Prince Harry and IceCube

by William H. Benson

December 19, 2013

     On Friday the thirteenth Prince Harry arrived at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. The twenty-nine-year old British army helicopter pilot joined his six UK teammates as they gathered around the mirror-like chrome sphere set atop the red and white striped pole. “It will just prove to everybody,” Harry said, “that there’s so much that can be made possible when you think that nothing else is left.”

     His team wore red parkas and was one of three teams that raised funds for Walking with the Wounded, a charity that supports wounded servicemen and women. The United States team wore blue, and the Australian and Canadian team wore yellow. At first, the three teams raced, but then part-way through they gave up the competition and decided to cooperate and enjoy the 208 mile course.

     For over a week the three teams’ members walked across Antarctica’s ice on skis, while holding a pole in each hand and pulling a sled that contained food, supplies, and tent. Because the elevation at the South Pole is at 9301feet high, the air is thin, the average daily high temperature this month is -15.7 °F, and the wind blows strong every day. Most of that elevation, nearly two miles thick, is compressed ice.

     What did Prince Harry see once he arrived at the South Pole? First, he saw a settlement of no more than 200 people, mainly scientists: glaciologists, astrophysicists, and climatologists. He saw the unheated 164 foot wide geodesic dome, built in 1975, that holds the town’s supplies and fuel, and he saw the modern rectangular box-like building that stands on stilts above the icepack, and where the men and women live and work and relax.

     He saw the South Pole Telescope, first directed at the stars in 2007, and also he saw the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the South Pole’s most amazing attraction. The Observatory is a three-year-old telescope that is aimed not at the stars above, but at the ice underneath.

     Scientists drilled eighty-six holes deep into that ice, almost to bedrock. They then dropped a string of sixty Digital Optical Modules, each the size of a basketball, down each hole to depths of between 4750 to 8000 feet. The 5160 DOM’s detect the faint blue light that is emitted whenever a neutrino from outer space strikes an oxygen atom, part of the water molecule. The ghost-like neutrino is without electrical charge and mass, and passes through everything it touches, including planet Earth.

     For months, the astrophysicists watched but failed to find any neutrinos, and so they looked at the data again. On November 26, 2013, Professor Lutz Kopke announced that “we have found neutrinos that were very probably generated in the vast expanses of outer space.” He and his fellow scientists  discovered twenty-eight high-energy neutrinos that passed through IceCube between 2010 and 2012.

     The scientists believe that the neutrinos were created “in the proximity of supernovas, black holes, pulsars, active galaxies, or other extra galactic phenomena.” These cosmic accelerators drove the neutrinos outward in all directions. A reporter explained that IceCube is like a camera that develops “a long-exposure photograph” of what once occurred in deep space. Rather than seeing photons of light, it detects the neutrinos, the negative image of that light.

     Astrophysics is a science that promises future revelations, as well as exciting and intriguing glimpses into other galaxies, and into other worlds within our own Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers continue to discover other planets that revolve around their own sun, and their goal is to find a planet situated at that ideal distance from its sun, like Earth, neither too hot nor too cold, a place where plant and animal life could evolve.

     So back from the Afghanistan war are Prince Harry, a member of Britain’s royal, and his fellow warriors, some who walked on Antarctica’s ice with a prosthesis, or who saw none of it because they were blinded by a bomb. Harry was truly walking with the wounded. They met the scientists at the frozen South Pole, a place where neither native plant or animal lives, on a continent that receives so little precipitation that geographers label it a desert.

     Warriors and scientists have little to say to each other because they each hold different mindsets, distinct and divergent points of view of how to see and relate to the world. A ruler would not send his scientists to the battlefield, and he would not ask his warriors to conduct scientific experiments. But for a few hours last weekend, they met and talked about deep space, neutrinos, and a space observatory located in a dense block of ice a mile or two below their feet.

     Perhaps Harry and his team will stay long enough to celebrate the South Pole’s summer solstice on December 21, the day when summer begins, when the shadows are the shortest. 

Human Migration

by William H. Benson

December 5, 2013

     Sixty thousand years ago perhaps as few as “a couple of hundred people,” members of the species Homo Sapiens, departed “humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa,” and ventured out of Africa and crossed into Arabia. Some of their progeny walked north into Europe, but others headed east into Asia and down to Australia, or crossed the Bering Sea and walked south into North and South America. Now, after 2,500 generations, human beings claim the Earth.

     The National Geographic writer Paul Salopek calls this epic journey “by far our greatest voyage.” He writes that those first African nomads took with them: “complex language, abstract thinking, a compulsion to make art, and a genius for technological innovation.” They thrived everywhere.

     On occasion they met up with other species of hominins, such as the “Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, and the Denisovans, who weren’t quite like us.” They may have killed off or may have swallowed whole those other species into their own population. Salopek writes that “Outside Africa, modern human populations seem to contain as much as 2.5 percent of Neanderthal DNA.”

     This year Salopek began a 21,000 mile walk that will retrace man’s first migration. From Africa he will walk north to Turkey, east to Tajikistan, south into India, then north through China, and thereafter  he will ferry across the Bering Sea, walk the full length of the west coasts of North and South America, and finish at Tierra del Fuego, Chile’s southern point. He claims he will walk for the next 7 years, along with two camels, and you can read of his venture in National Geographic‘s December 2013 edition.

     Human beings migrate. They move. They do so for reasons: wanderlust, the need to see and experience other lands, or because they are driven out of their home, or they see opportunity elsewhere.

     The Pilgrims and the Puritans fled England because of Archbishop Laud’s persecution of those outside of the Church of England’s good graces, and once settled in New England on the coast of North America, they constructed a new Plymouth and a new Boston.

     So ubiquitous are human beings across planet Earth though that when those English people arrived, there were people already here, the First Peoples or the Native Americans or the Indians, and they resented the Englishmen’s claim upon land that they, these natives, had lived upon for generations.

     In 1672, an Indian chief named King Philip attacked, terrorized, and burned down hundreds of New England towns in order to pry the English from their land. They killed some 10 percent of the English population in New England that year, but through sheer force of will, the English prevailed. It is a fact of human history that displaced peoples feel resentment when driven from their native lands.

     Once the Europeans arrived on North America’s coast, they bumped into the tribes living there, and once those tribes moved west, they in turn bumped into other tribes. One writer explained that the migration process resembled an opening shot in a game of pool. The cue ball hits the point ball, and all the other balls scatter. The Cheyenne Indians’ ancient home was in the forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota, but tribes from the east pushed them onto the Great Plains where they adapted and thrived.

     In North America, in the twentieth century, two groups of people moved from the south to the north. First, numerous families of African-Americans left the fields in the segregated southern states to find work and jobs in the factories in the northern cities, such as in Chicago and Detroit. Then, the citizens of the United States of Mexico crossed the border, and here in the United States of America they found work and homes and opportunities that did not appear in Mexico.

     Displaced peoples do not take back their ancient homelands, but the one exception is Israel. Zionism succeeded in its goal to restore David and Solomon’s kingdom of ancient Israel in Palestine for the Jewish people. Israel is a miracle, but its dark side is how the Israelis mistreated the Palestinians. Once Israel declared its independence in May 1948, Lydda’s Palestinian citizens fled and settled in Jordan where they exist in miserable settlements, as a people without land and homes.

     In Palestine or what became Israel, one witnesses the seesaw of human migration.

     In Syria, the war has precipitated a massive migration into Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. According to the United Nations, “Syrian refugees now total more than 2.1 million, just 300,000 one year ago.” The New York Times reported last week that “government and organizations are quietly preparing for the refugee crisis to last years.” The refugee is the most destitute of all migrants because they migrate not by choice but by necessity.

     After 60,000 years and 2,500 generations, Homo Sapiens have conquered Earth and adapted to its heat and cold, to its blizzards and tornados, and wherever they settle they fight and struggle to maintain ownership of their land.

Rex and Rose Mary Walls

by William H. Benson

November 21, 2013

     Rex Walls was a character. Brash, loud, full of opinions, and convinced that he knew all that needed knowing, he stormed his way through life. When his daughter, Jeannette, then only four, burned her stomach when cooking some hotdogs, Rex got into a shouting match with the doctor, and then took her home. When attending mass, Rex would shout blasphemous words at the priest, embarrassing his wife and four kids. He was able to talk himself into a job as an electrician anytime and anywhere, but he could never keep the job once the supervisor gave him instructions.

     On the plus side, he was intelligent, a great reader, accomplished in math and science and technology, but on the negative side, he was an alcoholic, a womanizer, and was paranoid, convinced that the FBI was after him. He never paid his bills. When the landlord wanted the rent money, Rex would “skedaddle,” and move on. The family “had 27 addresses in five years.”

     Rose Mary Walls was patient, calm, and nonchalant, despite her husband’s chaotic temperament. She treated her kids kindly; there were no rules and no punishments. On the negative side, she was a dreamer, who believed herself a great artist and novelist, but she was so oblivious to her kids’ needs that she refused to prepare meals. Her attitude was, “why prepare a meal when its gone in thirty minutes, when a work of art will last forever?” So she painted all day and hoarded piles of junk.

     One day Jeannette, then in elementary school, ate a stick of margarine, the only thing in the refrigerator. When Rose Mary asked her why, Jeanette explained, “because I was hungry, mom.”

     The family finally settled into a shack at 93 Little Hobart Street in Welch, West Virginia, Rex’s hometown. There was no plumbing, other than a yellow bucket, and very little coal for the furnace, but there was an abundance of snakes, rats, cats, dogs, and Rosemary’s junk that piled up everywhere. Rex drank all the time, and would disappear for days at a time. As the house deteriorated, so did the family.

     At school, Jeannette was so hungry that she rooted in the garbage, eating what the other students had thrown away: a half-eaten apple, part of a sandwich, or a pickle. She and her two sisters, Lori and Maureen, and her brother, Brian, were starving skinny urchins, but Rose Mary gained weight. One day they discovered why; they caught her eating a chocolate bar.

     Once Lori graduated from high school, she bought a one-way ticket to New York City and escaped the family’s chaos, and Jeannette followed a year later. Once there, Jeannette found work and a room to rent, finished high school, and graduated from Barnard College. She took a job as a column writer, and encouraged Brian and Maureen to also come to New York City.

     Dad and mom followed. The four kids tried to help their parents, but it was hopeless. Eventually, Rex and Rose Mary were homeless, squatters who lived in an abandoned building. One evening, Jeannette was driving to a party and saw her mom pulling food and junk out of a dumpster. Rex died at fifty-nine, after consuming “four packs of cigarettes and two quarts of booze since he was thirteen.”

     In 2005, Jeanette published her book, The Glass Castle, a memoir of her life with Rex and Rose Mary, and today Jeanette and her husband live on an acreage in Virginia. For Rose Mary, Jeanette built a cottage on her property, and there her mother lives with her dogs and cats. A reporter from the New York Times went to interview Rose Mary last spring, and came away appalled.

     “The stench of cat urine was an almost-physical entity, pushing against the piles of garbage and crusted-over cat food in myriad dishes. One room was so filled with junk that it was impossible to enter. Rose Mary’s light blue T-shirt was heavily stained, as were her bluejeans. The filth, the stink, the boxes, and the piles were like a force field separating her from the world.”

     Jeannette commented, “That was nothing to the smell I grew up with.”

     Hollywood wants to convert The Glass Castle into a movie, and “Jennifer Lawrence was recently announced to play Jeannette Walls.”  

     Several years ago, Jeannette invited her mom and siblings to celebrate Thanksgiving with her and her husband. When they were ready to gather at the table and eat, Brian looked at the dishes and said, “You know, it’s really not that hard to put food on the table if that’s what you decide to do.”

     In America that is so evident. Supermarkets are everywhere, and jobs are plentiful, despite the economists’ grim announcements. Because we live in America, we have much to be thankful for.

     Rex Walls was lost to alcohol and dissipation, and Rose Mary was lost to her unfulfilled dreams of artistic greatness and her hordes of junk, and so their kids were caught in their parent’s crossfire and forced to eat margarine and root around in a garbage pail.

     Next Thursday, we will buy groceries, prepare a turkey, and celebrate Thanksgiving, but only if that it what we decide to do so.

Magic and Michael

by William H. Benson

November 7, 2013

     Magic and Michael. Both were from the Midwest, from the cold Rust Belt. Magic was from Lansing, Michigan, and Michael was from Gary, Indiana. When young, both moved to warm and sunny California. Magic played basketball better than anyone, perhaps better than Michael Jordan, and Michael danced and sang better than anyone, perhaps better than Elvis. Both achieved global fame.

     Magic Johnson played for the Los Angeles Lakers for thirteen seasons, won five national championships, the first in 1980, and the last in 1988, and was named the NBA’s most valuable player three times, in 1987, 1989, and 1990. On a basketball court, he dazzled everyone with his “Showtime” playing style, “a mix of no-look passes off the fast break, pin-point alley-oops from half-court, spinning feeds, and overhand bullets through triple teams.”

     The magic ended with a routine blood test, and the worst news. On November 7, 1991, 22 years ago today, at a press conference, Magic announced that he had tested positive for HIV and that he would retire from the Lakers, and from basketball. The news stunned his fans, his team, his coaches, and the nation. HIV was now infecting heterosexuals, not just gay men and drug addicts.

     An ominous and bleak future stretched before Magic Johnson, because in those days, HIV was considered a death sentence. If a person contracted the virus, he or she would get AIDS and die. There was little hope. Magic responded to the dire news in two ways: by taking a daily combination of multiple antiretroviral drugs that strengthened his body’s immune system, and by pursuing a second career in business. The drugs worked; he is alive today, and his business is successful.

     At the age of twenty-four, Michael Jackson achieved stunning success when he released his Thriller album on November 30, 1982. It has sold 42.4 million copies, the best-selling album ever, by far. The songs are tame compared to today’s heavier style. In one of them, Michael and Paul McCartney sing a cute duet, “The Girl is Mine,” but Vincent Price’s ghastly voice at the end of “Thriller” is haunting.

     “Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. And grisly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom. And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver, for no mortal can resist the evil of the thriller.” Price then finishes with a maniacal laugh from deep within an echo chamber.

      The thirteen-minute “Thriller” video features zombies who crawl from their graves to dance and spin with Michael. It still thrills to watch it.

     The 1980’s was Michael’s decade. If he would have stopped then, he could have achieved more, but the weirdness consumed him: the unrestrained spending habit without the income, the half a billion dollars of debt, the bills never paid, the promises to perform never honored, his failed marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, the child abuse accusations and criminal trial, the addiction to drugs to numb him and give him sleep, and the plastic surgeries to redesign his face.

     Jane Fonda confronted him about that. “I want you to stop now,” she said. “No more. Promise me you won’t go too far with this thing. Love yourself the way you are, for who you are.” But Jane could not reach him, and his looks deteriorated. Gaunt, ghostly-looking, and emaciated, he transmogrified himself into a freak, which reminds me of the joke kids say in November. “Halloween is over. You can take off your mask now.” For Michael that was impossible; his mask had become his face.

     Michael died June 25, 2009, four years ago, of cardiac arrest caused by a drug overdose when trying to get some sleep, to quiet the inner loop that ran again and again through his mind.

     Like Elvis, Michael still sells tickets, still packs auditoriums across the world, and people still love to hear him sing “Billy Jean,” watch him moonwalk, spin, and stand on his toes, but they are watching a video. John Branca, Michael’s estate attorney, says, “Michael sells more tickets now than when he was alive.” The magic that was in Michael still lives.

     Magic and Michael. Similar starts in life and both endowed with breath-taking talents, but their lives unfolded in such disparate ways. Michael never contracted HIV, but Magic did. Both turned to drugs: Magic to stay alive, and Michael to quiet the demons. Michael left behind three children: Prince, Paris, and Michael II. Magic also has three children, but he never held any of his babies over a balcony in Germany, like Michael did with his youngest. Despite HIV, Magic worked to maintain his balance and common sense, but Michael lost his sometime after “Thriller.”

Dialogue

by William H. Benson

October 24, 2013

     In recent days I came across a book published in 2010 with a thought-provoking title, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us. The author, an Englishman named Ferdinand Mount, argues in it that “so much about the society that is now emerging bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world.”

     In Mount’s book, he dares to equate our modern society to the Greeks of 400 B.C. and to the Romans of the days of Julius Caesar, and that we of the living have reverted to similar ideas and habits of those who died ages ago in Mediterranean Europe.

     Mount’s chapter titles include: “bath, gym, bedroom, kitchen, science, and religion.” Then, midway through the book he includes a chapter on “dialogue.” In it, Mount describes our human love for dialogue, for conversation, for argument, for talk, as did the ancient Greeks and the Romans.

     Mount lays out a series of sentences that would resound in any reader’s ears: “The dialogue is the key that opens up fortified intellectual positions and minds that are firmly closed.” “It has become unchallenged wisdom that all wisdom has to be challenged.” “The most abundant of all the fruits of affluence is conversation.” “The fashion for contestation is not just an accidental quirk of modern life. It is built into the nature of modernity.” “Everyone has the right to engage in the conversation.”

     Yes, those sentences would cause a reader to pause and think and even reflect upon them, but I question Mount’s argument that what occurred in Greece and Rome eons ago has returned to us. History does not always repeat itself, but on occasion it will rhyme. I say that in every generation certain human beings wanted to talk and question others, but many did not dare out of fear of their life. 

     Our modern society has decided that conversation is a good thing, that “the only way forward is through dialogue,” and that “getting around a table” and “getting down to serious talks” is crucial. A week ago Congress and the President agreed to reopen the government, but only after endless discussions, proposals, counter-proposals, and threats, until one side capitulated to the other.

     Thursday, October 24 is the day we remember the United Nations, an organization that asks countries’s leaders to engage in dialogue, rather than threaten war. The UN’s success is debatable.

     Education and talk are one in the same thing. The teacher or professor talks, and the students listen and respond back on exams or reports. In that dialogue between master and student, education happens, or so it is believed, will happen. Mount says that, “In the real world, most education turns out to be a mixture of injecting facts, and training in critical evaluation, a blend of information and skepticism.”

     Where marital counseling is a three-way dialogue, psychoanalysis is two-way. “Dialogue, “writes Mount, “is the dominant cure for all forms of addiction, and that talking really is good for our mental health,” an idea that extends back to Sigmund Freud. To that idea, another Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, responded, “Psychoanalysis is the disease that takes itself for a cure.”

     But the one arena where talk has multiplied exponentially is on the television and radio airwaves. Where once a nameless reporter shoved a microphone in front of a celebrity or politician and allowed him or her to express his or her arguments, now the interviewer speaks as much as the interviewee, often supplying words and ideas into the dialogue. I wonder, “who is interviewing who?”

     In ancient Greece one person dared to dialogue and to question all assumptions. His name was Socrates, and he frustrated so many by his questions and talk that the authorities executed him. His disciple, a philosopher named Plato, wrote down Socrates’s words in works he called “Dialogues.”

     According to Plato, wherever Socrates went, he caused havoc by asking difficult questions: “How do our acts of piety benefit the gods?” “How on earth can there be any justification for attributing divine sanction for our acts?” “How can we achieve anything resembling justice except by relentlessly examining our motives and our prejudices?”

     In ancient Greek, dialogue meant the flow of ideas “through speech,” and not “two-speech,” which would have been “duologue.” In other words, dialogue is the revelation of crucial and important ideas through the medium of language and conversation.

     Should we talk everywhere? Mount says “no,” not in areas where health and safety are paramount, such as in a surgical ward or in a jet’s cockpit. Should we talk to everyone? I say not to tyrants, madmen, or dictators. There is no conversation with them because they only understand power, not language. We should enjoy our conversations, our dialogues with others, because in their midst we feel human warmth, are connected and comforted.

Jim Ryun and the Mile

by William H. Benson

October 10, 2013

     Decades ago, one lap around a high school or college track equalled a quarter of a mile. A race on the straight in front of the stands was the 100 yard dash, and a half lap was 220 yards. Those two were the sprints. A single lap was the quarter mile run, and two laps was the half mile run. Those were the middle distance races. Four laps was the mile run, and eight laps was the two-mile run. Those were the long distance races. Along with the relays, that was “track” for generations of students.

     At some time in the recent past, those distances were converted over to the metric system. Oval tracks are now 400 meters long, which converts to 437.445 yards, just short of the former 440 yards. Now runners run meters: 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500, 3000, 5000, 10,000 or more. According to the International Association of Athletics Federation, records now are in meters, indoors and outdoors, men and women, with one exception: the mile run.

     The mile run captivated people’s imagination once a stop clock was brought to the track, and people began dreaming about running a mile in less than 4 minutes. Quarter-milers routinely run their race in less than 60 seconds, but for a runner to run a sub 4 minute mile means that his average for each lap must be less than 60 seconds, no small feat. Theorists believed it impossible, the limit of man’s ability.

     One hundred years ago, two Americans set the world record for the mile: 4:14.4 in 1913, and 4:12.6 in 1915. Glen Cunningham ran the mile for the Kansas University track team, and set the world record on June 6, 1934, at 4:06.8. At his prime he could not break the 4 minute barrier.

     Finally, on May 6, 1954, on the track at Oxford, an English medical student named Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile mark for the first time, and set a new world record at 3:59.4. Once he proved the feat achievable, others did the same. The Australian John Landy did it 46 days later.

     Ten years later, a running phenomenon began to catch people’s attention. His name was Jim Ryun, an East High School student in Wichita, Kansas, who had the body build of a distance runner: tall, thin, and long legs. Plus, he possessed an amazing kick on the final lap. Soon, he was breaking the nation’s high school records in the half-mile, 1500 meters, mile, and two mile.

      Then, at Kansas University in Lawrence, he continued breaking records. On July 17, 1966, when he was 19, he raced at Berkeley, California and set the world’s record in the mile at 3:51.3. Eleven months later, on June 23, 1967, he broke his own record at Bakersfield, California, running the mile in 3:51.1, and that record stood for the next 8 years.

     He was the fourth and the last American to own the world record in the mile.

     In October of 1968, Jim Ryun ran the 1500 meters at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Heavily favored to win, Ryun was not accustomed to Mexico City’s altitude of 7,300 feet. Plus, he had suffered a bout with mononucleosis in June. Throughout most of the race, Ryun ran at the back of the pack while the Kenyan, Kip Keino, ran a blistering pace at the front of the pack. On the final lap, Ryun kicked and sprinted ahead of the pack but was still 20 meters behind Kip at the finish line.

     Ryun ran a time of 3:37.8 and took the silver, and Kip Keino ran it in 3:34.9 and took the gold.

     Years later, when reflecting on that race, Jim said, “We had thought that 3:39 would win, and I ran under that. I considered it like winning a gold medal; I had done my very best, and I still believe I would have won at sea level.” Also, if the race had been a mile, or 1,609.334 meters, instead of 1500 meters, Ryun’s kick may have carried him past the Kenyan. An additional 109 meters may have helped.

     Jim Ryun was tripped at the beginning of the 1500 meter race at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, and was disqualified. Because he retired from competitive running after that, he never won an Olympic gold.

     In 1996, Kansas’s voters elected Jim to the U.S. House of Representatives, and he served there until 2006. He is now 66 years old, and lives in Lawrence, Kansas. Kip Keino is 73, and lives in Eldoret, Kenya. Both men have established schools and programs in their respective countries to encourage students to run. Roger Bannister became a neurologist at Pembroke College, Oxford, and is now 84.

     The current record holder for the mile is Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco, who ran the race on July 7, 1999 at a time of 3:43.13, almost 8 seconds faster than Jim Ryun’s world record, and over 16 seconds faster than Roger Bannister’s personal best.

     The mile is still there, but runners run it on 400 meter tracks. The stop watch is still there, and runners shave seconds and tenths of seconds off their times. Matching time to that distance is the competition. Someone will set a new world record in the mile run someday.