Captain Kidd's Ship

Sitting here in the library, writing a paper, measuring time by the number of window panes the moon has crossed. One pane is about 20 minutes, in case you were wondering. It's refreshing sometimes to sit back and watch the sky - moon, stars, planets, sun. It's easy to convince ourselves that our physical domain stops a few blocks down the road, but really, we are on the greatest roller coaster imaginable, hurtling through space at 18.55 miles per second! The moon crossing a window is a nice reminder of that.

Back on Earth, a pretty cool discovery out of Hispanola today - Captain Kidd's ship, the Quedagh Merchant, has been found. Kidd's life reads like an adventure novel - he captured the ship in the Indian Ocean in 1698, sailed it to Madagascar, where he restocked. Then he set off for the Caribbean, and was captured soon thereafter. But poor Mr. Kidd has received a public relations beating, and it seems that he was wrongly convicted of (and executed for) piracy. Turns out he was an authorized privateer, meaning he had the authority to seize French ships, such as the Quedagh Merchant. Anyway, the boat was found just off the coast of the Dominican Republic under a mere 10 feet of water. It's amazing that this incredible wreck has been so accessible for hundreds of years, only now to be discovered. Sometimes it feels like all of the big discoveries have been made, especially in science as people delve more and more into narrow specialties, so it's encouraging to be reminded that that may not be the case. Maybe not quite everything has been discovered yet.