New Post on ASRI

For my Wise Readers: Leaping Into the Saddle of the Horse I’d Put Out to Pasture. In which I explain why I’ve been so horribly out of touch with so many people, and announce the short story I’m working on.

I’ll be posting that story to ye olde writing blog, which is invitation only. I know at least one of you wanted an invite a bit ago. I got the email at a time when I didn’t have time to log on and send you said invite, promptly forgot to flag the email, and it got buried under a mountain of other stuff. I have no idea where it is. So please, ask again! And for anyone else who wants to become a Wise Reader, email me. Yahoo knows me as dhunterauthor.

I’ll be setting aside an hour or so to do such housekeeping, and maybe even correspond with a few friends who must think my email is broken or that I’m not willing to think of them anymore. Neither is true! I can’t wait for the day when we can email people with our thoughts no matter where we are. I’ll be better at this whole communication thing then.

Right. Off to continue slaving for my Muse get some writing done. Labor Day indeed…

New Post on ASRI
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Los Links 9/2

Another week, another passel o’ links. Funny. Somehow, I’d felt that I hadn’t done much reading this past week. Apparently I was wrong…

Irene

Grist: Global warming will make future hurricanes worse, full stop and U.S. Navy’s wave-power buoy plays chicken with Irene, wins.

The New Yorker: Vermont Floods: A Bad Day for Baal.

ThinkProgress: Eric Cantor Won’t Support Any Hurricane Disaster Funding Without Massive Cuts To First Responders.

Mike the Mad Biologist: GOP Response to Hurricane Irene: Take More Hostages.

Guardian: Hurricane Irene or Britain adopting misogynistic attitudes: I know which I find scarier.

Kate Messner: After Irene: A small-town Adirondack library needs your help.

Slobber and Spittle: Call it a PSA and Are You Afraid Yet? 

Virginia Earthquake

Mountain Beltway: Damage to the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Washington Post: Five myths about earthquakes.

Science

Glacial Till: One Year Blogiversray of Glacial Till and Meteorite Monday: Shergottites.

The Dynamic Earth: Backup Amazon (in case the other one breaks?).

Scientific American: Diamond World Discovered By Astronomers.

Professor Astronomy: A diamond planet? I dunno..

Dinosaur Tracking: An Ode to Archaeopteryx.

Not Exactly Rocket Science: The lost plague – London graveyards suggest that Black Death strain may be extinct and Bacteria: resisting antibiotics since at least 30,000 BC.

ABQJournal: Study: American Indians May Be More Affected by Climate Change.

Research Digest: The woman misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and how we can all be affected by the suggestion that we have psychological problems.

National Groundwater Association: Protect Your Groundwater Day.

DC’s Improbable Science: A thoroughly dangerous charity: YesToLife promotes nonsense cancer treatments.

Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview Blog: NBC urges women >40 to ask about CRP test – something not supported by evidence.

Georneys: Geology Word of the Week: M is for Migmatite.

Highly Allochthonous: Scenic Saturday: Ropy pahoehoe on a biogenic beach.

NASA Earth Observatory: Why I love Geologists.

Science Sushi: Observations: Tuna and Mythbusting 101: Sharks will cure cancer.

Grist: Fox News viewers ‘confused’ by Bill Nye, science in general.

Scientific American: Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Perspective Is Everything, Details Alone Are Nothing.

Superbug: Borders are Irrelevant: Polio Returns to China and Antibiotic Prescribing to Kids — Down, But Still Too Much.

Scientific American: The Bearable Closeness of Being: Why Cities Create Community.

The Scicurious Brain: Muscle fatigue may be all in your head.

The Dynamic Earth: Drilling for Oil…in the Everglades?

Forbes: Can Our Pruney Fingers Help Us Build Better Rain Treads?

Myrmecos: A mural on moth wings.

Cosmic Variance: Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time.

Gizmodo: First Quantum Computer Simulator Operates at the Speed of Light.

Bad Astronomy: No, a new study does not show cosmic-rays are connected to global warming.

Andrew Alden: Higher Profile for Geoforensics.

Think Progress: Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change.”

Respectful Insolence: The ultimate homeopathic remedy.

Writing

My Own Brand of Madness: Going Indie – Is it worth it?

The Book Designer: Independent Publishing: That’s Evolution!

Confessions of a Science Librarian: On the evilness of the emerging ebook app ecosystem.

The Writing Bomb: Letter to the Beginning Indie Author.

The Passive Voice: Ebook Formatting Red Flags, Writers who oppose agency pricing aren’t acting in their own self-interest, and How to Misunderstand a Contract.

Compound Eye: Creative Commons Is Not Public Domain.

Barry Hutchinson: Meeting Neil Gaiman.

Melissa Walker: Cover Stories: Wintering Well.

Almost Diamonds: The Love of Problematic Literature.

Nieman Journalism Lab: Amazon’s new @author feature launches, and changes (just a bit) what a book is all about.

Patricia C. Wrede: Telling details vs. clutter.

The Book Designer: 5 Great Fonts for Book Covers.

Nathan Bransford: On the Internet There Is No Such Thing as a Brand. There Is Only You.

Atheism and Religion

Alternet: Are Michele Bachmann’s Views About ‘Christian Submission’ Even More Extreme Than She’s Letting On?

Why Evolution is True: An atheist who almost believes in God.

Almost Diamonds: The Accommodationism Challenges.

Open Parachute: Martydom of the priveliged.

mlkshk: Norse Crisis flowchart (source link at bottom).

Pharyngula: As an American Atheist, I am disgusted by the 9/11 coloring book.

The Spirited Atheist: College too late, too little for secular studies in America.

Life on the Hill: I’m Coming Out.

Women’s Issues

Guardian: It isn’t girls who need to watch their words.

Alternet: How I Escaped the “Biblical Family Values” Nightmare That Drives Perry, Bachmann, and Tea Party Politics.

Skepchick: Too Pretty To Do Homework.

XX Factor: Some Good News for Pro-Choicers.

Guardian: Rick Perry’s demeaning abortion doctrine.

The Smart Set: Old Boys Club.

Laurie Hale Anderson: District that tried to ban SPEAK accused of covering up rapes.

Rethinking Vision Forum: Why I Wish I Went to College.

Politics

A Leaf Warbler’s Gleanings: Science and Democracy in the Arab Spring and American Fall.

Paul Krugman: Republicans Against Science.

Mother Jones: The Right, Anti-bacterials, and the “Nanny State”.

Margaret and Helen: Who has the better bouffant?

Rolling Stone: The GOP War on Voting.

Butterflies and Wheels: The history of dissident thought.

Culture of Science: On The Privilege To Serve This Country.

Scientific American: Can Politicians be Trusted with Science?

Nymwars

GigaOm: It’s official: Google wants to own your online identity.

Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: Real Names, Guilt, Self-Censorship, and the Identity War.

Guardian: Google Plus forces us to discuss identity.

Society and Culture

Loudoun Times: Potomac Falls woman removed from son’s Boy Scout troop.

Almost Diamonds: Male Rape Victims: Let’s Talk About the Men.

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub: Quote of the moment: Diane Ravitch, history won’t be kind to those who attacked teachers.

On Liberty: “Racial Profiling First Hand”.

BBC: After the sludge: Rebuilding Hungary’s towns.

Salon: Confessions of a bad teacher.

NeuroTribes: Dear United Airlines: I Want My Kindle, and My Dignity, Back.

New York Times: How to Fix Our Math Education.

Teddy Partridge: Jury Unable to Reach Verdict in Gay Student’s Killing — UPDATE: Mistrial.

CNN: West Virginia learns Finland’s ‘most honorable profession’: Teacher.

On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess: Unclench Your Butthole Before You Talk About Bias.

Hudson Valley Geologist: Good quote on education.

The New Civil Rights Movement: Student Of Anti-Gay Florida Teacher Jerry Buell Speaks Out – Exclusive!

Los Links 9/2

I Can't Show You This Picture, But You Must See It

I have this weird respect for copyright, so I didn’t want to embed this, but you really have to see it. Then come back and we’ll talk about it.

Yeah, that’s some kind of delicious, isn’t it just? More where that came from, at David Rankin’s website. So many sights there that reminded me of the not-so-halcyon days when I lived in Page. The only thing good about Page was the scenery. No complaints there, my friends – it’s truly dramatic. And David managed to capture an extra dollop of drama there. Fantastic.

I thought I recognized that old local icon, the Navajo Generating Station, but I wrote to him about it just to be sure. He advised, “The photo was taken with a telephoto lens from southern Utah just across the UT/AZ border looking at the Navajo Generating Station and LeChee Rock.” Four years I lived there, and I never knew that was LeChee Rock. We callow kids didn’t know the names of most of the mesas. We just kind of pointed at them and said “That one” when discussing them. I think the only reason we knew Page is built on Manson Mesa is because, hey, it’s Manson.

I used to go out at night up to the place on the edge of the mesa where it was rumored a whole settlement had blown sky-high one Halloween night back in the ’50s, and I’d stand there looking beyond the barely-lit airstrip out to the Navajo Generating Station. You wouldn’t normally think of a coal-fired plant as beautiful, but it was. Standing out there alone in the bare desert, the only light beyond Page for miles aside from the moon and stars, it looked like a ship in a sandy sea, sailing serenely among rocky icebergs. I mean, seriously. Go look at it again. Take your eyes off the lightning and really look at the plant. Doesn’t that look just like a grand old steamship, floating out there against the mesas? David captured it just as I remember it. Only he managed to capture so much more: the stark, dark cliffs standing against storm-torn skies.

This is what I was talking about when I told you about slickrock. Those mesas rose up from the desert floor, stark and still. The storms rolling in over them are bloody amazing to watch. Only you’ll want to do it from high ground. David’s shot what I’m talking about. It may not even be raining within a hundred miles of where you are, but suddenly, a sound, a roar, and water, swift and deep and treacherous. You can’t outrun it, and if you’re in a slot canyon, you can’t out-climb it, either. People have died because they didn’t understand this about the desert: even here, you can drown.

But to stand in a high place, to watch the lightning strike and the rain arrow down, to hear the wind roar through the barren rock – that you won’t trade for anything. To see the storm-light on the red rock, watch colors and hues change, dappled over ten or fifty or a hundred miles around you, painting an already painted desert – that’s a vision that will imprint itself indelibly. It stays.

I want to go back. I want to sit in the high places, and watch the sun explore ancient rocks. I want to hear a silence so profound it’s like a physical force. I want to lie back against that smooth, bare slickrock and stare into an endless sky. And I want to see the storms again, smell a petrichor so intense it tangles up and overwhelms the more prosaic scent of sand, feel that shock of chill air from a thunderstorm that washes over the skin like a mist and leaves you with goosebumps in a hundred degrees. I love and miss those things.

I’m glad I have such images to remind me.

I Can't Show You This Picture, But You Must See It

Caturday Geocat: Hand Sample Analysis

My poor beautiful hand samples from our Oregon trip are just sitting forlorn on the porch, waiting for me to come up with a permanent home for them. I’m afraid I may never get to properly house them, however. My cat has taken a definite interest.



We have this little ritual when I come home for lunch. She usually spends the time outside on the porch, hanging out on her carpet square whilst I scarf some food and catch up on Twitter. Then she greets me at the door as I head outside for a smoke. She follows me over to the lounge chair, where I sit and enjoy the last moments of freedom before heading back for another four hours of soul-sucking drudgery agonizing boredom work. She consents to a scratch behind the ears, and then ambles over and starts inspecting the rocks.



Here she’s analyzing one of the platy volcanic bits (which may or may not be basalt or basaltic andesite, but that’s a story for another day). It’s one of the ones with dendrites on it. Once she gets done with those, she’ll establish ownership over the rhyolite by rubbing her cheeks all over every piece she can reach. I have to watch her on that – they’ve got some glassy textures and sharp edges.

She’ll look up occasionally, stare off into the distance like she’s considering what she’s just learned from her latest inspection.



Then she’ll go back to her favorite sample, a frothy bit of basalt or basaltic andesite with quartz in.



She loves that rock the best. She curls up with it every time we’re out there together. I’m surprised it’s not coated in cat hair, considering how much she snuggles with it.



It’ll be winter soon, and both rocks and kitteh will have to come in from the cold and rain. But for now, I think I’ll leave her hand samples just as they are. This time we have together, me and her and the rocks, is precious.

I’m lucky to live with a cat who shares my love of geology and Doctor Who. I can forgive the occasional homicidal rages. We all have our little quirks, after all.

You’ve had your Caturday dose of cute. Time for something of substance. Both Lockwood and Cujo have written up bits of our recent trip. Cujo explains why geology is important, and Lockwood’s done a more in-depth look at his teaser tweeting, a sexy take on the Pinnacles, and a dedication to the teacher who introduced him to many of the wonders we saw. Enjoy!

Caturday Geocat: Hand Sample Analysis

Interlude With Dragonfly

I wish I could promise you drama. However, aside from some very nice scenery, Highway 58’s about the least-dramatic road through the Cascades. When you reach Willamette Pass and stop by Odell Lake, you don’t really feel as though you’ve just reached the mid-point through some of the most dramatic mountains in the United States. Sure, they explode occasionally, but they haven’t exploded round here just lately. You haven’t even climbed very much – you’re at a mere 5,000 feet. There’s some nice pointy peaks surrounding you, but it’s not like you’ve been on a steep climb with hairpin turns through them. You don’t feel like you’ve really worked for it.

Which is fine, because that’s left you nice and relaxed and in a mood to amble round photographing pretty things. There’s even a helpful sign that tells you what you’re photographing:

Hard to be sure, but that could be Diamond Peak there in the distance

Rather not what one expects in a shield volcano, is it? But that’s what it is – a great big shield volcano composed of fifteen cubic kilometers worth of basaltic andesite. That’s lots. And it’s thought to be fairly young – around 100,000 years or so, which in geologic terms means it’s barely out of diapers.

I know, I know. You’re looking at its jaggedy profile and saying, “Dana, my dear, that looks more like a stratovolcano.” Well, yes, of course it does. It stopped erupting before the last ice age ended, and the ice did a number on it. Ice is quite the artist (not Vanilla Ice, but actual ice, mind). It sculpted and carved and removed bits until this nice, sharp diamond shape was left.

And it left a rather nice lake, as well.

A bit of Odell Lake

The glacier that covered this area carved out a nice basin, then closed it off with a terminal moraine, and left the lake behind. The Cascades are riddled with these high mountain lakes, and they’re all quite lovely. Not warm. But pretty.

I’d have quite a few more pictures of mountains and so forth, only I came across this wonderful wee beastie as I was pottering about:

An unexpected dragonfly

Well, you know I’m mad for these things. And this poor bloke was dying. When I saw him, he was a bit pathetically crumpled up, on his back, and just looking miserable lying there on the bare shoulder pavement. I didn’t want him to finish the last moments of his life by being squished under a tire, so I scooped him up. He spent a comfortable few moments on my knee:

A fine fellow

And he didn’t seem much fussed by the whole thing. He just rested there calmly, and I thought, I’ll never have a better opportunity to photograph a dragonfly’s eyes. Only I’m a softhearted silly person who won’t reposition a dying dragonfly for her own gain, so I bunged the camera in front of him and hoped for the best, although I couldn’t see where we were aiming:

Dragonfly eyes

Looks a bit insouciant, doesn’t he just? Rather like he’s bellying up with an elbow on a bar, about to order a cold one. I liked him very much, and wished there was some reasonable way to prevent nature taking its course, but of course there’s not. You can’t rush an elderly dragonfly to the hospital and demand emergency resuscitation. So after a bit, I just eased him off into the weeds, where nature could finish taking its course without intervention from half a ton of passenger vehicle. I took one last photo, with my hand for scale, so you can have an idea of how very large he was:

Goodbye, dragonfly

My index finger is about 3 1/2 inches from knuckle to tip, for those who like precision. That translates into a seriously large dragonfly. I’m very nearly sure he’s one of the darners, but they all look so similar I’m not sure exactly which he might be.

Strangely, these skinny creatures with their transparent wings don’t feel delicate. Their little legs are sturdy, and their bodies hard and smooth. Even though this one had one pair of feet over the Styx, he seemed quite tough. They’re even quite tough after hitting the hood of a Honda Civic at 60 miles per hour – we ended up with one plastered to the front during the trip, and while everything else had spattered, it was still a whole, recognizable dragonfly, although a bit crispy and very, very deceased. I have even more respect for these guys after seeing that. They’re certainly not as dainty as they look.

After savoring my closest encounter with a dragonfly yet, we drove on. Hang on, my darlings, because it’s about to get a wee bit explosive.

Interlude With Dragonfly

Is There a Word for a First World Nation Becoming a Third World Country?

Even when I was a kid, I knew I was lucky. I had a middle-class family in a prosperous country. Sally Fields used to come on the teevee soliciting funds for all those poor, starving kids in other countries where families were lucky if they had a bit of cloth to throw over a stick for a house, and I’d be quite grateful my country wasn’t like that. Poorest kids I knew still had roofs over their heads and got a few good meals a week. And we knew America was the greatest country on earth. Almost everybody wanted to be like us.

I used to feel sorry for those folks who lived in countries that weren’t number one in everything.

Rome used to be great, too, the greatest on earth, and it fell. When I learned about it, I couldn’t imagine it. What would it have been like, to live in a nation that was sliding down to oblivion? Weren’t the people sad, maybe even despairing? Did they know? Did they realize what was happening to them? I didn’t think it would happen to America, not very soon anyway, but I knew it could happen, and I just hoped it wouldn’t happen in my lifetime. I loved my country. I wanted the best for it. Selfish reasons, too: I’d never wanted to live in a decayed civilization, amongst the ruins of greatness, without a chance to become anything amazing. It’s really hard to write works of enduring literature when you haven’t got any paper and everybody in your country’s so poor they couldn’t afford to buy your book even if you managed to write it.

Those were my silly childish thoughts. Then I grew up, and for a little while, in the heyday of the ’90s, it looked like America, despite some occasional stumbles, didn’t really have to worry about falling from its perch. We were great, and we’d continue being great. We could certainly be greater. I’d learned about homelessness and grinding poverty, and some of our cities were falling apart, and the Republicans were getting awfully weird, and we spent a fuck of a lot of money on the military while screwing the poor and the public schools, but still. We weren’t doing all that badly.

Then it got worse. And worse. We voted a jackass into office (never mind Florida, it never should’ve been so close anyway). Terrorists slipped through our defenses, and the jackass and his merry band of fuckwits used that as carte blanche to invade the wrong damned country and basically bomb all the brown people they could. They turned this from a nation of laws that didn’t always live up to its rhetoric but at least acted ashamed when it didn’t into a nation that proudly tortured people. And the middle class melted away, and the infrastructure crumbled, and even crazier fuckwits started getting bold enough to dazzle a bunch of flaming morons into voting for them, and here we are today, rubbing shoulders with third-world nationhood.

Seriously. We are.

Take air travel: The United States, the report notes, now has the worst air-traffic congestion on the planet, with one-quarter of flights arriving more than 15 minutes late. One reason is that U.S. air-traffic control still relies on 1950s-era ground radar technology, even as the rest of the world has been shifting to satellite tracking (the FAA has begun the transition to a satellite-based system, though it’s moving slowly and future funding is a big question). According to recent World Economic Forum rankings, even Malaysia and Panama now boast better air infrastructure.

For fuck’s sake.

And check out what came across my Twitter feed only yesterday: we are the only industrialized nation to have a World Heritage Site we can’t be bothered to preserve. Every other country on the list has probably got a plausible excuse: tiny and poor, tiny and war-torn, tiny and trying too hard to deal with extreme natural disasters and religious fuckery and trying to build themselves up to a reasonable standard of living to be much fussed with things like World Heritage Sites. What’s our excuse? We have Republicans who think preserving things like the Everglades takes too much money out of super-rich pockets. We still have gobs and oodles of money, more than enough to pay for things like preserving priceless treasures and repairing that aged infrastructure and ensuring people get an education and health care and have decent jobs, but we’ve elected absolute idiots and let them give all the money to a disgustingly bloated military and greedy asshats who sit on millions and billions of dollars and scream like two year-olds denied a toy when someone tries to extract so much as a penny from their tight fists for the common good.

We’re 37th in the world in health care, or at least we were in 2000 – I shudder to think where we are now, after eight years of Bush and before our inadequate but good-as-we’re-gonna-get-at-this-point new health care law fully kicks in. Square between Costa Rica and Slovenia, we are. Best in the world? Which world? Certainly not the second world – maybe best in the third world, I think we can comfortably claim that, but we’d best not get too comfortable with that idea, because Cuba’s only two rungs below us on that particular ladder.

Oh, and here’s a nifty little fact: the United States of America gets its ass kicked in income equality by the likes of Iran and Nigeria. Oh, yes, we are so great and glorious, we are kicking Haiti’s ass! Eat it, the exactly two developed nations who do worse than we do! USA! USA!

And while we slide down into the scrap-heap of has-been empires, we’ve got Republicans running around beating their chests and screaming we’re the absolute best at everything there ever was. Best at what, exactly? Burning ignorance? Failed leadership? Shitting on science after sending men to the moon? Yeah. Sure. I’ll grant you that. We’re certainly top contenders in those categories.

What pisses me off is that I know we’re better than this. Yes, this country is full of willfully ignorant fucktards intent on launching us back into the dark ages, but we used to keep them on the hopeless fringes of our political system. We didn’t give them the power and authority they needed to run this country into the ground. We made a mistake. And we’re going to have to rectify that, remove the dangerous halfwits from office and never ever let them have power again, if we don’t want to end up on the bottom of the heap.

I don’t want to live in a former first world country, people. Neither do you. And neither does that greedy little shithead on Wall Street, but he could give a rat’s ass considering he’s got the money to move. So it’s up to us.

America deserves better. We’re gonna have to vote smarter and work harder to ensure she climbs back towards the top. And then, once we’ve stopped falling down, we’ve got to help the rest of the world up.

We were a beacon once. We can be that again.

Is There a Word for a First World Nation Becoming a Third World Country?