Twenty two chronometers

Well, Charles Darwin finally made it back to England on HMS Beagle, after a five year voyage. He spent most of his time ashore during the voyage since the actual transit time betweeen the various stops was only about 18 months. Of course the Beagle itself spent a lot of the other 36 months at sea in and around the harbors where Darwin was set ashore for his explorations.

The appendixes at the end of the book turned out to be almost as interesting as the book itself. For instance, the Beagle left England with 22 chronometers in order to be sure that Captain Fitzroy could accurately chart the longitude of a bunch of places, which was the real job of the ship. Even with 22 of the most accurate clocks that could be bought in 1831 the ship's itinerary was planned to allow stops in many places whose longitude was known with fair precision so Fitzroy could calibrate his chronometers by observing and timing the occultations of stars by the moon. Fitzroy took an instrument maker whose sole job was maintenance of the clocks.

It came to me as I was listening to all of this that the sheer amount of detailed mathematical work which needed to be done after the Beagle returned to England was unbelievable. By taking his observations at the known longitude places Fitzroy would have related the time shown by all of those clocks to the actual known time of the occultation. None of this would have had any precise meaning until after he returned to England and compared the time on the clocks to standard Greenwich Mean Time. At that point Fitzroy, and several assistants no doubt, would have had to go back and reconstruct the whole voyage to calculate the real longitude of all the places where he took what had to be tens of thousands of soundings and bearings to known points of land. Almost unbelievable how much detail work had to be involved.

The other thng that struck me was Darwin commenting at length on how easy the voyage was relative to the previous voyages of Captain Cook and the other earlier explorers. The Beagle was 90 feet long and 24 feet wide in the beam. It was home to no less than 74 men for those five long years. Of course that was far fewer men than the Beagle had carried when it was outfitted with 12 cannon as a warship. For that purpose the crew was 120 men. As a survey ship the Beagle carried only 6 cannon.

We think of Charles Darwin as the plump bald guy with the heavy brows whose picture was taken in 1854, or as the fusty old bearded guy whose picture was taken in 1868. But when he went off on the Beagle he was a determined looking 22 year old. A rich 22 year old, by the way. He took a servant with him for the five year exploration trip. He was the grandson of the Wedgwood pottery guy and also the son and grandson of two generations of very prominent doctors. His grandfather had the nerve to turn down King George the 3rd's invitation to be his personal doctor.

The Voyage of the Beagle was an interesting listen.

Glorious snow, cannibals, missionaries and Rosebud

Linda thinks fifteen inches. I think more like eighteen inches. Both of us are too lazy to go out and measure the great heap on the picnic table. Eventually I'll have to go out there to plow. I'll measure it then, but of course I'll have to apply an adjustment to the raw data because it's a well known phenomenon that light drifty snow compacts down over time.

Linda reports that the post office has cancelled deliveries for today. Whatever happened to "neither snow nor heat. . ." Back in the good old days when Jas and Kathy were handling the mail this would never have happened.

Speaking of the good old days, The Beagle just got to New Zealand after a stop in Tahiti. And Darwin was going on quite poeticly yesterday about the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean yesterday while I was driving back and forth to the tanning salon. He was marvelling at the days and weeks of travel involved over the heaving trackless ocean to reach the little islands dotted around. He was also decrying the British naysayers he had heard criticizing the missionaries in Tahiti. He didn't quite point out that the naysayers would have been killed, cooked and eaten by the Tahitians in the days before the missionaries, but he hinted at it.

Meanwhile there are two kids down there by the bridge. Maybe seven or eight year olds, little enough so the snow comes up to their thighs. One of them is covered with dusty snow. Oh for the days when snow meant eagerness to get out there in it until the cold damp coming though your gloves and clothes drove you inside to warm up for a few minutes before heading out again. There are deer running around beyond the pond; but I don't think the kids see them.

Quite a lot of activity out there today. A teenage girl trudged across from Stratford toward Bridal Lane carrying a yellow sled a little while ago. She just headed back with another teenager and a younger girl in tow. They're probably going to try to sled down the sidewalks on Stratford. These days the local governments plow and salt too quickly and thoroughly to allow for proper sledding on the streets. Back in the good old days Park Avenue down in Trooper might stay unplowed all day, and when it was plowed there was still a good packed down base of snow to sled on, sometimes for several days. Those were the days when you had to have a plowed road to sled on because the only sleds around had thin metal runners.

Four deer just leaped and ran across the lawn from Bridal Lane to down by the bridge. Those little kids missed quite a sight, although on second thought the deer probably would have skirted well clear if the kids had still been there.

Gotta run now. The tractor calls. I should paint a name on the tractor. Perhaps Rosebud.

There's a Great Blue Heron wandering around

He glided in and landed down by the bridge and he's now patiently stalking along the creek. I can't imagine what he expects to catch in this cold.

But I didn't sign in to comment on the Great Blue Heron. I signed in to comment on the damn Canadian politician who's planning to swoop down here into the U.S. to have a heart operation.

We keep getting told and told and told that Canada has such a great health care system. If that's the case why is a damned Canadian politician coming down here for his operation? Perhaps all the good Canadian doctors have moved to the U.S.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2510700

In related news Sam and Deb, along with Dolores and Don, came to dinner on Sunday. So we were able to see the stitches in Sam's finger. It turns out they didn't go to the hospital emergency room but rather to the Premier Urgent Care center in Oaks. They got good efficient service there. Sam said the doctor got to him within fifteen minutes of their arrival. This urgent care concept seems to make sense. The hospitals charge far too much for most emergency room care because of the way hospital accounting works. And the waiting times in hospital emergency rooms can be long.

Sam's main concern is that the stitches should be out by the time it's warm enough for golf.

One of the red headed woodpeckers is down there on the sugar maple tree, so I have to go now.

But first I should mention that I've been listening to Charles Darwin's book The Voyage of the Beagle while driving over the past couple of weeks. A very interesting book, although you do have to be patient when he runs on and on about some particular frog, or mouse, or geological formation that has interested him. What's most interesting is how humble Darwin is. He never asserts anything.

He's groping toward explanations for a whole host of natural phenomena besides evolution, including plate techtonics, ocean currents, vulcanism, mountain uplift, climate variation and change, extinction, etc.; but it's clear he doesn't make up his mind until the evidence is overwhelming. On the subject of evolution it's neat that at that at the point of his life when he wrote this book he was still somewhat of a believer in what was later called Lysenkoism, namely that acquired traits are geneticly passed down.

A very interesting book and a very interesting man, not at all like the forbidding bearded elder who's popular image comes down to us as a result of the fact that he ultimately got to the overarching theory of evolution.

On that subject Linda and I finally saw Ben Stein's movie Expelled a few weeks ago. The movie was contentious, and Stein skewered some of the too proud and exclusionary evolutionists; but it's hard for me not to think that Stein is more reasonable in the end than the evolution explains everything true believers.

The book The Voyage of the Beagle is worth reading, and the movie Expelled is worth seeing.