Month: June 2011

While We Wait for the Carnival to Come to Town…

Dana Hunter

Due to a breakdown, one of our sideshows is coming in late, so Ye Olde Accretionary Wedge #34 Addendum won’t be up until later today or tomorrow.  It will be worth the wait.  And if you missed the first go-round but have something you’d like to submit, please do feel free!

Due to a breakdown in my mad time management skillz, I haven’t got anything to fill the gap.  And I’ve got five hours of hard writing ahead, which means I can’t whip up anything brilliant.  So I’m going to ask your input instead.

Y’see, I’m fast running low on quotes for Cantina Quote o’ the Week.  And I figured, rather than scouring the intertoobz for more quotes, I’d invite you, my darlings, to submit your own favorites.  Anything you like.  I can’t promise I’ll use them, but I’d love to see them all.  I likes a good quote, me.

And now, ’tis time for a quote from my best friend: “I’m off – and I’m leaving, too.”

See ye at the sideshow.

While We Wait for the Carnival to Come to Town…
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Los Links 6/3

Dana Hunter

You know, this would’ve been on time, if Blogger had published yesterday like I told it to.  Ah, well, on with the show.

Monday was Memorial Day, of course, and a lot of people wrote some incredibly excellent things round it.  Here, in their own words:

Almost Diamonds: Fallen Warriors.  “People have died every time our country has been persuaded to recognize the right of another group to be considered full human beings.” Wherein people who didn’t fight on actual battlefields but fought and died for our freedoms nonetheless get a look in. 

Decrepit Old Fool: Memorial Day 2011.  “War is crazy; it is crazy-making. It drains reason out of what passes for civilization. The stories matter. They let us know about courage, who have never been there. And yes, many wars should not ever have happened. The stories punch holes in the fantasy that it’s all some kind of glorious video game. If we’re going to do this to human beings, let’s be damn, damn sure there’s a real reason.”

Stupid Evil Bastard: Thoughts on Memorial Day 2011.  “I’ve heard enough to know that it’s a whole lot of not fun covered in a thick layer of fuck this shit. I know enough to know that war is something that should be a last resort when all other options have been exhausted. I know enough to realize that it has impacts far beyond the battlefield that affect people individually, and nations collectively, long after the guns have gone silent.”  Yes.

Slobber and Spittle: Memorial Day 2011.  “America’s saddest acre won’t be closing anytime soon.”  And there will be more fallen soldiers to remember next Memorial Day.

It seems appropriate to post a link to this paper (pdf): The Psychological Cost of War: Military Combat and Mental Health.  It’s bloody expensive, both in dollars and human terms.

This week, the person voted Most In Need of a Good Sharp Smack appears to be Sen. Tom Coburn, whose ignorance of science knows no bounds.  He hated on the National Science Foundation.  Well, we can give as good as we get.

NeuroTribes: Why the GOP Hates the National Science Foundation.  “The truth is, the current incarnation of the GOP, frozen in its pose of perpetually indignant outrage, doesn’t want additional perspective, more data and nuance, and — Heaven forbid — dissenting voices.”  Damn you, reality, and your liberal bias!

The Tightrope: Attacks on science and Coburn’s ignorance.  Amazing how much ignorance can be revealed in a short post, but then again, Coburn’s a motherlode. 

Take it to the Bridge: Transformative Science.  Which is precisely what Coburn doesn’t understand even a tiny little bit.

NeuroDojo: What the Coburn report has in common with arsenic life.  When we expect science to produce nothing but bright, shiny breakthroughs, things like Coburn and the arsenic life debacle happen.  Neither one is good for science.

Respectful Insolence: Need to pander to your base? Attack funny-sounding science funded by the NSF!  Orac utterly destroys Coburn’s attack on the NSF.  The ground Coburn stands upon is scorched.  He is finished.

Science

Slate: The Discovery of Arsenic-Based Twitter.  The story of #arseniclife, and what it means for science.

Neuroself: Jonah Lehrer is Not a Neuroscientist.  Really not.  So don’t get worked into too much of a lather over that “wisdom of crowds” article in the WSJ.

John Hawks Weblog: No echoing the echo chamber here. No, seriously, forget those “intertubz are maeking u stoopid” articles.

The Guardian: How to spot a psychopath.  A long but fascinating read – psychopaths are intriguing.

Guardian: Children don’t need Brain Gym to spot nonsense.  But they do get censored for pointing out utter bullshit.

BoingBoing: Tornadoes, climate change, and real scientific literacy.  This post does a phenomenal job of tying together several important concepts.  Read it.

Uncovered Earth: It May Usually Rain, But It’s Not As Wet As You Think.  This is the one post you need for comprehending Pacific Northwest Weather.  Also, Sunday Science Photos, May 22 – 28.

Glacial Till: Meteorite Monday: The OSIRIS-REx Mission.  Pure awesome!

The Atlantic: Endeavour’s Final Mission.  These photographs made me gasp and grin and think, “ZOMG humans did this! We are teh awesome!”  Absolutely, utterly beautiful.

Skepticblog: Litigation gone wild! A geologist’s take on the Italian seismology manslaughter case.  The clearest take I’ve read yet on the rabid stupidity that is putting scientists on trial for not predicting the unpredictable. 

Neurotic Physiology: SCIENCE 101: Cranial Nerve V, the Trigeminal.  Science gone Bollywood!  Brilliant!

NPR: Science Deniers: Hand Over Your Cellphones!  We so totally should make them do this.  Might make people who don’t know jack shit about science but like to piss on it anyway think twice if they’d lose their iPhone in the process.

Laelaps: Stressed Lemurs and Grass-Eating Humans.  Amazing what we can learn from teeth – like our cousins had more in common with horses than we thought.  Also, at Dinosaur Tracking: Dinosaur Diamond: Moab’s Potash Road. 

Respectful Insolence: The bride of the son of the revenge of cell phones and cancer rises from the grave…again.  No, your cell phone won’t kill you.  Relax and keep talking.

Pharyngula: Is your cell phone cooking your brain?  For the last time: NO IT’S REALLY NOT. Seriously. 

Scientific American: An Epidemic of False Claims.  We need to change the funding and incentives, or science will continue to suffer.

Clastic Detritus: Surprising, Important — or Weird and Fun.  Blogs can step up for science when editors fail.

The Gleaming Retort: Great Moments in Science Writing: The Alpha Cavewoman Fiasco.  Write a stupid article butchering science, get pwnd by a master.  That’s all I’m sayin’.

Highly Allochthonous: Simulating river processes…ooh shiny, stream table!  ZOMG I want one of these! Amazing way to show how water and geology mix.

Eruptions: Carbon dioxide as a volcanic hazard at the Dieng Plateau (and beyond).  It’s not just lava, lahars, and big booms that make volcanoes dangerous.

Women’s Issues

New York Times: Badminton’s New Dress Code Is Being Criticized as Sexist.  Because it is.  When they start sexualizing the menfolk, then I might give them the benefit of the doubt.

Salon: Abortion saved my life.  If religious shits want to force women to view sonograms, they should be forced to read stories like these.

Good Media: Why White Men Should Refuse to Be on Panels of All White Men.  Step up to the plate, pasty boyz.

The Guardian: The incredible shrinking presence of women SF writers.  Wherein we learn that books written by women get short shrift in “best of” polls.  Quelle surprise.  Take especial note of this comment.

Biodork: Remembering Dr. Tiller.  It infuriates me that doctors trying to do a good service for women get targeted by religious fucktards who love to proclaim themselves “pro-life” while killing human beings.

Aetiology: You’re also too pretty for math.  How our culture tells little girls they shouldn’t do nerdy boy things like study math and science.

Inner Workings of My Mind: I’ve Gone and Done It Now: What It’s Like Without the Muslim Headscarf.  An inside look you should really have a look at.

Atheism and Religion

Why Evolution is True: Evidence against New Atheism: Exhibit B?  In which Chris Mooney is given yet another righteous spanking, and a study is studied.

Choice in Dying:  Through the Looking-Glass.  In which a vicar on a train is taken to task for being a lousy source of comfort to a grieving woman.  Also,  It’s all of a piece …

Sam Harris: Morality Without “Free Will”.  Yes, indeed, there is such a thing.  Religious people, take especial note – especially if you’re tempted to go on about how people can’t be good without God.

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club: D’Souza on callousness and compassion, atheism and morality.  Spoiler: D’Souza gets it completely wrong.

EvolutionBlog: Ye Olde “Atheism is a Religion” Canard.  Jason Rosenhouse puts a stake through its heart.  Again.

Writing

The Passive Voice: Publishers and Agents are Trying to Figure Out How to Skin Their Own Authors.  Possibly even flay them alive.  However, while they flay, you can pwn: How to Read a Book Contract – For Avoidance of Doubt.  Booyah!

The Atlantic: Why Are Spy Researchers Building a ‘Metaphor Program’?  And why did I stick it under ‘writing’?  Because it’ll make you think about metaphors in a whole new way.

A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing: Do Flashbacks Make Your Butt Look Big? (aka, Baby Got Backstory…)  All writers who have ever/are now/will ever struggle with how much backstory to put in the story need to read this post.  In other words, all writers need to read this post.

Dean Wesley Smith: Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Killing a Career.  It’s not as easy as you think.

Literary Abominations: Principles of Contracts: Everybody Knows Peggy Lee (or should).  Because if you don’t, you just might find yourself signing away the rights to every format your creative work could end up in ever.

The Chronicle: The Nature of E.B. White.  Bet you didn’t know there was a lot of science behind Charlotte’s Web.  But there was.  No matter how fluffy your fantasy, it could benefit from knowing about how the real world works.

Writer Beware: Contract Red Flag: Net Profit Royalty Clauses.  Be very sure you understand just how the publisher intends to calculate your royalties before you sign, or you could end up with pennies.  Literally.

A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Ebooks and Self-Publishing Part 3 – Yet Another Dialog Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath.  All I can say is, Amazon must be making publishers afraid.  Very afraid.  And if they’re not terrified already, they should be.  Authors, meanwhile, may scream for joy.

NeuroTribes: Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors. Some of the best writing advice you’ll get, from people who made it happen.  Like a smorgasbord, there’s lots to pick and choose from.

Politics

Speakeasy Science: Jessica Alba and the Chemistry Thing.  Celebrities, science, and the pathetic fact we have to sell common sense with sexy but badly informed people.

Bad Astronomy: Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA): on climate change, makes wrong even wronger.  Lest you thought it was only Coburn being a raging dumbass this week.  And why giving Rohrabacher the benefit of the doubt on possibly being taken out of context doesn’t make him any less of a mega-moron.

Liberal Values: Doctors Moving Left For Many More Reasons Than The New York Times Reports.  Cuz Dems are better for business, and some people are smart enough to realize when tax cuts taketh away more than they giveth.  Among other reasons.  Heh.

Society and Culture

Outside the Interzone: We Had Been Told This Mighty Ocean-Liner Even God Himself Could Not Sink.  A fantastic post on sinking ships, hubris, and why it’s important not to think too much of ourselves.

Mike the Mad Biologist: Do Pro-Education ‘Reform’ Progressives Actually Know Any Teachers?  If they did, they probably wouldn’t be spouting such utterly stupid shit about them.

Washington Monthly: The consequences of education cuts.  Parents are now paying for things that should be part of the educational package.  Schools can’t afford fucking paper towels and soap.  When will we have to admit we haven’t got a public education system anymore?  And when will we demand it be restored?

Los Links 6/3

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

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