Pencils and engagement rings

Nearby Exoplanet Could Be Covered With Diamond
Using information about 55 Cancri e’s size, mass and orbital velocity, as well as the composition of its parent star 55 Cancri (located 40 light years away in the constellation Cancer) a research team led by scientists from Yale University created computer models to determine what the planet is most likely made of. They determined that 55 Cancri e is composed primarily of carbon (as graphite and diamond), iron, silicon carbide, and possibly some silicates. The researchers estimate that at least a third of the planet’s mass — the equivalent of about three Earth masses — could be diamond…“On this planet there would basically be a thin layer below the surface which will have both graphite and diamond,” Madhusudhan told Universe Today in an email.

55 Cancri e's host star is a mere 40.2 light years from Earth.

Back to the future of space exploration

In a dozen juvenile novels (that's novels for young people, not novels written when he was young), Robert Heinlein laid out a manifesto for the exploration and colonisation of the solar system. Arthur C. Clarke supposedly remarked that the Moon landings justified all science fiction to that date. Everyone expected colonies on Mars, generation ships etc. by 1985. But, for various reasons, the exploration of space has been left to unmanned vehicles, while human activity has stopped at the low earth orbit of the International Space Station.

(Speaking of unmanned vehicles, there is some blogger buzz – but no confirmation from NASA – that Voyager 1 has in fact finally left the solar system).

Reading NASA's press releases sometimes it does indeed seem that they just want to discover the effects of weightlessness on little tiny screws:

(Look! A legitimate Simpsons clip on YouTube!)

It may quiet the shades of Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov to learn that NASA is looking into the possibility of building a Gateway to the Moon at L-2 (one of the five Lagrangian points where the gravity of the Earth and the gravity of the Moon cancel each other out). And, as if that is not enough, they are also looking at the possibility of mining in the asteroid belt. All we need now is Delos D. Harriman telling us we have got to be believers.

What? Another One?

When I was at school, my English teacher once referred to Christopher Tolkien as publishing manuscripts from "out of a trunk in the attic". I thought this was an excessively cynical way of looking at The History of Middle Earth, and still do.

What would she make of the reconstruction of an incomplete long version of The Children of Húrin, a previously unheard of translation cum adaptation of the Völsunga saga in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (always reaching for the accents, that Tolkien chap) and now another another work which nobody has ever heard of before, The Fall of Arthur? Next it will be Robin Hood, then the Táin, the Mabinogion and so on. Pretty soon he should have the entire Cambridge ASNAC syllabus covered.

UPDATE: What do you mean? Of course I'll be getting it!

UPDATE 2: And the deluxe version.

More cricket pitches!

36-Dish Australian Telescope Array Opens for Business

The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is now standing tall in the outback of Western Australia, and will officially be turned on and open for business on Friday, October 5, 2012 . This large array is made up of 36 identical antennas, each 12 meters in diameter, spread out over 4,000 square meters but working together as a single instrument. ASKAP is designed to survey the whole sky very quickly, and astronomers expect to do studies of the sky that could never have been done before.

Just think. Thirty-six dish based cricket matches going on at once (at 40 secs):

The gentlemen at Parkes never actually used the dish for cricket, since despite its size it is actually a precision instrument.

Learning from the experts

It's funny that  they only hire total morons, who know nothing about liturgy, to organise the Papal Liturgies, especially when these liturgies are not even taking place in the Roman Rite. Consider the Pope's visit to the Basilica of St Paul of Harissa in Lebanon (Melkite I believe) and thank goodness the real experts are on hand to provide criticisms in the comments to this post:

Papal Liturgy and Music in the Maronite Rite.

Following the example of the locals

TRH the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recently spent some time in Brisbane on their way back from a tour of the Pacific Islands.

To be precise they spent 90 minutes.
Kate and Wills saved the best for last on their royal tour to Southeast Asia and the Pacific: 90 fun-packed minutes at Brisbane Airport. 
The international terminal has a multitude of attractions including five cafes, an RM Williams store, and countless seats on which young lovers can sit and stare out the window to watch the wondrous world of aviation unfolding on the tarmac.
Our heroes, Kel Knight and Kath Day-Knight, once did something similar.
At the airport, Kath and Kel learn all flights are grounded but they soon realise the airport is as much fun as a holiday. They spend two days at the airport - shopping in the stores, sleeping in the lounge, sneaking into the VIP area to steal food from the kitchens - and eventually realise they don't need to go on a plane to come home, and that if you're bored there are always the moving escalators.

Commander Bill King

A lot of the Daily Telegraph military obituaries are of blokes who did something fantastically heroic at Arnhem, then went home, became accountants and grew roses for the rest of their lives. Commander Bill King … not so much:
In August 1968 he set off from Plymouth to circumnavigate the world single-handed, in the junk-rigged Galway Blazer II. He described his odyssey as “a lonely venture intended to unwind the springs of tension which had never quite been eased out of my deepest being since submarine days”. In submarines he had lived on “a soaplike meat substitute” (Spam), the smell of which haunted him still, and on this voyage he subsisted on a diet of raisins; wholemeal biscuits; almond nut paste for protein; and, for vitamin C, cress grown in jars. This was supplemented by the occasional flying fish which landed on board.
Yummy.


The despotism of Gregorian chant

In advance of our wedding, my wife and I agreed that I would be responsible for making decisions about the liturgy. I reached for the Roman Gradual and started selecting chants. We hired a church musician to put together a choir (he wept for joy when we told him what we wanted) and who helped us with choosing some polyphony.

I was discussing it over the telephone with the priest who was to be chief celebrant. I said that the point is that there are different chants for pretty much every Mass in the Church's year and ritual life (one offs like weddings and so on)*. The effect is almost "it's the introit 'In voluntate tua', it must be the 27th Sunday per annum".  My idea was simply that we "plug in" to that. As I spelled this out, our minds tumbled to the same point. Since as a matter of fact this is not the liturgy of our parish, and not particularly the liturgy of the Church where we were getting married – in fact despite all the laws to the contrary it is very rare anywhere in the Church – this appeal to Catholicity was not completely firm.

*(This is not quite true, in fact there is a fair amount of repetition but not according to a pattern on a smaller scale than a year.)

In the end of course we stuck with what I had planned. You have to pick something and it might as well be good. And for another thing I liked the idea of showing what was possible.

What is not always acknowledged is that there is something rather foolish about simply adding a Gregorian element to a musical pick 'n' mix.  If you have an Introit, then it does not make much sense not to have a Graduale, an Offertorium, and a Communio as well. Gregorian chant is imperial in its tendencies. Newman would call it – not intending a rebuke – despotic.

Per Jeffrey Tucker at the Chant Café:
But you might say: people have been ignoring Mass propers for years. That is true enough. It is astonishing that you can flip through even the most recent editions of the all the mainline music resources from mainline publishers and find next to nothing that obeys the strictures inherent in the rite. That is a tragedy. But that’s just the point. The approach these people are using is unstable and based on demonstrably false premises.
And again at Crisis Magazine:
And how to decide between the hundreds of such songs in the mainstream pew resources? The answer, we are told, is to look at the theme of the week, which is given by the readings. Flip through the book and find a song that seems to match in some way. Check out the theme index. Then consider and anticipate the congregation’s reactions to the pieces of your choosing and give it your best shot. Sadly, nearly everything about this is wrong. In this model, the musicians are being charged with making the liturgy happen on a week-to-week basis. The Church struggles to provide liturgical books with deep roots in history, but the musicians show up and put five minutes of thought into making decisions about styles and texts that have a gigantic effect on the overall liturgical ethos. It is too much responsibility to put on their shoulders, and no one is competent to pull it off.
 …
The trouble is that hardly anyone does understand this. Most everyone today think that Gregorian chant is a style or a genre, one marked by a monkish solemnity. They figure that, given that, it is enough to sing Pange Lingua on Holy Thursday, or sprinkle in a bit of Latin during Lent. Surely that is enough. But this characterization completely misses the point. Gregorian chant’s distinct contribution is that it is the most complete and robust body of music for the ritual of the Roman Rite that elevates and ennobles the word of God in the liturgy itself. The point is not to sing chant but to sing the liturgy itself, meaning the text that is assigned to be sung at the place in the Mass where this particular text is intended to be sung. The notes are important but secondary to the word, which is the word of God.
(My emphasis). And now comes the pitch:
But thanks mostly to the efforts of the Church Music Association of America, we now have the beginnings of a growing repertoire of music that is both accessible to parishes and seeks to do what the Church intends with regard to the liturgy, which is to say that these new resources set the liturgical word to music. There are new books of sung propers appearing every few months, books such as the Simple English Propers (2011) and the Parish Book of Psalms. 

Start with it in English and get people away from the hymn sandwich. Then you can move to the Gradual.

The Prince of Wales, the German Bishops, and Cardinal Newman

The Daily Telegraph in London is held up as a conservative newspaper. It is far more conservative than any Australian daily. And yet in a piece dated 3rd October 2012 (£1m from those who die without wills passes to Prince Charles's estate) we find this:
More than £1 million has passed to the Prince of Wales’s Duchy of Cornwall estate in the last six years from people who died without making a will or having an heir, latest accounts show. Under powers dating back to medieval times, the Duchy is entitled to all unclaimed property and estates left when someone dies in Cornwall, in an arrangement known as bona vacantia. In the last financial year alone, £552,000 passed to the Duchy under the ancient law, which was put in place when the Duchy was created by Edward III in 1337 for his son and heir, Edward, the Black Prince.
Note the oogedy boogedy of "dating back to medieval times" and all that crap about the Black Prince. This is not some part-time hack. The author is Gordon Rayner "Chief Reporter". Note the sense that this is all something rather strange and peculiar. It may not help matters to observe that bona vacantia is in fact a concept far older than the Middle Ages, something that can be confirmed by the obscure modern practice of looking things up on Google.
In most of Britain, the estates of people who die without making a will, and who have no obvious heirs, go to the Government.
Well that is not quite the legal way of expressing it. But to say that the property of those who die intestate goes to the Crown would undermine Rayner's snark – and what on earth does he think should happen to such property? To give this process in the rest of the UK its proper legal name, bona vacantia, would blow the gaff completely.

The Telegraph, remember, is a conservative newspaper.

Speaking of ignorance of history, the German bishops came in for some flack recently for their own means of raising revenue. I always assumed it was due to some sort of tidy minded Teutonicism that in Germany the state levies a special church tax which is then passed on to your religion. You can reduce your taxes by declaring that you are not the member of any church. Naturally the Catholic Church regards making such a declaration as a formal defection and so anyone who does this is forbidden the sacraments. And, as night follows day, people are complaining.

The thought that perhaps the Church should look to raise money some other way has occurred to at least one prominent expatriate German Catholic.
Once liberated from material and political burdens and privileges, the Church can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she can be truly open to the world. She can live more freely her vocation to the ministry of divine worship and service of neighbour.
The Supreme Pontiff, Servant of the Servants of God, may in fact be on to something. That assumes he was talking about the church tax. The German Bishops don't seem to think so.
"Clearly, someone withdrawing from the Church can no longer take advantage of the system like someone who remains a member," [Archbishop Zollitsch] said at a September 24 press conference as the bishops began a four-day meeting in Fulda. "We are grateful Rome has given completely clear approval to our stance."
But I was struck by the Bishops' defence of the practice. It is nothing to do with efficiency.
In its decree, the bishops' conference said the tax was designed to compensate for state seizures of Church property.
This reminded me of a satirical passage in Newman's Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), Lecture 6 'Prejudice the Life of the Protestant View' § 4. Newman is talking of a typical English Protestant abroad in Catholic Europe who
 …gets up at an English hour, has his breakfast at his leisure, and then saunters into some of the churches of the place; he is scandalized to have proof of what he has so often heard, the infrequency of communions among Catholics. Again and again, in the course of his tour, has he entered them, and never by any chance did he see a solitary communicant:—hundreds, perhaps, having communicated in those very churches, according to their custom, before he was out of his bedroom. But what scandalizes him most, is that even bishops and priests, nay, the Pope himself does not communicate at the great festivals of the Church. He was at a great ceremonial, a High Mass, on Lady Day, at the Minerva; not one Cardinal communicated; Pope and Cardinals, and every Priest present but the celebrant, having communicated, of course, each in his own Mass, and in his own chapel or church early in the morning. Then the churches are so dirty; faded splendour, tawdriness, squalidness are the fashion of the day;—thanks to the Protestants and Infidels, who, in almost every country where Catholicism is found, have stolen the revenues by which they were kept decent.
Stolen the revenues by which they were kept decent. A pity they can't just give the properties back.

Sung Mass with the Benedictines of St Louis in 1964

(From Chant Café)

Speaking of Dom Guéranger and the EBC, this is a video of Mass at St Louis Priory – now St Louis Abbey – in 1964.

American local TV stations still broadcast significant religious events. I once saw a recording of the installation of a Bishop of a diocese in the Western USA, broadcast on one of the local channels. This included an embarrassing incident where it turned out the Apostolic Mandate – absolutely necessary unless those involved wanted to get excommunicated – had been left in someone's car which was parked in a distant location. Since the major parties all had radio mikes, if you turned up the volume of the TV you could hear the panicked discussions.

From about 4:40 in the video below is an interview of the then Prior of St Louis Fr Columba Cary-Elwes. St Louis was founded from Ampleforth (hence the English accent) and my recollection is that Fr Columba came back to Ampleforth and was still alive when I was at the school. Ampleforth was founded (at several removes) from Westminster. I like the deadpan way Fr Columba handles the matter of the reformation at 9:00. "This is the famous Westminster Abbey? But that's not still a Benedictine Monastery is it?" "No, I'm afraid not. Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth the First have changed all that."

Solesmes and an English Benedictine

I have mentioned the Graduale Triplex before. It is one of many books of chant produced by the community at Solesmes. Charles Cole posts photographs of the place where these books were produced, and presumably still are: Atelier de Paléographie Musicale.

Judith Champ in William Bernard Ullathorne : A different Kind of Monk (Gracewing 2006) – about the monk of Downside who was an early missionary in Australia and later the first Archbishop of Birmingham – writes about Ullathorne's visit to Rome after leaving Australia to give an account of the Church there. Downside (like Ampleforth) is part of the English Benedictine Congregation or EBC which traces its origins back to English monasticism before the Reformation. The English monasteries on the continent were founded by refugees from English monasteries closed down by the reformers. When they were closed in their turn during the French Revolution ("closed" does not do justice to the violence involved in both cases) the monks came back to England bearing a tradition not unlike liturgical tradition itself.

On the way to Rome Ullathorne met Prosper Guéranger – the founder of Solesmes.
Dom Guéranger went to Rome, in 1837, to ask the Vatican for official recognition of Solesmes as a benedictine community. Rome not only granted Dom Guéranger's request, but on its own initiative raised Solesmes from the status of priory to that of an abbey making it the head of a new Benedictine Congregation de France, successor to the Congregations of St. Maurus and St. Vanne as well as the more venerable and ancient family of monasteries belonging to Cluny. On July 26, Dom Guéranger made his solemn profession in the presence of the abbot of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.
"Dom Guéranger's Restoration" 
Champ remarks that Ullathorne still remembered the meeting with affection and pride, many years later, in a letter to the Abbess of Stanbrook.
I was the first professed monk, he told me, he had ever seen. I therefore claim some interest in the monks and nuns of Solesmes, who are his children, and I shall be obliged if you will tell the abbess and community that I claim an interest in them and their prayers, as I also claim some right to thank them for their tender and sisterly care of the Abbess of Stanbrook.
Quoted in Judith Champ, William Bernard Ullathorne : A different Kind of Monk (Gracewing 2006), chapter 2, p. 63. 
The first professed monk the founder of Solesmes had ever seen. Remember that next time you hear some trad make a crack about "Every Bodily Comfort" or a sniffy remark about the vernacular in English monasteries.

Pity the poor commies

To be elected Pope it is not necessary to be a Cardinal, although only Cardinals may elect a Pope. The last time they elected someone not of their number – in the Conclave that elected Urban VI (born c.1318 reigned 1378-1389) — the consequences were not happy. You do not absolutely have to be a Cardinal to become Pope, but it certainly helps. George Weigel tells us how Karol Wojtyła became Cardinal-Archbishop of Kraków. Wojtyła (in case you didn't know) went on to be Pope John Paul II and an instrument in the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. He describes a conversation between the Polish regime's chief communist ideologue, Zenon Kliszko, and one of the few serving Catholic politicians. Weigel states that Kliszko was Marshall (or Speaker) of the Sejm (Parliament) but apparently at the time that was Czesław Wychech. According to Jonathan Kwitny in chapter 1 of Man of the Century, Kliszko was "minister of religious affairs" (lower case in original). (That link might not work since the New York Times has a delayed firewall: the same link should be the first result of this search). Anyway, Weigel:
In the late fall of 1963, Father Andrzej Bardecki, the ecclesiastical assistant at Tygodnik Powzechny [Universal Weekly, a Catholic newspaper], had a visitor. Professor Stanisław Stomma, head of a five-member Catholic micro-party permitted in the Sejm, discreetly asked Father Bardecki if they could take a walk on the Planty, the greensward that surrounds Kraków's Old Town and a pleasant place to talk while avoiding the secret police bugs in the Tygodnik Powzechny office. Once the two men were outside, Stomma told Bardecki that he had recently spoken with Zenon Kliszko about the logjam in filling the vacant archbishopric of Kraków. Kliszko, who did not lack ego, was very pleased with himself for having vetoed all seven names the Primate had proposed over the past year and a half. "I am waiting for Wojtyła," Kliszko said, "and I'll continue to veto names until I get him." Stomma had thanked the ideologist for sharing this confidence, but had had to work hard to keep himself from laughing. Wojtyła was precisely the candidate Stomma, his fellow Catholic parliamentarians, and priests like Father Bardecki were quietly hoping for…
Then there was the warden at the prison in Gdańsk, who at the time had a distinguished prisoner. Father Piotr Rostworowski, abbot of the Camaldolese monastery outside Kraków, was doing time for helping smuggle Czech citizens across the Czech-Polish border. When Karol Wojtyła's nomination as archbishop was publicly announced, the warden paid his prisoner a visit and gloated over the nomination. This was "very good news," he told the abbot; Wojtyła was exactly the man the comrades wanted. Four months later the warden, on another visit to the abbott, took a different line. "Wojtyła has swindled us!" he cried.
George Weigel, Witness to Hope, Harper-Collins, 1999, chapter 6, pp. 184-6. 
I thought of that story when I read a post by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith at the Catholic Herald. It was about the 'White March' of 17th May 1981 organised as a show of support for the Pope after the attempt on his life on four days earlier.
People did go to huge Communist rallies in the old days, but they went, one rather suspects, because they felt they had to, rather than because they wanted to. But for John Paul, people turned out with a will. It was all organised by word of mouth, and all organised in defiance of the state. And those were the people I felt sorry for – the members of the Politburo, the high ups in the Polish United Workers’ Party: Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s henchmen. How their hearts must have sunk when they saw half a million people turn out to pray for their Pope. For at that moment they must have seen that it was all quite hopeless, that Communism was doomed, that it never had, and never would, command people’s affections in the way the Church and Karol Wojtyla so effortlessly did.

Our cousins across the Tasman

I daresay many Americans are unaware that Australia fought in the Vietnam War. I daresay many Australians are unaware that the Kiwis went too.

On 12th May 1968 the Australian 1st and 3rd Battalions flew to an area about 30 miles north of Saigon. They were setting up a "fire support base" codenamed Coral for an area of operations codenamed Bondi (the names all came from Sydney beaches). This was the Australian contribution to an American operation designed to draw the communists into battle in an area through which they passed to attack the South Vietnamese capital. The landing was chaotic, as recounted by Paul Ham in Vietnam: The Australian War (note "Dustoff" was the radio call-sign in the Vietnam War for an airborne evacuation of a casualty, typically by helicopter).
Meanwhile, Captain Michael Bindley did his best to coordinate the landing zone. Yet nerves frayed. Soldiers noticed a 'funny' — as in strange — atmosphere so unlike the usually boisterous mood. Tempers flared in the intense heat. One private threatened to shoot another, after a dispute, and a New Zealander collapsed from heat exhaustion. When a US observer asked why the man's buddies had not called a dust-off, Bindley replied, "I can't explain New Zealanders to you, but I'm sure he'll be all right."

After your Master's in doodling

A leftie Australian news/opinion site called (naturally) Independent Australia just published a Facebook interview by Carl Scrase of independent musician Brian Ritchie.

It is all screen grabs of a Facebook conversation and since FB changes its design every 5 minutes I haven't a clue how to find the original. Scrase – who was involved in Occupy Melbourne – mentioned to his interviewee an essay about "Musical Improvisation and the Complex Dynamics of Group Creativity". Ritchie replied "This interests me because I am starting a Ph.D. on improvising soon." A white person twofer: pointless academic study and jazz. To be fair to Ritchie it is Scrase who comes across as the complete prat.