Quick Afghanistan Note: The Sand is Everywhere

The dust and sand is everywhere, including the air.  I have yet to start work but already am coughing up a storm.  There are mountains nearby but I can barely make them out through the haze.

In Afghanistan

United States of (Google) Autocomplete

Very Small Array has created a map of Google autocomplete searches for each state.  For example: typing in "South Dakota" will have Google recommend "South Dakota State University."

Click to enlarge.

Sports and universities dominate the Google autocomplete search landscape.   Twelve states have universities as the first result and fourteen are sports related (counting Nevada).  It is clear that gridiron football truly is America's modern-day pastime.  Even the media-dominating New York Yankees baseball team lose out to the New York Times newspaper.

Interestingly the states of Washington and Montana are losers.  "Washington Post," a national newspaper published in the city of Washington in the District of Columbia is the first recommended search result.  "Montana Fisburne," a pornographic "actress" is the top recommended result for the state of Montana.  Of the losers, I rather be Washington. (Hat tip: Torgo Jr.)

Afghan War Deaths By Country: Part I

As of December 3, 2010.  Chart from iCasualties

Brave Patriots

Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Does Not Like America's Geography Standards (But His Own Are Not as Good as Believed)

The long-running, stereotype of Americans not being geographically literate has been discussed on this blog before.  Many Americans do lack critical knowledge of not only the world but also spatial reasoning.  This has been the point of many jokes both within America and around the world.  Now it has become a (albeit minor) part of global diplomacy.  While on a trip to Central Asia, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is quoted to have told foreign businessmen that Americans do not know geography while Britain had the best geography teachers in the world.

While I too have been impressed by geography in education it may not be as good as Andrew believes.  For example, a 2008 ESRI (UK) geographic literacy survey of British found
A study to raise awareness of geography found that two thirds of people (65%) mistakenly believe Britain is made up of four countries, rather than the correct three: England, Scotland and Wales.

Half of the 2,000 people surveyed (51%) wrongly believe English is the most spoken language in the world, as opposed to Mandarin Chinese. And one in 10 think Everest is Britain's highest mountain.
Struggling with the "how many countries" question, 6% said Britain was made up of five countries, 3% thought one and 2% chose two.
Yet asked what profession they would most like to be out of list of six, 23% of respondents said explorer, compared with doctor (22%), painter (16%), teacher (15%), journalist (14%) and banker (11%).

December 2010 Travel Photo: Ruins of Immaculata Chapel

The Virgin Mary looks down and away from the ruins of her Immaculata Chapel.  The photos are from my travels to St Marys in 2006 and 2007.

St Marys, Kansas is a very unique place.  It was originally settled by Potawatomi Indians in 1848 forced out of Michigan by the United States.  The Potawatomis were a deeply Catholic tribe and were accompanied by Jesuit missionaries who had been with them for over one hundred years.  While a minority of Potawatomis adopted Great Plains Indian culture the one's at St Marys set out to learn from the oncoming white culture.  During the Oregon Trail, many wagon train diary remark how "civilized" the Indians of St Marys were: they had brick homes, farms, a nice church, doctors, blacksmiths, and even their own toll bridge.  Another removal in the 1860s split the tribe but a large number chose to stay and accept American citizenship.  The Potawatomi became a rare example of Indian assimilation.  Even today the St Marys region is full of people with Potawatomi blood and French last names (acquired from French fur trappers intermarrying into the nation).

The Catholic presence was and is still strong in St Marys.  It had the first non-Spanish/Mexican bishop west of the Missouri River.  The Jesuits had a school and seminary there since 1848.  In 1909 the Immaculata Chapel was completed and was called the "Mother of Priests" because of its many seminarians. 

The Jesuits left in 1967.  The population of St Marys began to dwindle with the loss of the school and slow but steady economic turn against small-scale agriculture.  However, in late 1978 the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) acquired the old Jesuit campus and established their own school.  The town quickly regrew with up to 1,500 SSPX supporters moving from across the country to be located in the new SSPX prairie capital.

(SSPX is known as the Latin Mass-only, radical, anti-Semetic Catholic breakaway group who celebrated the lifting of their bishops' excommunication by saying things like "we were never excommunicated" and "the Holocaust never happened."  But the painful breakaway did not occur until 1988, well after the initial St Marys land transfer.)

Depending on who ask something strange, divine, or demonic happened as the SSPX was moving into St Marys.  Immaculata Chapel was going to be the prize American icon of the SSPX.  SSPX founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre visited St Marys in May 1978 and Immaculata's beauty persuaded him to acquire St Marys.  In November, though, a massive fire erupted in the church and gutted the inside before the SSPX could celebrate mass in it.  In August 1979 Lefebvre visited the ruins to bless upcoming reconstruction work.  Then on May 31, 1980, random luck/God/dark forces responded with a massive wind storm which further damaged the chapel.

Today the chapel stands in ruins.  Walking up to chapel one can look through the places where stained glass windows were and look into the grass field that was once the interior of the church.  Look further back it is hard for one not to get a sense of loss.

A ghost of a church.  I thought about the ruins of monasteries in England destroyed during the Reformation.

SSPX has plans for rebuilding the chapel but these come and go.  Right now there is a website for the reconstruction but no news has been published since 2009 (the last news said check back "this afternoon" for another update).


View Larger Map

The Dwarf Star Tyche Might Be Out There

Imagine yourself flying away from the surface of the Sun.  The first four rocky planets pass by quickly enough.  However, the gaps between gas giants are bigger than the Sun to Mars and only progressively grow larger.  When one passes by Neptune one will eventually go through the monsterly thick Kuiper belt full of asteroids.  Once one is past that they will eventually encounter the Oort cloud, home of comets.  It is as "close" as 11 lights day from the Sun (Pluto is about 5.5 light hours away from the Sun) and ends about 1 light year away from the Sun.

The Oort cloud is much, much more larger than the solar system.  Image from Wikipedia.

Traditional understanding of nearby space has all but a rare few comets staying in the Oort cloud.  However, since the 1980s some astronomers noticed a casual cycle between comets entering the solar system and mass extinctions.  Some theorized that a dwarf star, a dying star that produces little light but has a powerful gravitational sway, in the Oort cloud was throwing life-destroying comets towards Earth.  The theoritical dwarf was named after the life killing goddess, Nemesis.

Scientific models were created to see if a dwarf star was throwing comets towards Earth.  It now seems unlikely that a dwarf planet would be responsible for mass extinctions due to the timing of comets entering the solar system.  However, further research and models suggest up to twenty percent visible from Earth were sent by a dwarf star.  The possible dwarf is now being called by Tyche, named after a sister of Nemesis and not a vengeful goddess, by some astronmers.

It could be out there.  Nemesis/Tyche in the midst of the Oort cloud.  The Sun is the small light in the middle of the image.  Image from Wikipedia

If there is a Tyche out there then it would be the closest star to the Earth (it would be one-fourth the distance between Earth and the current closest star: Proxima Centauri).