Not Going to Read This...

...but I will comment on it. I've been hearing for a while that Rod Blagojevich's wife was going to be doing a reality series. Fine. I won't watch it. I find the idea offensive. "Reality TV" is arguably the worst media idea ever. The idea of taking psychopaths and using them for their "entertainment" value is, well, psychopathic.

How much time each day do you spend watching (for its entertainment value) traffic go by on a moderately busy street? Not much, I would guess. But what if you knew of a street where you could go and reasonably expect to see a horrific multi-car accident with terrible, gut-turning injuries and fatalities every few minutes? Would you go stand in a safe viewing area for an hour or two each day, just to be entertained by the carnage? Or would you be sickened by the very idea of calling such an activity "entertainment?" Would you support the vendors who made a living selling refreshments in the stands?

At long last,

have you finally become

comfortably numb?

Friday Fragment: For BrianR

I've been terribly remiss on my rock-blogging, and I apologize. These photos have been on my drive for nearly 3 months now; time to post them.

The rock is a sample of the King's Valley Siltstone (Tkv), a volcaniclastic sedimentary member of the Siletz River Volcanics (Tsr). The latter forms the "basement" of Siletzia, as described in the 3rd to last paragraph of this post. (The lowest and generally oldest rock in a regional sequence, "the basement" also sort of implies that it extends down into the earth far enough that for practical purposes, it doesn't really matter what's below it).

Tsr is mid to late Eocene in age, and I'll post on it some other time. It's thought to be, at its base, ocean ridge basalt. On top of that was formed a ridge of hot-spot, Hawaiian-style volcanoes. The importance of Tkv is that it shows these volcanoes emerged from the ocean and formed what must have been fairly substantial islands off the coast. (At the time, the coast would have been somewhere near the current axis of the Cascade volcanic arc, and these islands a little outboard of the current coastline) Had Tsr not emerged from the ocean, there couldn't have been enough erosion to produce these turbidites.

Tkv is intimately related to Tsr in a number of ways. First, near the contact, Tsr flows and pillows are interfingered with strata of Tkv. Second, as mentioned, the main source material of Tkv is weathered and eroded Tsr basalt. (At the site I collected this, there are also some interbeds of ashey rhyolitic tuff, which may be derived from the Challis volcanics of central Washington- but I can't vouch for that) As a result of the second point, the compositions of these two units are quite similar, and in weathered outcrops or drive-by geology, they can be difficult to distinguish.

The Kings Valley Siltstone member is fairly limited in areal extent, showing up in a band paralleling the Corvallis fault, another local feature I haven't discussed yet. It's also limited in terms of outcrops; I've only found a few, to the west on Marys Peak and to the north in Dunn State Forest (a unit of OSU's research forest land). Some of these outcrops, though, can knock your socks off. My favorite is a gravel quarry in Dunn SF, where one can clearly see the above mentioned interfingering, and I once found a most excellent feeding structure with radiating green phosphorite(?) worm poop. Carried the slab (~ 16x10x4 inches) home on my back too, about 10 miles. A friend of mine also found a magnificent turtle fossil in an outcrop near the town of Kings Valley- I tried to convince her that it might be an important fossil, and that she should show it to a researcher, but I couldn't get her to. It was about the size of a box turtle shell, but one corner had broken off, and you could see bone in the matrix. More mundane fossils (mostly mollusks, in my experience) can be found occasionally, but I've never seen a concentration of fossils anywhere.

From what I can remember, Tkv is a maximum of about 500 feet thick; that fits with my own trompings about. The top of the unit is pretty chaotic and unsorted, as is the bottom. The middle seems to be dominantly turbidites. Glassy basalt (sideromelane) and palagonite are abundant in the bottom of the unit, but absent from much less abundant in the middle, and then more near the top, though not as well preserved as at the bottom. I interpret these features to indicate less transport near the top and bottom, and from a more weathered source at the top.

So despite the lack of much research on this unit, I personally suspect it has a lot to offer, including a sedimentary record of the emergence, then erosion and submergence of a Hawaiian Island analogue, an admittedly spotty record of late Eocene life, but unique with respect to its location and time. It's also a beautiful area with overall good access- forestry (and the roads that go with it) rules a few miles to the west of my current position.

The pictures show three faces of the piece I have in my possesion at the moment, and show the graded bedding constituting the base of a single turbidity flow; the overlying finer sediments weather and crumble so fast they're very dificult to collect. And geo people should be able to see immediately that they're upside-down from the original deposition orientation- the "top" made a flatter, more stable position for photographing. Non-geo people should note that as you start from the top, the grains are larger, and as you move down, they get smaller. Turbidity currents (another thing I need to discuss in more detail at another time) start suddenly, then gradually slow over a period of hours to (maybe) a day or so. So the larger grains will drop out and settle first, then progressively smaller and smaller grains. The first deposited material is at the bottom of a sequence, later materials will be above, on top of, earlier materials, so the largest grains are at the bottom. Which happens to be on top in this picture, because the rock is "upside down."

Now here's the treat: I've learned how to upload big pictures, so the link below each will take you into a fantasy land of explicit geological detail.

BTW, this post is dedicated to BrianR, because he's always going on about turbidites, and I think he'll get a kick out of these.

I wanna see!
Big as a House! (just realized the first two are actually the same face from slightly different angles. Oh, well)
Penny the size of a grapefruit! (This is a slightly weathered face, but still fresh enough to see the texture)

I also wanted to mention that the glittery bits you can see are mostly the zeolite cement and some patches of calcite. Location information for this sample can be gleaned from the GoogleEarth screen caps below, or leave a comment for further info.

(Outcrop is immediately west of where the power line (~straight n/s swath) crosses the lower road (winding, ~e/w swath at the bottom).

OMG! Obama IS the Highlander!

Obama, touring a 4600-year-old Egyptian tomb yesterday, reportedly said "That looks like me! Look at those ears." So after this evidence from more recent history, we now have additional evidence that Obama is the immortal! Either that, or he's a vampire.

I don't know why he'd draw attention to this issue, though. But I'm sure he's got some angle.

Followup: After inverting the colors and running auto levels, the resemblance is even more compelling:
Duuuude! That is just too freaky!

Lucy In the Sky With Peridot

NASA's image of the day today (click over for larger sizes) is a pretty and cool-looking artist's conception of an early stage in stellar evolution, when an outburst from the young star causes a recrstallization of amorphous silicate particles to forsterite.  AKA Mg-rich olivine, AKA peridot.  
Imagine the whole region from, say, Mercury to Mars a-swirl with li'l sparkly green gemstones.  It's the stuff of happy hallucinations.  And apparently it really happened.

Right Now!

As you might have gathered from my previos post, the weather has been unsettled (OOOH, Thunder boom!)  here in my little town.  As I write this, the pavement is dry.  We don't get real storms very often, so most of us get pretty excited when we do.  Enormous sporadic drops hitting the pavement now.  I hate the muggyness that goes with this weather, but I love it when it pays off with a real storm.  Pavement is wet, cars are hissing rather than rumbling, but it's still not a downpour.  Going out to look.  Whee!  Rip of lightning!

Followup 7:00 pm: Quite wonderful and refreshing!  I'm guessing an inch and a half fell in 10-15 minutes.  I think this may be the heaviest downpour I've witnessed here.  More in a later post.

Asperatus (?) Experiment

OK, someone just showed me how to sign up and use photobucket, this is an experiment to see if I've figured it out.  Bear with me, and hopefully through the day I can show you these timely photos.  Theoretically, you should be able to click the pics for larger.
Asperatus clouds last night behind my favorite coffee shop.
Same pic with the contrast ramped up, to show more of the detail. 

(A few minutes later) Nope, doesn't work... let's try this:

(And a bit later still) OK, that works.  First I tried to post the largest Blooger seems to allow, 400 pixels width, then link those images to the photobucket larger images.  That doesn't seem to work.  But those tiny thumbs photobucket provides just aren't big enough and detailed enough to talk about.  I'll figure it out eventually... but right now, time for a smoke.

I-5 Road Trip

Timothy Egan has a pretty, fluffy piece that amounts to nothing any conscious person doesn't already know.  He's driving down I-5, the main interstate freeway along the west coast.  He's looking for something everyone knows isn't there, alternative transportation fuel sources.  And Lo and Behold!  He doesn't find any!  Then he ends on this note:  "So we beat on, waiting on a sunny day, as Springsteen sang at last light, my windows down, the crash of the Oregon surf as a chorus."  Now I don't know which I-5 Egan is driving, but through all of Oregon, there are some substantial mountains between I-5 and the coast, and at least an hour's drive, more likely an hour and a half to two.

Yee-haw!  Nothing like a blue screen road trip!  Or maybe this is the issue:

Cheezburger

Silly Timmy!

Universal Radio

(Fun German version here)

Dang, Nina was crazy! But not dumb. In fact, I just found a story that Universal Radio may be within reach! Not what Nina was describing, I think, but still...

Big Gay Ice Cream Truck

DGuzman, over at ...Other Dreams had an elegant, concise statement earlier this morning that sort of stopped me in my tracks.  I'm glad I went back and found it:

Gay marriage, as I've said before, isn't really my issue, but I abhor the idea of denying people the right to marry whomever they please. Discrimination is just wrong.

See, every time I start out to say something like that, I get all verbose and eloquent, and on and on, and here I go again.  But the point is that many people I know are gay.  While I don't discuss others' sexual habits, or my own, there are as many ways to express love as there are people, and no one is beyond reproach on that topic.  As I have gotten over some of my youthful discomfort with homosexuality, I have moved beyond caring whether a person is or isn't "flamboyantly" gay.  I have reached the point where I don't even know what I thought that meant.  I have also reached the point where I'm pretty supportive of an "in your face" approach to dealing with outrageous stereotyping, hate-mongering, and discrimination.  Case in point: I once told a complete stranger who was going on about "fags," "Look, I'm gay, and I find that pretty fucking offensive.  Would you like to continue?"  (It didn't hurt that I was twice the size of the guy.)

So when I see something like this, it warms the cockles of my heart (whatever that means):  The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck!Speaking of making good, 'mercan, god-fearin' conservatives' heads go all 'spoldey! (which I was, a couple of posts back).  There's liable to be quite a few disappointed republican kids this summer.  "Why can't I have some happy ice cream?"

Followup: I often go back over my posts, proofreading and musing.  If I find an irritating error, or a remark seems unclear, I don't hesitate to edit.  But I generally won't add anything of substance with a followup alert like this one.  Which is a long-winded way of getting to the point that I was contemplating the "no one is beyond reproach" comment above, and it occurred to me that the problem was that life doesn't come with an instruction manual.  Then it occured to me that with the advent of the net, I might be among the last humans to be able to say that.  Then it occured to me that much of the net's info has been around for years, decades, and centuries.  My final conclusion is this: "The problem isn't that life doesn't come with an instruction manual.  It does.  The problem is that there are too many of them, and they each disagree with all the others."

Yes It Can

My friend Kyle, a music and composition major, just sent me a link to this.  I L'dol.  
From Serious Lulz, a site which, after looking it over a bit, I seriously suspect will show up in the Sunday Funnies.  I can almost garn-tee it.

Bump the Ones You Love Today

I adored this picture the moment I saw it, but I hadn't realized a year has already passed since it appeared.  Yes, on June 3, 2008, the Obamas openly declared themselves to be islamocommunifacisiliberal terrorists, who would stop at nothing to make the head of every righteous, god-fearing conservative go all 'splodey.  So today has been declared "National Fist Bump Day." I had seen this on a couple of the pop-culture aggregators earlier, but the meme seems to be spreading.  Shoot, sounds good to me.

And if you don't like the post title, I did consider, for the better part of a minute, going with "Fist the One You Love Today."  But as I've said before, I do try to keep a more or less clean shop here.  And I think our political discourse has already been burdened with enough unintentional double entendres.  Right, Tea-baggers?

Flight 447

I'm not sure why I find this story so compelling, even horrifying.  I guess it has to do with the idea that the plane was just "disappeared."  That Mysterious Forces combined to just make the plane and the 228 souls aboard simply vanish.  That the issue is not that we don't know what happened, but that we can't.

So I've taken a rather odd sense of relief and comfort from this.

My condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims, for what it's worth.  Not much, I'm afraid, but I am hoping mightily that you get your questions answered.

Steep Streets

Google Sightseeing has a post up on the world's steepest streets.  I've been on some pretty horrific 4WD "roads," but the idea of a 37% grade on a city street, where any chucklehead with a license might feel compelled to play around with a ton or more of metal on wheels, is unnerving to me.

Are You Paying Attention?

Pew Research has a quiz with 12 questions.  I got all of them correct, but there was one I was a little uncertain about.  If you decide to take the quiz, after you finish, look at the results page that shows "How You Did, Question by Question."  Question #11, when I looked, was in last place in terms of correct responses, with only 38%.  That's a travesty.   But I suppose the real travesty is that only 6% of Americans can correctly answer this very simple quiz on what's happening in this country.  (Hat Tip to Swans on Tea)

What I Think

Context here and here.  And I missed yesterday's bit:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Would have been the first sound out of my mouth had I witnessed this: A cat in NYC fell 26 stories. Note the small labels on the right side of the photo below:
I was not particularly intimidated by heights as a youngster, but I had a couple of experiences in my 30's, and one as a field trip leader a few years ago involving a whole bunch of students (with bad results for no one, I should add), that have left me fairly very respectful of them. So respectful, in fact, that I feel like puking whenever I confront the edge of any substantial precipice without a rail between me and it. This would have definitely been a "speaking in chunks," "driving the porcelain bus" kind of moment for me.

So why am I posting it? The kitteh is fine! Some minor injuries, but already home safe. Lucky's owners say they will never open the windows again. Nice, smart, hoomins! Oh and yes, the cat's name really is "Lucky" Via BuzzFeed. There's also another picture and a newsclip video in which the vet explains why the cat survived, but (thankful me) not video of the fall.

Trivia: This tidbit of information, that cats are more likely to survive extreme falls than moderate falls, was established maybe 20 years ago, but few seem to be aware of it. It is counterintuitive from the hoomin point of view.

Conflict and Resolution

Hat tip to OleLog and Johannes Lochmann for this one...

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?>

Which is at odds with the result I posted here: $2792. However (honesty is the best policy), the current valution from that site is a whopping $83!

But I'm not satisfied with the accuracy of any of those valuators. After looking around in Paint.net (a freeware image editor that I'm learning and pretty much liking- infinitely superior to the bundled Paint app), and mustering the full power of my almost (but not quite) non-existant skills at making sense of the hash that is HTML, I found a valuator I like much, much better:

My blog is worth One Zillion dollars!
How much is your blog worth?

Followup: I have tidied this up a bit and saved it as a simple picture, which I have placed on the second-level sidebar. Feel free to steal if you think your blog is also worth One Zillion Dollars! I think it is.

My Guess

This is my guess for Silver Fox's current edition of her occasional game, Where In The West.However, note the word 'guess.' There are some important features I simply cannot get into the right perspective, so I'm not positive. The GE Image would be an enlargement of the 2nd and 3rd peaks descending toward the valley floor from the right in SF's photo.

The geology in this area is so varied, I'm not sure where to start. There is a metamorphic complex that I think dates back to late Paleozoic(?), which is intruded by some Mesozoic plutons (see this post). During the Cenezoic, there were two major episodes of volcanism. First was the Miocene Steens Mountain basalt (correlative to the CRB, but smaller in scale, and more southern vent/fissure locations). Later came the Pliocene McDermitt Caldera silicic volcanics. The eponymous caldera is some distance from this location, I'm thinking 40-50 miles to the ENE, but there are large volumes of tuff, both sedimentary and welded, and rhyolite flows associated with this episode in the area. One of the few places in the US that has gem-quality opal is Virgin Valley, maybe 10 miles west (as the crow flies, not as the road drives) from the GoogleEarth image location. Many of the gemmy opals are a replacement of wood buried in tuffaceous sediment, which gives added beauty with the wood grain. Wood that has been replaced with common opal is pretty abundant and easy to find, and quite beautiful even without the opalesence. Virigin Valley also happens to be my favoritest camping area evar.

Finally, since the McDermitt volcanics, basin and range spreading has ripped the area apart, allowing some relatively minor basaltic volcanism. There is also some mineralization, the age of which I don't know- given the complex history of the area, my initial supposition would be mutliple episodes. There are/have been claims for gold, copper and molybdenum that I know of. There are many, many abandoned mines in the area, and last I knew, one medium-sized one in operation. The latter was after moly, but was picking up some chalcopyrite as frosting, in a large quartz vein. It was actually on the road across the valley from 140 to that mine that I first guessed this photo might have been shot.

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. But if I'm right, I'll feel pushed to do a bigger spread on this absolutely wonderful area. Also if I'm right, Silver, where the dickens were you standing?

Sunday Funnies

Sunday Funnies, Comin' Atcha! Like an IFD! (improvised flying drink).(From Picture is Unrelated) Or maybe that guy has amazing powers of pyschokinesis... nah. I think he's just really thrilled that he's about to lose his front teeth.

Now, I should probably explain, since I don't think I have before, just how I go about compiling these posts. Over the course of the 30 days, GoogleReader tells me I have "read" 18,746 items. That works out to roughly 4300-4400 per week. Now I haven't actually read all of those; many are repeats, many are uninteresting, many are basically copy-n-paste posts whose texts are 90% or more simply pulled from elsewhere (that I have often already read), with very little effort to add anything. But of those 600+ posts that I skim over each day, maybe 125 of those are comedy, humor, silly, pop culture, and the ilk. Each day I star and share a few that made me crack up. "Shared" items can be seen any time by clicking the "Lockwood's Shared Items" button under "Stuff I haven't blogged yet" or the linked quote. Fair warning- it's all sorts of stuff that I've found interesting, not just amusement. It's the kind of stuff I consider blogging on or discussing with friends here at my favorite coffee shop: a very disjointed, eclectic mix of topics and writings that have particularly engaged me.

Then each Sunday, when I've finished all my reading, I go through that list and paste what I think are the funniest of the humorous items that have accumulated there since the last Sunday, and, if I think about it, whatever cosmic debris has landed in my e-mail or other browsing sources. I don't know how to stick those latter links in my shared items, so at some point I have to remember that there's other stuff I want to mix in with the funnies, and go track it down either on the web or hard drive. I feel pretty strongly that I should give attribution when I can, so I try to paste a source link with each image.

Finally, I try to come up with some narrative to give the whole mass of "borrowed" pictures some kind of coherence. I'm not necessarily looking hard for a theme, but somtimes one emerges. And sometimes it's just incoherent, but folks seem to enjoy it anyway.

Well, the theme that seemed to pop out at me today is science and science fiction.I was thinking about doing this as a post on its own when it came out in the NYT on Tuesday, but my initial reaction to the picture above was so funny I decided to save it for this post: the thought that went through my mind was "Is that a pencil for scale?" So at a cost of $3.5 billion, we have managed to shrink a team of caffeine-overdosed technicians (I didn't perceive the guy on the platform at first), equiped them with pocket knives, and created the world's largest pencil sharpener- most expensive one, too. A dual Win.

Now all comedy aside, this is actually a very interesting and amazing article, especially if you're interested in fusion power. And you should be. And in fairness, at the same time the NYT was posting an op-ed suggesting we should just write off fusion power as an expensive lost cause, a number of European papers were covering much of the same ground as the above article, and more (See details here). Nearly six months ago. See why I like foreign papers? From Tuesday's article:

The project’s director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition(defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

In other "architectual wonders" news, there's this faucet:

see more Fail Blog. Now here's the thing with failblog: I have little problem with them swiping other's photos without attribution (...well maybe a little...), but plastering the word FAIL on it does not make it funnier. On the contrary, it's gratuitous, repetitve and after a while, downright grating. Still funny, but failblog, you're in danger of FAIL.

This in itself is not so much funny as very cool and inspiring... a seven-year old sent NASA an idea for getting the Spirit Rover out of its Martian sandtrap. Apparently, the technicians hadn't thought of this, are very excited, and are busy running tests to see if it's feasible.
The rover drivers were so pleased, in fact, that they promised to send Julian a reward! If they can find him, that is. Their proposed reward (this is the funny part)? "18 tonnes of KSC-1 mars simulant, and the mobility test bed rover." (KSC-1 is a material designed to mimic the properties of Martian soil, and the mtbr is a functional replica of the rover to use here on Earth to try to solve mobility problems)
Savage Chickens points out another technical achievement with unintended consequences...

...and Neat Gemstones finds a nice lesson in physics, a crucial disciplinary component of the above four accomplishments, in her post "A Sign You May Be Driving Too Fast:"(or at least accelerating too quickly)

Shifting over to the bio-sciences, we see here a marvelous evolutionary adaptation in camoflage. This allows the organism to elude the senses of his primary food source, chess pieces and checkers, until it's much, much too late for them.From Tattoo Disaters, an irregular, but often funny (and sometimes horrifying, and possibly mildly NSFW) Tat photos.

Cougars are all the buzz this spring, here in my cozy little burg: there was one out in the northern part of town that was scared off from taking a cat, frighteningly close to a school. Now we have word from Philomath, a small town about 5 miles west, that "Chiquita the Chihuahua and Rosie the border terrier chased off a cougar that strayed into this small town near the Oregon State University campus." (From OregonLive) Within a couple of hours, blogger buddy Tengrain posted this picture. I don't know if it was the actual event, but I think it might plausibly explain how a chihuahua and a border terrier might chase off a cougar.
And on the subject of "What's for dinner?" that fish shows a surprising perspicacity regarding both the food chain and pop culture...

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Archie, likewise, is pondering the imperatives of biology, as it was announced that he was finally going to propose to Veronica. My guess? I'm betting Veronica turns him down and he runs back to Betty, and does right by her. Medium Large has a different take: (front page here)For whatever reason, one search topic that brings a disproportionate number of folks to my favorite coffee shop is squirrels. I don't totally understand why, but yes, I have posted a few. And I don't particularly care for the fact that this sign wouldn't have been edited unless someone had actually tried the action in question:

see more Fail Blog

OK, let's take a bit of a break, and go have a drink...

see more Lolcats and funny pictures. Well, maybe not. How about a snack over at the pizza place?
(Domino’s Three Cheese Mac-N-Cheese Pasta Bread Bowl) Urp... definitely not! BTW, This Is Why You're Fat, Congrats! on what may be your first bacon-free post ever. (not really, but it is a rare event) For a real celebration, see if you can find something that my vegan friends would have to think over carefully.

OK, after that, I've lost most of my appetite. Maybe just a bagel? Or a piece of toast?
No. No, no, no, no. No refreshment break today. I'm starting to look at those goldfish. (From Criggo, of course)

After all that nutritional science, I'm ready for some fictional science. Much safer, that. Must. Not. Think about. Cheesy mac and cheese. Cheesy bread cheese Bowl. With Cheesy box. And Cheese.

see more Lol Celebs

Pills are not generally considered nutritional, are they?

see more Lol Celebs

There are Dragons! And we would not want our wake-up call to be a nucular-armed dragon blowing a mushroom cloud out of the receiver, frying what little brains we had left!

see more Political Pictures

No! Do! Do Look! Uhhh... Bin Laden's in there! You could catch him! You'd be a hero! Loooook!

see more Political Pictures

Well have a good week out there in the work line...
(From Criggo, of course)

Don't believe everything they tell you, and absolutely don't believe it's as important as they tell you... you need to figure that one out for yourself: (from The Quotations Page)

The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. David Brinkley
US television newscaster (1920 - 2003)

Well, that was fun, but here's the thing: I like science. I hope I don't have to do this to it again. Maybe horror? No, wait, I like that too:
From Weather Moose, a meteorologist's blog, but mostly about the travails of a young family, with some science and funny thrown in the mix.

Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

Swans on Tea (a physics, funny and slomo blog I follow pretty religiously- front here) found this stunning photo of the Milky Way over Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park. Two of my favorite flavors, geology and astronomy, in one great, delicious, explosion. (Click the pic to exspansify)