Answers To a Couple of Long-Standing Questions

A couple of questions that have nagged me for a while- but for which I haven't bothered to track down answers- are "What is the rate at which we are using oil compared to the rate at which it forms," and "When was the last formally (i.e. Congressionally) declared US war?" On the surface they're unrelated, but looking at our current conflicts, I think you can make a case for an important relationship. Even Afghanistan, which has little in the way of fossil energy resources, can be interpreted at least in part as a manifestation of Muslim anger at perceived exploitation by western corporate interests.

Yesterday, I came across a quote in an interview in Der Speigel claiming "...we consume as much oil in one year as was created in 5.3 million years." I have guesstimated that our rate of consumption is about a million times greater than the rate of generation, but that was just an off-the-cuff stab at the magnitude. While I'd sure like a citation or link to how the method by which "5.3 million" was calculated, it sits comfortably in the range I'd expect, and I'm pleased (though uneasy) to finally see an estimate.

I just Googled the second question, and found this in a PDF (817 kb) from the Congressional Research Service: "The last formal declaration of war was enacted on June 5, 1942, against Rumania during World War II." I had thought maybe Grenada or Panama (during the Reagan administration) had been formally declared wars, but I wasn't sure. Nor was I sure about Desert Storm under Bush Senior. I guess I'm kind of surprised that there has never been an "official" US war during my lifetime.

Titillating Trivia

The likeness of which Playboy playmate has been to the Lunar surface? Answer here, and if it's your kind of thing, it's up for auction, along with quite a bit of other spacey memorabilia.

Items can currently be previewed on the Company's main site. Bidding runs from January 13-20.

Followup: According to IO9, it didn't actually go to the lunar surface; it was stashed in the command module.

Measuring C In Your Microwave

WiFi was down here for a while, and I'm afraid I'm not going to get much posted today.  But I just came across this and figured I'd pass it along to you science nerds out there... you know who you are.  Here's an interesting method for measuring the speed of light in the safety and comfort of your own kitchen. If you click on the "back" and "next" buttons at the upper right, there are other experiments as well. And for your useless trivia today "c" as the symbol for the speed of light in a vacuum comes from the Latin celeritas, meaning swiftness or speed, and root of the English word celerity, which means pretty much the same thing.

Today's Useless But Amusing Trivia Tidbit

According to Balloon Juice, SpongeBob SquarePants gets twice as many viewers as Glenn Beck.

You're welcome.

(Fair disclosure: the author of this blog doesn't watch either of them.)

Why I Take InfoGraphics With A Grain of Salt

Total amount of food eaten: 36,750 pounds... seems like a reasonable estimate. That's about a pound and a half a day.Total amount of feces produced: 6734 pounds. That's a 30,000 lb deficit, and about a quarter pound produced per day. Now much of the food has lots of water, and many of the energy producing components are metabolized to water, but I still think that latter number is, well, full of it.

Tin Toy

I think I've only seen this one time before now, at the animation cinema during the 1989 DaVinci Days Festival. I suspect many others have never even heard of it.

USA Today had an article a few days ago coinciding with the opening of Toy Story 3, listing 10 bits of Pixar Toy trivia. Among them,

1. Tinny, the one-man-band character from the Oscar-winning Pixar short Tin Toy, was supposed to be a star of 1995's Toy Story. But he was deemed too antiquated. A military action figure was suggested before filmmakers settled on a space toy.

While the clip is clearly dated, it was a jaw dropping example of detail and sophistication in the young genre of computer animation 20 or more years ago, and I find it kind of charming in a retro sort of way- for example, I love those balloon diapers. The Wiki page says

Tin Toy is a 1988 Pixar Animation Studios short film using computer animation. It was directed by John Lasseter and won the 1988 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. In 2003, Tin Toy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

I have much enjoyed the Toy Story series- in fact, there's nothing I've seen from Pixar that I haven't enjoyed. There are a few of their features I haven't seen: Cars, Ratatouille, and Up; I haven't seen the new Toy Story either. I love the bittersweet quality that infuses everything they do, the subtle moodiness, the moments of real sadness. It makes the saccharine moments actually sweet, rather than cloying. Which brings me to this comic from The Far Left Side.I love things that make me happy and sad at the same time.

Our Amazing Planet

A site that I started following recently is Our Amazing Planet; the post that got my attention was one that went viral in the pop aggregators, and was pointed out by two or three geobloggers as well: a to-scale column of earth from 36,000 feet in the atmosphere to 36,000 feet depth. If you haven't seen this infographic, I do recommend it... for example, had you asked me to guess a typical jetliner cruising altitude, I would have essentially nailed it. But had you asked me the highest elevation a bird has been seen flying, I would have been off by a factor of fifty percent or more.

Sites like this are fun and enjoyable, and to the extent that they cite their sources (as they do quite nicely on the above infographic), educational. Other pieces can be unclear and misleading, though if you know your science, you can see how they chose the words they did. Unlike, for example, National Geographic, which has been disappointing me more and more recently with their sloppiness, this site is not pretending to be authoritative or to be interviewing the power hitters of cutting-edge research. They're having fun with something they obviously enjoy, and at that level, doing a good job.

A Willy Wonka-worthy post was The Scrumptious Chocolate Falls of Arizona. Two other recent ones I've enjoyed were the Ten Most Visited National Parks (the national park bucket list) and Ten Least Visited National Parks (all yours). It's another one of those US-centric ones, but I thought this might be a fun early summer geo meme. Bold the ones you have visited, and italicize the ones you've never heard of before. Leave a comment and/or link if you decide to play, and I'll post a link to you.

Most visited:
10: Glacier
9: Acadia (Maine, Alaska and Hawaii are the three states I've never visited)
8: Grand Teton
7: Cuyahoga Valley (I've visited the area many times in the 60's and 70's, though it wasn't until 2000 that this became an official unit of the NPS)
6: Rocky Mountain (I'm kind of ashamed of this one)
5: Olympic
4: Yellowstone
3: Yosemite
2: Grand Canyon
1: Great Smoky Mountains

Least Visited:
10: City of Rocks NR, Idaho
9: Cumberland Island NS, Georgia
8: Florissant Fossil Beds NM, Colorado (This is one I've always wanted to see)
7: Chiricahua NM, Arizona
6: Tonto NM, Arizona
5: Dry Tortugas NP, Florida
4: Katmai NP & Preserve, Alaska
3: Kalaupapa NHP, Hawaii
2: Hagerman Fossil Beds NM, Idaho
1: Russell Cave NM, Alabama

Callan's in, and yes it is the same Cuyahoga River, but upstream of the Cleveland metro area. The rocks are Ordovician and Silurian Mississippian and Devonian. The exposures are quite spectacular.

Phillip, the only other Oregon Geoblogger I know of, has his list here.

Gaelyn's back yard is #2 on the first list... Soooo jealous!

Silver Fox smokes out a spelling error, and her list is here. As always, mistakes are my own, and I reserve the right to edit ones that embarrass me.

Ed at Geology Happens has the fullest list I've seen so far.

Geotripper Garry Hayes is playing too, and notes how few of us have been to many on the "least visited" list.

Via a comment at Callan's list, blarg! Another spelling error on my part: Russell Cave should have two l's... now it does.

Oops, missed Fab Grandma's post a couple of days ago.

Coconino, at Ordinary High Water Mark, gets into the game.

Planelight at Life in Plane Light adds another list, with the comment, "I need to visit more National Parks / Monuments." So do we all.

Medusaceratops lokii and Other Recent Geo-Trivia

I know it's frowned upon to combine Greek and Latin roots to create new science terms, but is it OK to combine Roman and Norse mythological characters to create new scientific names?

The stunning new species has been identified as Medusaceratops lokii, a nod to two freakish mythological beings that inspired Michael Ryan -- the dinosaur's Ottawa-born co-discoverer-- when it came time to assign a name to the creature.

You can see a rendering of this very strange looking creature at Paleoblog.Any geology person worth his or her halite luvs them some Far Side. And this has to be one of the favorite geology panels from that comic, from 1982. It's hardly news, first being officially used in 1993, but it's news to me that "thagomizer" is actually the official term for the arrays of spikes at the end of Stegosaurus tails. The comic below came to my attention via Swans on Tea.
Via Andrew Revkin at the NYT Dot Earth blog, I learned that the total amount of oil in the reservoir that is currently vomiting into the Gulf of Mexico amounts to trivia:

BP officials have estimated it contains no more than 100 million barrels of oil. That’s five days and change worth of American demand for this precious fuel.

Note that's a maximum. I'll try to do a more meaty post on the spill, but there's an awful lot of information, and it's painful and infuriating for me to go through.

This hurricane season is shaping up to be the worst since 2005, perhaps comparable.

The hurricane season of 2010 is upon us. With unprecedented sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, El Niño gone and possibly transitioning to La Niña, a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, a million earthquake refugees in Haiti at the mercy of a hurricane strike, and an ever-increasing number of people living on our coasts, the arrival of this year's hurricane season comes with an unusually ominous tone. NOAA is forecasting a very active and possibly hyperactive season, and Dr. Bill Gray has said he expects "a hell of a year."

"2010 hurricane season seen more active than feared." Whew! That's a... say what? "Worse!?!?" Guess what? Haiti's not prepared.

This was picked up by Geology Rocks:
from Good Will Job Hunting, URL Hire Me Because I'm Smart, with the comment,

The Earth’s altitudes are bimodally distributed — there is lots of terrain just above sea level, and lots of terrain 2 miles below sea level (the “abyssal plain”).

Weird, huh?

Well, no, not really. This distribution is an easily predictable result of having two different kinds of crust over a plastic (but solid) mantle. Continental crust is thick and comparatively low density; oceanic crust is thin and comparatively high density. I'm sure this was kind of weird looking fifty years ago before the development of plate tectonic theory, but someone who has a middle school level understanding of geology at this point shouldn't find the above diagram the least bit mysterious. It is very cool, though.

Exciting news about my home ground, from my home ground:

America's Pacific Northwest has a 37% chance of being hit by a magnitude 8 or larger earthquake in the next 50 years, a new study shows. That's more than double previous estimates of a 10-15% risk, says Chris Goldfinger, a marine geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

I'm curious to see how this stands up to verification and critical review.

Speaking of Oregon, it's official: NOAA is here.This is very big news for Newport, about an hour across the Coast Range. OSU has a world-class school of Oceanography, Jane Lubchenco is from OSU, and Newport, along with most of the Oregon Coast, has been slammed pretty hard economically over the last 20 years, by both loss of logging jobs and fisheries restrictions. Tourism has helped, but not enough. Good on ya, Newport!

I don't do Twitter; nothing against it, and there are a couple of accounts that I check from time to time, but there's just too much other stuff for me to read and check on. So I was aware of this contest, but wasn't paying any attention to it. "Stephen Fry crowns most beautiful tweet at Hay Festival" Imagine my surprise to find it was a geology-related winner! And here it is:

The winning tweet read: "I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it'll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it."

Physorg Newsletter

I get this daily newsletter from physorg, and read basically none of it. It's an aggregator of press releases, and if you've read OTI for a while, you know how I feel about press releases. If not, here's a hint: grrrrr! Unfortunately, I have to remember my password to get them to stop sending the newletter and I don't. So every afternoon, I open it, skim over the headlines, and trash it. Once every week or two, I click through on an article, get angry at PR hacks all over again, and vow to never open anything else from physorg.

Today, it dawned on me I could have some fun with these... I think the links will actually take you to the articles. And while the stories behind them are most certainly real, passage through the mind and keyboards of some of the most scientifically illiterate minds known to man will often distort the story beyond recognition. Don't believe everything you read. Still, I will point out that one of my comments below is actually true. Do you know why mercury has the atomic symbol Hg?

- Nanotube transistor controlled by ATP could improve man-machine communication (Scientists still seeking techniques to improve man-woman communication)

- Building organs block by block: Tissue engineers create a new way to assemble artificial tissues (involves a lot of roadkill around the neighborhood)

- Silver tells a volatile story of Earth's origin: Water was present during its birth (today's trivia: hydro [water]+ argentum [silver]= hydrargentum= watersilver= Hg= mercury. Now you know)

- Mathematicians Solve 140-Year-Old Boltzmann Equation (answer is, unsurprisingly, 42)

- Tibetans developed genes to help them adapt to life at high elevations (Hippies developed jeans for that purpose 45 years ago)

- Aiming to cure deafness, Stanford scientists first to create functional inner-ear cells (Deaf now hear voices of convicts)

- Untangling Facebook, decoding Congress: New mathematical method may help tame big data (genomics and proteomics moved down in grants for computer science research)

- Plant and animal in direct competition for food (next up on the WWF)

- Low oxygen levels prevent X chromosome inactivation in human embryonic stem cells (New explanation for Michael Jackson)

- Why a whiff of cats or rats is scary (if you're a mouse, that is) (well, duh)

- New pathway discovered in cellular cholesterol regulation (Walking it regularly will help lower cholesterol)

- Sun's constant size surprises scientists (If they got out of their darned labs a little more, they wouldn't so frequently be surprised at stuff the rest of us take for granted)

- Feathers too weak for early bird flight (Feathers return home, rest up, get plenty of fluids, and catch later flight)

- Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole Nebula (Ticket issued, and given warning to wait for the green "walk" signal)

503 Years Ago Today

Via The Bend Bulletin:

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.

In 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened to shipping.

From Wikipedia,

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.

Mesofacts

I love it when a couple of pieces I set aside as interesting, but not quite blogworthy in their own rights, end up being a nice compliment to each other. First, consider this quote from A. Toffler, found at Joie De Vivre earlier

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

I presume that's Alvin Toffler, who wrote the bestseller, Future Shock, though I don't see the above at a page of his quotes. Ah, here it is. There are some good ones at those two pages, and I also found out that he and I share the same birthday, albeit 31 years apart.

That matches nicely with this article from Boston.com, "Warning: Your Reality is Out of Date." The article introduces the concept of a "mesofact," a bit of data that is definitely true, but only for a fixed period of time. The first number I can recall hearing for the total global population was 4-4.5 billion, corresponding to the second half of the seventies. I knew we had passed 6 Gigahumans a while back, but I hadn't realized that it was 11 years ago, nor that we were anticipating the arrival of the seven billionth next year. In other words, that figure is one we need to keep relearning, if it's one that's important to us.

Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.

Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

Dr. Arbesman's article is a fun read, and if you like to stay as current as possible on relevant facts regarding our ever-changing world, the mesofact website and associated blog are worth checking out. Minor quibble: many of the graphics link to Wikipedia as the data source.

Today's Trivia

Apparently Canada is disappointed, maybe even ashamed, that they didn't do better in hockey. To Canadians I say, buck up. You have history on you side. Bet you whip ass next time.

In the first Olympic Winter Games, in 1924, the Canadian hockey team won all five of their games and outscored their opponents 110 to 3.

Via FactCheck.org.

Also too...
(TYWKIWDBI) ...and...
EpicPonyz

Once Again, SciAm Does Bogus Science

I really enjoy this Monday Game. Steve Mirsky list four science news headlines from the past week, but only three are real. The other is Totally Bogus. Have you been paying attention?

Story 1, Banned from import lo these past 21 years for fears of spongiform encephalopathy, it is now once again legal to bring Falkland Island sheep meat into the US.

Story 2, bats and dolphins that echolocate have the same genetic constructs that allow them to do it.

Story 3, llamas are providing proteins that could help find bioterror weapons.

And story 4, slime molds can successfully model efficient routes with multiple terminals, and proved it by doing a decent job recreating the Tokyo commuter train system.

(See link above for answers) I got this week's quiz because the actual story is very similar to the bogus one.

Also, if one of those stories had been "NASA developing single-pilot fight jacket weighing in at about 400 lbs," would you have chosen that one as bogus? According to Scientific American, you would have been wrong. Meet the Puffin:

I'm not sure this is a real good idea for widespread civilian use... I'm not sure it's a real good idea at all. But you do get more conservative as you get older, and a lot of my concerns are centered on safety issues. Like 400 lbs of Puffin packed with 150 lbs of meat falling out of the sky. But for all you young'uns, you may not get your jetpacks anytime soon, but an alternative might not be too far off.

Today's Trivia

On an average day in West Virginia, about 3 million pounds of explosives are detonated during the process of mountain top removal to exhume coal seams. That's the energy equivalent of 3 Hiroshima-sized explosions every month. Money line: "I feel that the US Congress should maybe send a registered letter to Japan next August saying, 'See? Really, it wasn’t anything personal.'" Via A Tiny Revolution.

One addendum: I'm not an expert, but mining often uses the diesel/ammonium nitrate explosive. It's cheap, and relatively safe to handle and transport.

Today's Trivia

On Jan. 13, 1990, Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the nation's first elected black governor as he took the oath of office in Richmond.

From NYT. I had no idea that the first US black governor was inaugurated only 20 years ago.

Burj Dubai

The Eiffel Tower, completed 1889, was the first man-made structure to exceed 1000 feet; its height is 1063 feet.Taipei 101 has, until today, held the record as the tallest inhabited building in the world, at 1667 feet. It was completed in 2003, and was the first building to surpass the half-kilometer mark. (Burj Dubai actually passed its height in July of 2007)
Burj Dubai, which opens today, tops out at 2717 feet. Which is just shorter than what you'd get if you stacked the Eiffel Tower on top of Taipei 101.
(Charles Crowell/Bloomberg)

There's an old joke... two drunks are pissing off a bridge, and one looks over at the other and says "Water's cold tonight." The second looks back at at him and says, "Mmmhmm. Deep, too."

This building strikes me as having something in common with that joke, but I have to admit, I'm impressed. You couldn't pay me enough to go up on the observation deck (I got woozy from the video posted from the crow's nest a while back), but I'm impressed. Here's a few links for more info: NYT (highlight: video of the fireworks celebrating the opening), a gallery of photos of the construction from BBC, and another gallery of photos of the finished product from Der Spiegel, along with a story containing a sort of mind blowing quote from the engineering firm that designed it: "I would think we could easily do a one kilometer building."

Wholly Wow.

Trivia fun: The Great Pyramid of Giza was about 480 feet tall when completed; its current hight is about 455 feet. It is believed to have been completed about 2551 BC, and was the tallest man-made object in the world for over 3800 years. It was exceeded by Lincoln Cathedral in England in 1311 AD.

Isaac Newton's Birthday

Today's Google Doodle:Also, if you click "I'm Feeling Lucky" without entering any search terms, you can still catch the New Year's fireworks display.

Has Anyone Seen This Waterfall?

TYWKIWDBI found this waterfall picture at Pixdaus, without any location. It looks very much like Pacific Northwest to me in terms of the rocks (resolution is too poor to be very confident, but it looks like multiple thin basalt flows) and in terms of the trees (which look a lot like Douglas-firs). However, despite looking at a hundred or more pictures in various archives, I'm not finding anything that looks like a probable match. My first impression was Salt Creek Falls, but it doesn't have as prominent an overhang. I'm certain it's not in the Columbia Gorge or at Silver Creek Falls (landscape is wrong). This is clearly a large waterfall, but it's not familiar to me. Anyone else recognize this? It may not be in the PNW, it just looks to me like it might be.

Followup, Sunday, 01/03/10: There have been two suggestions so far. First, Snoqualmie Falls, near Snoqualmie, Washington. I had to do a double take on this one; it was one I had looked at fairly carefully before I put this post together. In the fourth comment, I discuss why I cautiously reject this as the same waterfall as the one above. (picture from Google Images)
I have also received a couple of emails from a person at www.iafi.org, who seems confident it's Salt Creek Falls. (Also chosen to capture approximately the same aspect from Google Images) First, the edge of Salt Creek Falls is vertical for a distance, then juts out a bit, causing a step about a third of the way down. The unknown falls above the drop is vertical for a distance, then it recedes into the overhang. Second, the capstone of Salt Creek Falls is one thick intracanyon basalt flow- I've stopped at it a number of times on field trips. The unknown falls appears to be over multiple thin lava flows (though as noted before, the picture isn't high enough in resolution to be very certain of that). Below is another shot, from the e-mailer, with about the same aspect as above, but slightly lower flow. So as of now, I'm still calling this mystery unsolved.

Followup: And Heeeere's the Answer!

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Seconds left.

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Number of seconds left in the year. (Go here and click "I'm Feeling Lucky" without entering any search terms)