First Exta-terrestrial National Park

A Fairy-Tale Landscape

05.29.08

Fun, fairy-tale nicknames have been assigned to features in this mosaic of images showing the workspace reachable by the robotic arm of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander. For example, "Sleepy Hollow" denotes a trench and "Headless" designates a rock.

Click on Image to Enlarge

A "National Park," marked by purple text and a purple arrow, has been set aside for protection until scientists and engineers have tested the operation of the robotic scoop. First touches with the scoop will be to the left of the "National Park" line.

Scientists use such informal names for easy identification of features of interest during the mission.

In this view, rocks are circled in yellow, other areas of interest in green. The images were taken by the lander's 7-foot mast camera, called the Surface Stereo Imager.

The Phoenix Mission is led by the University of Arizona, Tucson, on behalf of NASA. Project management of the mission is by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Spacecraft development is by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Posthumous

Posthumous

by Jean Nordhaus
from Innocence. © Ohio State University Press, 2006.
From Writer's Almanac

Would it surprise you to learn
that years beyond your longest winter
you still get letters from your bank, your old
philanthropies, cold flakes drifting
through the mail-slot with your name?











Though it's been a long time since your face
interrupted the light in my door-frame,
and the last tremblings of your voice
have drained from my telephone wire,
from the lists of the likely, your name
is not missing. It circles in the shadow-world
of the machines, a wind-blown ghost. For generosity
will be exalted, and good credit
outlasts death. Caribbean cruises, recipes,
low-interest loans. For you who asked
so much of life, who lived acutely
even in duress, the brimming world
awaits your signature. Cancer and heart disease
are still counting on you for a cure.
B'nai Brith numbers you among the blessed.
They miss you. They want you back.

Welcome to Your Brain

A primer on the brain

Sam Wang explains why we lose our keys but never forget how to drive

When people find out that Sam Wang is a neuroscientist, they often pepper him with questions like: Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains? Does drinking kill brain cells? And will listening to Mozart make babies smarter? (The answer to all three is no.) With co-author Sandra Aamodt, editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience, Wang has answered those questions in Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life. Published by Bloomsbury in March, the book provides an overview of how the brain works and debunks myths and ideas that are embedded in popular culture. Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, spoke with PAW’s Katherine Federici Greenwood.

What is the most widespread myth about our brains?

That we use only 10 percent of our brains. The earliest mention [of the myth] that we were able to find was in the writings of the great speaker but non-neuroscientist, Dale Carnegie. In his speeches Carnegie said this was a fact discovered by the elder of psychology, William James. But James wrote that we use only a small fraction of our brain’s full potential. That idea, which is inspirational and helps motivate people to try harder, turned into a very scientific-sounding statement by Carnegie. In fact, our brain is a very efficient device, and we use all of it.

In your book you address a question I often wondered about: Why can’t we tickle ourselves?

Because one thing our brains do is predict what a movement will feel like. Your body turns down the volume on sensations that are caused by your own movement. So any time your brain generates a command to, say, move your hand and touch your neck, it sends other information within your brain that says “I’m moving my hand” and that you may expect a sensation that feels like that. But when someone else touches you, you feel that sensation more strongly because you’re not generating a movement that predicts that sensation. The brain region that is probably involved in this is the cerebellum.

Why might someone forget where he put the car keys but remember something that happened when he was a child?

We think of memory as one thing that our brains do, but our brains have about half a dozen different types of memory that use different brain regions. So it’s possible to have trouble in one type of memory and to have less trouble in another type of memory. Short-term memory — such as keeping track of your car keys, recalling a phone number, or recalling a fact — begins to decline in people starting in their 30s. Short-term memory requires the hippocampus and other nearby structures. The hippocampus shrinks as you age, which may account for decline in function. Your long-term memories, such as things that happened at the age of 5, get stored elsewhere. It’s thought that factual memories get laid down in the hippocampus and then over time get transferred out to the cerebral cortex. Long-term memory is therefore stored in a more secure fashion, making it possible for a person to remember events clearly from many years ago while having difficulty with more recent events.

What can people do to maintain healthy brain function later in life?

Have an intellectually engaged lifestyle and undertake physical exercise. People who engage in fitness training to get the heart rate up, and who do intellectual work for a living or who have complex intellectual hobbies like learning a language or bridge, are more likely to retain executive function. Executive function, which begins to decline in people’s 70s and 80s, is a set of abilities including self-control, making plans for the future, and decision-making. The more education you have, the more likely it is you will maintain healthy brain function later in life. Physical exercise increases blood flow to the brain and the amount of energy available to the brain. The short slogan in the book is if you do physical things for a living, you should get an intellectual hobby. If you do intellectual things [for a living], you should get a physical hobby. end of article

Portland Area Number 3 Carbon Footprint Leader

AMERICA'S METRO AREAS: TRACKING CARBON LEADERS AND LAGGARDS

By Neal Peirce
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group
June 1, 2008

As greenhouse gases increasingly warm the globe, Which of America’s big metro areas are the “cleanest” and which the “dirtiest” in carbon emissions? And what are the most obvious steps that could be taken to protect the planet’s future?

A first-ever study of the climate footprint of America’s top 100 metro regions starts to tell the story. Based on 2005 figures calculated by the Brookings Institution, each region’s carbon emissions caused by cars and trucks, plus power supplied to residences, is reported -- not a complete score (industries and office buildings are omitted), but close enough for a clear picture.


The “winners” -- the most modest carbon generators, per capita -- turn out to be such regions as New York-Northern New Jersey, Portland, Seattle-Tacoma, San Francisco, Honolulu, San Diego, and a surprise performer -- Los Angeles.

The biggest carbon emitters, by contrast, included such metro areas as Lexington (Ky.), Indianapolis, Knoxville, Oklahoma City, Nashville and St. Louis.

So what explains the differences?

The best performers provide a clue: high-density, compact development with new and expanded rail transit. Many of the regions with the smallest per capita carbon footprints -- among them New York, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles -- fit that profile.

By contrast, some of the metros with high per capita carbon emission scores have experienced dramatic sprawling, pedestrian-hostile development and are weaker on mass transit.

There are some exceptions: the Washington, D.C. and Atlanta regions, for example, have significant rail transit ridership but they’ve also sprawled so much they have larger than average carbon footprints.

And the source of power makes a real difference. The Nation’s Capital region has a carbon footprint 10 times the Seattle region’s, chiefly because it’s heavily dependent on coal for power, while the Pacific Northwest has major hydropower sources that don’t emit carbon.

Plus there’s a surprise geographic factor too: the heavy carbon footprint metros are overwhelmingly east of the Mississippi, the light carbon ones in the West. And there’s a north-south divide too: the map shows a concentration of high emitters in America’s heavily coal-consuming, fast-suburbanizing Southeast.

The implications are compelling: state officials, mayors, county leaders should push for protection of open lands, new transit lines that attract more compact development, and for rules and incentives to get utilities to switch away from coal (the most polluting, carbon-heavy energy source of all).

But the federal government needs to play a far more constructive role -- “Metros can’t ‘go it alone’ in solving as vast a problem as global climate change,” says Mark Muro, policy director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program.

And arguably, how the metros go on climate emissions, so goes America: the top 100 account for two-thirds of the country’s population and almost three-quarters of its economic activity. And their carbon output, despite all their mayors’ noble talk of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, rose 7.5 percent from 2000 to 2005.

The federal government is a poor ally now, Brookings charges. It fails to tax carbon fuels enough to discourage their polluting impacts and reduce the country’s massive dependence on foreign oil. While countries around the world expand their clean energy research budgets, Washington is spending just a third as much on energy research as it did in 1978. Federal transportation funding is tilted heavily toward highways, away from transit; indeed its formulas reward states for the worst behavior -- high vehicle miles traveled, fuel use, and lane miles of travel.

Solutions offered by Brookings include a targeted carbon tax or full “cap and trade” system so that polluting energy consumption pays its full costs. Dramatic increase in federal research on potentials like wind and solar power. A minimum power share of renewable sources that states must achieve (so that some, for example, can’t leave carbon-heavy coal riding high even while competitor states invest forward in more expensive renewables). And “modal neutrality” -- an even playing field between highways and rail in federal transportation funding to states and localities.

The tax code could be adjusted to give smaller houses and compact development a better break. And some ingenious shifts in regulations. Homebuyers, for example, now benefit from the federal Real Estate Settlement Practices Act that requires sellers to reveal hazards, impediments, detailed lending terms and the like. But why not, says Brookings, also require clear, nationally standardized energy information -- factors such as the efficiency of water heaters or furnaces or lighting, that can make a big difference in a buyers’ real costs?

America’s energy rules were written for a different world, a different century. So Brookings has it right: We need a massive reevaluation -- federal, state, and metro-wide -- to reinvent our energy future and reign in America’s cumulative, massive carbon footprint.

The Sheepherder's Ball

The Sheepherder's Ball: Hidden Basque Kitchens

by The Kitchen Sisters
Morning Edition, May 29, 2008 ·
To listen to the story Click Here.

Maybe you've been to Sparks, Nev., to John Ascuaga's Nugget Casino. He's been there for nearly 50 years. We were interviewing Mr. Ascuaga for our story "Liberace and The Trinidad Tripoli Steelband" for our Lost & Found Sound series. He began to tell us about his Basque heritage and what led him to Nevada. The "Hidden Kitchens" series was not on the horizon then, but like we always do, we began asking him about the food of home.


Ascuaga's family is Basque, from the village of Orozco in the Pyrenees.

"My father came in 1900," he said. "All kinds of men came to Idaho, Montana, Nevada, California and New Mexico to become sheepherders. I still keep a flock of sheep to remember my heritage. I have a Basque restaurant in the casino, Orozco. It's the name of my grandfather's village."

The Lasarte Brothers

Many years later I was visiting my Nelson Sister, Jessie, about our upcoming story about the hidden kitchen traditions of the Basque and she said, "Oh, the men out in front, doing landscaping on our house, are two Basque brothers, the Lasartes."

I grabbed the tape recorder, she introduced us, and out of the blue we did an interview that is the center of this story. They spoke, they sang, they whistled. I heard all the calls they have for the sheep dogs that traveled with them over the long treks across the American West.

Francisco and Joaquin Lasarte came to America in 1964 from Basque country in northern Spain. Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who repressively ruled the country for nearly 40 years, made life miserable for the Basque people, suppressing their language, culture and possibilities.

The result was a massive exodus, and the only way to come to the United States for many Basque was to contract as sheepherders. There was a shortage of shepherds in the American West, and Sen. Patrick McCarren of Nevada helped craft legislation in 1950 that allowed Basque men to take up this lonely and difficult job.

Neither Lasarte brother had any sheepherding experience when they arrived in America.

"You lonely, you by yourself," Francisco Lasarte said. "My God, you with 2,000 sheep and two dogs and you don't know what to do, where to go." The brothers were contracted for five years to this life. It was a sentence.

Each brother had his own flock, and they rarely saw each other or anyone else for months on end. Mostly they ate lamb and bread cooked in a Dutch oven in a hole they dug in the ground. You can still find these holes up in the mountains of Idaho, Montana, Nevada and California.

A herder holds freshly baked bread outside his wagon. The sheepwagon is a camp on wheels with beds, a table, and a wood stove. It was pulled in the early days by a team of horses and later by a pickup. Courtesy Basque Library at the University of Nevada, Reno

A Solitary Life

"You say Basque to a Westerner and you think sheepherder," said Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World. "In Basque country very few people were shepherds. The seven provinces of Basque country are about the size of New Hampshire. No one has huge expanses of land there."

William Douglass, former director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, describes this solitary life.

"Teenagers were ripped up out of their communities back home, brought to a foreign land, with a foreign language, put up on top of a mountain ... crying themselves to sleep at night during the first year on the range."

The Basques have a family-oriented, communal culture, gathering around big tables to eat, drink and sing. This solitary life in remote mountains ran against the grain.

"Sprinkled throughout the rural newspapers of the American West in the early 20th century," Douglass said, "you get these reports of the mad Basco sheepherder, talking to themselves. Amongst Basques there's this whole vocabulary of madness: the sheepherder who goes over the edge, who becomes sagebrushed or sheeped."

"They had to have a sponsor to come over," Linda Elizalde McCoy said. Her family has run the Noriega Hotel in Bakersfield, Calif., for more than 75 years. It has been the way station to countless Basque shepherds.


A Home Away from Home

Hotels like the Noriega were home in the winter months for these isolated men. They piled into these Basque boarding houses that sprung up in Elko and Winnemucca, Nev., and Boise, Idaho. The men ate family style — big bottles of red wine, accordion music, conversation and card games.

Bernadette Hirigoyen was a cook at the Noriega Hotel. The dishes included soup, stew, flan, hard chorizo, chicken and paella.

"All the shepherds came there, lots of Bascos," Hirigoyen said. "Just guys, not women. Bascos knew this place; they would help each other find jobs. My grandmother was like a mother to the men in their teens. It was a lively community."

[Click Here for some Basque Recipes -- Sheepherder Bread, Lamb Stew, Flan]

The Voice of the Basque

For 25 years, the voice of the Basque was Espe Alegria. Every Sunday night, sheepherders across the mountains of the American West would tune in to listen to her radio show on KBOI in Boise. Alegria's daughter, Rosita Artis, sent us some old recordings of her mother's show. Dedications, birthday greetings, suggestions of where to find good pasture, the soccer scores that her husband got off the shortwave from Spain, and the hit tunes from Spain and the Basque region. She would help the sheepherders with immigration issues, with buying plane tickets home, with doctor's appointments. She did her show for free, but once or twice a year the owners of the sheep camps would give her a lamb. The family would take it home, throw it on the kitchen table, cut it up and put in the freezer.

While working on this story we had the pleasure of working with people at the Center for Basque Studies and the Basque Library at the University of Nevada, Reno. We went to Basque festivals in San Francisco and Bakersfield, to the lively Gernika Bar inside Boise's Basque Center, and the Basque Museum and Cultural Center in Boise, one of the most inspiring places we've been on the "Hidden Kitchens" trail. There we found artifacts, the aspen trees with Basque carvings known as Arborglyphs and the Basque Oral History Collection, Oroitzapenak Memories: Voices from Basque America, which contains dozens of oral histories, many available online.

The Sheepherder's Ball was the highlight of the year in Boise, Rosita Artis tells us. The men wore denim, the women wore simple house dresses.

"You know, you wear gowns and tiaras to a ball. We wore house dresses. That's what we had," she said.

Lambs were auctioned off and proceeds given to a charity. Huge platters of chorizo and stew and pork sandwiches were served. Jimmy Jausoro's band played long sets deep into the night, and the community drank wine and danced. The ball continues to this day every December at the Euzkaldunak Club's Basque Center.

—Davia Nelson

Deranged

"We live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing."

Walker Percy

Portland Views

Cedar Crossing Covered Bridge

Click on image to enlarge.