This Would Have Scared the Screaming Jeebies Out of Me

Bit of set up here... The Guardian is reporting that a fan of Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick has written and published the manuscript that Jack Torrance's character purportedly created in The Shining, the novel by King, adapted to film by Kubrick.

In the story, Torrance is secluded with his family in a snowed-in, isolated hotel, where he hopes to complete a novel. Later in the story, his wife Wendy discovers that the entire manuscript is composed of the aphorism "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," repeated over and over.

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as "a big fan of Stanley
Kubrick and Stephen King", has self-published a book credited to Torrance,
repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the
words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.

Buehler limited himself to formatting that could be created with a typewriter- none of the graphic tricks that a writer/artist can pull off with computers. Predictably, at a certain point he was having a hard time coming up with novel formats for additional pages. He got to about page 60, out of an intended 80, and ran into writer's block (layout block?).

"I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on
for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film,
became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie,
and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.

If I had been that poor woman, I'd have been out the door, out of the city, and out of the country in flash, screaming like a banshee.

Bullet Time in the Matrix

Hubble has captured some images of high-speed, youthful stars tearing through interstellar gases. The stellar winds streaming out from the stars collides with the surrounding gas and creates these wonderful bow shocks. The release does not mention which wavelengths are imaged in these pictures, which would be an interesting tidbit of information. Full-size here, download page and overview here, full press release here. The top right image is most impressive at this scale, but in the full size versions the others are pretty spectacular too. Now we need to track them and see which nebula is "The One" who dodges these cosmic bullets.

OK, So I'm a Nerd

No surprise to me...

But the fact that I'm an "Uber Cool" Nerd King... well, that is something of a surprise. (Hat tip to Darius Whiteplume for leading me to this very silly test)

Dance the Apocalypso

I just found out that if a Chicxulub-size impactor were to fall in Corvallis, no one south of Panama would be directly harmed by the blast. Most everyone in North America, though, would face at least second degree burns. Sadly, since the precise location of "Corvallis, Oregon" appears to be about two blocks from my apartment, even the smallest blast (Little Boy, 15 kt) this simulator offers would be lights out for Lockwood. Fun, grim humor. Let's see... who's next?

Good Call Here, Bad Call There

Hat tip to Krugman:

Italy did for retirement financing what President George W. Bush couldn’t do in
the U.S.: It privatized part of its social security system. The timing couldn’t
have been worse.

I remember gleefully explaining to a grad student in science ed (where I was an instructor) four years ago that Bush's statement, that he'd earned political capitol and intended to spend it on "individual retirement accounts" to replace Social Security, was essentially going to destroy his second term. His desire and attempts to undermine SS basically did trash his second term (though the Terri Schiavo Fiasco later on certainly pounded a few more nails into his coffin, and the ongoing fiasco in Iraq didn't help matters).

I hadn't realized Italy made this mistake. My heart goes out to them. Please take this lesson to heart, people. (Full article, again from Krugman, here.)

Just Like "The Core"

...only better, and real. I hated that movie from beginning to end; when I confronted the friend who (I thought) had said it wasn't bad, he claimed that he'd never seen it. It was a waste of a rental, a waste of time, a waste of petroleum resources in the plastic of the DVD.

Over the past few weeks there have been several articles in my feed on the idea of fusion power, ranging from "we should just give up," to news that the EU may spend 5 billion Euros on a very large, tokomak-style reactor, to news that the National Ignition Facilty (NIF), at Livermore Labs (California) will be winding up its construction phase this spring. I found all of these articles very interesting, and recommend all three if fusion power is a topic that interests you. If you only have time for one, read the Der Spiegel piece on the possible EU project: it nicely outlines some of the problems, some of the recent insights and advances, and some emerging ideas that may yet bring this technology into the realm of commercial application. It's also the source of the following picture, the active plasma in a tokomak reactor.

Now, from the Telegraph (UK), is an article suggesting that even if Livermore's NIF fails to advance practical fusion power, the technology therein may still pay off big in terms of creating conditions of deep planetary interiors. This could lead to a better understanding of the earth's core, and even cores of giant planets such as Jupiter. The diamond anvil has been a useful, but limited investigative tool. I never imagined that our attempts to make fusion a commercially useful technology would provide tools to investigate geology. Stars, I might have guessed. Earth? Cool!

Heil Kitty!

Last night I finished the book "Gag Rule," by Lewis Lapham (limited preview at Google Books). I quite enjoyed it- terrific prose, makes a convincing case for his position, everything I want in a good piece of rhetoric. I do want to go through it again, because there were several passages that I thought were powerful and wanted to share here. However, I just came across a piece at Sadly, No! that drew my attention to a recurrent theme that I'm really tired of. (I mentioned yesterday that this past year had exhausted me- I'm probably going to end up doing a bit of elaborating on that in days to come.) And yes, Lapham commits the same exhausting blunder, which is why I bring it up. (In fairness to the author, I think he draws some meaningful and insightful parallels; it is unwarranted in this case to describe it as a blunder. It's just that coming across four or five references to Nazis, etc., in a day is tiresome.) Why is it that if a speaker or writer wants to demonize an opponent, the first characterization that springs to mind is Nazis and Fascism? On one hand, the answer is simple: to our current mindset, they are the worst of the worst, evil incarnate, Moloch manifest. I'm not going to argue with this; what I want to point out is the tiresome hyperbole here. I have from time to time described a rock outcrop as "an orgasmic experience." This is an intentionally jokey, hyperbolic, and relatively rare choice of words- maybe once every few years in conversations with friends who understand and enjoy my fascination with rocks and the earth. But what if I started describing everything I liked or enjoyed as "an orgasmic experience," or "better than sex?" At what point would my audience decide "that guy must be terrible in bed?" Or "he must really not enjoy sex." My trivialing of the metaphor would trivialize the thing itself.And that is exactly my point. We have so minimized the extremity of Hitler's Germany that it has become a punch line rather than an apt analogy or metaphor. I'm tired of conservatives referring to liberals as Nazis; I'm tired of liberals referring to conservatives as fascists; I'm tired of teenagers whose parents are worried about them referring to Mom and Dad as "the Gestapo." (From Sadly, No!)

There are reasons to remember Nazi Germany; this kind of hyperbole, oddly enough, only causes people to forget the lessons they should remember, and makes our continuing efforts to fully understand the human capacity for "evil" more difficult
So no more Nazi references this year. 'K?

Eee-yup. That's Exactly Right.

Today's Non Sequitur. I've been baffled by which pictures get bigger when you click them and which don't. As of testing a moment ago, you can see this one enlargified if you click on it.

A Simple Request

The blogosphere has been buzzing with year-end wrap ups, resolutions, predictions, well-wishing for the new year and so on. I find the human fascination with arbitrary mileposts fascinating in itself, but often tiresome. Personally I have found this past year just exhausting for so many reasons at so many levels- that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. In many ways, it's been one of the best. It just left me very, very tired. So forgive me for not playing along with all the conventions this time; maybe next year.

However, I will highlight one thing that has been particularly positive about the past year: taking my first steps in participating in the blogosphere. It's huge, it's fun, and whatever interests you or engages you, someone is putting stuff up that you'll love. I hope to update my blog roll to more fully show the (literally) 283 bloggers and sites that I follow daily- and that's not including the inumerable side links I click on each day. In particular, I'd like to send a shout-out to the geoblogosphere, a bunch of rock geeks who are as infatuated with the earth as I am, and by and large know a lot more than I do. I consider myself well-rounded with respect to geology (evidence of fluvial transport), and the way I got to that point was a willingness to learn and a willingness to ask (often inane) questions. The geoblogosphere was apparently created for me.

I also appreciate the vast number of other science blogs, humor blogs and sites, political and economic commentary and analysis, and what I have classed in my RSS folders as "This 'n That:" bloggers whose stuff is all over the map. I never know what to expect from these people, but I'm always well pleased. I put my own blog into that folder (not because I need to read it again, but because I want to see what it looks like in RSS, and as a further opportunity to catch and correct typos and grammatical errors).

Since I love to laugh, I'll preface my simple request with a simple problem: (From Talk Like a Physicist) The key quote from this post is "So the search for simplicity is guided by what Einstein taught us : 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'" Which, oddly enough, was echoed in a post today from Cosmic Variance (front page here), one of the astronomy blogs I follow. The post in question is called "Blogs That Should Exist." It is basically a simple request that if you don't blog, would you please start? I hearby echo that sentiment. They offer a list of suggested names, one of which is "But No Simpler."

Whether your interests are astronomy, geology, stuff to make you laugh... whatever, there's a crowd out there that shares your interests, and wishes they could hear from you. It takes some time, first to actually do the blogging, second to connect to others, and third to actually establish some friendships. There are a number of people who visit my blog often and leave comments; I try to return the favor. Close friends? No, but they're people who would miss me if I went AWOL, and vice versa. I have only met a few of my fellow blogospherians IRL (in real life) so far, but I look forward to meeting more, to putting faces with names and personalities that have made an impact on me.

And did I mention it's simple? It is. And it's free. As I noted a while back, I showed my nephews how to do a post; later I helped them start their own blogs. These guys are grade-school aged, and if they can do it, so can you.Kris, at Just For Fun. My sister sent me a class project he did on Neptune last fall, and I'm glad to see Kris posted it. His writing is better than many college-age students.
Garette, at My Life as a Garette. Kris and Garette's posts so far have been mostly funny YouTube Clips, and I am trying to encourage them to write more. I never really learned to "keyboard," (which I guess is a verb these days) but as a result of much writing and computer use, my fingers just seem to know where the keys are. It's obviously very tedious for these two to compose on the computer, and it's almost painful to watch the ideas slip away as they struggle to peck out, letter by letter, the words to express their thoughts. But only through practice will they get better, and I look forward to hearing from them over the years as they become more fluent with the written word. (And Callan, note the prominant placement of your "Geology Rocks" Sticker. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't remark on it.)Kris and Garette got a Wii for Christmas; I suppose within a few years there will be some new-fangled technology that does for typing what Wii has done for bowling and boxing. That's their dad, my brother-in-law, Frank, in the back. (Is it just me, or does "Wii" sound like toilet humor aimed at kids?) But in the meantime, guys, typing it is.

And as long as I'm on the subject, a friendly "Thanks!" to the folks who follow my blog; I'm pleased and honored. Please understand that you have provided me with many hours of entertainment and education... and what more could one ask of the blogosphere?
Becca
Phil
Darius Whiteplume
Dr Monkey Von Monkerstein
Micgar
Silver Fox
Loosecannon
Jon Swift
Lost Geologist
Distributorcap

See? If you started a blog, you too could be on this list! Wouldn't that be fun?

One More From the Coast

As I mentioned in my post on Sea Lion Caves, it was pretty rainy and blustery the day we went over there (two weeks ago today). Below is the view south from the headland into which the cave is eroded.
The N/S fault that formed the major plane of weakness that allowed erosion to create the cave cuts off the stack in the midground. The coastal town of Florence lies somewhere out there in the gloom. Between Florence and the next town to the north, Yachats (pronounced yah-hahts; Oregonians get very touchy about mispronounced place names), lies a beautiful stretch of rocky headlands. These rocks, the Yachats Basalt, are younger than the Siletz River Volcanics that make up most of the Coast Range accreted terrane known as Sileztia. (More on Siletzia at the end of this post) I have never been clear about the origin and age of the Yachats Basalt, but fortunately, my focus in this post is more on the much younger stuff to the south.
The above GoogleEarth image shows fairly clearly the boundary between the basaltic headlands to the north and the dunes southward into Florence. (I have moved the scale bar to the middle of the picture.) Sea Lion Cave is about where the label "Cox Rock" is. This stretch of dunes continues south to Coos Bay, 40 to 45 miles as the crow flies. Some of the dunes rise over 500 feet high, and make for great field trip stops. From a geological perspective, dunes are pretty straightforward (i.e. simple), and for some reason I find them much more interesting when they're lithified. From an ecological and biological perspective, though, they are even more fascinating.

The above photo shows a couple of interesting features: first, there is a constant tension between colonizing plants and moving sand- the two don't play well together. Moving sand swamps and suffocates plants, while plants stabilize the sand and prevent it from moving. I imagine this as a constantly shifting patchwork of green and beige. Second, the flow of sand is fast enough that most smaller streams in this area never reach the ocean. They are impounded behind a wall of sand, then drain out to the ocean as groundwater. In the above case the two small pools have neither inflowing surface water nor outflowing surface water. I'm presuming that during drier periods these basins are excavated and eroded by strong coastal winds and local vortices. During wet periods (as during this trip), the groundwater rises above the ground's surface.

I suspect that the above lake does have an inflowing stream, but drains through the permiable sandy substrate.

Since the sand is dominantly quartz, with the remainder fresh lithic fragments, as soils go the ground is very poor in nutrients. Forest with quite large trees can become established, but only after hundreds of years of succesion, typically going through beach grasses, brushy plants like salal and Oregon grape, and finally young trees, creating and storing enough organic matter that the ground can support a mature forest.In the above picture, the leaves with a "normal" shape are salal. Since standing water prevents the oxidation and decay of organic material, nitrogen tends to be in short supply in wetlands within the dunes. The odd cobra shaped leaves are those of Darlingtonia Californica, a plant that has evolved a surprising set of charateristics to deal with this situation.
A denser patch of the plant that makes it more obvious why its common name is the Cobra Lily. While not venemous like its namesake, it is carnivorous. Unlike the well-known Venus Flytrap, pitcher plant are passive carnivores; they don't actually move to capture their prey. I had been planning to write out the various adaptations they use to do this, but Wikipedia has a photo of the sign from this wayside that explains it as well as I could. The photo linked above is from the article that discusses this small but fascinating break from geologizing along the Oregon Coast- though as I have implied here, the geology plays an important role in creating an environment where the specialized features of this plant allow it to successfully compete with other species.
The crop above is from the lower right of the previous picture, and shows the opening to the interior of one of the pitcher-shaped leaves. The upright leaf in the lower middle shows the lighter spots, or "skylights." These are translucent spots that fool flying insects into trying to fly through the "roof" of the leaf, rather than exiting from the lower opening.

Strategery I Support

Speaking only for myself, geology can be both pleasingly and frustratingly confusing. It's nice to know that anything I don't understand can henceforth be blamed on giant protists. I was tired of blaming God, anyway. (From LOLScience)

The End of the World

And I feel fine? (From Night Deposits)

Which reminds me of another self-created joke I meant to pass on a week ago...
Q: Where does the Earth hang its Christmas Stocking?
A: From the mantle.