Brittany Lighthouses

Tagged by London blogger and member of the MEC (Mutual Enjoyment Club), Brian Micklethwait in a lighthouse post? I had better document that.

Brian shares a photo of a poster in a shop window; a poster featuring 12 Brittany Lighthouses, which I love, and which I have half-inched to share here:

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Two things I noted about the poster (which I now want for my study wall). Firstly, the second lighthouse from the left is La Jument, a 48m high stone tower built in 1911, and apparently “The most famous lighthouse in the world”. Why the fame? Because of this famous (see?) photo by famous lighthouse photographer, Jean Guichard, which has sold over a million copies.

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But you must ignore that motivational crap about looking fear in the face, because when the photograph was taken, the lighthouse keeper Théodore Malgorn (for it are he in the doorway) had no idea that the wave was coming, as this account testifies:

Malgorn, suddenly realising that a giant wave was about to engulf the structure, rushed back inside just in time to save his life. In an interview he said “If I had been a little further away from the door, I would not have made it back into the tower. And I would be dead today. You cannot play with the sea.”

The photograph – taken on the 21st December 1989 – won second place in the 1991 World Press Photo awards. (The winner was Guichard’s compatriot Georges Mérillon.)

Aaannd the other thing that interested me particularly about the post was the “coffee cup rings” over each of the towers. I don’t think that they are actual coffee cup rings – I’m hoping that they are examples of light characteristics – a representation of the sequence of flashes that differentiate and identify each lighthouse.

My theory is supported by the fact that La Jument (remember that? It’s famous, after all) has a light characteristic of Fl 3 R 15s that’s 3 flashes of a red light every 15 seconds. And look at its coffee cup ring:

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Assuming that ring makes up a minute (and ignoring that awkward gap, top right) I can see three flashes 4 times there.

It’s this sort of technical detail which I love about posters like this. It makes it less of a picture and more of a document. And just as I know that my readers needed to know who won the 1991 World Press Photo awards, I know that you’ll want to know the full light characteristic for Cape Agulhas lighthouse. And that is: Fl W 5s 31m 30M – a white light flashing every 5 seconds, 31 metres above sea level and visible for 30 nautical miles. .

Other selected lighthouse light characteristics include (but are not limited to):

Slangkop: Fl 4 W 30s. 4 white flashes every 30 seconds.
Cape Point: Fl 3 W 30s. 3 white flashes every 30 seconds.
Green Point: Fl W 10s. White light flashing every 10 seconds.
Dreswick Point (IOM): Fl 2 W 30s. 2 white flashes every 30 seconds.

Lighthouses, eh? I’m a sucker for them.

Tungsten Station

I grabbed my trusty camera at the last minute and shot the space station as it passed over Cape Town yesterday evening.

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Quickly adjusting the exposure time and f-stop on the manual exposure setting allowed me to capture this quick and dirty shot of it going over, but it was only upon reviewing the images later that I realised that a little tweaking of the white balance (which had been set to “Tungsten” for this image) may have been advisable.

I’m such a pro.

It wasn’t a Blue Sunday really. And – aside from the sky – today isn’t really a Blue Monday either.

From Space

Here’s an image of South Africa from space, via NASA’s Modis/Terra satellite. Modis is Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (I know – it doesn’t quite work, does it?)

With its sweeping 2,330-km-wide viewing swath, MODIS sees every point on our world every 1-2 days in 36 discrete spectral bands. Consequently, MODIS tracks a wider array of the earth’s vital signs than any other Terra sensor. For instance, the sensor measures the percent of the planet’s surface that is covered by clouds almost every day.

That’s conveniently just about the width of South Africa, allowing this sort of shot:

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Click through for hugeness and detail.

You can see that we were having a wonderful day in Cape Town (although I spent it in a lab, in a car and at Tygerberg Hospital, rather than chilling at a bar by the beach).

I’m hoping to be able to get a repeat image to compare when the cold front comes through on Thursday evening (it’ll be dark, I know) and through Friday morning.

A bit of science on Friday

Australia is moving

Sadly, it’s towards civilisation (North) rather than away from us all. 7cm a year, to be exact, because of tectonic plate movement. Australia is on the Indian-Australian Plate (can you guess which other country is also on there?) and that plate is moving North, where it collides with the Pacific Plate and the Sunda Plate.

Now, 7cm might not seem like a lot (because it’s not a lot), but there’s been no update of GPS systems and the like since 1994, and now Australia is 1.5m further north than it was back then.

Now, 1.5m might not seem like a lot (because it’s not a lot) (although it’s clearly more than 7cm), but if you are navigating by super-accurate GPS, and the data you’re getting is fundamentally incorrect, then that might have rather serious consequences, as Dan Jaksa from Geoscience Australia told ABC News.

In the not-too-distant future, we are going to have possibly driverless cars or at least autonomous vehicles where, 1.5 metres, well, you’re in the middle of the road or you’re in another lane.

Indeed, so what are they going to do about it?

On 1 January 2017, Australia’s local co-ordinates will be shifted further north – by 1.8m. The over-correction means Australia’s local co-ordinates and the Earth’s global co-ordinates will align in 2020.At that point a new system, which can take changes over time into account, will be implemented.

Can’t we just rather give it a big push back the other way?

Brain Disease

I learned about a disease called kuru when I was at university, but suddenly, it became much more relevant when people worked out that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, Mad Cow Disease – and its human equivalent CJD – Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) had the same causal “agent”.
I use those quotes, because these diseases aren’t caused by bacteria or viruses, but rather prions – tiny strands of protein that gradually destroy the brain. It’s a slow, drawn out, lingering death. And we have no way of stopping it. Any antibacterial or antiviral drug relies on attacking some part of the life cycle of the bug to kill it. Protein strands don’t have life cycles. They’re just protein strands. Prion diseases are (currently) incurable.

What’s interesting about kuru is that it existed solely in remote tribes in Papua New Guinea – specifically the Fore people – who engaged in cannibalism. In many villages:

…when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. It was an act of love and grief.

“If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects.”

What’s even more interesting is that these prions attack the nervous system. And the vast majority of the victims were women and children, because traditionally, they were the ones who ate the brains. The elders and men in the tribe were spared the offal, and thus, mostly spared from kuru as well.

There’s more reading on that link above, but the last known kuru victim died in 2009. Sadly, because of the long incubation period of prion diseases (I’m still on 40-year high risk list because I processed patient specimens from suspected CJD cases when I worked in the labs in the UK) we can’t be certain that it’s completely gone, but there have been no cases in the intervening 7 years.

Which probably explains why Australia now thinks it’s safe to drift closer to Papua New Guinea.

That’s not how you get cholera

Look, as a description of the current state (and oh, what a state) of affairs in SA right now, this tweet is pretty accurate.

Fullscreen capture 2016-09-05 104312 AM.bmpHowever, as a description of how you get cholera, it’s wildly inaccurate. That is, unless the carrot in question has been washed in cholera-infested water.
And I wouldn’t put anything past the Gupta family, to be honest.

Cholera is an infectious disease that causes severe watery diarrhoea. It’s spread via the faecal-oral route. That means that the bacterium in question – called Vibrio cholerae – er… “exits” the body of a cholera sufferer and somehow ends up being ingested by another individual. This is often via it getting into the drinking water system through poor hygiene and inadequate water treatment though.
You don’t get it from eating carrots (with the caveat above firmly in place, that is).

And anyway, even if you did cholera from eating carrots, there’s no evidence that donkeys can get cholera. In fact, in their 1996 book “Cholera and the Ecology of Vibrio cholerae“, Drasar and Forrest cite a 1974 study by Sanyal et al. in which 195 animals (including donkeys), living in a cholera endemic area in India were routinely tested for the bacterium over a period of a year. Pathogenic V.cholerae was only isolated from 3 cows, 2 dogs and 2 chickens. (NB – no donkeys).

And then, even if the donkey did eat the carrot and you could get cholera from carrots, and even the donkey could get cholera, it’s a big stretch to suggest that the entire nation would then become infected with cholera, just because a donkey got it from a poisinous [sic] carrot. Just what was this donkey doing? How on earth would it successfully have infected 55 million people? That’s biological warfare on a massive scale. I’m not sure anyone could carry that out, let alone a lone donkey, who, lest we forget, is allegedly rather unwell.

So, no. As an accurate account of the source of a cholera infection and how it might be spread, this tweet is rubbish.
As a metaphor of what Jacob Zuma and his friends have done to South Africa though – pretty good.