It’s nearly the 100th anniversary of the Titanic! Celebrate with sapphires. Believe it or not, it’s one of the most difficult posts I’ve ever written. Argh. I shall now celebrate by vanishing from the internets for a day in order to give both brain and hands time to relax. Also, I may go buy a sapphire…
Short notice, I know, but this shit’s important. If you can, make it out to show that the IDiotic “academic fairness (but what we really mean is we want to overthrow science in the classroom)” legislation that just opened the doors of Tennessee classrooms to all manner of IDiocy, creationism, and outright denialism needs to go down in flames.
Special bonus: it’s a former Earth Sciences professor from Vanderbilt who’s headlining. And Ryan Haupt from the Science…sort of podcast is speaking. For updates, see Science…sort of on Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s the vitals from Ryan:
WHAT: Rally and press conference to voice concerns about HB 368 and discuss plans for continued work to promote strong science education
WHEN: Saturday, April 14, 2012, 2:00 p.m.
WHERE: South steps of the Tennessee State Capitol, 600 Charlotte Avenue, Nashville
WHO: Multiple speakers, led by Larisa DeSantis, parent and Vanderbilt professor who led petition drive to urge Governor Haslam to veto the bill.
If you can’t make it, you can still get involved. The cowardly (mis)governor’s contact info is here. Also, thanks to the magic of copy-paste on the internets, here!
Governor Haslam
Phone: (615) 741-2001
Fax: (615) 532-9711
email: [email protected]
The schools of Tennessee already physically beat children (14,868 in 2006 alone). Let’s show them that physical abuse shouldn’t be compounded by intellectual abuse. With better science standards, perhaps the next generation of Tennessee legislators and school officials will be able to figure out that science doesn’t support the efficacy of corporal punishment, and the physical abuse will stop as well.
(h/t Ryan Brown and JT Eberhard)
Trebuchet has a ‘plaint: “But really, Dana, you were at Ecola and couldn’t at least favor me with a picture of the Tillamook Rock lighthouse? It is, after all, sitting on a rock!”
Why, yes. Yes, it is.
They didn’t name it Tillamook Rock Lighthouse for nothin’.
These beauties come from Hug Point in Oregon. I dragged my intrepid companion down there because I’d read Ellen Morris Bishop’s In Search of Ancient Oregon and decided I need to go search for it meself. One thing I hadn’t quite grasped yet, apart from the dramatic scope of the geology, was that the Pacific Northwest is full of flowers that people from Arizona would pay cold hard cash for and struggle mightily to keep alive. Imagine my delight when I discovered these things grow wild up here.
Wild. On the beach. In the rocks. Extraordinary beauty, clinging on wherever it can. Often hiding the geology, but one can forgive it for that. Sort of.
That’s the only photo I have of this particular mystery. But we can’t stop at just one pretty flower, so what the hell? I’ll throw in some irises for free.
I’m wrecked. I’ve only just now recovered the use of both nostrils after a mild but annoying cold, and then a certain manufacturer of a certain famous cell phone announced a change that has led to my day job getting busier by a factor of 10. I should be researching and writing. Instead, I’ve been spending time trying to coddle my poor brain.
This is good news for those of you who either like a flower challenge, or who like to listen to me ramble. We’re having both.
It’s about rhododendron season. I remember reading one of those little filler snippets in a Reader’s Digest once, where a woman was talking about sending her husband home to clean the place up while she went to the grocery store after they’d invited their pastor for dinner on short notice. When she got back, the house was still a mess, but her husband was busy ensuring the leaves of their potted rhododendron were sparkling clean.
Dunno why, but that left me with the impression that rhodies were just boring houseplants with nothing but thick green leaves. I’d never knowingly seen one in bloom before. When I moved up here, I discovered that they grew up into great big bushy bushes used in landscaping seemingly everywhere, but not until after blooming season, which meant I now thought of them as boring indoor/outdoor plants with nothing but thick green leaves.
Then they bloomed.
Trebuchet mentioned that LBBs – little brown birds – were totally legit to use as UFDs. So here we go, an LBB at Seward Park.
It’s the best picture I’ve ever taken of one of these, which is silly, because they land on my porch all the time. It’s just that by the time I’ve turned the camera on, they’ve gone away. Birds are total bastards.
To help with identification, I’ve included some photos I took during the Snowpocalypse, such as this shot of a bird’s backside.
Couple o’ quick links before I drag me arse to work.
Bora has an interview with yours truly up at Scientific American’s The Network Central blog. Fun times! I may have waxed a bit lyrical about geology. Okay, a lot lyrical. Not actual lyrics, however, I do have some restraint.
And, in case you missed it, I’ve got a post up at Rosetta Stones that starts a discussion about the three basic rock types off with a bang. I know most of you already know what the three basic rock types are, but there are photos of Mount St. Helens, so there’s that.
Enjoy!
My dear friend Ryan Brown has a post up, #Iamscience, or how I got involved in space rocks, that I’d like you all to read. Especially those of you who don’t think you’re cut out for a life in science. Especially those of you who are afraid of math. Especially those of you who think you’re already stuck on a particular path. Here’s a taste:
I wasn’t a science and math genius as a kid. What I had were parents who recognized my interest in astronomy and bought me a cheap little Tasco telescope from Wal-Mart. I don’t remember if it was for my birthday or for Christmas. All I remember was the excitement of breaking out that 2.4 inch refractor from the box and setting it up without looking at the directions. I’m not prone to hyperbole, but let me say what a glorious gift that was! I remember cruising the Pleiades and Orion’s Nebula during the cold Missouri winters. Summer vacation was spent traipsing through the Summer Triangle in the Milk Way. Jupiter and its dancing moons became a nightly game of guess-which-moon-is-which as they conspired in their galactic version of musical chairs. And then there was Saturn. If ever there was a “holy shit” moment in my young life, it came from stumbling across the queen of the Solar System.
I think most of us had that love for science as kids. The trick is to reclaim it as adults, and hold on to it even when it’s tough and you want to quit. Ryan has. Have you?
I suppose we should have a bunny then, eh?
Easter’s never been a big holiday on my radar. I’ve seldom worked jobs where we get time off for it or folks make a big fuss, which is pretty much my only means of keeping track of holidays. There were the baskets when I was a kid, which were always quite a lot of fun and something my mother and I enjoyed immensely. Dyeing eggs, not as much. I’m not much of an egg artist. We’d buy those egg-dyeing kits and end up with a huge mess and some fairly grotesque-looking pastel eggs, which we then had to eat, and I’m not a fan of hard-boiled eggs, honestly. Especially not ones that have turned suspicious colors because of the dye seeping through the shell. I’ll tell you what I do get excited about, though: Cadbury Creme Eggs. And nice big chocolate rabbits, though I’ve become enough of a chocolate snob over the years that I don’t buy those much. Does anyone know if there are Belgian chocolate bunnies on the market? Or eggs. I’ll take eggs in a pinch.
Speaking of eggs, I’ve been meaning to post these chickens for over a month now. The Giradet vineyard has Silkie chickens running about. I’d never even heard of such a thing. They’re wonderfully absurd.
Continue reading “Oh. Right. Happy Easter and All That Rot.”
Places are like people: you never know them as well as you think you do. They can still surprise you. I’ve walked round the North Creek area of Bothell several times a year for, oh, going on four years now. I drive those same roads, nearly every day. And yet, every time I go out, there’s something new.
This time it was obsidian.
I only ever noticed it because of the daffodil. Since Ophelia mentioned daffodils, I’ve been paying attention to them. Most of the ones I encounter are typical yellow varieties, but this one had an interesting petal structure with a little bit of orange in it, and I leaned over close for a look, and ZOMG OBSIDIAN! Is it? Is that really obsidian?
