RALEIGH, NC—A coalition of geologists are challenging the way we look at global stone reserves, claiming that, unless smarter methods of preservation are developed, mankind will eventually run out of rocks.(...)
Kaiser claims that humanity has "wreaked havoc" on the earth's stones by picking them up, carrying them around, and displacing them from their natural habitat.(The Onion) The second paragraph reminds me of a favorite pastime on field trips- screwing with the geologic record. One time we left a chunk of coal near the Owens Valley Fault Scarp near Lone Pine (a site frequently visited on geological field trips, which is key). On the return to Oregon, we left a large block of granite from Lone Pine in the pumice from the Mazama eruption along Highway 97 north of Chemult. In turn, I once found a piece of (Paleozoic?) fossiliferous limestone at Siskyou Summit along I-5 near the OR-CA border. That cut is made entirely of Cascade volcanic rock; the nearest limestone (though not marble) is hundreds of miles away.
"A rock can take millions of years to form, but it only takes a second for someone to skip a smooth pebble into a lake, and then it is gone." Dr. Kaiser said. "Perhaps these thoughtless rock-skippers don't care if they leave our planet completely devoid of rocks, but what about our children? Don't they deserve the chance to hold a rock and toss it up and down a few times?"
But as the winter lingered, Spirit began producing thousands of pages of sometimes rambling and dubious data, ranging from complaints that the Martian surface was made up almost entirely of the same basalt, to long-winded rants questioning the exorbitant cost and scientific relevance of the mission.Well, yes. I am. Thanks, Onion
"Granted, Spirit has been extraordinarily useful to our work," Callas said. "Last week, however, we received three straight days of images of the same rock with the message 'HAPPY NOW?'"
USGS geologist, David Johnston, enters crater of Mount St. Helens, April 30, 1980, image by Rick Hoblitt, USGS
USGS geologist, David Johnston, samples water of Mount St. Helens crater lake, April 30, 1980, image by Rick Hoblitt, USGS
Aerial view of Mount St. Helens' summit crater as seen from the west, May 2, 1980, image by C.Dan Miller, USGS 
(from here) Though potentially even scarier than the oil spill. If you don't know the back story, Krugman's column this morning may help.
But for the time being, this amused me. (Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)
Gratuitous "Joker" reference, yes, but the resemblance is creee-py!
Yes, Laura, we've been meaning to talk to you about that...
I think this one is my favorite.
In Baton Rouge, Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency Thursday afternoon, saying that the oil slick, which has been spreading perilously closer to shore, “threatens the state’s natural resources."From the NYT.
Janet Napolitano, the Secretary for Homeland Security, said at a White House briefing on Thursday that the oil slick was “a spill of national significance.” That designation meant that federal resources from many regions can be used to combat it.I'll bet Texas is pissed that their tax dollars might be put to work somewhere else. I'm curious exactly which resources BJ is woried about... my suspicion is that he's concerned this might interfere with more drilling.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill | ||||
| ||||
She also opened up the possibility that if the government determines that BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, cannot handle the spill with the resources available in the private sector, that Defense Department could become involved to contribute technology.Not that I'm against that; in an emergency I feel like we have to use the resources available to solve the problems present. But I'm not happy about it. Interesting bit of news from a couple of days ago:
Profits at oil giant BP have more than doubled from a year ago on the back of rising oil prices.Now I feel pretty strongly that switching out from petroleum-based energy to alternatives any time in the near future- less than a decade or two- is unlikely to be practical or even possible. And I feel pretty strongly that for non-energy uses it's even less likely. Given that, I support finding and using what domestic supplies are available. We will never meet our own needs, but we should use what we have. In other words, I actually support "drill, baby, drill," though I suspect in detail, very differently from Ms. Palin and her tea partiers.
Replacement cost profit for January to March was $5.6bn (£3.6bn), compared with $2.4bn for the first quarter of 2009 - a 135% rise. The profit figure is also up from the $3.45bn profit made in the last three months of 2009.
From a recent find, Senor Gif... this one specifically.
Little did Data know, this crash had been planned long, long before... Jim and Bones are such pranksters!
And in case you didn't notice the title of the post, I'd suggest we change the title of the book, as well.
Environment Canada
In 1993, Canadian and American government scientists conducted a test burn of an
oil slick off the coast of Newfoundland.
Glurg... too much interesting stuff today. Gulf of Mexico to be set on fire ('cause a sooty fire drifting toward shore has got to be better than oil drifting toward shore... right?)... The UK General Election … betting on 2010 temperatures … Southern California music festival … UK schoolgirls’ geography field trip … the Norwegian Government (iPad to the rescue) … touring wrestlers … Boston Marathon runners … the London Book Fair … health of pets … football, ice hockey and running … Premier League referees … the gilded progresses of celebs and pop stars … John Cleese’s trip home … football, cycling and running … Polish state funeral … transport of wounded soldiers … Dubai luxury hotel opening … Morocco golf tournaments … exams, exotic foods and surgery … yet more celebs (Hollywood ‘paralized’, no less) …That's just a third of the list, and I haven't included the links he found for each item. Now most of the disruptions listed in that post resulted from the grounding, but nevertheless, the estimated economic impact of 2.5 billion Euros seems more and more credible, and it may go yet higher.
The reality, however, looks different: Airlines and primarily the aviation industry are responsible for a poorly prepared warning system that went on autopilot during the crisis.The industry didn't want to put the time, effort and resources into figuring out a decent set of safety limits for ash. Then when there was a major ash fall, there were no firm, pre-agreed upon numbers to say when it was safe to fly again. This is a lesson that we seem to be doomed to
There is a global network of nine volcanic ash observatories under the direction of the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO). The early warning center located in London sounded the alarm on Wednesday the week before last. A cloud of ash from Iceland was rapidly moving towards the continent. The result: Europe's airspace was shut down.
But it was unclear how to proceed after that. "The system very effectively ensures that airspace with clouds of ash is closed," says Werner Knorr, head of flight operations at Lufthansa, "but it doesn't say how air traffic should resume once the cloud has dispersed."
...is a prominent Austro-American politician. And that's all you need to know about politics in this country. (Let There Be Blogs)
Now I'm not going to act like I'm offended, but this is just plain wrong.
So you have some 'splainin' to do, unknown Prius driver.
(The Onion)"Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes… What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes."Old story, right? During the 80's, there was a dog-eared copy of The Watchtower proclaiming that sin caused earthquakes in the geology students' study room... it may still be there, as far as I know. And as far as I know, this little bit of perniciousness goes back to the beginnings of guilt-oriented religions: when bad things happen to people, it's because the people have been bad. And to prevent bad things happening, all you have to do is what you're told, as channeled from God via their human mouth pieces. Bleargh.
"On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that's your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake."Below is a photo from her most recent post, as of this writing, demonstrating her earnest effort to incur the wrath of... whatever deity is in charge of making the earth
Okay, I've been aware of this for a while; as you might guess, this sort of thing gets loose in the geoblogosphere very, very quickly. It's not the kind of thing I tend to blog about, though. So why the exception? There have been such a raft of posts, ranging from hysterical to thoughtful, that I just had to acknowledge the incredible power of boobs.
It's kind of odd to find myself posting photos of immodestly dressed women, but in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I feel compelled to participate. And obviously, my own hairy manboobs do not possess the "supernatural power" of women's mammaries.I'm asking women to wear their most "immodest" outfit that they already would wear, but to coordinate it all on the same day for the sake of the experiment. Heck, just showing an ankle would be considered immodest by some people. I don't want to force people out of their comfort zones, because I believe women have the right to choose how they want to dress. Please don't pressure women to participate if they don't want to. If men ogle, that's the fault of the men, not me for dressing how I like. If I want to a show a little cleavage or joke about my boobs, that's my prerogative.And also, Rachel at 4.5 Billion Years of Wonder helped clarify the feminist issues here:
Right now, it's easier for women who meet societal beauty standards to have that required confidence. But you know what? There's a lot of women who don't match that ridiculous beauty ideal who still have that amazing confidence, and good on them. And those of us that don't? It's not the fault of a silly event like Boobquake, and no one is getting on our case about it anyway.So this event in and of itself isn't about objectification, but the reaction to it is symptomatic of society's incapacity to deal with women's sexuality and objectification.
And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. The idea of Boobquake is to debunk the cleric by saying that women can reveal their boobs and not start a seismic event (ignoring perhaps the tremors caused by geek guys habitually running to their computers every few minutes and checking for updates). But without defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.He also posted the following photo with the caption, "The actual cleavage
Which is all well and good, except that's not cleavage. This is cleavage (from):
Goodness. (pant, pant) Talk about immodest! And for my final link, 
In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller named a huge land mass in the Western Hemisphere “America,” in honor of Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.Apparently, this is a big day in the history of navigation. From the same link,
In 1859, ground was broken for the Suez Canal.From Wikipedia,
In 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened to shipping.
In 1513 Waldseemüller appears to have had second thoughts about the name, probably due to contemporary protests about Vespucci’s role in the discovery and naming of America, or just carefully waiting for the official discovery of the whole northwestern coast of what is now called North America, as separated from East Asia. In his reworking of the Ptolemy atlas, the continent is labelled simply Terra Incognita (unknown land). Despite the revision, 1,000 copies of the world maps had since been distributed, and the original suggestion took hold. While North America was still called Indies in documents for some time, it was eventually called America as well.I've always been a little curious about how these two continents came to be known as America, rather than Columbia. I mean, I knew where the name came from, but why didn't he choose the actual discoverer as the eponym, rather than a second explorer and writer? According to the excerpt below, the decision was made because it was Vespucci's observations, not those of Columbus, that made it clear this was an entirely new land:
Apparently among most map-makers until that time, it was still erroneously believed that the lands discovered by Christopher Columbus, Vespucci, and others formed part of the Indies of Asia. Thus some believe that it is impossible that Waldseemüller could have known about the Pacific, which is depicted on his map. The historian Peter Whitfield has theorized that Waldseemüller incorporated the ocean into his map because Vespucci's accounts of the Americas, with their so-called "savage" peoples, could not be reconciled with contemporary knowledge of India, China, and the islands of Indies. Thus, Waldseemüller reasoned, the newly discovered lands could not be part of Asia, but must be separate from it, a leap of intuition that was later proved uncannily precise.
Also from Wikipedia, the above is apparently the chart under discussion. I love old maps, but the full size image is ginormous, 13,708 × 7,590 pixels, file size: 19.65 MB, and my computer basically choked on it. Below is a crop (from the same page as above) showing our part of the world getting named.
Safety Graphic Fun
Buttersafe
Motivated Photos
Motivated Photos
Yass
Funny Times
Funny Times
When your rock collecting habit may be a problem... That Will Buff Out.
FuckYeahAlbuquerque
Eyjafjallajökull cat, via Skull Swap
FuckYeahAlbuquerque
Sober in a Nightclub
Night Deposits
Darius Whiteplume's Tumblr
Luke Surl
Skull Swap
Married to the Sea
Sober in a Nightclub
Bits and Pieces
Failblog
Swedish Penguins? Probably Bad News
Friends of Irony "1" 27 times, or "2" 13 times and "1" once, or "3" 9 times. Results may vary.
My First Dictionary
The Daily What
FuckYeahAlbuquerque
Noise to Signal, posted with the title, "By popular vote, we're cutting the blue wi-" Nice little essay, including the following:...the station opened its phone lines, asking “Who’s right?”
For 99.9% of the population, the only honest answer possible is “How the hell should I know? Why are you asking me? I don’t have an engineering background.”
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Don't worry: they poke holes in the lid. Criggo
The Daily What
Alphaville
Darius Whiteplume's Tumblr. His blog is called "Adventures in Nerdliness." Why do you ask?
Those journalists... can't sneak anything by them. Criggo
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Darius Whiteplume's Tumblr
Ugliest Tattoos
Slowest missile ever. Probably Bad News
"A KFC Double Down, with extra sauce, sandwiched between a sliced glazed donut." This is why you're fat. There. That'll keep all that nasty grease off your fingers, too.
You're not allowed to smork anywhere else. Blackadder
Friends of Irony
FuckYeahAlbuquerque
EpicPonyz
Hubba hubba! The Intersection
Hacked IRL
Cyanide and Happiness
ChannelATE
Failblog
Medium Large
Oddly Specific... my Triceratops will be soooo disappointed
Hacked IRL; the next post at that site was this one:
Via The Daily What, “My kid designed his own scientist costume for career day (including the “to do list”). I feel like I’ve suceeded as a parent.”
Marge Simpson's European Adventure, from Strange Maps.
Kyle sent me this earlier this week.
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