When the Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Canada met with Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen of England he asked her. “Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Are there any tips you can give me?”
“Well,” said the Queen, “The most important thing is to surround yourself with intelligent people.”
The Minister frowned, and then asked, “but how do I know if the people around me are really intelligent?”
The Queen took a sip of champagne. Oh, that’s easy; you just ask them to answer an intelligent riddle. Watch.
“The Queen pushed a button on her intercom.”Please send in the Prime Minister would you?” The Minister walked into the room and said, “Yes, your Majesty?”
The Queen smiled and said, “Answer me this please. Your mother and father have a child. It is not your brother and it is not your sister. Who is it?” Without pausing for a moment, the Minister answered…”That would be me.” “Yes! Very good.” said the Queen. Continue reading Humour – The Queen’s Riddle→
For an update on what a Mise Tale is then please see Mise Tales One. As mentioned earlier on the front page of my website, any photos or cartoons, or short bits of information, when it is removed from the front page, will also be included again later in the next Misc Tales. That way you can keep track of it, search for it, or copy it.
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Some beautiful night-time photos of lighthouses, some in a 360º panorama format from Aaron D. Priest on his website aaronpriestphoto.com.
Back in 1969 on my first lighthouse at Pulteney Point we had a third keeper on station. Wayne and Beth were a very friendly couple who lived the hippie lifestyle. One of the things Wayne used to do every morning at daybreak was wander down to the shoreline right in front of his house, bend over and look at the sunrise between his legs, and then scoop up a few handfuls of seawater and drink it. To each his own I guess!
A Single Drop of Seawater, Magnified 25 Times
OK, you’ve seen the title of the photo above taken from the website This is Colossal. On there they state:
You know when you’re horsing around at the beach and accidentally swallow a nasty gulp of salt water? Well I hate to break it to you but that foul taste wasn’t just salt. Photographer David Littschwager captured this amazing shot of a single drop of seawater magnified 25 times to reveal an entire ecosystem of crab larva,diatoms, bacteria, fish eggs, zooplankton, and even worms. Read more about what you probably don’t want to know at Dive Shield. We do admit the little crab larva in the lower right-hand corner is pretty darned cute. (via Lost at E Minor) Prints of this photograph are available at Art.com.
Scoop up a bucket of seawater (or swallow a mouthful) and this is what you get: a bizarre menagerie of plants and animals, some of them known to us, others a complete mystery.
This extraordinary photograph shows a random splash of seawater, magnified 25 times. The Earth’s open seas are home to countless tiny animals and plants that are known collectively as plankton.
Often referred to as Cosmic Lighthouses, neutron stars (also known as pulsars) are incredibly dense stars that shoot out X-rays at a predictable rate, like a lighthouse.
A new NASA mission proposes to examine the nature of these neutron stars as well as how accurately we can use these beacons as celestial guiding points for deep space missions.
Pulsars spin at a dizzying rate of anywhere from seconds to milliseconds. As they whip around in their rotation, the hotspots flash periodically within sight of Earth. X-ray brightness from the pulsar increases when the hotspots comes within view, then dims as the hotspots turn away.
(There are a) millisecond class of pulsars that spin as rapidly as 700 times a second.These pulsars have such a consistent rotation rate that they are considered accurate celestial clocks. In space, they could be used in a similar way to global positioning satellites that provide navigation data to the military and civilians, particularly in vehicles.
Sen—Spinning in space are incredibly dense stars that shoot out X-rays at a predictable rate, like a lighthouse. A new NASA mission proposes to examine the nature of these neutron stars – also known as ‘pulsars’ – as well as how accurately we can use these beacons as celestial guiding points for deep space missions.Called NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer) the mission will use X-rays to look at emissions from these strange stars. The instrument will launch in 2017. It will be mounted on the International Space Station for observations from low Earth orbit.Neutron stars are thought to form after the collapse of a massive star that is between 8 and 30 times the size of the sun, according to the University of Maryland’s Coleman Miller, an astronomy researcher. After the supernova blows off most of its mass, what is left behind is a small core about the size of New York City, at 20 kilometres (12 miles) across.In this small space, the protons and electrons that make up matter are “literally scrunched together”, stated NASA. One sugar-cube-sized bit of neutron star has a mass of a billion tons, the equivalent of Mount Everest’s weight, the agency added.Zaven Arzoumanian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, is deputy principal investigator for NICER. He told Sen: “Everything in our world is made of atoms consisting of protons and neutrons making up the nucleus plus electrons in orbit around it. But they are mainly empty space.”If you squeezed some gold, uranium or lead so hard that you eliminated all the empty space, you’d have something just like a neutron star. We want to understand how stuff behaves at such incredibly high densities.”
NICER is one of NASA’s astrophysics explorer-class missions that aim to examine the universe at low cost. This will cap NICER’s mission costs at just US$55 million (£39.2 million). Simulataneously with NICER’s announcement, the agency also said it will fund the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite for US$200 million (£130.7 million).
The NICER instrument will include 56 small X-ray telescopes packed into a mini fridge-sized package. It will probably arrive at station in a Dragon cargo spacecraft manufactured and operated by SpaceX.
Once ready, the telescope array will examine X-rays that come from “hotspots” on the star’s surface, as well as its magnetic field, NASA stated. Pulsars spin at a dizzying rate of anywhere from seconds to milliseconds. As they whip around in their rotation, the hotspots flash periodically within sight of Earth. X-ray brightness from the pulsar increases whn the hotspots comes within view, then dims as the hotspots turn away.
NICER will focus on the millisecond class of pulsars that spin as rapidly as 700 times a second. These pulsars have such a consistent rotation rate that they are considered accurate celestial clocks. In space, they could be used in a similar way to global positioning satellites that provide navigation data to the military and civilians, particularly in vehicles.
“To demonstrate the navigation technology’s viability, the NICER … payload will use its telescopes to detect X-ray photons within these powerful beams of light to estimate the arrival times of their pulses,” NASA stated.
“With these measurements, the system will use specially developed algorithms to stitch together an on-board navigation solution.”
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COSMIC LIGHTHOUSES WILL GUIDE SPACESHIPS THROUGH THE GALAXY
AMANDA DOYLE 02 APRIL 2012 00:00
Sen— Scientists have proposed using pulsars – ‘cosmic lighthouses’ – as a way of navigating future space missions.Space navigation currently relies on communications with Earth which can become problematic at large distances from the planet, but the proposed star navigation based on pulsar signals would make deep space exploration more feasible.Stars have always been important for navigation, and mariners have lobang been using the night sky to find their way. Many satellites and spacecraft also have star trackers which monitor the positions of the constellations so that they can automatically adjust their orientation. However, star trackers cannot achieve sufficient accuracy for deep space missions. In addition, the constellations will not retain their familiar patterns if one were to travel far beyond the Solar System.Currently spacecraft are tracked by radio telescopes on Earth, but this has major flaws. As light can only travel at a finite speed, it takes time to send a signal to Earth and back again to determine the spacecraft’s position. For example, a signal from NASA’s Voyager 1 would take around 30 hours to do a round trip.In addition, the further one travels from Earth, the larger the errors in the measured location will be. There will be an error of four kilometres for every Astronomical Unit travelled, where an Astronomical Unit is the distance between the Sun and the Earth (150 million kilometres). Thus for the likes of Voyager 1, which is at a distance of around 120 Astronomical Units from Earth, we can only pinpoint its location to within 480 kilometres.Neither of these facts are particularly comforting to any future deep space astronauts, so how can we can get around this problem? Professor Werner Becker from the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik discussed a possible solution at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester, England, last week.Becker has suggested using cosmic lighthouses, known as pulsars, as navigational aids. A pulsar is a “dead” star which ended its adult life in a massive explosion known as a supernova. After many of the outer layers of the star get blown away, an extremely dense, compact core known as a neutron star is left behind. Neutron stars emit beams of radiation from their poles, and if one of these beams sweeps past Earth, akin to beams from a lighthouse, then the star is known as a pulsar.Pulsars have periodic signals, and will gradually spin down over time. However, Becker’s calculations take this reduction in rotation rate into account to produce accurate measurements. “The periods can be measured with accuracy which compares with atomic clocks, and this includes all the measurements of the spin down,” Becker told Sen. “Then you can predict the pulse arrival time over quite a long time.”
There are several different types of pulsars, but the ones best suited for the job are milli-second pulsars, which have extremely rapid rotation rates. “We concentrated on the milli-second pulsars for the purpose that they have the shortest periods which allows you to probe the distance with the highest accuracy,” explained Becker.
Knowing the exact time at which to expect a beam from a pulsar to arrive at Earth, and then comparing this to the time that the beam swept past a distant spacecraft, allows the location of the craft to be determined. Becker explained how the time difference in pulses can be extrapolated to find differences in distances.
“When we compare the pulse arrival time, we know where it should have been and where we measured it, and the difference in arrival time can be used (if multiplied by the velocity [of the spacecraft] and period of the pulsar) to compute the distance from the position you assumed you were during the measurement and where you were actually during the measurement. Then you correct your position according to your measurement and you do a new measurement. So it’s a kind of iterative process.”
The pulses as measured from Earth would also need to be corrected to the Solar System barycentre, i.e. the centre of mass of the Solar System, to take into account the different locations of radio telescopes.
As well as interstellar space, pulsar navigation could also be used for space exploration in the Solar System to provide back-up to Earth based systems. “The next step is going to Mars, and then you may ask the question do you really want to rely on being tracked only from Earth,” said Becker. If communications failed between Earth and a spacecraft en route to Mars, then the astronauts would be forced to navigate using the constellations. However, using this new system they would be able to navigate independent of radio communications with Earth.
Timing the signals from pulsars can also have applications much closer to home, as it can be used to assist current GPS satellites and the upcoming Galileo satellite navigation system, and Becker explained the advantages to this.
“These satellites are also controlled from Earth, and if you don’t control and correct the orbits of the GPS satellites for longer than 72 hours the signals get completely unreliable. It needs a control from the Earth, but if you have a satellite using this pulsar method and technology, you could use this to augment the GPS satellites or the Galileo satellites and they would refer to this external satellite doing the navigation. It would mean that you would not have any requirement to control the satellites any more from Earth; it would make it really autonomous.”
Astronomers have been collecting data on pulsars for decades, so some milli-second pulsars have already been timed to high precision. The next step for the pulsar navigation method is to design the technology that will allow it to be used aboard a spacecraft, and simulations are already being implemented to discover the best way to do this.
tem will use specially developed algorithms to stitch together an on-board navigation solution.”
photo credit: The densely packed matter of a pulsar spins at incredible speeds, and emits radio waves that can be observed from Earth, but how neutron stars emit these waves is still a mystery / Swinburne Astronomy Productions/CAASTRO
An international team of astronomers has made a precise measurement of a distant, spinning star that’s about a million times more precise than the previous world’s best. That resolution is like being able to see DNA’s double helix structure from the moon.
“Compared to other objects in space, neutron stars are tiny,” Jean-Pierre Macquart from Curtin University explains in a news release. They’re about tens of kilometers in diameter. “So we need extremely high resolution to observe them and understand their physics.” Neutron stars are particularly interesting for astronomers because some of them (called pulsars) gave off pulsed radio waves whose beams regularly sweep across telescopes. Nearly five decades since pulsars were discovered, astronomers still don’t understand how they emit those pulses.
To get this highest resolution yet, Macquart, Ue-Li Pen of the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, and colleagues used the interstellar medium — the turbulent “empty” spaces in between, where charged particles float around — as a giant magnifying glass to look at the radio waves emitted by a small, spinning neutron star called PSR 0834+06.
These pulse signals become distorted as they pass through the interstellar medium. The team was able to use the distortions to reconstruct a close-up view of the pulsar from thousands of individual images of the scattering speckle pattern.
“The best we could previously do was pointing a large number of radio telescopes across the world at the same pulsar, using the distance between the telescopes on Earth to get good resolution,” Macquart explains. By combining views from several telescopes, the previous record had a resolution of 50 microarcseconds.
The new record using this “interstellar lens,” the galaxy’s biggest telescope, is 50 picoarcseconds, or a million times more detail. And it resolves areas of less than 5 kilometers in the emission region. Because of that, the team found that the emission region of pulsar B0834+06 was much smaller than previously assumed and possibly much closer to the star’s surface — a critical piece of information for understanding the origin of the radio wave emission.
The work was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The world’s oldest lighthouse (the Pharos of Alexandria) was built by Sostratus of Cnidus around 270 BC.
The oldest UK lighthouse? The lighthouse and lightkeeper’s house at Spurn.
It was a pyramid-shaped tower of white marble on the island of Pharos (in Greek the word Pharos means lighthouse) off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt.
It was estimated to be 400ft tall, and was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a listing designated by Antipater of Sidon in the second century BC.
This formed part of Alexander’s Harbour, Alexander being of course Alexander the Great.
Alas, the lighthouse was destroyed by an earthquake in 1375 AD.
Unfortunately, the Guinness Book Of Records never provided a listing for the oldest British lighthouse. – read more
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The oldest lighthouse in my home country ofCanada was built in 1713 and went into service at the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1734.
What is the name and location of the oldest lighthouse in your country? Write me a note and let me know and I will post it here.
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THE world’s oldest lighthouse was built by Sostratus of Cnidus around 270 BC, writes Tim Mickleburgh.
It was a pyramid-shaped tower of white marble on the island of Pharos (in Greek the word Pharos means lighthouse) off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt.
It was estimated to be 400ft tall, and was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a listing designated by Antipater of Sidon in the second century BC.
This formed part of Alexander’s Harbour, Alexander being of course Alexander the Great.
Alas, the lighthouse was destroyed by an earthquake in 1375 AD.
Unfortunately, the Guinness Book Of Records never provided a listing for the oldest British lighthouse.
So when this came up as a quiz question recently, I was stumped, expressing ignorance when the answer was given as Spurn Head.
This though set me to do some private research.
Fortunately I have the book written by Kenneth E Hartley and Howard M Frost, The Spurn Head Railway (Second Edition 1988). It gives reference to a hermit named Reedbarrow being responsible for erecting a lighthouse in c1427, going on to state that “following the unrecorded disappearance of Reedbarrow’s early lighthouse a London man, Justinian Angel, erected a lighthouse at Spurn during the years 1673-4”. There is no claim however that the lighthouse was Britain’s first.
So I then turned to Lynn F Pearson’s Piers And Other Seaside Architecture (Second Edition 2011) for enlightenment. But it wasn’t to be, as lighthouses don’t feature within its pages.
The AA Book Of The Seaside (1972) is of more help, telling readers that only 11 lighthouses existed by the 17th century, all on the south coast. It adds that the Roman Pharos in Dover castle was “one of the earliest surviving examples … from this dim brazier … lighthouses have slowly developed”.
This though presumably wasn’t a standalone building, unlike that at Spurn Head.
Thus I await further information from amongst your erudite readership!
Do you know which is Britain’s oldest lighthouse? If you can help, then please write to Bygones, Grimsby Telegraph, 80 Cleethorpe Road, Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire DN31 3EH or you can e-mail bygones@grimsbytelegraph.co.uk
A lot of people who visit Victoria, British Columbia (on the southern tip of Vancouver Island) never get to see Trial Island lighthouse as it is not visible from the town core. One must travel to the Oak Bay waterfront to see the lighthouse.
Although it is only about half a mile from Oak Bay, most people see only the radio station antennas of BC TV on a black rock be it day or night.
An interesting article on the web is Trial Island Lighthouse & VE7DQA – describing the life of a Ham Radio operator living and working there.
Trial Island is NOT an isolated station compared to West Coast Vancouver Island lightstations like Carmanah Point, Pachena Point and Cape Beale, but it is an interesting place to work.
Google Interactive Map showing the location of Trial Island.
I have mentioned Machias Seal Island before in my articles here, here, here, and here.
Well writer John Farrier published on Neatorama on Tuesday, April 22, 2014 a great article about how MAJOR/insignificant this dispute really is!
(Maps: Google Maps)
This is Machias Seal Island, a 20-acre island in the Bay of Fundy.
You can’t see it? Let’s zoom in.
And from there the story continues! Such an insignificant island for such a big debate. That is government for you. Naturally it belongs to Canada! . . . more
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Hmm. That doesn’t help much. Let’s zoom in some more.
There it is! It’s a speck of land that barely appears on the map.
The ownership of Machias Seal Island is disputed by the United States and Canada. Canada is in physical possession of it, but the United States has not formally dropped its claim to the island.
I’ve previously written several posts about the development of the US-Canadian border, whichincludesweirdexclaves. Ambiguity about the border even led to the creation of 2 short-lived nations.
(Painting by Benjamin West of the American delegation at the Treaty of Paris)
Although the United States and Canada now maintain a long, peaceful border, the placement of that border has been in doubt since the Treaty of Paris (1783) in which Britain recognized the United States as an independent nation. That treaty attempted to draw borders over unexplored lands. The authors did the best that they could with their knowledge of geography. But, alas, one of the descriptions for the border between Maine and maritime Canada was problematic. The treaty says that US territory includes:
all Islands within twenty Leagues of any Part of the Shores of the United States, and lying between Lines to be drawn due East from the Points where the aforesaid Boundaries between Nova Scotia on the one Part and East Florida on the other shall, respectively, touch the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Ocean, excepting such Islands as now are or heretofore have been within the limits of the said Province of Nova Scotia.
I’ve bolded the parts of the text that are the source for the Machias Seal Island dispute.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, the eastern border of Maine was of great concern to the British. Some British officials coveted what Americans saw as their territory, and vice versa. Control of the Bay of Fundy was of great importance to British commissioners at the Treaty of Ghent (1814), which ended the War of 1812.
Now back to Machias Seal Island. The American argument is that it lies within 20 leagues (approximately 69 miles) of the coast of the United States.
The Canadian argument is that a land grant that pre-exists the Treaty of Paris defines the island as part of Nova Scotia. It built and has operated a lighthouse on the island since 1832.
Occasionally fishermen from the 2 nations have gotten into scraps about its ownership. Some Canadian citizens have staked mining claims to the island as a means of asserting Canadian sovereignty. The State of Maine has included the island on its maps of electoral districts.
But if possession is indeed 9/10ths of the law, then Machias Seal Island is Canadian. The United States has chosen not to press the issue.
La saison démarre bien, j’ai déjà accueillit beaucoup de monde. Et qui dit nouvelle saison , dit “Nuit du Phare”. La première nuit de cette année aura lieu lundi 5 mai à partir de 21h30. Toutes les 1/2h. un groupe de 20 personnes pourra venir admirer la mer d’Iroise et ses phares à partir du chemin de ronde. Visite uniquement sur réservation au 0298890017 ou 0686310347.
Fishing boats do not have anything to do with lighthouses you say!
Well they do, because without fishing boats (plus vessels of other types) and the men that man them we would have no need for manned lighthouses, so fishing boats are important for lighthouses and the British Columbia (BC) economy.
Trolling, Seining, Gillnetting – don’t know one fishboat or fishing method from the next? Well take a look at this page from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. It will help clarify things.
On September 21, 2013 I wrote Message in a Bottle which described a 107 year old message-in-a-bottle find. Later on October 29, 2013 I wrote More Messges in Bottles which described more messages found in bottles. It seems that everybody loves to do it!
German fishermen made a surprising catch this week when they pulled the oldest recorded message in a bottle out of the sea. A man from Berlin scribbled the note 101 years ago. . . . more
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What initially looked like a normal, discarded beer bottle, nestled among fish in the Maria I’s nets, turned out to be a record-breaking find – as it contained a postcard dated May 17th, 1913 written by a man named Richard Platz.
A modest Danish postcard with two German stamps on it and a polite message asking the finder to send it on to his address in Berlin; it appears that Platz could have been trying to save on international postage fees.
But the card never arrived, instead landing in the hands of fishermen from Heikendorf in Schleswig Holstein, on Tuesday – over 100 years later.
“I had it in my hand, but then a colleague told me there was something in it,” skipper Konrad Fischer told regional newspaper the Kieler Nachrichten, explaining he was ready to throw it back into the Baltic.
“When I saw the date I got really excited,” he said.
Until now, the oldest message in a bottle listed in the Guinness Book of Records was 97 years old when found in 2012, making Fischer’s a potential record breaker.
“If the message is really this old, maybe a museum would be interested,” said Fischer, who will be taking his bottled post to experts for them to take a closer look.
Fischer has been a fisherman for 50 years and in that time has found mines, bombs, torpedoes and a corpse in the sea.
He told news agency DPA that he was not sure yet what he would do with the bottle but would “maybe auction it to the highest bidder”. [/private] Continue reading It’s Old, But Not The Oldest!→
The Queen’s Riddle
