US Great White Fleet sails around the world 1907
In 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, the United States was thrust into the mainstream of international affairs and gained status as a world power, acquiring as possessions the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific, then Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. In 1904, the United States also established a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to ensure the safety of the Panama Canal, then under construction.
President Teddy Roosevelt stressed the upgrading and expansion of the US fleet in order to protect American interests abroad. From 1904 to 1907, American shipyards turned out 11 new battleships to give the Navy awesome battle capabilities. This was timely, for, in 1906, hostilities with Japan seemed possible; the Japanese navy dominated the Pacific and posed a potential threat to the Philippines.
USS Connecticut 1907
America's problems with Japan arose shortly after Roosevelt mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1906, ending the Russo-Japanese War. In that conflict the Russian fleet had been annihilated by the Japanese. But despite their triumphs over the Russians on the high seas, the Japanese failed to get all they felt they deserved at the peace table and blamed Roosevelt for it.In the same year, anti-Japanese feelings were sweeping California. The San Francisco Board of Education ordered the segregation of all immigrant and descendent Japanese school children.When the news of this reached Japan, violent anti-American protests broke out. Roosevelt managed to persuade the Board of Education to discontinue its segregation policy in exchange for an agreement with Japan to slow down its stream of immigrants into the United States.
USS Minnesota in Seattle
Roosevelt didn't want a break with Japan, as the United States was ill-prepared for war. Most of our battle fleet was concentrated in the Atlantic, and there were only a handful of armored cruisers on duty in the Pacific. In the event of war with Japan, this small contingent that made up the Asiatic Battle Fleet would have to abandon the Philippines for West Coast ports until the United States had strength enough to go on the offensive.
Thus, to impress upon Japan that the US Navy could shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Roosevelt ordered the Great White Fleet to sail around the world. Four squadrons of warships, dubbed the "Great White Fleet," were manned by 14,000 sailors and marines. All were embarking upon a naval deployment the scale of which had never been attempted by any nation before - the first 'round-the-world cruise by a fleet of steam-powered, steel battleships. The 43,000 mile, 14-month circumnavigation would include 20 port calls on six continents; it is widely considered one of the greatest peacetime achievements of the US Navy.
The idea of sending the new battle fleet around the world was the brainchild of the energetic Roosevelt, former colonel of the Rough Riders and one-time assistant secretary of the Navy.
USS Ohio decorated for the Empress of Japan
Assuming the presidency after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, Roosevelt brought to the White House a deep conviction that only through a strong navy could a nation project its power and prestige abroad.
With the exception of the few highest ranking naval officials, nobody was aware of Roosevelt's intention to send the fleet around the world. Even the President's own cabinet didn't know about it. All anyone knew was that the fleet would be steaming from the east to West Coast in a training exercise.
USS Pittsburgh in Venice, Italy
Once it was publicly announced that the fleet would sail around the globe, many invitations were made for the ships the visit foreign ports.The first leg of the cruise took the fleet into the South Atlantic. After stops in Trinidad and Brazil, and setting a course for the Straits of Magellan near the southern tip of So. America, the route went to California and Washington.
Ships would normally go into port and take on coal every two weeks. "Coaling ship" was an all hands evolution and a dirty job. It would take several days to coal a ship. Afterward, the crew would spend several more days cleaning the ship, inside and out, fore and aft, since coal dust settled everywhere.
The fleet visit up and down the West Coast was one week shy of three months. After a six-day layover at Pearl Harbor, where it was feted with luaus and sailing regattas, the great armada got underway for New Zealand, Australia, Formosa, China and Japan. Sailing into the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal, several stops in the Mediterranean and then back to Virginia.
The Navy realized that bigger displacements were needed to survive in rough seas, and the guns near the waterline were not usable, and decided to paint the ships gray instead of white.
USS Louisiana (12 inch diameter guns)
In 1855, John Roebling, the owner of a wire-rope company and a famous bridge designer, proposed a suspension bridge over the East River after becoming impatient with the Atlantic Avenue-Fulton Street Ferry. Roebling worked out every detail of the bridge, from its massive granite towers to its four steel cables. He thought his design entitled the bridge "to be ranked as a national monument… a great work of art."
towards manhattan. in background are several buildings which are also seen in myspace/ vodkaprozac5 (Municipal bldg (1913), Dome of NY World (1890) demolished 1955, Woolworth bldg)
Times Square 1930s
Greyhound bus 1936
Diesel locomotive. Burlington Zephyr.
I'd like to meet:
Jillian Barberie, Good Day LA ratings magnet and
Anyone who feels Deal or No Deal is boring.
Evolution of Snakes
The famous double helix shaped molecule DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) carries the genetic information necessary for replication and is universal to all organisms on the planet. For this reason it is often suggested that all life can be traced back to one common ancestor.
The dandelion is an asexual plant which flowers and releases pollen: produces seeds without their flowers being fertilized, it uses this form of vegitative reproduction. some biologists have suggested that it has recently switched from sexual reproduction. The common chimpanzee
is mankind's closest relation. Humans diverged from chimpanzees between five and seven million years ago.Snakes, like all living things, are the product of the process of evolution, which allowsspecies to change over time in response to environmental factors to produce entirely newspecies.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the originator of the idea of evolution by natural selection, in which those individual animalsthat possess superior survival traits tend to live longer than others and reproduce, inturn passing those same traits on to their offspring.
reptiles evolved from ancient amphibians; the shelled egg could belaid on land. several different families of ancient amphibians seemed to have beendeveloping characteristics at the time similar to those of reptiles.The continents were all joined into onelarge super-continent near the equator, known as Pangea ("all earth"), and even suchplaces as Antarctica and northern Canada had warm, humid climates with lush tropicalforests. Since then, the Pangea land mass has broken up into a series of "plates" whichmove slowly atop the earth's mantle, a process known as "plate tectonics".
"stem reptiles" are believed to be ancestral to all of the reptile families alive today.first appeared during the period immediately preceded the rise of thedinosaurs. During the next few million years, diverged into three distinct groups ofreptiles which are distinguished from each other by their differing skull structures.those that lacked any arches or openings between their skull bones went on to produce themodern turtles. another group developed a single arch in the skull, went on to evolve intothe modern mammals. The third group of reptiles, diversified to produce the extinctdinosaurs as well as the modern lizards and snakes. snakes are not direct descendants ofthe dinosaurs, they are evolutionary cousins of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. (Modernbirds are also distant evolutionary cousins of the modern snakes.)
the skull of modern crocodiles evolved while the legs and body were evolving toward greater walking ability, rather than toward greater swimming ability.
Specializations for land walking are mainly found in the forelimbs, including a ball-and-socket joint in the shoulder, like that of mammals. such indicates the forelimbs were held underneath the body, not out to the side as in living crocodilians.modern boas and pythons are usually considered to be the most primitive of the livingsnakes. snakes probably evolved from a family of lizards during the time of the dinosaurs.Snakes and lizards share a number of distinct features in the structure of their skull;both, for instance, possess a moveable quadrate bone at the back of the jaw, and both aremissing the quadratojugal bone at the rear of the skull.
In particular, the family of lizards, which includes the monitors, are very similar tosnakes in their skull structure. an ancient group of monitor-like lizards began to followa burrowing way of life, Over a millions of years, these burrowing lizards lost theirlimbs and their external ears--to help them burrow more easily--and also replaced theireyelids with a clear brille or spectacle to protect their eyes while digging. At about thetime that the dinosaurs reached their apex, one group of these burrowing lizards then gaveup its subterranean lifestyle and emerged to the surface, where they developed a newlegless mode of locomotion and rapidly diversified to invade a large number of ecologicalniches. Today we classify the various descendants of these legless lizards as snakes.
the covered eyes and the long limbless bodies allowed the first snakes to moveefficiently through water or wet marshy areas in search of prey. modern terrestrial snakesseem to have been relatives of the living boas and pythons. These were large heavy-bodiedsnakes with a rather primitive and heavy skull structure. The living boas and pythons allhave tiny clawlike toes protruding from either side of their cloaca--these are theremnants of the legs that their ancestors once had, and are thus an evolutionary relictying the snakes directly to their lizard ancestors.
After the dinosaurs disappeared, the boids were the dominant snake family on earth, andbecame widespread and very diverse. About 36 million years ago a group of smaller, fastersnakes appeared which competed for food and living space. These which we think of todayas "typical snakes" were unable to outcompete and remained a small group of snakes untilabout 20 million years ago, when the continental plates began to reach their presentpositions. As the tectonic plates moved away from the equator, the climate cooleddramatically. boas and pythons, unable to cope with the lower temperatures, disappearedfrom many areas and were greatly reduced in number and diversity. Today, the "typicalsnakes" make up over two-thirds of all the living species of snakes.
One family added a new twist to the snake's survival arsenal.About 15 million years ago,snakes began appearing which had a number of greatly enlarged teeth at the rear of theirjaw. These teeth had shallow grooves running down one side. Today, such snakes arereferred to as "rear-fanged" snakes. the enlarged teeth are used to pierce the skin ofprey after it has been seized and partially swallowed, allowing venom (composed of highlymodified saliva) to flow out and dribble down the grooved teeth into the wound. Since itis difficult for these snakes to inject their venom until after they have partiallyswallowed their victim, it is unlikely that the snake's venom apparatus was originallydeveloped as a defensive weapon. More probably it appeared as an effective way of quicklykilling and subduing food. A large number of rear-fanged snakes are still alive today.
juvenile american aligator
another group of snakes developed a more refined venom apparatus. Instead of having fangsat the rear of the jaws, have short fixed fangs which have migrated (by reducing the sizeof the maxillary bone) to the front of the mouth, where they can be used to bite andstrike at enemies as well as food. The grooves in the fangs have become deeper and meet atthe edges to form a hollow tube. These hollow fangs are connected to venom glands in thecheeks, which can inject venom through the fangs like hypodermic needles when the snakebites. these include the cobras and the sea snakes.
By about 10 million years ago, the most highly specialized of the snakes appeared asvipers. In the vipers, the fangs are extremely long, the snake cannot close its mouth ifthey are erected. use a rotating maxillary bone to fold the fangs up against the roof ofthe mouth, where they are ready to spring into position when the snake bites. A short timeafter the vipers appeared, a group known as the pit vipers developed a number ofheat-sensitive pits on the front of the face, which they used for finding theirwarm-blooded prey at night (this feature has also been independently developed by thevenerable boas and pythons).
reticulated Python
a few million years ago, a group of pit vipers developed astructure at the end of their tail, made up of interlocking pieces of unshed skin, whichcould be loudly rattled and used as a warning device against predators. The rattlesnakesare generally thought to be the most specialized of all the living snakes.
The study of snakes using DNA techniques is still in its infancy, but has already revealeda few surprises. Preliminary results indicate that the vipers are not, as was formerlythought, the most recent of the snakes, but instead diverged from the ancestral boas.
If this finding is confirmed, it means that we have to completely re-think our view of howsnakes evolved. It appears that the snakes underwent a rapid radiation in their initialburst of evolution, with a number of different lifestyles appearing at once and thendeveloping independently and in parallel afterwards. Much work remains to be done on theevolution of snakes.
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Television:
reptiles, big cats, elephants, apes, physics, biology, industrial processes, mechanical object assembly and operation. History. Smart witty commentary. Pleasant vocals, attractive faces and pretty clothing.
