poking out of the soil, which may have been formed by microbial life. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Figure 1 – Signs of life on Mars? Martian mineral deposits taken by Spirit near Home Plate shows silica formations poking out of the soil, which may have been formed by microbial life. (NASA/JPL-Caltech and in the public domain.)

In 2008, NASA scientists announced that NASA’s Spirit rover had discovered opaline silica deposits inside Mars’ Gusev crater. Significantly the outer layers were covered with in tiny nodules that resembled the heads of sprouting cauliflower. Merely of aesthetic and scientific interest?

It is a very curious point of ambiguity that the image of Figure 1 may, in fact, be the first definitive demonstration or evidence of life on Mars. Recent discoveries in a Chilean desert by Arizona State University at Tempe scientists, Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer, presented at the American Geophysical Union this past December, has led them to hypothesize that these silica structures may have been created by microbes.

The ambiguity may take a very long time to resolve. But recognize that obtaining microorganisms from another planet would have very profound significance. Do they have DNA? Is it composed of the same nucleic acids? Do the same triads of nucleic acids code for the same amino acid? The questions of similarity and dissimilarity have profound implications of the commonality of life in the universe.

But for now we still do not even know if these structures are caused by microorganisms. We do not know if Figure 1 is our first tentative look at extraterrestrial life.

 

Mannequins: Contrasting pairs #2

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Figure 1 - Mannequins: Contrasting pairs #2. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – Mannequins: Contrasting pairs #2. IPhone photograph.  (c) DE Wolf 2016.

We have spoken before about this trend in retail for mannequins to lose all facial features and even to become headless. So I wanted to post, as the second in a series of contrasting pairs, photographs of two mannequins, one faceless one with appealing visage and even painted-in catch-light. Interestingly, these were taken at the same store. One window had the fully anthropomorphic mannequins and the other the faceless ones. I am even wondering if I Photoshopped out the arm to shoulder joint whether she could be mistaken for human. So what is the point? At one junture in their history mannequins were meant to be human like in their appearance. Now the opposite is true. And maybe a part of this is the political correctness of not assuming racial, ethnic, or national type. Still it gives you a little emotional jab to see them dismembered, stripped of clothing, and then rudely dressed – with no concern for possible humanity. Perhaps this is a metaphor for how we treat each other.

Hand-drying: Contrasting pair #1

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Figure 1 - Hand-dryers: Contrasting Pair # 1. (c) DE Wolf 2016

Figure 1 – Hand-drying: Contrasting Pair # 1. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016

Despite an unseasonably warm winter, extenuating circumstances have driven me indoors and out of nature. So this poses the question of where to find photographic amusement. I am starting a project that I call “contrasting pairs,” and launched this project this morning during a walk at the local mall. Just to prove that there are amusing photographic subjects to be found everywhere, I took this first “contrasting pair” of hand-drying devices. The top shows the good old standby – a paper towel dispenser, while the bottom shows the new-fangled electric stream dryer – advertised as both more sanitary and more eco-friendly. The eco-friendly part I question as it takes a certain amount of electrical energy to dry one’s hand. I have yet to do the calculation. I am also suspicious that these machines are designed to rip peoples rings off – well not really. I will also point out that the top photo may well fall into the category of photographs of things soon to be obsolete. Of course, one may also wonder why such gadgets are necessary at all. What’s wrong with drying your hands on your pants?

Death by selfie

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You have probably heard that life imitates art. Most notable is Oscar Wilde’s comment that:

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life“

I mention this because in the play and movie Auntie Mame, Mame’s husband, Beauregard Burnside, dies when they are on the Matterhorn, and he falls to his death trying to take a photograph of Mame on the mountain. That is “death by photography,” and today we have the subset “death by selfie.” This came to mind this week when a woman in India was rescued from a thirty foot deep well in which she had fallen while trying to take a selfie.

Not surprisingly there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to death and injuries by selfie. The most common accidents, like the woman in India, is leaning too far off  bridges, buildings, and mountains – like the Matterhorn. Another common theme is being killed by trains while taking a selfie standing on a railroad track.  I am suspicious that this is an attempt to have a train in the photo barreling down on one. Hello, people – not so smart! This certainly seems a variant on the Darwin Awards.

It appears unlikely that “death by selfie” has increased the number of “deaths by photography,” except in that there are more people taking photographs with cell phones than in “olden days” with “conventional” cameras. More significant, I suspect, is the danger of abstractedness. While the cell-phone and the taking of selfies increases connectedness with one’s greater community, it certainly abstracts the individual from his/her surroundings. “Death by selfie” is a small problem compared to the greater problem of “death by cell phone.” In 2012, 3,328 people were killed in automobile crashes in the United States, involving a distracted driver. An additional, 421,000 people were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving a distracted driver in 2012. There’s the epidemic.

And it also represents a clash between our hunger for technology and our ability to adapt and intercolate this technology into our conscious lives – emphasis on the word conscious. As we rocket towards the singularity, we are the weak link, and what we see is the need to automate cars more and more to compensate for distracted humans.

We will never forget them

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Figure 1 - Challenger explosion January 28, 1986 11:39 EST. From NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Challenger explosion January 28, 1986 11:39 EST. From NASA and in the public domain.

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'”

President Ronald Reagan – January 28, 1986

Spike in the snow

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Figure 1 - Spike in the snow, Nine Acres, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – Spike in the snow, Nine Acres, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

It is always fun after a fresh snow to poke around and see what kind of interesting geometrics you can find. I especially love the patterns that blowing wind makes on fresh pliable snow.The key is the intense contrasts broken by little bits of plants poking free. On Sunday I came upon the spike in the snow shown in Figure1. The spike was there to hold cords that helped a young specimen sapling survive the relentless onslaught of wind. I was intrigued by the starkness of the white contrasted with the red of the rusty spike as well as the perfectly straight line of the cord contrasted with the curve of its shadow. And, of course, the fundamental minimalism of the composition appeals to me.

There is always the question with soundscapes in color as to how to deal with the blue. It is a real physical phenomenon but your eye tends to correct for it. Here I decided to leave it. Surprisingly, my preferred exposure called for no exposure compensation. Usually you have to over expose to get the snow properly white.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 94 mm, ISO 200, Aperture priority AE Mode 1/800th sec at f/10 with no exposure compensation.

Thunder snow from space

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Figure 1 - A massive snowstorm churns over the East Coast of the United States on Jan. 23. Scott Kelly / NASA

Figure 1 – A massive snowstorm churns over the East Coast of the United States on Jan. 23. Scott Kelly / NASA

The recent east coast snow storm brought us another great image from space that I cannot resist. Astronaut Scott Kelly who recently marked 300 days on the International Space Station tweeted: “Rare #thundersnow visible from @Space_Station” along with the awe-inspiring image of Figure 1.

Thundersnow is as you might expect snow accompanied by thunder and lightning. It happens when the atmosphere is especially unstable. That is like a monster storm spanning most of the east coast of the United States.

 

The black hole

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Figure 1 - The Black Hole. (cv) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – The Black Hole. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I have always loved and related to Hamlet’s statement:

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

It is, of course, a statement of Hamlet’s contemplative nature. But I think also that it points out the infinite in the miniature, the view that the structures of the universe are everywhere repeated. This is, of course, the whole concept or definition of a fractal, a random process creating order out of apparent disorder, but the same on all scales. The other geometry that seems ubiquitous is the spiral. We have the golden spiral ( a so-called logarithmic spiral) and the Archimedes spiral (a linear spiral): the spiral of the ram’s horn, the spiral of cream in a cup of coffee, and the spiral of the galaxies.

Yesterday was a gloomy day here in Massachusetts as we awaited the big snow, I had sought warmth, shelter, and amusement in the local indoor mall and while walking came across the spirals of Figure 1 – a spiral in a glass vase. My first thoughts were of the Twilight Zone hypnotic spiral, and the wonderful ambiguity of whether it features an inward or an outward spiral. Then my mind wandered to the the warp in space-time around a black hole, where everything is inexorably drawn in, even light, and where nothing escapes.  I don’t apologize for obscure associations.  All of our minds are set by random, that is fractal, associations. More accurately this is the path that you would see of an object trying to move perpendicular to the radius. This is the path of a planet circling a star – a decaying orbit drawn in the end to its doom. You may have seen shot marbles spiraling down a hemisphere at you local science center.

I took the image with my Iphone, and it proved exceedingly difficult to work-up to what I had visualized. In the end, I liked the distracting reflections mimicking galaxies and faint alternate spiral reflections. These seemed to add to the sense that I was looking at some giant scale astronomical phenomenon.

Snowzilla

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Figure 1 - Night image of blizzard bearing down on the East coast of the United States NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite snapped this image of the approaching blizzard around 2:35 a.m. EST on Jan. 22, 2016 using the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument's Day-Night band. Credit NOAA/NASA.

Figure 1 – Night image of blizzard bearing down on the East coast of the United States NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite snapped this image of the approaching blizzard around 2:35 a.m. EST on Jan. 22, 2016 using the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument’s Day-Night band. Credit NOAA/NASA.

As Hati and Skoll goes to press – so to speak, people along the East coast of the United States are awaiting Snowzilla 2, which is already hitting the southern states and threatens to dump as much as three feet of snow in Washington, DC. The Boston area happily, is not expecting for than a dusting.

But significantly the NOAA and NASA have just released the spectacular image of Figure 1 showing the massive storm ominously hovering over beautifully illuminated cities. I could not resist the post.  Stay safe and warm eastern readers and have fun in the snow – just remember to use a little positive exposure compensation if you take photographs.