Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may haveNo doubt this will be a mess. When a crime of this magnitude has been committed, no administration that wishes to be taken seriously can simply turn away and pretend they just didn't see. Yet, in trying to read between the lines, it seems this is exactly what Obama would like to do. This is not to be terribly critical of him: the reasons for doing so are obvious and compelling. Our economy is in the tank, sinking with concrete galoshes, and we don't know where the bottom of the tank is yet. The news on the climate change front seems to get scarier every day. Health care is increasingly out of reach of moderately well-off families, and a single emergency could bankrupt even an insured, well-off family. Conflicts major and minor burst in and out of our consciousness like fireflies, reported but never really covered by the TV news.
committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and
political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.
In short, Obama has a stove full of scorching kettles, and there's no cool back burner to move any of them to.
Dealing with a war crimes investigation would be the last thing I'd want to deal with, were I in his shoes.
And yet the smooth functioning of this country demands it. One of the core ideals of this country is that no man is above the law; we are all equal before the workings of justice. Our adherence to that ideal has slipped; each of us can recite innumerable anecdotes of this person escaping justice because his wealth and power allowed him to buy out the system. Of that person incarcerated, brutalized, even executed, because of skin color and poverty. And I don't want to minimize those travesties. But here we are talking about the supposed "leader of the free world," a man who refused to hear, let alone consider, criticisms and questions regarding his actions and decisions and those of his subordinates. If he is allowed to amble amiably off into his Texas sunset, we might as well just announce in the headlines of every newspaper, of every evening local newscast, "You live in a police state. Your leaders can do whatever they want, and you are powerless to stop them. Get used to it."
If Obama wants to be taken seriously by the world and the majority of this country, if he wants to maintain the core, the spirit, of what makes this country the magnificent achievement that it is, he really has no choice.
Granite is the endpoint of segregation of the lowest melting temperature components of igneous rocks, so it's kind of extreme to begin with (actually, aplites could be considered even more of an endpoint here, but anyway...). Could it get more extreme? Yes. Pegmatites are the result of very slow crystallization, and thus have very large crystals. Now granite is slow cooling to begin with, and has by definition, large (visible to the naked eye) crystals. Granite pegmatites are not terribly uncommon, and they can have enormous crystals.
The reddish stains are probably from weathering of the biotite. So graphic granite is a pegmatitic granite with a very distinctive texture. The quartz and orthoclase crystallize out in a series of (more or less) parallel lathes. Looking perpendicular to the axis of the lathes, there is a peculiar columnar texture:
And a close-up (a crop from the above smallified image):
Looking down the axis of the lathes, on the other hand, the quartz looks like small cuniform marks on the rock- hence, like writing: graphic. 
In the below crop from the full-size picture, you can see the cuniform-like patterns that the quartz crystals form. You can also see clearly that the orthoclase is the major component of this rock.
I will try again when we get some sunshine; I couldn't really capture it with the flash. If you look back at the close-up picture of the quartz-orthoclase lathes, you can see that one of the quartz lathes branches from the lower right to the upper left. So in the upper left, even though the two areas of quartz are separated, crystallographically they are continuous! That is, it's all the same mineral grain. You can really see this with the orthoclase: as you tilt it back and forth, all of the cleavage surfaces of that mineral glint at the same time.
Very nice pair of 
A dinnertime request or offer, or the female parent of a potato.
Onomatopoeia for what you do after eating too much gas-producing food. "After the baked beans last night, it was just one fancher after another."
A particularly scary male antagonist (generally in film).
Dies in flames, but ritheth again from the atheth. With a lithp.
I knew 
From "
From "
From 
I don't remember exactly when I collected these; the fun thing in this picture is the old apothecary jar I found to keep them in.
Here are a few of them scattered out on a table. I didn't think to include something for scale, but I'd estimate the longest dimensions on these to be a bit less than a centimeter. I snapped these pictures as I was getting ready to leave for my coffee shop this morning, and (again) wasn't really thinking about trying to capture notable or interesting features. However in the following crop from the upper right area of the above picture, you can see the typical polysynthetic twinning on one of the crystals. The piece in the upper right, though a little out-of-focus, shows some of the play of light that makes better specimans of this mineral desirable. These particular pieces have no real value; they're small, the color is unremarkable, and the play of light (schiller)is not particularly striking. If memory serves, the value of high-quality cut gems can pass $2000 per carat. I'm not finding a citation for that, but there is an interesting 
While there are a number of mining claims, the most productive portion of the area, about 4 square miles, has been set aside by the BLM as unclaimable, and is open, free, to the public (though mechanized digging is prohibited: hand tools only).
The above graph, from the Wonderblog piece, shows with black lines the predictions of a variety of models with respect to Arctic ice retreat looking forward to 2100 AD. The bold red line shows the actual observed data. If you look at the average prediction, the dark black line running through the middle of the plots, and compare it to the observed data, where we are as of 2007-08 is about where our best suggestions said we might be about 2050. Quite a number of the more optimistic predictions suggested that by 2100, we wouldn't be where we are in reality over 90 years earlier.
Yes indeedy! You are Here!
See that little blue dot above and to the left of the rings? That little spot of sweetness? All our troubles, yes, but also all of our hopes, dreams and desires nestle in that little tiny blob of pixels.
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