Author: Dana Hunter

Cantina Quote o' The Week: Louis L'Amour

Dana Hunter

…What the world has always needed is more heretics and less authority.

–Louis L’Amour, The Walking Drum

Yes, that Louis L’Amour.  I am quoting an author of Westerns.  You gotta problem with that?

Louis was a seriously good writer, and he wrote some seriously great books.  The one that tops my list is The Walking Drum, which I burbled about once.  Okay, twice.  I remember the heft of that book in my young middle-school hands.  I remember being so enthralled that I memorized passages, and regularly recited one of them to Mars when it hung bright and red in the sky.  Changed my life, that book did, and now I look at so many of the quotes I pulled from it, I realize it’s an excellent book for skeptics.

For instance:

The wider my knowledge became the more I realized my ignorance.  It is only the ignorant who can be positive, only the ignorant who can become fanatics, for the more I learned the more I became aware that there are shadings and relationships in all things.

And:

In my knowledge lay not only power but freedom from fear, for generally speaking one only fears what one does not understand.

Not to mention:

…Question all things.  Seek for answers, and when you find what seems to be an answer, question that, too.

Just one more:

It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.

L’Amour’s hero Kerbouchard thunders across the 11th Century world kicking ass, taking names, kissing the ladies, and engaging in fiery, passionate book learning.  I don’t think I’ve ever come across an author who can make scholarship look more macho and ultra damned sexy.  And Kerbouchard puts all that studying to use in situations you might not necessarily expect it, especially not in an action novel, and always with a rapier wit that leaves enemies thoroughly punctured while he rides off with the woman.  He’s like the MacGuyver of the medieval world, only he has better hair and social graces.

What I’m saying is, just go read the damned book, m’kay?

Cantina Quote o' The Week: Louis L'Amour
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Seattle Has Finally Learned to Count in Spanish

Dana Hunter

Yes, I know, it’s been over a week since I said I’d be putting up more pics from the Peacemakers’ show, and I’m sure you’ve all just been dying waiting.  Here they are:

Now they’re getting it!

Allow me to do my part to convince my fellow Seattleites that you should, indeed, wear a straw cowboy hat:
Mexico, May 2006

I wear a straw hat now.  Straw hats are cool.

And yes, that is the Peacemakers’ logo tattooed to my shoulder.  If you wonder why, just go see one of the shows.  Then you’ll understand.

Seattle Has Finally Learned to Count in Spanish

Volcanic Venerations: Elden

Dana Hunter1 Comment
Mount Elden from Route 66 (San Francisco Peaks in background). May 20th, 2005

I’ve run out of sediments to get sentimental about.  So, let’s stand on the Kaibab and gaze at one of the mountains that loomed over my childhood, by way of transition.  That, my friends, is a volcano.  And it was considered middling size, where I grew up, although considering it’s smack-dab in the midst of Flagstaff, it seems enormous.  My elementary school was right at the base of it.  We probably sat on its deposits.  We could walk to it, and did, and walked right up it.

Funny how you can spend so much time staring out the window at something less than a quarter mile away, not to mention climb it, and have no real idea what the hell it is.

The teachers mostly didn’t mention Mount Elden.  It was just there, this great big brown lump, unremarkable in every way aside from the fact it was a volcano in the midst of a city.  Once a year or so, they’d herd us all into the gym and roll out the film projector, and Mount Elden would get its fifteen minutes of fame in an old video showing us what happens when runaway kiddies light campfires in canyons on a mountain in dry country.  The results were probably a bit reminiscent of when it erupted: lots of smoke and sparks and a terrifying orange glow that seemed like it would consume the world.  They thought they’d lose the city before they got the fire out, and the scars are still there.  Trees don’t grow back well on steep lava slopes in dry country.  Erosion undoes what our precious little water tries to do.  The mountain may not recover until the climate changes.  So, children, look upon Mount Elden and know why you should never, ever light a match.

Somehow, some way, we learned it was a volcano, which led to a few nervous moments until we were told it’s not merely dormant, but extinct.  Extinct was good.  Except, of course, on those days when it was sunny and brilliant outside and it might have been nice to have a merely dormant volcano fast becoming active outside so they’d have to evacuate us.

One of our teachers pointed to it as a prime example of a shield volcano, and for years, I thought that’s what it was.  Big lump of near-solid lava, what else could it be?

2,300 feet worth of dacite dome, is what.  Five or six hundred thousand years ago, thick, sticky magma that occupies that space on the continuum between andesite and rhyolite squeezed up through the old sedimentary layers, overturned them, and extruded itself out in globs and lobes until it built a mountain.  As it erupted, bits cooled, fractured in the process, and peppered the slopes with boulders.  Lava flows on those steep slopes sometimes lost their hold and became chaotic avalanches of hot gas and chunks of dacite that fanned out around the base of the volcano.  The rest of it piled into mounds and cliffs, incredibly steep, where a few rare resident bald eagles live.
Elden’s Cliffs, where the bald eagles dwell.  June 10, 2009

The result was a gigantic lump of a lava dome.  A lot of Arizona’s volcanoes are fairly symmetrical: even though different angles give you a different perspective, they’re recognizably themselves.  Not so Elden.  It looks compact and rather small from some directions.  Depending on where you are, you might see it as an actual dome, or a peak with a hump, as in the photo above.  Then travel round the compass a few degrees, and all of a sudden, it presents a very long, strange profile.
Mount Elden, seen from Sunset Crater.  June 10, 2009

There’s a trail that winds up it, right to the very top where all the radio antennae are.  It climbs gently at first, lulling you into a false sense of security before taking off through hairpin switchbacks that don’t do much to cut back on all the straight up.  The overwhelming impression is tan.  The old dacite is tan, and it gives rise to tan dirt, and even the trees that grow where they weren’t burnt down have a tan undertone to their green.  Occasionally, there are splashes of bright reddish-pink sloshed over the big tan boulders.  The massive amounts of flame retardant dumped on that mountain in the 1970s left some garish streaks behind.  It was still there in the late 80s, when my class climbed to the top.  It might still be there.

The mountain has human stories to tell.  About a little girl lost who nearly fried the city, and a little boy, whose family homesteaded on the flanks of the mountain over a hundred years ago.  There was a spring there, and water was precious.  There wasn’t much of it.  And when the homesteaders had to make the choice between watering their herds and family and watering a passing stranger’s mules, they chose to refuse the gift of water.  There was, after all, another spring not far away, with more water more easily spared.  The stranger, not happy with this reply, fired at the family, and killed their young son.  Being a little girl myself, standing in that meadow where water trickled through an old pipe, looking at the site where a home used to stand and a family had been forced to bury their child, I felt the tragedy of it acutely.

You can still see his grave.  And the mountain carries his family name, so it, too, stands as something of a memorial.

Mount Elden stands as a reminder of acts that cannot be undone.  With the strike of a match, the firing of a gun, something can be taken away that can never be replaced.

And that, combined with the fascination of its geology – I mean, a young dacite dome far from a plate boundary? – transforms it from an odd lump of lava into something truly beautiful.
Mount Elden from Route 66, photographed by my Intrepid Companion.  June 11th, 2009.  The chewed-up pile of cinders in front o
f it is the remnant of a cinder cone, now a quarry.
Volcanic Venerations: Elden

Dojo Summer Sessions: Mah Sooper Sekrit Projeckt

Dana Hunter3 Comments

So, for almost three months now, I’ve been writing like mad.  I’ve often compared writing to volcanoes: there are times when the magma chamber’s empty, then over a period of time it fills, you get your basic harmonic tremors, and then an eruption that lasts days, weeks or months, depending.  That’s how it’s been for these past many weeks: one sustained eruption that’s disrupted the airspace over this blog and rained ash all over my relationships.  Even the cat’s been deprived of premium cuddle time.  I am Busy Writing Fiction, by the gods, and there is nothing that can pull me away from it for long.

I’m up to 169 pages over the past 12 weeks, and that’s not counting over 100 pages of writing journal and various handwritten scribbles.

With all that, by now, my Wise Readers are saying, “Well, then, Dana: where are the damned excerpts?“

There’s a good reason I haven’t posted a single word of all this mad, frantic fiction on ye olde writing blogge for your reading pleasure (or displeasure, depending).  That’s because it’sfanfiction.
Artist’s Impression of Reader Response

Deep breath.

Screw courage to sticking place.

THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S FAN FICTION, ALL RIGHT?
Artist’s Impression of Reader Response

Now, don’t be that way.  There’s nothing wrong with fan fiction, and I’ll tell you why.

For one thing, lots of us get our start writing fan fiction.  Think of it this way: it’s like learning how to play the guitar.  Most folks aren’t virtuosos from the start.  They learn by imitation, drive people mad by playing “Stairway to Heaven” ninety-seven times a day really badly, and eventually, after stealing borrowing bits from the professionals for many years, become skilled and confident enough to strike out on their own.  You can learn a lot about telling stories and handling characterization and all those important but difficult aspects of writing by getting your feet wet in other writers’ worlds.

But after you’ve gotten your feet wet, once you’ve learned how to swim (or, switching metaphors, play something that is not “Stairway to Heaven”), you should never, ever write fan fiction ever again, right?

I mean, you’re just wasting time that could’ve been spent on your own magnum opus.

You’re grown up.  You’re past that, now.

It’s silly.  Immature.  Useless.

And those are things you can tell yourself in order to stay on track with your own work rather than reverting to young writerhood, but let me ‘splain why, after having given myself the “Stay focused, you’re too grown up for fan fiction, you shouldn’t waste time, etc. etc. Peter Cetera etc.” lecture, I’ve plunged into writing fan fiction anyway.

It’s because I needed New Eyes.  Not Wise Reader eyes.  Not New Character Eyes.  They weren’t helping.  I’d got bogged down in the minutiae of my created universe and couldn’t see the forest for the trees.  Hell, I couldn’t even make out some of the trees for the trees.  I knew there were places where I was stuck, where my imagination wasn’t grasping the essentials, but I couldn’t for the life of me see what they were or how the hell I could extract myself.  Also, I am teh suck at action scenes, and I’d grown tired of page after page of nothing much going on.  Okay, so lots was going on, psychological drama and all that, but still.  Everything felt stagnant.  And you know what happens when things stagnate.  Ain’t pretty.

Around the time I was about to write this winter writing season off as a bad job and bugger off to do something else, my intrepid companion hauled Doctor Who up for our Monday entertainment.  And there they were.  My much-needed New Eyes.  I didn’t mean to write fan fiction, I really didn’t, but a story presented itself and then (as things to do when the Doctor’s around) spiraled a bit out of control and now we’re pushing two hundred pages, and I don’t begrudge an instant of it because chucking him into my universe is allowing me to see it in ways I’ve never seen it before.  Thorny problems that plagued me for years are resolving nicely.  And I’m improving on the action scene front.  And it’s fun.

There’s nothing not to love here.

When I go back to writing non-fan fiction, I’ll have a fresh perspective.  Not to mention all that lovely exercise.

So here’s my advice to you writers who might be stuck: don’t run away screaming if the possibility of writing some good old fashioned fan fiction presents itself.  If you can fit someone else’s character into your world for a bit, and you feel like trying it, try.  Unleash your imagination.  Because here’s what it does:

1.  Forces you to write from an unfamiliar perspective.  If your characters have all started blending in to each other, or slotted themselves into neat little types, filching other people’s characters and writing from their viewpoint for a bit can break that vicious cycle.  And it’ll improve your characterization chops in the process.

2.  Helps you see your world afresh.  What’s intimately familiar to you and your characters is completely new to other people’s characters.  They’ll notice things you and your own characters wouldn’t pay any attention to.  And sometimes, that will lead to creative revelations.  You might even find yourself quoting T.H. Huxley: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”  You’ll find yourself questioning assumptions and seeing things differently and asking those questions that make writing a process of exploration and discovery rather than a plodding one-word-after-another slog.

3.  Gives you practice with different techniques and situations.  If your mad writing skillz suffer in a particular area, and you know you need to polish ’em up, using an established character who’s an old pro at this sort o’ thing can give you that polish.  There’s already a template to follow.  And after tracing the template until you’re good at it will allow you to toss the template out and strike out confidently on your own later.

4.  Gets you excited again.  After so much time exploring every detail of your world, you might be suffering the old “familiarity breeds contempt” malady.  Not to mention, you have performance anxiety.  Fan fiction allows you to spend some time writing without suffering those complaints, and hence can recharge your fictional batteries nicely.  It can allow you to fall in love with your own writing again.

5.  Gives you practice for that great day when, as a famous author, you’re asked to write a reboot of your favorite fiction.  Look.  There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, is there?  And you never, ever know.  It could happen.  You might even make it happen.  And in case points 1-4 weren’t enough to convince yourself it’s really okay to spend a little time playing, this last one might be just the permission slip you need.

There are other benefits, I’m sure, probably quite a few I haven’t discovered yet or won’t discover because they’re not relevant to my situation, but might be for yours.  You won’t know until you’ve tried.  And you might never try.  You might never need to write fan fiction in your entire life.  But if you’re stuck, consider this as a way of unsticking yourself.  And enjoy the hell out of it.  And if people sneer at you for piddling around with fan fiction when you should be spending your time being a Really Serious Original Writer, there’s just one response:
Artist’s Illustration of Proper Technique
Dojo Summer Sessions: Mah Sooper Sekrit Projeckt

Memorials

Dana Hunter3 Comments
The Moving Wall Vietnam Memorial

My dad used to tell me stories.

He’d been in Vietnam.  Infantry, United States Army.  He’d gotten drafted while switching colleges (never let it be said grades aren’t important: they can keep you from getting shot, for instance).  And it was a hard year.  That year changed his life.  He went to war.  He lost half his hearing when someone shot a .45 near his ear in a tunnel; he’d had his jaw broken by a bullet; he still has bits of shrapnel working their way out of his chest from a grenade wound he took to the ankle.  He still won’t sit with his back to a door.  And for years, he could only allow bits and pieces of that year to surface.  He’d talk about it, but only in fragments.  Some of it he barely talked about at all.

I used to go out into the garage and open the box with his war medals.  I remember the cold, rich glow and sharp points of the Bronze Star; the royal starkness of his Purple Hearts.  There was a scent to them, old ribbon and polished metal, somehow seeming very distant and serious.  I remember his name sewn on his fatigues, and the stiff decorations.

He hated green for a great many years.  Green was Army fatigues, and jungles, and too many memories.  Maybe that’s part of the reason we ended up in Arizona.  Not so much green there.  And he wouldn’t eat beans on a bet.  Yes, part of that was because of the horrors of his grandmother’s method of cooking green beans (place in pressure cooker, cook until it explodes, scrape beans of ceiling along with flecks of yellow paint, serve).  But the rest of beankind got short shrift from him after a year in the Army.

He’d tell me stories. 

There were young men in that unit who knew you had to be a little crazy to survive.  So they’d be crazy.  You’d have to be crazy to be pinned down in trenches, under heavy fire, running out of ammo, and go fetch an enormous sack of the stuff, come back through the trenches with that sack on your back singing “Here comes Santy Claus, here comes Santy Claus – and what can Santa do for you?”

And my father, giddy with the relief of seeing rather more useful bullets come his way than the ones that had been coming his way a moment before, said, “Well, Santa, I’d like some ammunition.”

And the man – Jimmy Blue, I believe, though you can’t trust a kid’s memory and I hesitate to dredge my father’s memory at this time of year – the crazy man with the enormous sack of ammunition on his back handed over some ammunition with a cheerful “Here you go!” and went singing off to the next man pinned down under fire, the best Christmas present they could have asked for.

There was the time they were out on patrol with a lieutenant they didn’t like.  Obstacles were supposed to be whispered back.  This was enemy territory at night – had to be quiet.  So you whispered back the obstructions and moved as quietly as possible.  Until you heard riotous laughter from the back of the line, and stormed back there to see what the fuck was going on, and found Zimmerman and a few of the others laughing at the lieutenant, up to his neck in raw sewage in a drainage ditch, because one of them “forgot” to pass the word along.

You did not piss off the men, because they would find ways to piss on you.  So would their monkey.  They had a monkey who lived in the common area.  It once pissed on an officer.  This, they decided, was an enlisted man’s own monkey.  Nobody had liked that officer much.  Neither, it appeared, had the monkey.

So many men, so many stories, hilarious stories, funny and heartwarming and head-shaking stories.  There were moments of high bravery and low comedy.  Brothels in Saigon.  Beer runs.  Trying to eat a steak when your jaw had been shattered in a dozen places.  Shooting a wild pig at dawn, because as it turns out, pigs breathe quite a bit like humans and don’t identify themselves when they’re ordered to.  That poor unfortunate porker came upon my dad and a few of his fellows when they were in a perimeter camp.  My dad built that story from the foundations: a dark, quiet morning.  Breathing in the jungle.  Something creeping closer, closer, surely the enemy.  Finally opening fire.  Silence.  “Should we check?”  Finally, a cautious excursion, and the dead enemy: a wild boar.  Inspiration.  Breakfast.  Their commanding officer came up on them just as they were busy roasting the boar for breakfast, demanded to know what was going on, and was solemnly informed that they’d engaged the enemy.  They had a confirmed Viet Cong kill: this pig.  Would you like some, sir?

He told me the stories.  So many stories.  And then, one day, the Traveling Wall came through Page, and he handed me a list of names.  He couldn’t face that wall yet.  Could I find those names and get rubbings of them?

I looked down at the list.  On it were a lot of the people he’d told me stories about, people I’d come to love and look forward to.  I remember going numb, and then I started crying.  I’d had no idea.  I knew that war had claimed over fifty thousand American lives, but not them.  Not those lives.  Please, not the men I’d grown up hearing about.  I don’t remember much about that day.  I don’t remember getting those names off that wall.  I just remember looking at it not as a curiosity, not as a monument, but for what it was: a memorial, a long black monolith with the names of the dead written on it in stark white letters.  It’s different, when they’re men you’ve known.  It’s different, when they’re men your father fought and nearly died with.  It’s harder and it means more.

I wish I remembered them better.  One day, my father and I will sit at a table again, and he’ll be in the mood to talk about Vietnam, and I’ll treat those names with more care.  There’s only one I’m sure of: Jimmy Blue.

He was twenty years old.

He’d had the kind of outsized personality that made you believe he could never die.  And a memory of him never will.  There will be his name in stone, which will probably outlast this republic.  There’s the stories, which my dad told and which I’ll pass on, and generations from now, someone will remember the crazy kid who once went through the trenches near Christmas with a sack of ammo on his back and a song on his lips.

Your feelings about the justification for the Vietnam War don’t matter here.  There’s just one fact, on this day, that we must remember: this country asked these young men and women to fight and die for their country, and they did.  Whatever their personal feelings about why they were there or whether it was a “good” war, they served their country, and gave their lives for it, and this is the day we’ve set aside to remember them as a nation.

I give my love to all of those boys who only came home in my dad’s memory.  I wish I’d met you.  I’m so glad I’ve known you.

Thank you.

Memorials

Accretionary Wedge #34: Weird Geology

Dana Hunter5 Comments

It seems to me that there would be no such science as geology if dear old planet Earth wasn’t really damned weird.
Image Credit: Chris Rowan

People had been running into seashells on mountaintops for years.  Seashells.  On mountaintops.  “That’s weird,” they said, and eventually, some clever types not content with “Funny old world, innit?” and “God must’ve done it” arguments said, “That’s really weird.  How’d they get up there?  How, in fact, did mountains get there?”  And then you had Hutton sailing people around to Siccar Point and pointing out the rather dramatic angular unconformity there.  Now, that was weird.  So weird he took twenty-five years and a very verbose book to explain it.

Now, of course, we don’t think it’s all that weird.  But that’s only because it’s familiar.  It’s like your Great Aunt Vanessa, whose personal quirks like dressing every square inch of exposed furniture surface in doilies and pontificating on the personalities of her plants strikes first-time visitors as mightily strange, but after you’ve got used to her and had the origins of those oddities explained away, just seems charmingly eccentric.

I mean, the very idea that these big ol’ solid continents go rafting round the world was so laughably ridiculous on its face that nearly everybody laughed at poor old Alfie Wegener when he floated the idea.  Sure, everybody’d looked at a map of the world at some point and went, “Hmm, Africa and South America are a perfect fit.  Well, that’s weird,” but not as weird as Wegener’s idea – until the evidence piled up, and everything fell into place, and the mountains made sense, and now everybody who knows anything about geology doesn’t think plate tectonics is all that weird at all.  But it is.  Really, really weird.  Just because something makes perfect sense and can be proven scientifically doesn’t mean it’s not strange.

It’s hard to remember how weird all this stuff really is.  Which is why I invited all you all to hop in the wayback machine or scurry out to the field in search of bizarre, befuddling, or simply baffling bits of geology.  What follows is a carnival sideshow of Weird Geology.  Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen, and feast your eyes on mind-boggling minerals, eccentric erratics, and a veritable smorgasbord of delightfully strange stones!
Image Credit: NIH

Roll up and see the famous Siamese Twins, Evelyn of Georneys and Michael of Through the Sandglass, conjoined at the posts Geology Word of the Week: Y is for Yardang and Yardangs: an Accretionary Wedge Weirdness Cross-post!  Feel the stare of the yardang!  Marvel at its perfect form and conformation!

Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen!  Hear Metageologist at Earth Science Erratics announce, “Chalk is weird.”  Surely not chalk, you say!  But surely yes!  This dull, dry, bland-tasting (admit it, you had a nibble, perfectly normal for a geologist even though you weren’t technically a geologist at that age) and indeed chalky rock is indubitably weird, and, dare we say, even strange.  See chalk as you’ve never seen it before!

And speaking of seeing, don’t believe your eyes!  Geology is a master of illusion.  Venture into Magma Cum Laude’s tempting tent, and Jessica shall show you illusions that will leave your brain befuddled and your senses insensible!  It’s all here in Weird Geology: Accretionary Wedge #34, wherein it is proved that seeing should not always be believing.
Image Credit: kh1234567890

Weird Geology?  Holy Haleakala, what’s weirder than molten rock? Let Matt at Research at a Snail’s Pace show you there’s nothing ordinary about rocks melting deep in the earth!

And then, ladies and gentlemen, come this way and walk on land – moving land, that is!  That’s right, Rachael at 4.5 Billion Years of Wonder has a Slow Motion Landslide that must be trod upon to be believed!  It will give a whole new meaning to “the earth moved.”  Guaranteed!

But that’s not all!  No, simple moving earth is not all landslides have to offer!  Let David at History of Geology show you The landslide of Köfels: Geology between Pseudoscience and Pseudotachylite, where you will find pumice created by the friction of a landslide!  That’s truly weird!  Weirder, even, than The toad in the hole…

Watch your step, folks, watch your step!  That may be Quicksand you’re headed for!  At Ron Schott’s Geology Home Companion Blog, it is proved “that not all terra is firma,” a lesson you won’t soon forget!
Image Credit: The Church of Man-Love

Hoodoo?  Voodoo?  Erosiondoo!  Phillip at Geology Blues knows that Goblin Valley is Weird!  Take an eerie journey through the hoodoos, at night, on Halloween – the only way to see your truly weird geology!

Oh, but ladies and gentlemen, Malcom at Pawn of the Pumice Castle has landforms that are not only weird, but unsolved!  Accretionary Wedge #34: That is Weird will introduce you to the great and terrible mystery of Mima Mounds.  Prepare to be amazed!

And, speaking of mounds, go Geocaching and discover Quellschwemmkegel – mounds created by springs.  No mystery how these formed, but plenty weird, as Ole well knows!
Image Credit: Visboo

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve seen breccia, but never like this!  You will marvel, you will ponder, Silver Fox of Looking for Detachment will prompt Some Thoughts on Weirdness, and A Picture (or Two) (or Three) – and what magnificent pictures they are!  How big can breccia be?  Come this way and find out!

Rocks can be magical, and what could be more magical than a crystal-filled rock appearing where no rock has ever been before?  Special to AW-34 Weird Geology, a blast from the past, Ann at Ann’s Musing on Geology and Other Things has the story of a stone rafted on ice, buried, and brought to the surface by frost. Marvelous!

Continue your tour of  Accretionary Wedge 34: Weird geology at Hypo-theses, where Doctor Ian will show you rocks that will make you gasp, yes, gasp in shock and delight!

And you know that Accretionary Wedge #34 – Weird Geology would not be complete without a very weird wave-cut bench, which On-The-Rocks at Geosciblog provides for your entertainment and edification.

Now see, right here at ETEV, captured in stone, frozen forever, phenomena that will make you wonder about Permanent Impermanence: or, How the Fuck Did That Fossilize? 

And speaking of fossils, ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be amazed, astonished, and astounded at fossil rocks.  Step Outside the Interzone, where Lockwood hosts Weird Geology: Name That Rock Type!  What’s in a name?  Much more than you realize!

Ladies and gentlemen, the carnival is over, but the Weird Geology is still out there, awaiting discovery.  Take up your rock hammers, your beer, and your hand lens, don your boots, and go, intrepid explorers, to reveal the weird and the wonderful, the bizarre and the beautiful, the anomalous and the alluring bones of this good planet Earth.
Image Credit: IGN
Accretionary Wedge #34: Weird Geology

Cantina Quote o' The Week: Steven Pinker

Dana Hunter

The problem in dealing with people is that people can deal back.

–Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

So can animals.  Just ask any pet owner who’s left the buggers alone for a weekend, and upon their return discovered that revenge is a dish that may be served cold, in several expensive pieces, or as a steaming pile of unspeakable horror left on one’s pillow.

Cantina Quote o' The Week: Steven Pinker

Los Links 5/27

Dana Hunter

I caught up on some reading whilst Aunty Flow was here.  That means you’ll have more linkage than you know what to do with.  And on time!  So let’s get right down to it, shall we?

Biggest news of the week, at least for the United States, was Joplin getting leveled by a tornado.  It’s one of those shitty things that can happen when you’re in the middle of Tornado Alley and storms are getting stronger due to climate change.  For most of us, the immediate reaction was empathy and a hope that folks would make it out okay.  For others…

PoliticsUSA: The Darker Side of YHWH: Janet Porter Says Tornadoes Were God’s Wrath.  You knew some religious lackwit was gonna say it.  As if the people of Joplin haven’t been through enough.

This shit’s depressing.  So are head-in-the-sand attitudes that will allow this planet to bake to death.

Grist: Missouri tornado whips up media discussion of climate change and extreme weather.  No better post if you need to sober up in a hurry.

Kansas City Star: Tornadoes! Floods! Droughts! Scientists say it’s global warming.  Our own Anne Jefferson gives a kick-ass interview.

The news we poked the most fun at, o’ course, was the Rapture!

LiveScience: Failed Doomsday Has Real Deadly Consequences.   Pets and people dead.  So don’t tell me there’s no harm in religion.

Greta Christina’s Blog: Live-blogging the Rapture.  We do still get to point and laugh, though.  “There is a vanishingly small but non-zero chance of butt monkeys.”  Oh, Greta, how I love you!

Pharyngula: Wrong, root and branch; wrong at every cell and molecule; wrong to the core.   The aftermath, and a rant.

Science

Miller-McCune: Scientists Take Charles Darwin on the Road.  Getting scientists into classrooms to talk about *gasp* evolution has some surprising – and uplifting – results.  Also, Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth, in which we see the sad result when scientists refuse to face the lack of evidence.

Puffthemutantdragon: Bubonic Plague in America, Part I: LA Outbreak.   Yes, I’m a sucker for super-deadly infectious disease stuff, but this is fascinating even if you aren’t a sucker for same.  Don’t miss Part II.

Speaking of Research: A paralyzed man stands again…thanks to animal research!   This, my friends, is among the many reasons why it’s important to stand up against the animal rights maniacs who think mayhem and murder are justified against animal researchers.

Neurotic Physiology: Friday Weird Science: Horsing Around and the Sexual Behavior of Stallions.  You know, I owned horses for years and never realized they pleasure themselves…  Also, see how to handle being wrong with kick-ass awesomeness.

Georneys: Blast from the Past: Element Talk Show.  Evelyn’s posting bits of her school projects for a bit of a laugh, but this one’s brilliant.  I want to see it produced!  Also, the Geologist’s Alphabet is complete.  Learn your ABZs!  And then feast your eyes on Cape Peninsula in Pictures.  Wowza!

ScienceNews: Stellar oddballs.  If anyone was wondering if Kepler’s worth the money it took to develop and launch it, the answer is yes.  Yes, it is.  Sign of a truly great mission, this, the fact it’s already gone so far beyond its original intent.

Uncovered Earth: Expressions In Stone: Suiseki.  For those of you wondering what to do with those unruly rock collections, or looking for excuses to collect more rocks, this.  Bonus: suiseki, unlike bonsai, won’t die horribly because you have a black thumb.  Also, Sunday Science Photos, May 15 – 21. 

Contagions: Rinderpest, Measles and Medieval Emerging Infectious Diseases.  Measles is younger than you think.  And 400 kids die of it every day.  Vaccinate, people!

About Geology: A Poet’s Advice on Geology.  Walt Whitman proving science and poetry do mix.  Beautifully.  Plus, the d-word.

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: The world’s longest cells? Speculations on the nervous systems of sauropods.  You thought the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve was ridiculous?  Check this out!

Glacial Till: Meteorite Monday: Lunar meteorites.  Including one of the most beautiful pictures of the Moon you’ll ever see.

Outside the Interzone: Moonday: Io.  While we’re on the subject of incredible pictures of moons….

The Loom: How a zombie virus became a big biotech business.  Shh.  Don’t tell the anti-vaccine frothers that zombies manufacture vaccines!

Highly Allochthonous: Earthquake ‘precursors’ and the curse of the false positive.  Chris Rowan takes the latest earthquake prediction nonsense down.

Doctor Stu’s Blog: Blue Lights Shown to Give a Brain Boost! But is a Better than Coffee?  I need me a blue light!

Thoughtomics: Why Life is like Lego.  This is purely awesome.  I’ll never play with Legos the same way ever again.

Scientific American: Physics and the Immortality of the Soul.  Damn you, physicist Sean Carroll, for making my writing life harder!  But I’m glad you did.  Too bad about the souls, really.

Bad Astronomy: Weather satellites capture shots of volcanic plume blasting through clouds.  Okay, this is too cool for words – just go look.

The Official Geologist Webpage.  ZOMG LOL just go have a look I can’t talk about it laughing too hard ow.

Scientific American: Looking for Empathy in a Conflict-Ridden World.  Can you capture empathy in a scanner?  Appears so – and the results may or may not startle you.

Quest: Geological Outings Around the Bay: Ring Mountain.  Andrew, look, you know I love you – but stop making me want to move to California!  Okay, actually, don’t stop.

Grist: How industrial agriculture makes us vulnerable to climate change, Mississippi floods edition.  Awgawds.  As if it wasn’t already horrible…

Smithsonian: Top Ten Myths About the Brain.  If I ever hear “We only use 10%” again ever in my life, the person saying it will get such a smack.

Mountain Beltway: Weekend macro bugs.  So pretty!  A camera certainly changes your whole perspective on creepy-crawlies.

Laelaps: Long Live the Anomalocaridids!  Squee!  Anomalocaridids survived longer than we thought!  Hooray for bizarre beasties!  Also, don’t miss Brian’s ScienceNOW companion piece: Who You Callin’ Shrimp? 

io9: The story behind the world’s oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago.  Modern archaeology, meet ancient archaeology.

The Guardian: Britain’s volcanic past.  Epic.  Geology is awesome.

Eruptions: That about wraps it up for the Grímsvötn eruption.  Nice finale to the biggest Icelandic volcano news since that bloody unpronouncible one.

Scientific American: Material Poet.  Cloning glaciers.  I bloody love it when art and science mix!

Writing

A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing: In Which I Wax Philosophical on Narrative Distance, POV, and Voice.  This isn’t a run-of-the-mill post on those points – this is a brain scientist’s post on those points.  Much food for thought for such a short post!

The Passive Voice: How to Read a Book Contract – Assignments – Part 1.  Assignments, people, not assignment.  As in, assignments in a contract.  And if you don’t know what those are, you’d better get your arse over there and read up.  Also, Part 2.  

Nathan Bransford: Reversals in Novels and Movies.  Or, why your story should be more like switchbacks than open road.  Hey, I should write that…

Dean Wesley Smith: Think Like A Publisher #11… Electronic Sales to Bookstores.  This is possibly the coolest idea ever.  Who says you can’t sell ebooks in a brick-and-mortar store?!

The Business Rusch: Publishers (Surviving the Transition Part 2).  It’s amazing, innit, just how many different ways people can find to screw you royally.  Good thing there are people who can help you screw back.

Imaginary Foundation: Seth Godin: The Wealth of Free.  “The industry’s dead.” Find out why.

Atheism and Religion

Blag Hag: Atheist high schooler receives death threats for protesting graduation prayer.  Seriously.  Death threats, merely for pointing out that a school-sponsored prayer is against the law.  This is why atheists have to speak out, folks: to keep kids like this from being ostracized, disowned, and threatened.

What Would JT Do: They drag prayer lower than I ever could.  I hope they enjoy the ensuing court battle.

Jessica Ahlquist: A Quick History.  Another brave, eloquent high school student finding herself under fire for trying to get her school to understand the law.

Miranda Celeste: A worthless and dangerous report.  Once again, the Catholic Church blames everybody but itself for its child-raping priests – with bonus blame-society and but-they-were-never-taught-raping-kiddies-was-wrong handwaving.  Good on Miranda for ripping their report apart!

Patheos: Time for a Nontheist History Month.  I’m so down with this.  And can you imagine the frothing fundies’ reactions when they find out this nation wasn’t so Christian after all?  Heh.

Bad Astronomy: Oregon set to remove faith healing defense for parents.  Good.

Open Parachute: Confronting accomodationism.  Excellent.

Women’s Issues

The Daily Beast: DSK Accuser: The Dangerous Life of a Hotel Maid.  You’ll never see the woman who brings you fresh towels as anything less than incredibly brave after this.

The Difference Engine: What it feels like to be me.   A neat little thought experiment that should help even the most obtuse among us understand what it’s like to be female in a male-dominated world.

Coyote Crossing: How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men.  Give to every man you meet.  Men not already following the guide: pay close attention.

Sasha’s Den of Iniquity: Sasha’s Brief Guide to Not Being a Douchy Misogynist.  Also give this to every man you meet.  See?  Some men really get it.  You can, too!

The Plog: Kansas Rep. Pete DeGraaf: Being impregnated during a rape is just like getting a flat tire.  But I’ll bet he expects his insurance to cover Viagra while women are forced to pay for their own abortions after a rape.

Greta Christina’s Blog: Atheism, Sexism, and Pretty Blonde Videobloggers: or, What Jen Said.  Dear atheist males: you should be better than this.  Please ask the nearest female atheist to whack you over the head with a clue-by-four.  Repeat as necessary.

Blag Hag: We’re not here for eye candy.  Got that yet?

Skepchick: The Secular Movement’s Position on Women’s Rights.  As in, when you’re fighting frothing fundie encroachment on secular society, you shouldn’t forget the war against women they’re waging.

Almost Diamonds: Sexism Always Wins, but It Still Loses.  There’s good news.  Nothing like allowing the opponent room to shoot self in foot, is there?

Sociological Images: Serena Williams’ Patriarchal Bargain.  Why are we playing a game we can’t win, ladies?  It’s time to change that game.

Mike the Mad Biologist: Refusing to Cede the Moral High Ground on Abortion.  This is what abortion really is.  A blessing.  And we shouldn’t forget that, lest we lose all access to that blessing.  Oh, and before you start babbling about adoption, read this comment at Pharyngula.

The Independent: Laurie Penny: Say it again: it’s our right to choose.  Britain’s facing the same kind of frothing fundie anti-abortion crusades we are here.  Ladies, if you don’t want to end up a baby factory, time to get loud.

Society and Culture

MoveOn: The Most Aggressive Defense Of Teachers You’ll Hear This Year.  I don’t normally point to videos, but da-amn, this one’s worth watching in its entirety.

A Teacher on Teaching: Sham Standards: Governor Kasich and the Standardized Testing Fetish.  Veterans, teaching-to-the-test, and good old righteous rage.  You must read this, which is why it’s in bold.

Racialicious: How to Debunk Pseudo-Science Articles about Race in Five Easy Steps.  One of the best how-tos ever – definitely one we’ve needed.

Technosociology: Why Twitter’s Oral Culture Irritates Bill Keller (and why this is an important issue).  I love posts that make me look at something familiar through new eyes.  I’ll never see Twitter quite the same way again.

Rationally Speaking: Who dunnit? The not-so-insignificant quirks of language.  It’s fascinating how language can change one’s views.  This post shows how the way we word things can change the way we understand the world with chilling clarity.

Not Exactly Rocket Science: Bad gossip affects our vision as well as our judgment.  Speaking of how language affects us, check out how a little gossip can change the way we actually see.

Decrepit Old Fool:  Consumerism and attachment.  Clocks, consumers, and a bit o’ Zen.  Also, The daughters of popular culture, in which the People of Wal-Mart and children’s toys are used to make some excellent points about our society.

Bug Girl’s Blog: Photos, Flames, and Copyright.  Copyright is important.  So is not being a total asscrunch when you think someone’s violated your copyright (but really hasn’t).  Also, never ever buy a picture from Ron Wolf.  Really, don’t.  There are plenty of photographers who aren’t gargantuan assholes who also take better photos.  Give them your business.

Almost Diamonds: The Role of Confrontation in the Gay Rights Struggle.  An awesome list of resources for those who want to understand the subject.  Accommodationists, take especial note, please, and extrapolate accordingly.  And don’t miss Stephanie’s Scientific American post: The Politics of the Null Hypothesis.

The Guardian: Our ignorance was bliss for Fred Goodwin.  Why we must learn to say, “That’s tough” a lot more often.  In fact, it’s so important that I’m going to quote it right here:

When censors try to restrict debate, democratic peoples must learn to reply with two words: that’s tough. “You want to use violence to stop criticism of religions that claim supernatural dominion over men’s minds and women’s bodies – that’s tough. You want to use libel law to stop scientists warning about the quack “cures” of chiropractic therapists – that’s tough. You want to use privacy law to prevent any mention of an alleged relationship between Sir Fred Goodwin and a colleague at the precise moment when he was taking the Royal Bank of Scotland over the cliff’s edge. Well, we can see why his tender feelings may be hurt, but this is a free society – so that’s tough too.”

SF Gate: The value of facts.  Apparently, reality violates some people’s values.  Jon Carroll helps us practice “that’s tough.”  And explains why volcanoes violate his values.

Politics

Marie Porter: Minnesota’s Gay Marriage Amendment.  A proper rant on the bigoted and badly misplaced priorities of the Cons.

Almost Diamonds: Not in My Constitution.  And while we’re on that subject, Stephanie Szvan’s blistering take on that nonsense.

NeuroDojo: Before you attack science, could you at least learn to use Google?  ABC plays the stenographer for Sen. Tom Coburn (R, of course, what did you expect?). 

Think Progress: BREAKING: Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin Makes History By Signing Into Law Single Payer Health Care.  WOOT! Nation, follow Vermont’s lead.

Alternet: Why Conservatives Want to Destroy Public Education.  Hint: it has a little summat to do with edimicashun and eekwaluhtee.

Los Links 5/27

Mathematical Memories

Dana Hunter4 Comments
There’s this post, you see, up at a new blog called Hyperbolic Guitars, that’s dredged up some old memories:
We should have, as a goal, to never hear the question “why are we learning this?” again.  No one asks why we learn to read.  The same should be true for basic mathematics.  Once students go beyond the basics, they should learn what their natural interests require of them.  The job of a mathematics teacher, once a student achieves basic mathematical fluency, should be to shine light on where mathematics lives in the world, and to point the curious student in the direction that they wish to go.  And then to stand aside.
The teachers, the engineers, the musicians, the artists, the scientists – all of us need to demonstrate – not EXPLAIN – how the quantitative complements the qualitative; the reasons that knowing why is as important as knowing how.  Or what.  Or when.  Or who.

I remember math.  I remember spending a good part of elementary school living in dread of it, because after I’d proudly learned my numbers and some basic addition and subtraction, it started getting nonsensical.  No one told me multiplication and division could be cool, just that they had to be done.  We had timed tests.  Those timed tests comprised a goodly portion of my academic dread (and I was a nervous child, mind).  I’d freeze.  I’d fail.  And freezing and failure led to more freezing and failure, until I became convinced that mathematics was an Evil Subject that Was Not For Me.


Something clicked early in middle school – don’t know what – but we got to the more complex stuff at the end of the basic math courses and all of a sudden, I was flying.  Math was fun.  I could own this shit.  It made sense.  Numbers spoke to me.  Oh, and the tests weren’t timed, so that pressure was off.  Just a nice, happy communing with numbers – until the school said, “Congratulations!  You’re doing so well we’ll just let you skip the rest of this and get right into pre-algebra.”


It was rather like someone deciding a hole in the ground was as good as a finished foundation and trying to slap a house up on top of it.  I collapsed.  Numbers, once more, made no damned sense.  And the book – oh, that book, with its horrible word problems.  My dad, incensed that his daughter, the daughter of a civil engineer, couldn’t do pre-algebra, sat down one night to explain to me just how easy it was.  He looked at the book.  He fell silent mid-rant.  He flipped a few pages.  And then he told me he didn’t understand it, either.  What, he asked, did any of this have to do with real life?  This wasn’t how math behaved in the real world.


He worked thirteen hour days, so he didn’t have time to teach me when the teachers couldn’t.  He tried, but by then, I needed too much time and attention, and his books were decades out of date, and what he did the teachers tried to undo the next day, because it wasn’t the way it would be on the test, and so he gave up.  We both did.  Math became one of those subjects that I scraped by in.  The numbers never talked to me, and I could see no possible way it would ever be relevant to my interests.  I didn’t need algebra to balance a checkbook.  I had calculators to deal with the calculations.  And all I ever wanted or needed to be was a writer, and what writer needs calculus?


SF authors, actually, but nobody ever told me that.


There was only one more time when math made sense.  It was in high school chemistry, and our chemistry teacher didn’t take for granted we’d have learned any of the algebra we’d need.  So he taught it to us.  It had context, it was directly applicable to what we were doing, it helped us do interesting stuff with chemicals, and I loved it.  I could do it.  I could solve the problems.  But he was the only one who ever did that.  It was back to story problems and divorced-from-my-reality-bullshit-complete-with-blond-jokes-in-geometry for the rest of my academic career.  


And no one ever told me, ever, in all that time, that music and math were related.  Never told me where algebra came from, or how powerful it was.  No one ever said that calculus had been only a comparatively recent invention, and what a universe it had unlocked.  Math was never put in context.  The closest my math teachers got was some vague hand-waving about algebra being useful if you forgot to record a check in your checkbook (like we couldn’t just call the bank) and some extraordinarily lame “What if you were trapped on a desert island without a calculator?” bullshit when they tried to get us to go without calculators.


I felt that, in that case, solving for x wouldn’t be high on my list of priorities.


So I missed out.  There’s a whole enormous universe of numbers out there, and I don’t speak the lingo.  I can’t understand what they’re trying to say.  I never knew about “happy primes” until I watched Doctor Who and thought no such thing existed.  But they do.  There’s whole realms of happy and sad numbers.  Why don’t they teach recreational mathematics? 

I can’t tell you how to fix education.  But I can tell you what I needed: I needed teachers who loved the subject.  I needed less teaching to the test and a lot more exploration.  I needed strong foundations built.  I needed the who and the what and the when and the where and the why.  I needed teachers who demonstrated what math was good for, and the astonishing things it could reveal, and how art and music and myth and fiction and science and engineering and politics and just about everything else used math, could be inspired by it, could be given power and potential by it.  I needed to be shown how math tied in to other subjects.  I didn’t need it walled off from everything else, as if it was a noble gas that refused to react with anything else.  I needed to see it as something every bit as dramatic and exciting as a great story (which it can tell), and as uplifting and inspiring as a song (which it can be).  I needed to make friends with numbers.  I needed to understand you don’t have to be born good at math in order to become good at it.  And I needed to know it was beautiful.

If my teachers had done even a fraction of that, I’d very possibly have gotten right up through calculus.  Equations would still hold mystery, but they wouldn’t be mysterious.  I’d be able to suss out their secrets.  We’d be able to converse, these numbers and I.  Instead, we’re doomed to stuttering, stilted conversations held only when translators are available, and I don’t understand a tenth of what they’re saying.  That hurts, sometimes physically hurts, and it’s held me back in life.  It’s kept me from delving as far into science as I’d like to go.

So yes, education in this country is failing miserably, and I’m damned glad there’s a good place to have a conversation about it.  Maybe someday, if enough of us get talking, we can change the academic world.

Mathematical Memories