Month: August 2010

Ogods, Decisions – Geologists in the Audience, Halp!

Dana Hunter6 Comments

It’s that time again – got me bonus, must stimulate the economy.  I already have me music picked out, but ye olde book list is gargantuan.  So what do I do?  Make it bigger!

Need moar geology.  So all you geologists and geology-enthusiasts in the audience, this is your chance to influence the composition of my science shelves.  What shall I get?  What tomes on geology can I not do without?

And if you know of good books on the geology of the Mediterranean, now is the time to mention them.  For some reason, those are hard to track down on Amazon.

Non-geologist?  No problem!  Put in your recommendations for books you think I should own.  I’m not looking exclusively for geology, thee knows.



Extra bonus points to the readers who puzzle out this picture.

Ogods, Decisions – Geologists in the Audience, Halp!
{advertisement}

Plastic is for Grocery Bags

Dana Hunter1 Comment

Our own George W. has a thought-provoking post up pitting paper against plastic – in books.  Now seems like as good a time as any to take a stand I’ll possibly end up backing away from someday.

My stepmother, who recently sold me out for one o’ them new-fangled handheld-computers-that-can-sometimes-make-phone-calls contraptions, has also been extolling the virtues of her Kindle.  I think she’s trying to drag me kicking and screaming into the electronics age.  I’ve dug in my heels.  Yes, I swore I would never ever download music, and didn’t so much break that vow as blow it to smithereens.  But books are a different matter.  It’s going to take a hell of a lot of persuasion to wean me off of good old-fashioned dead-tree books.

I have my reasons.  For one thing, when I purchase a book, I like it to stay purchased.  There’s no guarantee of that on a Kindle.

You can’t dog-ear pages on an e-book reader.  And no, electronically bookmarking bits isn’t the same.

You can’t tell which bits you’ve read over and over by letting a book fall open on a reader.

Unless you’ve got the money for dozens of Kindles, you can’t sit in the middle of a pile of books while doing research.

Kindles don’t insulate your walls.

It’s harder for visitors to browse your shelves when your library’s on a Kindle.

Books are all one size on a reader, rather than a variety of shapes and sizes.

You can’t trade in your used books.

If the power goes out and your batteries are low, you can still read a paper book by candlelight.

And there are plenty of other reasons, all coming down to the fact that I like having actual, physical, individual, substantive texts around me.

Now, there are things that work better electronically.  George is right: technical manuals and encyclopedias are perfect candidates for electronic media.  So are things like phone books, reference books, anything that depends on being up-to-the-minute and is obsolete nearly as soon as you get a copy.  Since I got plugged into the magic of the intertoobz, haven’t needed those books of facts, atlases, or other things like that.  This leaves me more cold hard cash for the kind of books that keep for years, that deserve a life of their own and an individual place on my shelves. 

Paper, please!

Plastic is for Grocery Bags

Scenes From the Cat-Servant Life

Dana Hunter1 Comment

I had ambition today.  I promise, I did.  Aaalll sorts of things planned.  Wasn’t gonna be like the cat, doing nothing but lazing round in sunbeams:



Yeah, well.  Long day o’ work later, Rocko on me teevee, cat on me arm…



And yes, it’s really damned hard to snap photos of the cat with only one arm free.  I asked her to move, and this is all the movement I got:



My cat is my inspiration… to crawl into bed with a good book, stretch out my toeses, and be all the lazy I can be.

Substantive content tomorrow, my darlings.  Promise.  Unless the cat suggests otherwise…

Scenes From the Cat-Servant Life

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Dana Hunter

Typos in this post are solely the responsibility of my cat, who has decided that my arm is the best bed in the house.  I suppose it’s better than being ignored.

And it’s certainly better than being as ignorant as Jon Kyl:

David Broder’s column yesterday covered familiar ground — the Washington Post columnist is still disappointed with both parties — but there was one point in particular that stood out. (thanks to N.B. for the tip)
The Post reported earlier this week that, as Senate Republicans delay consideration of a new strategic arms treaty with Russia, the previous framework has lapsed. As a result, “for the first time in 15 years, U.S. officials have lost their ability to inspect Russian long-range nuclear bases.” Broder notes the political context.

The inspections were guaranteed by the old START agreement, which expired in December. The successor treaty was negotiated in April, but the Senate has not taken it up because several Republican senators have raised questions about its possible effect on plans to modernize the U.S. nuclear fleet.

Republican Richard Lugar, probably the Senate’s leading authority on nuclear disarmament, told reporter Mary Beth Sheridan that the delay “is very serious and impacts our national security.”

But Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the deputy Republican leader and one of the main voices challenging the urgency of action, told Sheridan he had assumed the inspections were continuing. What a price to pay for ignorance.

Indeed, Republicans holding up the new nuclear treaty have largely ignored the lapsed nuclear checks. Kyl, who’s helped lead the way in obstructing progress, was asked about the inspection cutoff. “I thought we were just going to continue doing business as usual” as the replacement treaty was debated, he said.
It’s a reminder that GOP obstructionism is not only abusive of institutional and national interests, it’s also often based on Republican ignorance about issues of global importance.

There are a great many reasons why I’m glad to have left Arizona.  The fact that my former state has a Senator this fucking ignorant is in the top 10.  Apparently, his momma never told him that when he assumes, he makes an ass out of himself and everyone who voted for him.  Oh, and incidentally, puts the entire fucking nation at risk.

This is how America ends: not with a bang, but with a “Dur, I dint know dat!”

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Some Preliminary Geological Findings

Dana Hunter2 Comments

There’s rain in our forecast for the weekend, which means I can probably forgo further adventures in favor of catching up on some of my geology homework.  I mean, we haven’t even gotten to hug Oregon geology yet, not to mention all the other stuff in the queue.  And there’s outtakes from this trip to select and share.

Let’s get a bit of a jump on things, then, shall we?  We’ll combine a few outtakes with a desultory bit of geology, beginning with moi standing on the rim of a cirque:



There’s also a baby cirque (or possibly a landslide scar) just over my left shoulder, there, and Hurricane Hill right beyond.  I love the West!  Where else in America would an elevation of 5,757 feet be considered a hill? 

So anyway, no shit, there we were, standing right on the lip of a cirque.  It was too big to get all in one shot until we were well along the trail up to Hurricane Hill later on.  Here it is:

Glacier’s long-gone, but snow still persists late into the year in one tiny portion of the cirque.  Cool off the climate by a few degrees, and a glacier might grow there again, deepening and widening the cirque, and carving Hurricane Ridge into ever-sharper relief.  For those who are curious, the Cirque Rim Trail runs right long the top by the snow patch, there.

Along the trail, you can get an excellent look at very slightly metamorphosed turbidites:



If you think these rocks look like they’ve had a rough life, you are so right.  They started out as submarine avalanches.  Then, after they’d settled down from that excitement, they got stuffed 10-15 miles down into the subduction zone along the North American plate, folded, spindled, mutilated, and then spat onto the edge of the continent before being hoisted aloft, where they were promptly (geologically speaking) attacked by glaciers.  And they didn’t even get the compensation prize of becoming fully metamorphic after all that trauma. They still look pretty much like plain ol’ sandstone and shale.  But give them the dignity of calling them semi-schist and argillite.  They deserve some acknowledgment of all they’ve been through.

Time now to get off the hill (hee, hill) and descend to nearer sea level, whereupon one can stand knee-deep in Lake Crescent, which was carved by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet:



Now, the fact that this is an Ice Age-created lake that is 624 feet deep, blue as can be, and has scenery that might put one in mind of fjords is awesome enough, but you don’t have to take my word that it’s a glacially-carved lake.  You can just look at the evidence at your feet:



Water has done a bit of smoothing, and wave action has created potholes, but you can see the enormous parallel scratches.  Here’s a better look:



Those gouges were so straight, the resistant, saw-toothed strata so regular, that at first I thought it was the remnant of an old boat ramp or some such human-created artifact.  It looks fake at first glance.  I really wasn’t prepared for the immensity and power of what an ice sheet as opposed to a valley glacier can do.  It took close inspection, and noting that the strata disappeared under the bank, but eventually I realized that yes, that really is the result of a ginormous sheet of ice planing everything down to the bedrock, and then grinding the bedrock itself down.  Amazing things, ice sheets.

Late that afternoon, we made it down the coast to Ruby Beach, where you can see additional evidence of what water, this time in liquid form, can carve:



And yes, rumors of a sunny day at the beach were greatly exaggerated by the National Weather Service.  Bloody north Pacific storm systems.  But the cold, misty gloom didn’t prevent us from enjoying the lovely sea stacks, which here are easily accessible even when the tide’s coming in.  You all got plenty of exposure to sea stacks when we were kicking around Ecola State Park a while back, but these are special – they’re not basalt, but sandstone.  Here’s a good closeup of it that would’ve been even better if I hadn’t managed to change the camera to the lowest quality picture setting by accident and without noticing:



See?  Sandstone!  I found that fairly awesome.  Did a double-take when I realized I wasn’t looking at basalt.  Even more exciting: I have finally touched undisputed graywacke. 

Yes, I get excited over rather odd things.

Abbey Island, on the other hand, is composed mostly of mixed volcanic breccia and sedimentary rock, cooked into a hard whole by heat and pressure, with a healthy coating of sand and gravel on top:



We’re talking about a rather dramatic change in rock types in a matter of a few hundred feet.  This is definitely an interesting suite o’ rocks, and I shall enjoy delving deeper into their history for ye olde upcoming in-depth post on ye geology of Olympic National Park.  Which I shall have to you sometime in winter, after we’ve caught up with Oregon and Eastern Washington.

And everybody raise a glass to my long-suffering intrepid companion, who braved mosquitoes and freezing cold without a jacket in order to act as my personal photographer.  Then he did all the driving on the way back, without complaining, even when the CD player crapped out and I dozed off.  There should be a medal of valor for all that, not to mention endurance medals for all of you who’ve waited so patiently for me to get around to posting something of substance.

Some Preliminary Geological Findings

Sound Science-Writing Advice

Dana Hunter

Ed Yong started this origin-of-science-writers extravaganza by asking science writers to tell him all about how they came to be science writers, and while they were at it, give some advice to those who would emulate them.  I haven’t had time to read the whole thread – he got a lot of responses – but you don’t have to read far to get great advice.  Why, here in Comment #2, we’ve got Mark Henderson dishing up the wisdom, complete with killer parting line:

A few things I’ve learnt…
You don’t have to be trained in science to write about it. A scientific training teaches a lot about a little: if you’re a PhD particle physicist, are you really much better off writing about molecular biology than a history or English graduate? Journalists are often (although not always) generalists. Knowing what it’s like to be a lay person can be helpful when you’re communicating with lay people. And you can pick up an awful lot of knowledge as you go along — even becoming fairly specialist in some areas. I’ve recently written a book about genetics. Ian Sample’s just written a book about particle physics. Neither of us has a scientific background in the field.
But you do have to understand how science works. You need to grasp the importance of evidence, replication, falsification and so on. If you get that, you’re half way there. You need to be able to at least begin to tell the difference between rigorous work and unfounded assertions.
Talk to everyone you can. A journalist in any field is only as good as his or her sources. The answer is always a phone call away — if you don’t know, you can usually find someone who does. And try to remember what they say — don’t just file knowledge under a particular story, store it to build up your own.
Learn from your mistakes. We all make them — it’s how you respond that matters. If someone complains that a story you’ve written is inaccurate, and they know a lot about the subject, hear them out. They might be right, and you might have an opportunity to avoid the same mistake in future. They might be wrong — but you’ll have been forced to think about your work, and will try harder to make it more robust next time.
If you don’t know what to think, find out what Prince Charles thinks. Then disagree with him.

I shall take all of that advice.  Especially that last.

Sound Science-Writing Advice

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Dana Hunter

Well, the results are in, and Washington State shall be choosing between Sen. Patty Murray and Dino Rossi this fall.  So now’s probably a good time to mention just what a math-challenged fucktard Dino Rossi is:

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has embraced the Obama administration’s proposal to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans to expire, while renewing those for the lower- and middle-class. Rossi, though, wants to extend all of the cuts, saying that allowing those for the rich to expire is a “class warfare program”:

Rossi argued that 2 1/2 million people in Washington benefit from the 2001 Bush tax cuts, the extension of which will be a major issue in Congress this fall. Rossi described as “this class warfare program” the Obama administration’s plan to extend the cuts enjoyed by middle-income taxpayers, while repealing tax cuts for high-income households.

There are about 6.7 million people in Washington state, so for Rossi’s number to be accurate, he’s either claiming that Obama and Murray want to raise taxes on people that they don’t, or he is claiming that more than one-third of the state’s population is making more than $200,000 per year. 

I’m sure you know what the answer is, but for just how wrong Dino Rossi is about Washingtonian wealth, click through to the link above for the number.  Now we just have to decide whether Dino is stupid, lying, or a stupid fucking liar.

Speaking of other stupid fucking liars for Senate, let’s have some vintage Sharron Angle:

For anyone familiar with the mantra of fundamentalist Christians, what I’m about to share will not surprise you. What might surprise you, though, is how doggedly Sharron Angle pursued the question of a high school football team wearing black jerseys for one homecoming game.
Back in 1992, Sharron Angle waged her very first public campaign — against black football jerseys. After the local favorites had been defeated by an upstart team of newbies from a neighboring county in 1991, the coach came up with this for the following year:

Springing ahead, Jones came up with an innovative idea to fire up his charges for their 1992 homecoming game against Laughlin. Utilizing the “darkest day” theme, he suggested the Muckers could wear black jerseys to remember the previous year’s debacle.

All politics is local, and nothing ratchets up the heat faster than high school sports, schools, and religious zealots. There were two factions opposing the coach’s idea. Those who objected to any color but school colors on the field, and Sharron Angle’s group, who objected on these grounds:

Also opposing the black jerseys was another group including Angle, a member, if not its leader.
They argued against our charges wearing black on religious grounds.

I cannot quote scripture as they did to justify their point but the gist of their argument was that black as a color was thoroughly evil, invoking the supernatural and especially the devil my take from dictionary definitions and not from scripture .

Angle’s weird and extreme position comes from the theology of light and dark articulated throughout the Bible. It’s based on a literal reading of Scriptural passages invoking metaphorical applications of light and dark, culminating in Jesus’ proclamation that he is the “light of the world”. 

Yes, that’s just the kind of reasoning the Senate needs.  She reminds me of the dumbshits in my community who pitched a fit over our high school basketball team, charmingly named the Sand Devils.  Y’see, Arizona’s team is the Sun Devils, cuz it’s the Valley of the Sun, and so we called our team the Sand Devils, cuz we lived in a place where, when the wind blew, you could step outside nekkid for a quick and vigorous exfoliation.  It was cute and clever and led to endless angst from the Bible-thumping crowd, who freaked out over the name of the team (ZOMG devils!!1!11!!!) and the mascot (a cute, fat little cherub-devil sort o’ thing).  Our mascot/logo had to be encased in a whirlwind because the fundies freaked when it was redesigned to show the whole devil.  Somehow, a devil in a dust devil didn’t excite their fury quite so much as a non-dust-deviled devil.  Go fucking figure.

We used to laugh our arses off at their rabid batshit insanity, and I guarantee you we’d not for an instant have taken one of them seriously as a prospect for Senate.  When folks freak this badly over the ball team, you know they’re a little too god-delusioned to serve in a public capacity without going off on ridiculous crusades.  What’s sad is that Sharron Angle actually makes our frothing fundie mascot-haters look reasonable in contrast.  At least they weren’t freaking out over a mere color.

Keeping with the theme of religious inanity, someone hasn’t been paying attention to the “render unto Caesar” part of their Bible:

The ironically named Dove World Church — whose pastor, Terry Jones, has written a book called “Islam Is Of The Devil,” which is also emblazoned on a sign outside the institution — is planning to host “International Burn A Quran Day” on September 11. But the radical church ran into a new roadblock yesterday as Gainesville city officials “denied a burn permit” for the church for the event, effectively telling them doing so would be illegal. The church, undeterred, sent out an e-mail to supporters promising to hold the burning event anyway:

Gainesville officials denied a burn permit for a church that plans to burn copies of the Quran on the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The Gainesville church, the Dove World Outreach Center, has a history of inflammatory comments and campaigns against Islam and remained defiant despite the burn permit denial.

In an e-mail sent out Wednesday, the church said, “City of Gainesville denies burn permit – BUT WE WILL STILL BURN KORANS.”

This, of course, will make it necessary for them to fleece the flock for the cost of the fines.  Now, I’m all for the burning of books – when there’s a living author who stands to make a profit off of other people’s dumbfuckery, and we’re talking mass-produced items rather than one-of-a-kind manuscripts.  But in this case, the copyright’s run out, the original author has been dead for well over a thousand years, and all they’re doing is wasting paper while they prove what dickheads they are.  It’s a pointless excercise – we already know they’re stupid fucking jackasses.  A demonstration in this case is overkill.

Maybe they should listen to Ted Olson, a conservative who, in some cases, isn’t a jackass at all.  But I’ve the sad feeling they’d burn him, too.

Dumbfuckery du Jour

Fortune Favors Those Who Haul Their Asses Up a Mountain at Six in the Morning

Dana Hunter2 Comments

I’m still recovering from the trip, still playing catch-up, and had to work Wednesday, which means eight hours of chaos.  Haven’t had time to sift through the 1000+ photos to find you the really good bits, and you know the geology’s gonna be a while.  That’s okay.  We have a long winter ahead.

In the meantime, I’ll throw out another teaser.  This one’s from Tuesday morning, when I got up insanely early and ducked out on my still-sleeping intrepid companion.  I drove up Hurricane Ridge Road to photograph all the strata I hadn’t had time to catch the day before.  I wasn’t expecting wildlife, and figured if I did see some, it would be at an inconvenient moment with no handy turn-outs.

How wrong I was:



Yes, that is a doe and her fawn, hanging out in plain view, right where I could park the car and photograph them. 

I can tell you that this trip was totally worth the sleep deprivation.  I can also tell you that I have done my part to ensure the birds on top of Hurricane Hill end up fat and happy.  No, I didn’t feed them – directly.  But, thanks to the fact we forgot the bug repellent in the car, and did not realize this glaring omission until we were over a mile away from it, I did feed quite a few mosquitoes, who in turn will end up in some bird’s belly.  This being-at-one-with-nature stuff is an itchy proposition, especially when you’re unable to swat nature away because you’re photographing other bits of it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go apply more anti-itch creme and try to get a bit more sleep.

Fortune Favors Those Who Haul Their Asses Up a Mountain at Six in the Morning