Here’s a map of the Terry Fox Drive extension:

The area inside the road’s arc will be developed; outside the arc, the land will be left in its natural state.

Ottawa is a surprisingly good place for turtles, which are still found in awfully built-up areas of the city (see, for example, Michelle Tribe’s photo of a Blanding’s Turtle at Mud Lake, right). They also get quite a bit of positive press, thanks in no small part to a local turtle rescue that pioneered the use of turtle crossing signs. Hopefully, road mortality won’t wipe them out — which is precisely the worry about the Terry Fox Drive extension.

Toronto has other SF conventions — in particular, Ad Astra, which takes place in early spring. (The next one is scheduled for April 9 to 11, 2010.)

Though I’m a lifelong SF fan, I’ve never actually been to a convention, despite thinking about it really hard every now and then. Will have to rectify that at some point.

There’s growing evidence that homework may hinder rather than help academic performance especially in early grades, and school boards have been revisiting their approach to it. But parents remain conflicted about how much their kids should do and how hard to push them — trying to balance a desire to see their child succeed against homework hostilities at the kitchen table.

While a survey by the Canadian Council on Learning found that the majority of parents felt that homework enhanced learning, more than 60 per cent said it was a source of stress in their homes. Many parents also quietly admit to offering more than just moral support — in a U.S. survey released last year, 43 per cent of parents (dads more often than moms) admitted that they had done their children’s homework.

One gets the impression that, when you factor in homework and extracurricular activities (team sports, music lessons, what have you), children today are expected to work longer hours than their parents.

The ejecta plume from the LCROSS upper stage 20 seconds after impact (NASA).

The big news in space last week was the announcement that the LCROSS probe, which along with its Centaur upper stage rocket smacked into Cabeus crater on October 9, has discovered water on the Moon.

Now, this isn’t exactly a surprise: the possibility of water is precisely why NASA sent LCROSS there. The idea was that water ice might persist in craters near the lunar poles that never saw sunlight. Water molecules don’t tend to survive on the lunar surface: sunlight tends to break water molecules apart. So the plan with LCROSS was to smack something big — i.e., the Centaur stage — into a crater they thought might contain water and then analyse the ejecta plume spectroscopically (before LCROSS itself crashed). The data revealed at least 100 kilograms of water vapour — which principal investigator Tony Colaprete called “a significant amount.”

Coverage: Astronomy; Bad Astronomer; Sky and Telescope; Universe Today.

The presence of water is everything from the perspective of setting up a permanent base: if there’s water on the Moon, you might not have to take it with you. It has implications not only for potable water, but also for generating fuel for fuel cells and rocket propellants: water ice from craters in permanent shadow could be electrolicized using power generated by solar cells set up on nearby mountains in permanent sunlight. It’s why talk of a permanent lunar base has generally assumed that it would be at the poles — because such talk assumed the existence of water at the poles. That may no longer be merely an assumption.

Bob’s referring to the debate over Sharp Park, a golf course owned by the City of San Francisco (but is located in nearby Pacifica) that serves as habitat for the endangered San Francisco garter; I covered the story on Gartersnake.info here and here.

But he’s also talking about the impact that feral and domestic cats have on local wildife populations, which has been an increasing concern among conservationists. No matter how tame, cats are born hunters; if left outside, they will do what they do best. And with 100 million cats in the United States alone, that adds up to a lot of dead wildlife. From the fact sheet Facts on Cats and Wildlife: A Conservation Dilemma:

Observation of free-ranging domestic cats shows that some individuals can kill over 1,000 wild animals per year, although smaller numbers are more typical. Some data suggest that free-ranging cats living in small towns kill an average of 14 wild animals each per year. Rural cats kill many more wild animals than urban or suburban cats do. Several studies found that up to 90 percent of free-ranging domestic cats’ diet was wild animals, and less than 10 percent of rural cats killed no wild animals.

See also the American Bird Conservancy’s fact sheet (PDF), which cites some specific, regional studies.

It’s a similar story in the U.K., where a study on cat predation estimated that approximately nine million British cats were catching something like 85 to 100 million wild animals a year — 52 to 63 million mammals, 25 to 29 million birds, and 4 to 6 million reptiles and amphibians. (This page disputes that study’s findings.)

The bottom line is that cats can kill an awful lot of small wild animals. Because they’re looked after by humans, they’re not subject to the same population pressures that wild predators are, which means that lots of cats can predate upon a given wildlife population. In other words, high cat population densities lead to low densities of wild animals.

Cat predation on birds get the most press, because birds have better P.R. No one gives a damn if a local population of meadow voles gets exterminated, but we generally want birds around — especially the small songbirds that make people go “AW!” and cats go “NOM!”

But cats also bring home frogs, toads and lizards — and they certainly bring home snakes. A friend of mine was once handed a Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi) that was brought home by a neighbourhood cat. Think about it: to a cat, a snake is basically a string that moves of its own accord. How can a cat resist that? But the cat may play with a snake it’s caught without killing it outright, giving it a chance at actually surviving if the cat’s people show up in time.

Our own cats have been absolutely transfixed by our snakes, at least while they were young. Fortunately, after a few years of daily exposure, the cats grew out of it. Without that kind of constant exposure, I can’t see a cat ever getting blasé about encountering a snake. I do know of one situation where a cat-and-snake owner brought a snake face-to-face with the cat; the snake promptly bit the cat on the nose, after which the cat was not at all interested in snakes. I wouldn’t recommend that kind of treatment.

Cats aren’t the only threat to wild snake populations, and humans certainly have done plenty of other things to put snakes (to say nothing of other animals) at risk, but keeping your cat indoors — particularly if you’re in a rural or suburban area where your cat might actually encounter wildlife — is one of the best things you can do on behalf of snake conservation.

Photos by Peter (pl1602), David (chickenboots) and Robert Huffstutter used in accordance with their Creative Commons licences.

Pete Conrad at the Surveyor 3 spacecraft; the Apollo 12 lunar module is in the background. November 20, 1969. Credit: Apollo 12 crew/NASA.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 12, the second manned lunar landing. Each Apollo mission had its own memorable highlights, and 12 had plenty: not least of which the fact that the Saturn V rocket was struck twice by lightning during the launch. It was also the first precision landing, with the lunar module coming down within 200 metres of Surveyor 3.

Apollo 12’s lunar module pilot, Alan Bean, turned himself into a full-time painter after his retirement from NASA. He’s been painting scenes from the Apollo mission for years, incorporating bits of his uniform and moon dust into his paintings, and texturing them with his boot prints. An exhibition of his work opened at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in July and runs until January 13, 2010; I bought the accompanying book, Alan Bean: Painting Apollo (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com), which reproduces his work since 1982. It’s interesting stuff, not at all photorealistic — an honest attempt to portray in paint what he saw and experienced, and definitely a change from the books that collect Apollo-era photos that have been published this year.

Miles O’Brien (the former CNN space reporter) has this video of Alan Bean giving a tour of the exhibition:

Here’s a New York Times article about Bean and his art from last June.

The spiral arms of the galaxy Messier 83, 15 million light years away, as seen by the Hubble’s new Wide Field Camera 3, installed last May. What you’re looking at — blue open clusters, red emission nebulae — is the formation of new stars on a massive scale. More at Astronomy Now, Bad Astronomy and Universe Today. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

Hold on — Torosaurus? How does that work? I thought Triceratops had a solid frill and Torosaurus had an open frill. How could Torosaurus be the same species with those big holes? The answer is metaplastic bone. From the ScienceDaily article:

[T]he so-called metaplastic bone on the heads of horned dinosaurs grows and dissolves, or resorbs, throughout life like no other bone, Horner said, and is reminiscent of the growth and loss of horns today in elk and deer. In earlier studies, Horner and Goodwin found dramatic remodeling of metaplastic bone in Triceratops, which led to their subsequent focus on dome-headed dinosaurs.

“Metaplastic bones get long and shorten, as in Triceratops, where the horn orientation is backwards in juveniles and forward in adults,” Horner said. Even in older specimens, such as the fossil previously named Torosaurus, bone in the face shield resorbs to create holes along the margin.

Metaplastic bone presumably also explains the morphological changes in the pachycephalosauria. Bottom line: dinosaur bone development may well have been quite different from what we’re used to — which makes figuring out which dinosaur was which from the bones a lot harder.

(Illustration by Wikipedia user ArthurWeasley.)

Even with all the activity, and despite some awfully close results, all incumbents were re-elected. Here are the results (“x” marks an incumbent):

Mayor
Armstrong, Albert (x): 545 (61.2%, +199)
Harris, Keith: 346 (38.8%)

Seat 2
Poisson-Hodgins, Sylvia (x): 455 (51.7%, +30)
Tubman, Kirk: 425 (48.3%)

Seat 3
Richardson, Royce (x): 550 (62.5%, +220)
Duggan, Dan: 330 (37.5%)

Seat 6
Hodgins, Jim (x): 444 (50.5%, +9)
Coles, George: 435 (49.5%)

Voter turnout was 69.35 percent: 903 of 1302 voters on the list cast ballots. To me that seems awfully high for a municipal election. Spoilage ranged from 12 to 24 ballots — between 1.33 and 2.66 percent.

John Beimers, Sandra Murray and Frank Stafford were acclaimed to their council seats; Beimers is, I guess, the one new face on council, replacing Keith Harris (who ran for mayor).

NASA’s Ares I-X rocket on Launch Pad 39b at the Kennedy Space Center on Monday, Oct. 26, 2009. It launched Wednesday morning. Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.

The engineering test flight Ares I-X took place Wednesday morning. A lot of us were excited to see it, though real Ares launches are still years off. More on that in a moment. Meanwhile, here are collections of photos:

• NASA’s set on Flickr
• Spaceflight Now’s gallery of launch photos
• Universe Today’s gallery of launch photos
• The Big Picture’s Ares gallery

The fact that Ares and the Constellation program are still years away from operational status, despite the fact that the Shuttle fleet they’re designed to replace is supposed to be retired next year, is a basic problem of resources: NASA doesn’t have the funds to develop new space hardware and use existing space hardware at the same time, and developing new space hardware doesn’t exactly happen overnight. (Consider that there was only one U.S. spaceflight between Skylab 4 in 1973-74 and STS-1 in 1981 — a period of seven years. That was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which used surplus Apollo hardware.) We’re in for a long drought in U.S. manned spaceflight.

So last night, our male Okeetee corn snake decided, while being handled as his cage was being changed, that Jennifer’s hand looked awfully delicious …

What you see above is a feeding bite: he clamped on and did not let go. (Not voluntarily, anyway — it took some doing.) A defensive bite would have been a quick jab-and-release.

He did manage to draw blood, but as wounds go, this was pretty superficial — to the point where my first response to Jen’s announcement that he was biting her was to run and grab the camera. I know: I’m a real sweetheart. But if that doesn’t put a bite from a nonvenomous snake into perspective, I don’t know what will.

If this isn’t the world’s smallest model train, I don’t know what is: it’s a Z-scale (1:220) model of an N-scale (1:160) model train, to be put inside a storefront window on the Z-scale James River Branch. It’s not precisely to scale, but if it was, it’d be 1:35,200. This video shows how it’s done. Via Engadget.

Here’s a picture of Doofus, taken while I was messing around with my new lens. Not that the AF Nikkor 85mm f/1.8D is itself new per se: it first came out in 1988, and is old enough that its instruction sheet refers only to film cameras. But it’s relatively inexpensive (and even at that I got a reasonably good deal on a new lens via eBay) and it generates really good results. I’ve been thinking about a new lens for a while, but it’s taken me a while to make up my mind about which one to get first. Looking forward to taking pictures of something other than our cats with it.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been using the Canon PowerShot SD 780 IS (see previous entry), and not always when I should — i.e., at home, indoors, without a flash, in low light. Let me tell you: four years shooting nothing but digital SLRs really makes you forget how much noise is in an image generated by a compact camera with a tiny sensor in low light with high ISOs. Really, it’s an outdoor camera. I have to remind myself of that.