Mammoths in the news

Note: I really need to put up more mammoth news without thinking I need to write a dissertation about each one. I have about twenty unfinished posts that fell prey to that impulse.

Here's a new mammoth find from San Diego.

In July, a work crew preparing the ground for a huge, one might even say mammoth, housing development started coming across big bones. California law requires construction projects that move large amounts of earth to have a paleontologist on site (he probably doubles as an archaeologist). Usually, with projects like this, someone is standing over the excavation tapping their foot moaning over the time being lost. In this case, the were able to move the work to another part of the project, which covers sixty acres. John Suster, the project superintendent, told the scientists "Take your time, this is kind of cool." Even Ure Kretowicz, the CEO of the development company, seems excited about it.  

So far they've found mammoths, horses, turtles and an undetermined species of bison. The mammoths are Columbian mammoths; woollys didn't live that far south. Woollys and Columbians are siblings. Both are descended from the steppe mammoths that lived in Eurasia six million years ago. Before the ice ages, steppe mammoths colonized North America, just one of many imperialist intrusions from that direction.

Steppe mammoths were adapted temperate grasslands. As the northlands grew colder, they had plenty of room to move south in North America. They evolved to better fit the specific the local ecologies from the northern plains of the US to the Valley of Mexico around Mexico City. Since the first discovery of their remains in 1726, they've been given several names: Jefferson's mammoth, the imperial mammoth, and the Columbian mammoths. Some taxonomists have tried to use two or all three to describe stages in their evolution. The current preferred taxonomy is to merge all three into one species. (Dammit! I'm getting all dissertationy.)

Meanwhile, back in Eurasia, rather than moving south and adapting to warmer climates where they would have had to compete with already established proboscideans (elephants), old world steppe mammoths adapted to the gradually cooler conditions of the north, eventually becoming woolly mammoths. In fact, they were a key species in the creation of a unique arctic ecology, the mammoth steppe, Since they went extinct, that territory has all been colonized with Arctic tundra.

Steppe mammoths were the second largest known probiscidean, after the odd looking giant dienotherium. They were tall and long legged with, we assume, some hair. Columbian mammoths were somewhat smaller (coming in at third largest) and, we think, hairer. Woolly mammoths differed quite a bit from it's parents and siblings. Not only were they shorter and stockier, they had multiple specific adaptations to the cold north. Besides hair, they had two layers of wool. Their trunk had a different shape that allowed them to scoop snow, for water, and protected the naked top of the trunk. Most intersting, they had a different blood hemoglobin that bonded oxygen at lower temperatures. They also had something called an anus flap.

Aside from just showing off my knowledge, my point is that the Columbian mammoth is a distinct species easily distinguished from the woolly mammoth. Mastodons, despite some superficial resemblances, aren't even close. Quite a few mastodon relatives might have lived in that area, but, except for the somewhat familiar American mastodon, all of them were extinct by the time mammoths arrived.

Possibly the coolest thing about this discovery is that so many different species have been found. Individually, each of these animals is fairly well known. Taken together, we have a slice of an entire ecology. The owners of the property are being very patient about letting the scientists take their time examining the site. The deserve credit for that. Send those guys a cake.

Some notes on translating

So far I've translated about 2000 pages out of ten languages that I don't speak. Here are my top three problems:

1. Though most of what I translate is technically in the modern form of these languages, the spelling isn't. If I actually spoke the languages, I could pronounce the words out loud and them figure out.

2. Some writers are overly flowery or just plain bad stylists. This often defeats the available grammar of my translation programs leaving me to bludgeon my way through in short phrases or even word-by-word.

3. Actual typos in the source material. I figure out the grammar part and start entering every possible variation I can into various dictionaries and none of them is a word. Finally, I realize they weren't minding their P's and Q's and everything is fine.

Bonus observation: About three years ago I noticed something odd about the way the long and short S was used in some documents. There two sets rules for their use. The difference centers on when to use the short S. In some pieces they would be using one set of rules and suddenly shift to a different set. At first I thought they didn't have enough pieces of long S type to do some sheets and shifted over to the rules that allowed more short S's for those sheets. Just last week I finally figured out what was really going on. I was reading a monthly journal that probably needed to be assembled and printed fairly quickly. The printer was a fairly large house and must have had more than one typesetter working in the shop with some of them using one set of rules and some using the other.

I'm writing this to avoid working on a Latin document that is rife with sin #2. Get back to work, John.

A tale of two skulls

In early December 1695, a group of workmen were excavating some fine white sand from a quarry between the villages of Burgtonna and Gräfentonna, in Thuringia. The sand was valuable in a number of crafts, including filling hourglasses, so the workers were careful in their excavations. You probably know what happened next. They uncovered “some awful big bones” and sent word to the castle to find out what to do with them. Luckily for us, the lord of the land, Duke Fredrick II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was an enlightened despot who was both a patron of the arts and sciences and an avid collector. More than simply ordering the workmen to save the bones for his collections, he had them leave the bones in place and slowly uncover them. This modern style excavation would be an under-appreciated milestone in the development of paleontology.

What the diggers discovered that day were a pair of feet and lower legs pointing northward. The feet had five toes and short ankle bones. The spectators thought they looked more like human feet than any animal they knew. At that point, the weather turned nasty and the excavation was halted until after the new year. In January, the work resumed. Over a period of about two weeks, they uncovered the upper legs, pelvis, a complete vertebral column with ribs, the upper limbs with five digit hands or feet, and... a “hideous head” unlike anything anyone had ever seen. To one side of the top of the skull were two enormous, curved pieces of what appeared to be ivory. With the entire skeleton nicely uncovered, the Duke made a special trip from Gotha on January 23 to view it, bringing along a large retinue that included a number of doctors from the university and his personal librarian.

The doctors, led by Johann Christoph Schnetter, and the librarian, Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, all had a good laugh over the silly peasants who had thought the bones were those of a giant. Although that would have been preferred explanation of many educated men earlier in the century, very few still believed that there had ever been giants other than the few individuals named in the Bible. While the doctors and Tentzel agreed on what the bones were not, they passionately disagreed about what they were. Schnetter and the doctors believed they were the natural formations that merely looked like bones while Tentzel believed that they were the remains of a real elephant. Duke Fredrick chose not to take sides. He ordered the doctors and Tentzel to each submit a brief summarizing their arguments.

Today, most people would look at the bones and say "any idiot can see that those are fossils of some kind of elephant." Most would probably pick a mammoth for that type of elephant. But, in the Seventeenth Century, idiots and educated alike had only the vaguest idea what an elephant looked like and even less idea what its skeleton looked like. The educated were aware that the lack of data for comparative anatomy was a problem, but there was nothing they could do about it. There weren't enough elephants to go around.

Between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, we have records of exactly two elephants appearing in European Christendom. One belonged to Charlemagne and the other to Henry III of England. This began to change during the Sixteenth Century. After the Portuguese reached India by going around Africa, they began bringing back elephants that various Indian kings sent as gifts to their king. Manuel I sent one of those elephants named Hanno to Pope Leo X. The elephant died soon after. When Leo died he was buried with his elephant. The Portuguese kings sent least four others to their fellow monarchs during that century. In the Seventeenth Century, elephants were still rare, but the owners began sending them on tours, both to show off their wealth and to educate the population. Two elephants in particular influenced the debate between the doctors and Tentzel.

The first was named Hansken. After the Dutch East India Company beat the Portuguese out of the India trade, one of their agents acquired a young female elephant in Ceylon in 1637. Once in Europe, her owners taught her some tricks and and sent her on a tour of the continent where she performed before audiences in an approximation of modern circus acts. After eighteen years on the road, she injured her foot in Italy, developed an infection, and died in Florence on November 9, 1655. A special mass was written for her. Grand Duke Ferdinando II was obsessed with the new sciences and had most of the good parts of Hansken removed before burying her. He had the skeleton mounted as accurately as possible and had her skin stuffed with straw for his collection.

Hansken, by Rembrandt. The British Museum.

There is no name recorded for the second elephant. In June of 1681, a showman named Wilkins brought an elephant to Dublin, Ireland and set up a booth near the Custom House to show it. Early on the morning of Friday the seventeenth, the booth caught fire and the poor creature was killed before Wilkins could bring it to safety. Wilkins realized there was still money to be made from his elephant if he could salvage the skeleton and continue his tour displaying it. He arranged for a troop of musketeers to be sent over to guard the corpse from souvenir seekers while he set out to hire as many butchers as he could to clean the bones before the smell became a public nuisance.

Late in the day, a doctor named Alan Mullen heard about the elephant and rushed over to negotiate with Wilkins. Mullen wanted to have an orderly dissection with artists ready to make renderings of each part. Wilkins was willing to let Mullen direct the work of the butchers, but insisted they finish it in one day and dispose of the smelly parts before Sunday when they would not be allowed to work. Mullen ordered the butchers to start working immediately. They worked through the night and through Saturday, completing the work before the Sunday deadline.

Mullen wrote up descriptions and measurements of the elephant’s parts and sent an account to Will Petty of the Royal Philosophical Society in London. His examination was far superior to anything that been published in Europe (in India, veterinary treatises on elephants had been available for centuries). Petty had Mullen’s letter published as a pamphlet. In the forty-two pages Mullen describes all of the major organs and some of the muscle groups, but gives surprising little space to the bones. This lack is made for by a trifold diagram of the reconstructed skeleton, which Wilkins had managed to assemble and take back on the road, and a separate drawing of the skull.

Mr. Wilkins' elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.

The Gotha doctors' belief that the bones were natural mineral occurrences and not organic remains was a peculiarly European idea. In most of the rest of the world, people had very little problem believing that unfamiliar old bones, even petrified and damaged ones, were organic remains. Renaissance Europeans had a tradition, derived from Neoplatonic philosophy, of a certain "power" in nature that allowed spontaneous generation. Things might grow based on no visible cause. Flies grow from poop, small pebbles appear in peoples' kidneys, Scottish geese grow out of driftwood, and, as even we moderns know, a crop of rocks grows in our gardens every winter. Another tradition, derived from a number of philosophic sources, held that certain other "powers" could give shape to growing things. This is why a piece of agate might have a landscape in it, another might have an image of the Virgin Mother in it, and other stones might be shaped like bones.

The doctors organized their arguments, Schnetter wrote them up, and they had them published and distributed to great thinkers around Europe by St. Valentine's day. The entire pamphlet is seven pages long and a sizable chunk of it is dedicated to describing the discovery. They spend very little space laying out the argument itself. They assume that most of their audience is already familiar with the basic elements of it. The largest part of the pamphlet is dedicated to citing contemporary thinkers who might agree with them. Between these two parts, they make a preemptive strike against Tentzel by explaining why the supposed bones could not be an elephant. One point is that, while the bones are not scattered, they are somewhat disarticulated. Each bone is separated from the next by at least the thickness of a hand. A second point is that the tusks appear to be hollow, not solid ivory. What appears to be the most damning point is that the skull looks nothing like an elephant. Why are the tusks up by the eyes and not by the mouth where everyone knows they should be?

Tentzel wrote a short response, which he submitted directly to the Duke (it still exists in the Gotha archives, but I haven't seen it). He took more time writing a full statement of his case and, by taking more time, was able to prepare a full rebuttal to the doctor's argument. He had a special advantage in preparing his case. As curator of the Duke' collections, he had access to fossils and other curiosities that he could compare with the bones. He had the bones themselves; the Duke had had him collect as many of the remains as he could. By taking more time he was able to interview the diggers and other witnesses to excavation. And he had Mullen's pamphlet with its detailed drawings of the skeleton and skull.

Tentzel's public presentation appeared in the April issue of a journal that he wrote every month called Monatliche Unterredungen einiger guten Freunde von Allerhand Büchern (Monthly Conversations between Good Friends about All Kinds of Books). It runs 108 pages with an illustration of the skull. After a detailed description of the discovery, the fictional friends of the title take sides. Caecilius and Passagirer take Tentzel's position and Aurelius and Didius defend the doctors”. Naturally, most of the space is given to the former.

Tentzel's skull. Monatliche Unterredungen... April 1696.

Mullen's pamphlet is liberally quoted to show that the Tonna bones have the same proportions as the Dublin ones. Tentzel admits that there is a problem here; his elephant is twice as big as the Dublin one. He has an answer to that problem. Among the observers he interviewed was a Dutch sailor who had spent many years in India. The sailor informed him that elephants keep growing. By the size of the tusks, he estimated that the Tonna elephant must have been at least 200 years old. Caecilius and Passagirer describe many other recent discoveries of large bones and ivory described by reputable witnesses. When Aurelius and Didius get their turn, to Tentzel's credit, they give an accurate summary of the doctor's position rather than a parody of it. They still lose the debate.

Along with his summary of Mullen's pamphlet, Tentzel mentions Hansken and says he is writing to some illustrious colleagues in Italy to get accurate measurements of it. In July, he published a long letter in Latin to Antonio Magliabechi, the personal librarian to Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, the brother of Grand Duke Ferdinando. Magliabechi was one of the major figures of the Republic of Letters during that generation and widely renowned for his disgusting personal hygiene. In his letter, Tentzel repeated most what he had written in Monatliche Unterredungen, leaving out the literary floutishes and defense of the doctors' position. Magliabechi and his Italian peers enthusiastically endorsed Tentzel's conclusions and sent the detailed information he requested. Italian scholars, as opposed to those north of the Alps, had no trouble accepting the presence of elephants on their lands. First, there were the war elephants of Pyrrus and Hannibal. Later, there were the many elephants brought by the Romans to be slaughtered in the circuses for entertainment. Magliabechi and several others wrote their own pamphlets and letters to journals.

As Northwestern Europeans began to accept the presence of elephants on their lands, the discoveries of Italian scholars were frequently cited to make the idea easier to accept. However, in the long run this delayed the acceptance of the idea of other, extinct, elephant-like species. Tentzel had his own cautious approach to the responses of his Italian correspondents. He was glad to have their endorsement for his conclusion that the remains were elephantine in nature. However, he distanced himself from the idea that the remains came from historical times. In his Monatliche Unterredungen, piece, he had Caecilius and Passagirer carefully go over various historical arguments and reject them. This could not be Charlemagne's elephant because it died in Northern Germany. This could not have been an elephant of Attila's because he moved to fast to have used elephants. It could not have belonged to some unknown merchant or returning crusader because no one would have abandoned something as valuable as the tusks. The very location of the tusks argued against human agency. Tentzel pointed out that the clear layering of strata above the remains showed that the ground had never been disrupted by human action.

Tentzel's arguments appear quite modern up to this point. His conclusion will appear less so to most contemporary readers. Tentzel was quite firm in arguing that the position of the remains was proof of the Noachian Deluge. This was a special interest of his ans a topic he regularly returned to in Monatliche Unterredungen. It's possible that his main interest in the boned was that he saw them as proof of the Deluge. To him, the northward orientation of the skeleton showed that it had drifted up from the south. The neat layering of the strata above it was the sort of deposition he expected from the receding flood waters.

Tentzel's argument that the bones were the actual organic remains of an elephant had an additional strength. As scientific communication moved from letters, however widely distributed, to printed journals, with much wider distribution, illustrations became much more important and accurate. Perhaps the most important parts of Mullen's pamphlet were the illustrations. Only a small number of living scholars had seen a live elephant and only a very tiny number had seen a skeleton. Tentzel took very conscious advantage of the importance of Mullen's skull illustration.

The skull of Mr. Wilkins' elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.

It took me a few looks to understand this illustration. Why do the tusks look so short compared to the profile? What's with that little hook at the end? I went back to my sources on elephant dentition (it's a surprisingly complex topic. Some day I'll write about it. I'm not sure how much the book needs). My first thought was that it was the tusk core, but that's soft tissue, not bone and, in any case, it doesn't have that hook at the end. Then it occurred to me, we're looking at the tusks from the tips. Most illustrations would tilt the skull to emphasize their length. Mullen already showed their length in the full skeleton profile. The tusks curve forward from the skull. A front-on view of the skull dramatically reduces the apparent length of the tusks.

Tentzel's illustration shows the same apparent shortness. By his own measurements, the tusks should be longer that the skull. To emphasize the similarity with Mullen's illustration, he portrayed his skull with the same orientation. It lacked the drama that tipping the skull forward and showing of the tusks would have had, but it strengthened his larger argument that the Tonna remains were those of an elephant.

The majority of scholars agreed with Tentzel about the remains being elephants though a significant minority sided with a doctors. A small minority still held out for giants. The great majority also agreed about the Deluge being the cause of their deposition, though a small number had begun to doubt the historical reality of a global flood. It would be another century before they became a narrow majority.

The Tonna elephant would be cited by proto-paleontologists for decades but their significance would evolve over time. At first they were nothing more than an argument for the organic nature of fossils. Later, as the debate over mammoths developed, they would become an argument for the idea that elephants had once lived far north of the tropics. Next, they would be cited as a mammoth, rather than an elephant.

The remains are probably gone now. If any parts are still in the Gotha collections, they are no longer identified as such. That doesn't mean we can't identify the species. In recent years, paleontologists have returned to the Tonna quarries and worked the layer of white sand. They have dated it to the late Eemian, the warmest period before the last ice age. The most common proboscidean in that strata is the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). This species was first identified in 1847. It had a fairly wide range across Europe. Some of them wandered into Sicily when the seas were low during the glacial maxima. There, constrained by the limited resources of an island, they underwent a process of dwarfing, eventually becoming Elephas mnaidriensis, the cyclops skeletons I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Tentzel only published Monatliche Unterredungen for one more year after his treatment of the Tonna remains. The following January, he wrote a shorter piece quoting the responses he had received from Italy. At the turn of the century, he moved on to a new job with King of Saxony and briefly published a new journal. During that time a second skeleton was found at Tonna and he and Schnetter went at it one more time, but neither added anything new to their arguments. The job with the King of Saxony didn't work out and Tentzel died in poverty. Despite his relevance during the next century, he has largely been relegated to footnote status since. This appears to changing. He's had some attention lately for his role as a science communicator. I'm doing my best to see that he gets some attention for his science as well.

Please help Tessa and Marlowe

This is a plea to save my ex from a financial death spiral. The short, short, short version is that she needs about $3500 by the end of next week or she loses both her car and her apartment.

Tessa lost her job soon after the crash in 2008 and hasn't had a permanent job since then. For a while, we tried to build a home business around soaps, lotions, and scents that she made, but that never did more than break even. She's an experienced technical writer and has been able to get short contract gigs from time to time, but nowhere close to enough to live on. When we split up, we divided what equity were able to get from the house, but that didn't last very long. By last year, she was pretty much completely broke. The one bright spot was that she was enrolled in a computer programming course under a state program that came with a modest living stipend. She was doing very well in the courses and it looked things were finally bottoming out for her. Then WellsFargo seized her stipend.

Like many people in her position, she had been juggling her bills, sometimes having to choose which bills would be paid that month and which would be skipped. She closed the bank account from her business so that the card wouldn't be a temptation. And she talked to their support people and thought she had a verbal agreement to pay what she could, when she could. They didn't remember it that way. After a few late and missed payments, they called the whole amount due. A few months ago, when her quarterly living stipend was deposited, they simply drained her personal account. This is completely legal in the state of Washington. Her rent check bounced and she didn't have any money for groceries. This is why people hate banks.

When I found out about it, I set up a GoFundMe account for her. Thanks to some very kind people, we were able to cover about half of what she lost, the rent was paid, and she was able to finish out the quarter. She graduated with flying colors and glowing recommendations. But, that means the stipends have stopped. She's had some short contract jobs and unrelated office temp jobs, but not enough to keep her from falling further behind. Her roommate doesn't make enough to cover both of their bills. Last week, her car was repossessed and her current temp job is in another town.

The world is full of these stories. There's nothing that makes hers stand out from the crowd. She's not a veteran. No one is forcing her to bake a cake. She's not a cute kid with a horrible disease. Its not tied to popular culture like a Tesla museum or new card game. I can't offer clever tee shirts or fun prizes for donations. She's just another person who made some mistakes and had far too many bad breaks. If it helps to make her story more personal, here's picture of her cat.

I restarted the GoFundMe account. There are more details of her fight with the bank there if you're interested. We've made a couple hundred dollars this week. If she already wasn't so far behind, that much each week would be enough to get her by. But now her bills are being called due again. I would completely cover her bills if I could, but I'm already homeless. At this point in her life, she should be looking forward to retirement, instead, she's staring into the void.

If you can, please donate. If you can't, please share her story. Thanks.

Flaming plagiarism from the skies!

I haven't done a good plagiarism story in a long time.

For the last couple of months, conspiracy and prophecy nuts have been fixated on mid-September as the time when something big is going to happen. They don't agree on the details, but a giant comet or asteroid hitting the earth has emerged as the favorite. Hunt online and you'll find dozens of blog posts and YouTube videos screaming that NASA has confirmed that a 2.5 mile-wide something is going to splash down into the Caribbean. And, as with the Mayan calendar and/or Niburu nonsense, NASA has finally had to issue a stop-being-silly press release.

I read the story about the press release in the British tabloid The Daily Mail. Toward the end of the short article, they linked to Huffington Post UK for details on one element of the conspiracy theory. I clicked through and found a slightly longer version of the same article. The first few sentences were so similar that I went back to the Mail to to see if they were both by the same writer. They're not. The HuffPo version is by Sara C. Nelson, the Mail version by Ellie Zolfagharifard. According to the timestamps, the HuffPo version went up thirteen hours earlier than the Mail version.

Take a look:

HuffPo: A gargantuan asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, with enough power to wipe out life as we know it.

The Mail: A massive asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, and it is large enough to spell the end of humanity.


HuffPo: That’s the belief of an online community of biblical theorists who predict our collective demise will occur between 22 – 28 September 2015.

The Mail: This is the radical claim of an online community of biblical theorists who say that life as we know it will be wiped out between 22 to 28 September this year.


HuffPo: Though sources are dubious, chatter about the impending end of life as we know it has prompted Nasa to speak up.

The Mail: Despite their lack of credentials, the popularity of the prediction has now forced Nasa to speak up, dismissing the theory as unfounded.


HuffPo: Other similarly questionable sources cite a meeting between French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and US Secretary of State John Kerry in May 2014 as being further evidence the Rapture is approaching.

The Mail: Some cite a meeting between French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and US Secretary of State John Kerry in May 2014 is further evidence the Rapture is approaching, according to the Huffington Post.


HuffPo: At odds with talk of the Rapture, however, is the theory that the asteroid isn’t going to get us – but the CERN Large Hadron Collider will.

The Mail: Others have even predicted the events will be started by Cern's Large Hadron Collider.


HuffPo: One blogger points out: “The CERN logo is 666, the sign of the beast in a circle.”

The Mail: One blogger, said: 'The Cern logo is 666, the sign of the beast in a circle. The Cern collider looks like the all seeing eye or stargate we see so much of.'


I don't know the peculiarities of British news publishing or whether HuffPo and the Mail have some kind of arrangement that makes this possible, but, from my seat, it looks like a big steaming mess of plagiarism seasoned with a generous dose of chutzpah.

The female James Bond

In comments on a friend's Facebook status, I brought up the question of "Favorite Bond?" The topic wasn't Bond, it was dumb e-dating questions.

He responded "Uma Thurman hasn't been given the role yet." My first thought was to say Idris Elba will be Bond before a woman (and I very much like the idea of Idris Elba as Bond). Then my mind did a quick ricochet off of "what would a female Bond be like?" and decided there cannot be a female Bond. James Bond is a misogynistic womanizer. Once you remove that, you've created a different character. It would be silly to call her Bond. So, which woman in spy literature is strong enough to be a female Bond?

Meanwhile, my fingers pointed out that Uma Thurman already has played a stylish spy: Emma Peel. We both paused a moment to drool over the memory of Diana Rigg's Emma Peel. As that reverie began to fade and various threads of thought I was having began to come together (including the realization that my mustache smelled like teriyaki, though this was not part following Hegelian synthesis), I thought, "Emma Peel!"

In The Avengers, Emma Peel and John Steed were partners, but neither was fully dependent on the other. Steed was clearly older and probably her mentor. There was no deep emotional bond (no pun intended) beyond than that held by any team members who must depend on each other for their safety*. This theory is supported by the fact that Rigg's Peel replaced Honor Blackman as Catherine Gale and was followed by Linda Thorson as Tara King and, in The New Avengers by Joanna Lumley as Purdey.

Where did Peel go? The only version I ever saw was the Rigg/Peel so I have no idea if they ever explained that. I'm assuming they didn't. If they did, we're going to ignore it. Let's assume, as a well trained agent, she went off on solo missions. There's your female Bond.

Let's cast the first of movie of the Emma Peel franchise. Obviously, casting Peel is at the top of the list, but we need to cast other recurring characters, villains, and so on.

* Diana Riggs agrees with this interpretation, the late Patrick Macnee did not. His interpretation amounted to "Well, look at her!!!" I will leave a modern feminist analysis of that to you, dear reader. Keep in mind he just died. So cut him some slack.

The mammoths of Niederweningen

During the summer of 1890, a work crew employed by the Swiss Northeastern Railway labored to extend a short spur up a valley from Zurich to the far side of the tiny hamlet of Niederweningen. As they approached their goal in July, they found convenient a layer of gravel on the south side of the tracks. The layer of gravel was nothing surprising. Switzerland was well processed during the ice ages and strata of glacial till were common in the valleys. What was surprising was the bones they found beneath it.

Unlike many stories I've told here, there was no mystery about the bones. By 1890, the ice age, extinction, and Pleistocene giants were completely accepted by European intellectuals. The workers, or at least their supervisors, knew the bones were something special that needed to be preserved. The railroad might even have had a formal policy about such things. They carefully collected each bone and took it to the local inn for storage. By the beginning of August, it was clear that there were a lot of bones there. The minister of the church in nearby Dielsdorf, Pastor Schluep (I can't find his first name), sent a telegram to the president of the Zurich Antiquarian Society telling him about the find.

The telegram arrived on August 2, a Saturday. Before the day was over, Arnold Lang was in Niederweningen eager to examine the site. As soon as business opened on Monday, he met with local authorities and the management of the railway and arranged formal permission to examine the site. In a mere two weeks he organized an conducted a full excavation of the site. During that time he not only collected bones, he brought in experts to examine the geological situation and botanical remains associated with the bones. In his account, he spends more words thanking the the people who helped him than in describing the actual work—something that is personally classy but frustrating to later historians and paleontologists. The following year Lang organized a second formal excavation. Remarkably, with all time he had to plan, they found little to add to his first, tiny, improvised season.

Lang thought mammoths were the most important part of the find. In his 1892 article, he cited mammoths in his title. The description of the find was buried deep within a historical essay on mammoth discoveries. Lang writes that they identified bones from six individual mammoths (modern paleontologists say seven), one so small he thought it might be a fetus. There were also bones from wolves, horses, birds, rodents, and a woolly rhinoceros that Lang calls "the constant companion of the extinct mammoths."

Herr Dreyer, one of the experts Lang recruited, used bones from all the adult mammoths to assemble a composite skeleton which was mounted and displayed in the zoology museum at the University of Zurich. Lang's drawing shows something remarkable about Dreyer's preparation. He put the tusks on the wrong sides. This wasn't a personal quirk of his; many paleontologists thought that was the proper mounting. Look carefully at some of the artwork from the time. Though mammoths are usually shown in profile, if you study the shading you'll see that the artists were portraying outward facing tusks. Unfortunately, art directors, even at scientific magazines, still use these illustrations. This is something of a pet peeve of mine.

The Niederweningen mammoth of 1892 (source)

The paleontologists and artists of the time labored under a certain disadvantage with respect to mammoths. No one had ever recovered a skull with the tusks still attached. In Siberia, where most mammoth remains were found, the finders were allowed to take and sell the ivory before notifying the authorities. And most of them preferred not to tell the authorities at all. In Europe, skulls didn't have a very good survival rate. The skulls of elephants and mammoths are very fragile. Though they look solid, they are actually made of of thin plates of bone honeycombed with sinuses. This makes them lighter. When the skulls were dug from the ground by farmers and railroad laborers, they frequently fell apart before scientists could arrive to examine them.

But, given all the possible arrangements, why did they choose one that looks so patently absurd to us? To be fair, they didn't all believe that. The proper placement was, as we say, controversial. Several placements had been suggested. By the 1890s, quite a few had come around to the right placement. At the root of it all was a conceptual problem. Western naturalists believed that all horns, antlers, fangs, and tusks had to be functional weapons. A moose's antlers might be over-engineered because the ladies love a good rack, but, in the end, they still need to be able to give a good thrashing to any challengers. The French word for an elephant's tusks is "défenses." In fact, modern elephants don't stab with their tusks; they swing sideways and hit with them.

Another argument was that the final inward curve of an old mammoth's tusks would have blocked their vision. The growth of an a mammoth's tusks begins downward and outward. They then curve forward and the outward growth ceases. By the time they seriously curve upward, they also begin to curve inward. In some old bulls, the tips actually cross in front of their faces. And that was the problem. Some naturalists, who weren't that familiar with elephant anatomy, thought this would dangerously obstruct their vision. However, an elephants eyes are not on the front of their skull. Like most herbivores, their eyes are on the side. The line of sight that these naturalists thought would be obstructed was already a blind spot for mammoths. Still, I am charmed by the image of old, cross-eyed mammoths staggering around the tundra supported by their woolly rhinoceros buddies.

During the 2003 and 2004 excavation seasons, new digs were conducted in Niederweningen. One of them was conducted at the same site as the 1890-1 dig. Like Lang, the organizers of these digs included botanists and geologists in their teams. They also took advantage of cores drilled during the eighties that revealed the geologic strata down to the bedrock twenty meters below the village. What they discovered was that the ice age before the most recent one scoured the valley clean. During the last glacial maximum, the ice didn't reach the future site of Niederweningen. For over 130,000 years, the valley has been home to alternating lakes and peat bogs.

Lang reported that the mammoths and other bones were discovered just beneath the gravel that the railroad desired and on top of a layer of peat. His geologists dug through the peat to reveal a layer of clay and silt—lake sediment—below it. Modern geologists interpret the gravel as glacial till washed down from the surrounding mountains at the end of the last ice age. The date the transition from peat bog to alluvial plain is uncertain. There is evidence of some erosion just above the boundary. The bones have been dated to 33-34 thousand years old while the peat just below it is six to eight thousand years older. Lang found some pits in the peat that he thought might have been mammoth footprints. Of they were, they weren't from any of the mammoths he found.

Dreyer's composite skeleton is still in Zurich (they have since fixed the tusks). Many of the other bones, including the woolly rhinoceros and the baby mammoth remained in Niederweningen. The 2004 dig discovered over half of a mammoth including the jaw, tusks, most of the limb bones, and part of the pelvis. The good citizens of Niederweningen promptly built a museum for their new mammoth. Due to the richness of the site, there will certainly be future digs there. I look forward to hearing about them.

The new Niederweningen mammoth (source)

I'm the best and why that sucks

Well, that was anticlimactic. At 3:00 I was sitting in my cubicle making progress writing something that fixed a bit of text I had been very unsatisfied with. The woman I reported to came by to thank me for my excellent work and say goodbye. I was more than a little shocked. After staring at her for a few weeks while I tried to find some way other than the obvious one to interpret what she was saying, I finally said "am I done?" She said yes, she thought that all the details been taken care of and I knew I was done. This was supposed to be a six to eight week job and today was the end of week three.

I filled out my last timesheet, cleaned up my corner, and went through my document, filling in placeholders with clear notes on what I had planned to put there. I wrote to the agency telling them what had happened and asking them what I should do next. Then I turned everything off, put on my hat, and started walking home.

About halfway there--after stopping to tell the police about a couple of people I had passed arguing over a gun--my phone rang and I dipped into a parking lot to take the call. As I expected, it was the person at the agency who had hired me. She apologized and said she had sent me an email yesterday morning, explaining the situation, but apparently it bounced off their servers. This is almost certainly true. When I filled out my timesheet, I tried to mail it to myself from the scanner and found I no longer had an email account at the place I was working. Looking over the last few days, I saw the the only emails I had received yesterday and today were company-wide reports and announcements.

So, what happened? It seems I'm just so good at what I do that I finished eight weeks of work in three. The client looked over my work on Wednesday and thought it looked so close to what they had been expecting that they figured I was winding things up. They called the agency and told them to close out the contract. In fact, I figured I was going to finish it next week and was hoping they would find other projects for me work on for the other four weeks.

There's a political lesson to be learned from this. Many people think (or, from what they say and advocate, appear to think) that the unemployed are just lazy. Or that unemployment is caused by greedy unions--and laziness. Or that unemployment is caused by undocumented immigrants--and laziness. Or that unemployment is caused by crafty foreigners--and laziness. In any case, the unemployed are contemptible and deserve no compassion or help--or help qualified by humiliation. The unspoken part of this belief is that the reason enemployment goes up must be because millions of gainfully employed American workers suddenly get lazy, quit their jobs, and refuse to go back to work.

Even if every part of that is true (and it's not), it's only half of the story. We could achieve full employment and be begging for foreigners to come work here if were weren't so damn productive. American workers put in more hours per year than any other developed country, with the exception of South Korea. As for productivity during those hours, we're number three (South Korea is near the bottom of that list). Those two statistics combined make us the most productive workers in the developed world. You can pick different bench marks and crunch the numbers in different ways, but you'll still find out that we're very good. You'd have to work really hard, and hate America, to give us an even moderately bad rating.

Since 1980, American productivity has risen about eighty percent while pay has risen about ten percent. If the wealth created by that productivity isn't going to the people who did the creating, where is it going? I can't say, because that would be engaging in class warfare.

Jeb Bush, a multi-millionaire who has done squat to create wealth or jobs for anyone outside his immediate family and friends, says American workers need to be more productive. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt on the "work more hours" part of that comment and focus on the "be more productive" part. Why should we be more productive? None of that created wealth comes to us. The very upper middle class are the only ones who actually make back the results of working harder. Everyone below them barely hangs on while all their wealth production goes to those above the upper middle class. Oh dear, I'm veering into class warfare again.

Though I impressed some people on this job, I'm not sure I impressed the right people. The agency that placed me expected to collect their share of my wealth creation for at least six weeks and only got three. I actually feel a little guilty about that and hope it doesn't work against me.

Let's get back to my situation. I just screwed myself out of 62.5% of the expected pay for this job by being so productive. The client was willing to pay for eight weeks for me to meet their expectations. I did that in three weeks. What I wanted to give them would have taken four weeks. To put it another way: If I had had my way, I would have exceeded expectations while coming far under budget and ahead of schedule.

If millions of people like me would goof off more, the totality of American society would be better off. Millions of other people like me would be employed. Those above the upper middle class would still do well, just not quite as well while Americans below the upper middle class would do anywhere for somewhat better to life-savingly better.

If I wasn't so damn good at what I do, I'd still have a job.

Note 1: So what is it that I do? I'm a writer. I'm a damn good writer. If you've read archy or any of my social media postings for any length of time, you've probably figured out that I'm chronically depressed and that my self-confidence and self-respect are in the toilet of the sub-sub-basement. Even from there, I have enough perspective to know that I'm a damn good writer and that I'm a damn good value for any any employer.

Note 2: Well, if I'm so good and such a great value, why don't I have a job? FUCK YOU! Fuck the horse you rode in on and fuck anyone who looks like you! This is the same as asking, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Once and for all, being skilled, talented, or brilliant in one thing does not mean you are the best in all other things. Einstein wasn't even close to being the richest man in the world. Bill Gates isn't close to being the smartest man in the world. But, they were each the best in what they did. I'm damn good at the thing I do, which is ferret out information and explain it in terms that are relevant to the people who need it. However, one of the things that I'm worst at is selling myself and maintaining the social connections necessary to do that. In other terms, I'm great at working, I'm awful at getting work.

Note 3: That wealth production thing, my example is one present-time event; other than statistics can I give you another real life example? Yes I can. My bid on this contract was two thirds what I was making for the same work fourteen years ago. Even adding in the agency's share, this is a huge transfer of wealth from the wealth creators to the wealth collectors (whatever you want to call them that isn't class warfare). As recently as when we lost the house, Clever Ex-wife thought two dollars more than this per hour for what we do was a humiliation. Several months ago, I thought I was a sure winner on a bid where I asked ten percent less than I made in 2001. The winner asked almost half what I did. Was he, she, or it going to be half as productive as I was fourteen years ago? Of course not. They planned to give it their best. I would have given better, but I can't communicate that. So good for them on winning the contract.

Note 4: I really need a job. I live in Alaska, but I'm a great telecommuter. And I'm really good at what I do. Really.

Update: I guess I'm done publicly wallowing in self-pity for now. What's the next Kubler-Ross stage?

I just signed a contract with a literary agent

I HAVE  AN AGENT!!!!!!! OMG,OMG,OMG,OMG,OMG,OMG,OMG,OMG,OMG!!!!!!!

On Planets X and Naming Names

This is a minor rewrite of a post I wrote in 2008. I have not updated it to include the controversy over demoting Pluto from planet to some other category. What to call and how to define that category is another story. Nor have I included the amazing KPO discoveries of Mike "Pluto Killer" Brown. Who knows, if I put it all together, I might have my next book.

In 2008, Scientists at Kobe University proposed that a Mars-sized planet still waited to be discovered in the outer solar system. Ever since the discovery of Neptune in 1846, scientists have debated whether another planet and its gravity were necessary to account for the observed motions of the other bodies in the solar system. Their prediction was based on a computer model of the evolution of the Kuiper Belt, that group of thousands of asteroids and mini planets that includes Pluto as its best known member.

The composer William Herschel and his sister Caroline in 1781 were the first people to discover a new planet. The idea of finding an unknown planet was so novel at the time that for months the Herschels thought they had discovered a comet and were puzzled by its orbit and refusal to develop a tail. When it finally dawned on them what they had discovered, they knew it need a better name than Comet Herschel. They called it George, after the insane king of England.

Understandably, continental astronomers were less than thrilled to accept a name chosen to flatter a foreign political figure. Several of their countries were at war with England at the time in support of the American rebellion. French astronomers graciously pushed for calling the planet Herschel. Johann Bode, a Prussian publisher of ephemeris tables, suggested a compromise. Since all of the other planets had names out of Greco-Roman mythology, why not continue the pattern and name it after a mythological figure? He suggested Uranus, the father of Saturn, as an appropriate name, not realizing how the mere heating of that name would cause English-speaking adolescent boys to fall into fits of giggles.

Bode's suggestion for the distant planet was adopted outside England and France, where astronomers stuck to their own names for another sixty years before finally giving in to the usage of the rest of the this planet. Bode's name was especially popular among other Germans. In 1789, a Berlin chemist, Martin Klaproth, isolated a new element found in pitchblende ore. Recalling the alchemical traditions of making connections between minerals and planets, he named his new element after the new planet, calling it Uranium. He has a crater on the moon named after him.

Herschel wasn't the first to use celestial discoveries to curry favor with his economic betters. When Galileo discovered the four major moons of Jupiter in 1610, he decided to name them after his former math student Cosimo de'Medici, who had since become the powerful Grand Duke of Tuscany. Galileo first thought to name them the Cosmican Stars, but then thought better of it. The name was too close to Cosmic Stars and the significance might be lost on the object of his up sucking. In Sidereus Nuncius, his little book announcing the discovery, he called the moons the Medicean Stars, a name unsubtle enough that even a busy Grand Duke would take notice. The attempt was successful; a few months later, Cosimo offered Galileo a high paying job that the the math teacher quickly accepted. Not that Galileo needs any more honors than he already has in order to be remembered, but the four giant moons of Jupiter are collectively known as the Galilean moons.

Four years after Galileo published his description of the Medicean Stars, a German astronomer, Simon Marius, published a work claiming to have discovered the moons before Galileo. He couldn't offer any convincing proof for his claim, so history has sided with Galileo. Marius' observations were, however, of high quality and he gave us something Galileo did not: individual names for the moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all lovers of Jupiter in mythology). The French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc suggested that the four moons be named after the four Medici brothers, something Galileo may also have had in mind, but the suggestion was not taken up by the budding international astronomical community.

The mythological names were not, in fact, Marius' first choice. His first idea was an awkward system of naming moons after the Sun's planets (i.e. the Mercury of Jupiter, the Venus of Jupiter). At the time there was no reason not to assume that smaller moons might be orbiting the bigger moons and so on. This might have led to names like the Saturn of the Mars of the Mercury of Jupiter. Clearly, a bad idea. Maris humbly credited Johannes Kepler with the much better suggestion of classical mythology. Kepler is famous for enough else that is vital for the development of astronomy; let's let Marius be remembered for publicizing the suggestion.

In 1655 Christiaan Huygens discovered a moon orbiting Saturn. He cleverly called it Saturn's Moon. When Giovanni Cassini discovered four more moons around Saturn, he followed Galileo's example and named them Sidera Lodoicea ("the stars of Louis") to honor his employer Louis XIV of France. He did not give his new moons individual names and, oddly, neither did anyone else. For most of the next two centuries, astronomers simply called them by numbers.

A century and a half later, following the Herschel's discovery of Uranus, other astronomers put their telescopes to work seeking out new Georges to name after their own political patrons. In 1801 a Sicilian astronomer, Giuseppe Piazzi, was the first to strike gold. Spotting an object orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and determining it not to be a comet, he announced that he had found a tiny planet, and named it Ceres Ferdinandea. The name seemed to cover all the bases, it had an element from classical mythology (Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture) and it sucked up to his king. Unfortunately, his king, Ferdinand of Sicily, had recently been overthrown by Napoleon and no one went along with naming a celestial object after a powerless refugee. Other mythological names were suggested, but eventually everyone accepted the Ceres part of Piazzi's suggestion.

As astronomers began looking at the region in which Ceres had been found, they promptly found three more tiny planets. These were named Pallas, Juno, and Vesta. Naming planets after kings had proved to be a non-starter, so the astronomers went straight classical mythology. On the other hand, naming elements after planets was very popular. Soon after the four tiny planets between Mars and Jupiter ere announced, chemists isolating the elements gave us Cerium and Palladium. Juno already had a month named after her, but poor Vesta didn't get squat, which is a shame because Vestanite would be a much cooler name than Rutherfordium or some of the other lame names given the transuranian elements.

Bode had predicted a planet in the region where the new mini-planets were found based on a pattern he, and other astronomers, perceived in the distances between the planets. This pattern is now called the Titus-Bode Law. However, the tiny new planets in that position bothered astronomers. They were smaller than any of the known moons. William Herschel suggested not letting these insignificant objects into the august club of planets. He coined a new word, "asteroid" (star like), to describe them. The little planets remained in limbo until the 1840s when a new generation of more powerful telescopes led to the discovery of more tiny bodies between Mars and Jupiter. Facing the prospect of dozens or more new planets, the international astronomical community adopted Herschel's suggestion and demoted the asteroids to a separate category apart from the planets.

The Herschels had discovered two moons to go with their new planet. These would later be named, on the suggestion of William's son John, after characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." While not strictly classical mythology, Shakespeare's fairies were close enough to satisfy Bode's mythology principle and the names were never seriously challenged. The Herschels also discovered two more moons around Saturn, bringing the known total to seven. Up until the 1840s, astronomers had simply referred to the Saturnian satellites by numbers counting out from the planet, not in the order of their discovery. This meant the names were subject to change every time a new moon was discovered. The largest moon had already been called Saturn II, IV, and VI. This couldn't continue. John suggested a classical mythology solution by naming the moons after the Titans, the brothers and sisters of Saturn, reserving the name Titan for the first discovered because it was so titanic. The named Saturnian moons are really no more than Titan and the Titans, which might be a decent name for a surf guitar band.

For their contributions, the Hershels had a well deserved number of objects named after them. Sir William had a crater on the moon, an impact basin on Mars, a crater Mimas (a Saturnian moon which he and Caroline discovered and which John named), and an asteroid named after him. Caroline has a lunar crater and an asteroid. John has a crater on the moon.

At about the same time that the word asteroid and the naming patterns for the moons of Saturn and Uranus were adopted, the search was on for another planet beyond Uranus. Based on a half century of observing Uranus' orbit and a search through older observations for potential Uranus sightings (stop giggling) some astronomers had come to believe that the gravity of another large body must be affecting it, causing it to move faster than expected till 1822 and slower afterwards. By the 1840s astronomers had a rough idea where to look for the mystery planet. In 1846 Urbain Le Verrier calculated and published the exact location and observers in three countries had no problem finding the planet soon after that. British astronomers had calculated the correct location before Le Verrier, but did not publish and were thus denied the glory of being part of the discovery.

Some French astronomers wanted to call the eighth planet Le Verrier, pointing out that naming a planet after its discoverer had a precedent, since they still called Uranus Herschel. Le Verrier at first suggested the name Neptune, after the god of the sea. For a while he also flirted with naming it after himself, but the name Neptune caught on beating out the other classical names Janus and Oceanus. The god of the sea was especially compelling because Neptune appeared very blue.

The new planet also got its commemorative element, thought this time it took longer. Neptunium was assembled, not refined, by scientists at Berkeley in 1940. It was the first synthetic element to be built by bombarding another element, in this case Uranium, with neutrons. Glenn Seaborg, who led the Berkeley project eventually got an element of his own for his work, Seaborgium, but he didn't get a celestial object... yet.

A mere seventeen days after the location of Neptune was confirmed, William Lassell, an English brewer, announced his discovery of a large moon. Since the astronomical community was busy arguing over the name of the planet, you would think that they would also get hot under the collar over a name for the moon. You would be wrong. Once again, naming the was forgotten. It carried the dull name Neptune's Moon for over thirty years. In 1880, Camille Flammarion suggested Triton, the name of Neptune's son, for the moon. He also named one of Jupiter's newly discovered minor moons, Amalthea, in 1892. For his contribution he has had a lunar crater, a Martian crater, and an asteroid named after him.

In 1919 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was created uniting various national astronomical societies from around the world. One of its main functions was to be the central authority for assigning names to celestial bodies. In general, certain patterns for naming, such as those John Herschel suggested for moons seventy years earlier are voted on and astronomers are allowed to exercise the discoverer's right on naming within those conventions. The IAU must officially accept an astronomer's name before it goes into international use. A system of numeric designations are used for objects as temporary names prior to the announcement of official names. The IAU came in the nick of time. The ideological conflicts of the twentieth century could easily have been fought out in naming conventions. Each power bloc might have adopted its own name for every discovery and changed their names with every revolution. Imagine St. Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad and back to St. Petersburg played out on every comet and crater in the solar system.

In the 1830s, astronomers were convinced that another planet was required to explain Uranus' movements and had begun working on calculations to locate the planet. That planet was Neptune. Even then, some astronomers believed one planet would not be enough. In 1834, a Dutch astronomer, Peter Andreas Hansen, wrote that he was convinced that two planets would be required to explain Uranus' movements. Following the discovery of Neptune, other astronomers agreed, though they did not agree just what was required. By the 1870s, enough data had been collected about Neptune for astronomers the begin making predictions as to where the next planet would be found and how big it should be. Astronomers in various countries began their own searches. None of these predictions matched Le Verrier's and no new planets were found.

Le Verrier himself became involved with the search for a tiny planet between Mercury and the Sun. Mercury's orbit, like Uranus' never quite matched the predictions of astronomers. Beginning in 1859, a number of amateur astronomers claimed to witness the transit of a small body across the sun. Le Verrier examined one such claim and became convinced he had another planet. He announced his discovery to the French Academy and called his second planet Vulcan. Unfortunately, the periodic sightings of a spot on the Sun never resolved into a single planet. After Le Verrier's death Vulcan fell out of fashion and was all but forgotten by the astronomical community. In 1919, the same year that the IAU was founded, Einstein proved the problems with Mercury's orbit were caused by the curving of space so close to the sun and not by the pull of a missing planet. Mysterious dots still are reported from time to time on the face of the sun, but these are usually dismissed as uncharted asteroids, comets, or alien starships, though the latter is decidedly a minority opinion. Although he was wrong about Vulcan, Le Verrier's other contributions earned him craters on the moon, Mars, an asteroid, and a ring around Neptune.

In 1894, Percival Lowell burst onto the astronomy scene. Lowell was the product of old an Boston family with lots of old Boston money. Lowell had traveled extensively in Asia, written several books on Asian culture, and served as foreign secretary and counselor for a special Korean diplomatic mission to the United States. In the nineties he turned his attention and considerable enthusiasm to astronomy. Lowell moved to Flagstaff, Arizona and built a world-class observatory in the high, clear, mountain air. At first, Lowell was obsesses with the planet Mars. He was convinced that the "canali" of Mars, as drawn by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, were indication of life and civilization on our red neighbor. Lowell wrote three books and suffered a nervous breakdown before he let go of that idea and moved on to something else.

That something else was the missing planet beyond Neptune. This was a serious problem, recognized by serious astronomers. Though Lowell was thick-skinned about the mockery directed at him over Mars, years of it had begun to wear on the staff at his observatory. Besides, there was very little more he could do about Mars without a spaceship. Lowell did his own calculations on the Neptune problem and decided a large planet must be lurking in the constellation Gemini. He spent the last eleven years of his life looking for the body he called Planet X, but died without finding it.

After Lowell's death there was a delay of a decade in the search while Lowell's widow, Constance, and the observatory fought over his will. In 1929 with their share of Lowell's wealth assured, the observatory hired a young amateur astronomer from Kansas, Clyde Tombaugh, to take over the search. Tombaugh was an excellent candidate, both hard working and an excellent observer. He carefully went over the calculations for Planet X done by Lowell and by Lowell's competitors before deciding on an area to search. On February 18, 1930, after only a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered his Planet X.

Naming rights belonged to the observatory. They decided to be democratic and hold a vote. Mrs. Lowell sent suggestions of Zeus, Lowell, and her own name Constance. Mrs. Lowell was not the favorite person at the observatory, having almost stopped their work for a decade. Her names were ignored. The choices on the ballot were Minerva, Cronos, and Pluto. Pluto, the god of the underworld, who eternally dwellsin darkness, won unanimously.

While astronomers were excited about the discovery of Pluto, it was clear from the beginning that it was too small to be the longed for Planet X. As time went by, better observations showed that Pluto was even smaller than at first believed--smaller than the Earth's Moon--and that it had an irregular orbit far different that that of any other planet. Pluto, however, had an advantage that Ceres never did in becoming accepted as a planet: mass communication and mass literacy. The discovery of new planet was announced in newspapers and newsreels. The name had been suggested to the observatory by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old girl in Oxford, England. Walt Disney introduced a character named Pluto into his Mickey Mouse cartoons later that year. Pluto even got its commemorative element, Plutonium. Like Neptunium, Plutonium was assembled at Berkeley. Pluto wasn't just the business of the astronomical community; Pluto belonged to the masses, particularly to the children.

In the same year that Tombaugh discovered Pluto, Frederick C. Leonard predicted that there was a whole belt of tiny objects beyond Neptune. Sooner or later we would have good enough telescopes to find them and the astronomical community would be faced with the same problem that they had faced with the asteroids: too many and too small to be planets. That day finally came in 1992. Gerard Kuiper was an astrophysicist, who speculated in 1950 that the region beyond Neptune ought to at one time have contained a belt of debris left over from the formation of the solar system, pieces that were neither asteroids nor comets. At the time, when Pluto was still thought to be fairly large, Kuiper believed Pluto would have destroyed the belt by flinging them into new orbits. But as estimates of Pluto's size went down, the probability that the debris belt still survived went up. In the late eighties, astronomers began looking for it. One Pluto like object was discovered in 1992. Five more were identified the next year. Today, over 1000 of these Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) have been discovered.

While thousands more KBOs are expected to lie beyond the orbit of Pluto, very few astronomers expect to find a large planet out there. For one thing, it's no longer needed. Close measurements provided by Voyager 2's 1989 flyby of Neptune allowed astronomers to more accurately measure the mass of Neptune. According to the current measurements of their masses, Uranus and Neptune orbit exactly as they should. Occasionally, astronomers come up with new reasons for a large planet or even a small star to be lurking in the distant reaches of the solar system, but these no longer have to do with the orbits of the known planets.

This brings us to the Kobe University study. Patryk Lykawka and Tadashi Mukai have determined that a body, Earth sized or just a little smaller, is needed to explain the observed shape of the Kuiper Belt. The rapid discovery of so many KBOs allowed astronomers to map the shape of the belt. To their surprise, the belt abruptly stops at a distance of 50 astronomical units. The belt also appears to have been sorted into several distinct groups of bodies. Lykawka's conclusion is that something fairly large--a new Planet X--was needed to sort and sculpt the belt into the shape we now see.

Close up observation of Saturn's rings have shown that they are herded into shape by complex gravitational forces exerted by Saturn's moons. Lykawka thinks something similar is at work in the Kuiper Belt, but with one difference. In the computer simulations that he and Mukai did, Planet X shapes the belt early in its history and then is thrown into a distant orbit where it has only minor interactions with the belt. After its initial shaping, the main influence on the Kuiper Belt becomes Neptune.

While Lykawka's theory has some sympathetic listeners, it also has some strong critics. Not surprisingly, some of the strongest criticism comes from the proponents of competing theories of the early development of the solar system. The bottom line is that we are just beginning to understand the outer solar system and to come up with plausible scenarios for the evolution of the solar system that account for all of its parts. If Lykawka's theory proves correct and someone finds Planet X, the really important question will be what do we call it. George is still up for grabs.

Epilog: A few hours after I post this, a spaceship from Earth will fly by Pluto gathering data. Pluto as the first and best studied KPO and erstwhile ninth planet is a special object of interest for scientists, children, and former children alike. After Tombaugh discovered Pluto, it seemed to be evaporating. Almost immediately, it was obvious that it wasn't big enough to be the gravitational source needed to explain the peculiarities in Uranus' orbit observed by Nineteenth Century astronomers.

Over estimating Pluto's initially might have been based on wishful thinking. However, increasingly better observations over the next half century undermined that estimate and undermined it again. Originally estimated as larger than Earth, Pluto soon shrank to Mars sized and smaller. When I was in grade school in the early sixties, my science textbooks wanted to give each planet a unique quality. While Pluto and Mercury easily claimed closest and furthest from the sun, they were tied for smallest. By the next edition of those books, it was clear that Pluto was the smallest. Soon it was the size of the moon. Then smaller.

In 1980, Alexander Dessler, and Christopher Russell published a graph of historical estimates of Pluto's size and predicted it would disappear by 1984. It didn't. By then, James Christy of the United States Naval Observatory had discovered a large moon around Pluto. Christy gave it the appropriate name Charon, the boatman who carries the souls of the dead across the river Styx into the realm of Pluto. But Christy wanted the name to be pronounced "Sharon" like his wife's name.

Because Pluto didn't evaporate, NASA took advantage of a rare post-Apollo moment of funding to fire a probe at the children's planet or whatever you want to call it. Since the New Horizons probe was launched, two more moons have been discovered around Pluto. Each was given a name appropriate to the god of the underworld's realm.

And Clyde Tombaugh, what about him? What honors did he get. Tombaugh died in 1997. He had his mortal remains cremated. A portion of his ashes were placed in a small tube and given to NASA. That tube was ataced to the New Horizons probe and will pass within spitting distance of the celestrial object he discovered. In many ways, if you're dead, that's far better than having your name stuck on a map.

Go Clyde! You have no idea how many nerds wish they were there with you.