Aristocracy a la Jean LaFitte

This music clip is from the CD entitled Field of Play. The band was directed by Dr. Robert Washut.https://scholarworks.uni.edu/jazzband/1019/thumbnail.jp

Cruising Contractual Waters: Searching for Laffite in the Records of the New Orleans Notarial Archives

The pirate Jean Laffite is a well known but elusive figure about whom much has been written and much is still unresolved. Laffite studies are especially dynamic today because of the appearance in 1948 of an internally credible but controversial French-language manuscript that purports to be the pirate\u27s own journal. Written largely in Missouri from 1845 to 1850 and recently issued in reprint, the journal contradicts previously accepted evidence that both Jean Laffite and his brother Pierre died in action and were buried in the Yucatan during the 1820s. It paints them instead as living until the 1840s and dying as prosperous middle-class citizens with traceable posterity. Today the chief historiographical question about Laffite and his followers is whether the Journal of Jean Laffite is authentic

The Journal of Jean Laffite: Its History and Controversy

Whether defined as original order or the history of ownership, provenance is one of the guiding lights of the archival profession, the key that guarantees the validity of documents in the archives. Archival material is rarely questioned, and authorship is seldom a topic of intense discussion. One assumes that the signer of the letter penned it except when secretaries were known to have been employed. Perhaps as a profession, however, archivists are too trusting and rely too often on provenance as a guiding light

Getting every kid outdoors: Notes from the field

The evolution of programs to encourage grade-schoolers to get out into parks

Jean-Baptiste Mazeris apaizgai barkoxtarraren "Erliak" (1932)

ldazlan honetan ezagutzera ematen da Erliak izenburuko zubererazko eskuizkribua (1932), Jean-Baptiste Mazeris apaizgai barkoxtarrak sinatua eta Euskaltzaindiaren Lafitte Funtsean aurkitua. Egilearen testuingurua eta obra aurkezteaz gainera, aipatu egin da helburu pedagogikoa duen lan bat idazteko eredu linguistiko subdialektal baten erabi lerak agertarazitako kontradikzioa

Tidal dynamics of extended bodies in planetary systems and multiple stars

With the discovery during the past decade of a large number of extrasolar planets orbiting their parent stars at a distance lower than 0.1 astronomical unit (and the launch and the preparation of dedicated space missions such as CoRoT and KEPLER), with the position of inner natural satellites around giant planets in our Solar System and with the existence of very closed but separated binary stars, tidal interaction has to be carefully studied. In particular, a question arises about the validity of usual approximations used in the modelling of this interaction. The purpose of this paper is to examine the step beyond the ponctual approximation for the tidal perturber. To achieve this aim, the gravitational interaction between two extended bodies and more precisely the interaction between mass multipole moments of their gravitational fields and the associated tidal phenomena are studied. Use of Cartesian Symmetric Trace Free (STF) tensors, of their relation with spherical harmonics and of the Kaula's transform enables to derive analytically the tidal and mutual interaction potentials as well as the associated disturbing functions in extended bodies systems. The tidal and mutual interaction potentials of two extended bodies are derived. Next, the external gravitational potential of such tidally disturbed extended body is obtained, using the Love's number theory, as well as the associated disturbing function. Finally, the dynamical evolution equations for such systems are given in their more general form without any linearization. The dynamical equations for the gravitational and tidal interactions between extended bodies and associated dynamics are derived in a form where they could be directly implemented to perform coherent numerical simulations of planetary systems or multiple stars tidal evolution.Comment: accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Prospects of dynamical determination of General Relativity parameter beta and solar quadrupole moment J2 with asteroid radar astronomy

We evaluated the prospects of quantifying the parameterized post-Newtonian parameter beta and solar quadrupole moment J2 with observations of near-Earth asteroids with large orbital precession rates (9 to 27 arcsec century$^{-1}$). We considered existing optical and radar astrometry, as well as radar astrometry that can realistically be obtained with the Arecibo planetary radar in the next five years. Our sensitivity calculations relied on a traditional covariance analysis and Monte Carlo simulations. We found that independent estimates of beta and J2 can be obtained with precisions of $6\times10^{-4}$ and $3\times10^{-8}$, respectively. Because we assumed rather conservative observational uncertainties, as is the usual practice when reporting radar astrometry, it is likely that the actual precision will be closer to $2\times10^{-4}$ and $10^{-8}$, respectively. A purely dynamical determination of solar oblateness with asteroid radar astronomy may therefore rival the helioseismology determination.Comment: The astrophysical journal (ApJ), in pres