Sometimes, I have no idea what I’m doing here, and I mean that in a good way. It’s nice to blog on a network filled with so many consistently awesome people. And we’ve just added two kickass atheists to the bunch: Zinnia Jones and Ashley Miller. They’re the vanguard for our videoblogging horde. Not only do they vlog, they blog, and they are outstanding writers. With Ashley and Zinnia, I think we have achieved a majority share of awesome atheists online. And dere r moar on teh wai!
Suddenly, taking over the world doesn’t seem like an impossibility…
You know, until I started writing this post and decided I wanted to do Spanish rather than English, I never know that “amarillo” means “yellow.” Yellow, Texas. Doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Interesting. Here’s some beautiful yellow flowers for you to identify.
Mystery Flowers I
I know, no fair. But these will probably be easy, so try your hand from this shot first. You’re looking across the wetlands at North Creek Park, so think stuff that grows in marshes in the northwestern United States. While you’re at it, admire the drumlin in the background. It’s pretty much the only topographic relief available.
I’m still not used to this. Arizona has plants, yes, and there are times of the year when there are more of them than at other times, but most places don’t get completely overwhelmed. In the Pacific Northwest, it very nearly gets menacing. I remember coming back here from the long Arizona trip we took in 2009, and feeling actually claustrophobic driving down my little road. Green growing shit pressed in on all sides, rather seeming as though it would pounce. It frightened me.
After sixteen hours of research yesterday, it was time to play. Good thing it was such a beautiful day today (hence the delay in posting). This is the perfect anthem for a lovely day. Also, there is some wild weathering at the beginning that looks a bit like tafoni. Some other gorgeous rocks throughout. Shame about the flowy dress thingy in the way.
I took my intrepid companion out to see the maclargehuge erratic, and he got a shot with the proper perspective for us. Yay, no more camera on the ground!
Maclargehuge erratic, moi for scale
Yep, still huge. We did some field breakage (i.e., threw one rock down on another) with some of the loose bits, and got some nice fresh surfaces, and I found a nice-sized chunk with what looks to be good crystalline structure, so I may be doing another post with samples so we can figure out if it’s definitely dunite (or gabbro) or not. Stay tuned.
Then we headed over to North Creek Park, which has changed rather dramatically since two months ago. I’ll be doing a compare-and-contrast post, but for now, some outtakes. Forget-me-nots were out in force and absolutely lovely:
Forget-me-nots growing out of the water.
I was hoping for frogs, but had to settle for a water-skipper instead.
Water-skipper. There's probably a technical name for this species, but hell if I know it.
And, last but not least, got a wonderful snap of a red-winged blackbird.
Red-Winged Blackbird
And now I’m home with the cat, who’s out on the porch in the nice sunshine, and birds are still singing, and I’ve got a fabulous UFD coming up for you. It truly is a beautiful day.
Here’s hoping yours was a little something wonderful, too, my darlings!
I’m deep in research for upcoming Mount St. Helens posts, so blogging will be light for a few days. Fortunately for you, some of my fellow FtBers are insane enough to engage in a blogathon for the Secular Student Alliance. Right now, Brianne at Biodork and Christina at WWJTD are engaged in mad blogging for an excellent cause. So read JT’s post about his work for the SSA and why it’s so critically important. It’s a great read, full of squee moments and packed with controversy. Once you’ve done that, are fired up and ready to go, head on over and support Brianne and Christine in their efforts to raise cold hard cash for secular students.
While they’re doing that, I’m diving deep into that monster 800+ paper on Mount St. Helens, collecting all sorts of delicious science for ye, and lemme tell ya, our Prelude to a Catastrophe series on Rosetta Stones is about to get explosive. In the meantime, here are some of the random bits that have amused me to no end during this long slog:
My reading of 18th and 19th century freethinkers continues apace. Charles Southwell – radical bookseller, socialist “missionary,” publisher, lecturer, Shakespearean actor – is an interesting read. He’s not quite as polished as many of the folks I’ve read, but once you’ve settled in and got up to speed, it’s a pleasant ride.
I’ve begun with Superstition Unveiled. I particularly loved this bit, where he takes off after those folks who absolutely insist on some kind of god being the eternal something that got the universe started:
It has always struck the author as remarkable that men should so obstinately refuse to admit the possibility of matter’s necessary existence, while they readily embrace, not only as possibly, but certainly, true, the paradoxical proposition that a something, having nothing in common with anything, is necessarily existent. Matter is everywhere around and about us. We ourselves are matter—all our ideas are derived from matter—and yet such is the singularly perverse character of human intellect that, while resolutely denying the possibility of matter’s eternity, an immense number of our race embrace the incredible proposition that matter was created in time by a necessarily existing Being, who is without body, parts, passions, or positive nature!
Right?
Also, this bit, which reminds me so much of the Christians I see today, screaming at atheists (which Southwell bundles together with universalists) that we haven’t got any morals, but they have, and then:
Oh yes, Christians are forward to judge of every tree by its fruit, except the tree called Christianity.
The vices of the universalist they ascribe to his creed. The vices of the Christian to anything but his creed. Let professors of Christianity be convicted of gross criminality, and lo its apologists say such professors are not Christian. Let fanatical Christians commit excesses which admit not of open justification, and the apologist of Christianity coolly assures us such conduct is mere rust on the body of his religion—moss which grows on the stock of his piety.
Before 1980, Mount St. Helens had a very distinguished career as an explosive volcano. Dwight R. Crandell of the USGS spent quite a number of years tracing her history. He called her “one of the most active and most explosive volcanoes in the Cascade Range.” He hadn’t even had time to get the ink down on his paper, much less let it dry, before Mount St. Helens hinted she was about to prove him right…
Mount St. Helens' sunset before 1980. The peak's symmetric cone earned it the title of the "Fuji of North America." USFS photo courtesy of Jim Hughes.
As always, feel free to leave comments here. I know SciAm’s commenting system is a pain in the arse. Also, please do raise a drink to Dr. “Rocky” Crandell – he did a hell of a lot of work on the fire mountains round here, and he saved a lot of lives. Jane, your dad was a man I wish I’d had the honor of meeting.
I want you all to know that I carry you round in a little bundle in the back of my head, pretty much all the time. I spend an inordinate amount of time at work bragging about you (and my supervisor, btw, is totally in love with you all after you identified her little baby cedar waxwing). I pounce upon things I think you might like, and if those things happen to belong to other people, I beg them to share (just you wait until you see the rock I’ve got for ye!). And, of course, I’m always on the lookout for UFDs. I think my friends are flummoxed by the sudden bird obsession, but I don’t care. It doesn’t matter where we go now, I’m all I MUST GET A UFD FOR MY READERS!!! while also collecting mystery flora and delicious geology and pretty much anything else I think may delight you.
So when I saw this lovely UFD sitting on a transmission tower whilst walking around Brier, WA, I would have jumped up and down and screamed if I hadn’t been so afraid of scaring it away before getting the camera aimed.
As I might have mentioned, I’m on an 18th and 19th century freethinker spree. I’m taking great pleasure in reading the words of atheists and not-atheists-but-at-least-in-the-same-zip-code heretics. It’s refreshing, knowing we’re walking a trail blazed by super-sharp thinkers of the past, and seeing how they dealt with the same old tired arguments we hear ad nauseum today. Of course, there’s the corollary: they dealt with this shit, why do we have to keep dealing with it? But religion is like kudzu, and it takes the effort of more than a handful of heretics to weed it out.
Back in March, the skunk cabbage bloomed, and I treated you to a skunk cabbage extravaganza. I also promised I’d treat you to a Seward Park skunk cabbage extravaganza, and promptly forgot. We’ll remedy that here, because skunk cabbage in bloom is rather beautiful, and it’ll make a nice contrast to what comes next.
Young skunk cabbage at Seward Park
At Seward Park, one of the main attractions is the skunk cabbage. There’s a whole marshy area full of them. And when spring comes, they push their spikes through and unfurl a little bit of botanical sunshine within easy view of the main trail.
Spiky botanical sunshine
The whole marsh fills with these little delights.
Skunk cabbage bonanza
And you look upon them, and breathe the fresh, sweet air, and think, “skunk, eh? Naw, they’re not so bad. They’re beautiful! Barely a whiff.”
Who you callin' a skunk, punk?
Right? So far, so lovely.
However.
I now know why skunk cabbage has got that name. When I was investigating the parks around Brier, Washington a few weeks ago, I found an inviting little spur trail going down toward Locust Creek. It’s one of those oh-so-typical Pacific Northwest tracks – you can tell it’s there because the plants are shorter on it, while the taller plants to either side lean in with that “Nice trail ya got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it” attitude. Bits are nearly overgrown, other bits are muddy or underwater, and the whole gives the impression it’s been abandoned for years, even though volunteers probably cleared it last fall.
Not the Locust Creek trail, but a close analogue.
Generally, these trails smell absolutely wonderful. There’s an undertone of clean wet earth, with occasional essences of running water. The blackberry brambles add overtones of elegant, understated sweetness. And there’s strong essences of leaves and bark and moss. Lovely!
That’s the way this trail smelled, until I’d got past the washed-out ponded bit that required some very fancy footwork, and began to smell something distinctly skunky. I mean, it didn’t smell like a black furry mammal with a white stripe had let its displeasure be known. known. That’s a particular and unmistakable stench. This wasn’t that. But there was a definite eau-de-skunk. It smelled rather like a group of plants wearing the essences of skunk glands as if it were an expensive perfume.
This tipped me off to the probability of skunk cabbage in the area. And lo! There it was.
Grown-up skunk cabbage
I’d read that skunk cabbage smells – well, skunky. But I hadn’t realized just how pervasive it is until I experienced it. And I’d heard of the enormous size skunk cabbage can attain, but when you compare March to May, you’re struck by two things: these plants are bloody ginormous, and they grow from zero to gargantuan in just a couple of months.
Thigh-high, many-feet-wide, skunky green glory
Amazing. Evolution produces intriguing results. Someday, I’ll investigate why skunk cabbage grows so large so fast.
There were some smaller examples, one that still had its spike, though without the yellow bits.
Adolescent skunk cabbage with spike. Kids these days...
These plants are edible with proper preparation. After smelling them in their full mature glory, however, I have to wonder how anyone discovered that. I can imagine only two possibilities: desperation, or a person with no nose.
Skunk cabbage at the age where it starts asking if it can borrow the keys to the car, even though it's too short to reach the pedals.
I found recipes. They look hideous. And I can’t find anyone who reports having enjoyed the result, so forget them. Gaze upon the glory of these leaves, try not to breathe their fragrance, and go eat something else.
