Digital Transition

For the last year and a half (maybe more), the cable company has been saturation advertising on the digital transition: "Are you ready?" Then they proceded to tell me that if I had cable, I didn't need to do anything. My cable is paid as part of my rent, and my television is just over a year old, so it's digital-ready. Doing nothing is okey-dokey by me.

Then yesterday, less than a month from the transition, I get a letter from Comcast. "If you don't get a converter box NOW, you will lose half the channels you are now receiving." The three channels I spend any time watching at all are CNN, The Weather Channel and Comedy Central. All three are in the upper tier that I am now, apparently, in immanent peril of losing.

I don't have a car. I don't have a phone. Their office is about seven miles north of town, at a stoplight called Lewisburg. I can't afford to pay for much of anything. Guess there's only one thing to do.

Targetting...

Fire in the Hole!

I knew that simulator would come in handy. Sorry about the collateral damage, Lewisburg, but you really need to choose your neighbors more carefully. Allowing Comcast to move in was just a bad decision. Covert that to digital, Comcast.

Quotable Thoughts

A few quotes selected from The Quotations Page. I have subscribed to the Quotes of the Day feed, and it adds a little sparkle and humor to each day.

Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.
Barbara Tober (1/13)

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.
Rita Rudner (1/11)

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
Sir William Drummond (1/10)

A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions.
Wilson Mizner (1/9)

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
John Cleese (1/9)

Silent But Deadly

No, not farts, silly! Those are unpleasant, but not deadly. No, we're talking Ninja Kitties here.

This one was making the rounds a while back, but it's still great. Getting closer and closer and closer... without ever moving.

Kitty in training, will soon graduate to walking on the ceiling.

When you can take the spot from the end of the laser beam you will be ready to leave, Grasshopper.

First, He Changed Parties

Oooh! You can do Breaking News TV Captions too!

moar funny pictures

Just select "Breaking News Builder" rather than "Basic Builder" at the I Can Has Cheezburger site. This character is Doris Kearns Goodwin, incidentally. I don't really know much about her beyond the fact she appears to be part of the Democratic Appeasement of Republicans Committee (DARC), but the first time I saw her picture I thought, "Criminy... that's Leiberman in drag!" Saw another picture of her earlier today, and had to figure out how to do this.

You Know How Your Mom Always Warned You About That?

Yes, his face is now stuck that way. And has been since at least 2007. From "Sayonara to the Smirk."From "Funny the World." From Huffpo. yesterday.

Goodness! Is that a little embarassment or contrition creeping into that expression? Naaaah!

I swear, this guy reminds me of the Edward Norton charater at the end of Primal Fear... he got away with, he knows it, and he's just tickled pink to flaunt it in our faces.

Monday Mineral: Sunstone

Andrew Alden has up a piece on state minerals; Oregon doesn't have a state mineral, but we do have a state gem- which is a mineral. Gems are not necessarily minerals; two that come to mind are amber, which is solidified pitch from trees, and opal, which isn't crystalline. But Oregon's state gem is sunstone, which is a transparent form of plagioclase feldspar (labradorite, for us nerds).
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 piece at e-bay discussing the factors that might make a particular gem more or less valuable, along with some beautiful pictures of cut and polished gems. The source that I remember is Orr, Orr and Baldwin's Geology of Oregon. I'll double check that figure, but it has remained unchanged since the earliest editions of that book; I suspect it's actually significantly higher now. (Followup: wrong on two counts. First, the figure is $1000 per carat, not 2000. Second, the edition of Geology of Oregon I have at home is authored by Orr and Orr; though based heavily on the previous editions authored by Baldwin, he was not involved with the edition I have. I still suspect that the price has risen with inflation.)
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 photo was lifted from Google Earth; is is somewhat misplaced to the east. If you go to 42.722960, -119.861271 (decimal degrees) in Google Earth, you can zoom in close enough to see the sign. I'm always surprised by the resolution of coverage in GE- it varys from place to place, but I'm still generally pleasantly surprised. One of the fun things about camping at the sunstone area is how terribly remote and removed you feel. As it gets dark the coyotes sing to each other across the low hills surrounding this basin. Often there are no other people there at all, and the nearest community, Plush, is about 25 road miles away. The population of that metropolis is 82. Below is a GE view toward Hart Mountain to the southeast from the sunstone area.
This is quite true-to-life; at least it's quite true to my memories. Hart Mountain is a fault block in the northern Basin and Range; it is composed of Steens Mountain Basalt. SMB is more or less contemporaneous with the Columbia River Basalt. As I remember, its composition is also quite similar to CRB. Its source (Steens Mountain area) is 200-300 miles south of the (much larger) CRB eruptive area and the span of eruption of these basalts was shorter than that of the CRB. The sunstones are simply large (and they can be enormous) phenocrysts of plagioclase that have survived weathering better than the surrounding ground mass of the basalt. My suspicion is that mechanical weathering and eolian erosion are the two major processes at work here; as you can see in the above picture the local relief is nearly non-existent. A couple of links of interest are the Dust Devil Mining website, which has some great photos of gem quality specimans, and the BLM website, which offers some basic information on the area.

I have been thinking about starting this series for a while, and I thank Andrew for providing the motivation to get going. Other posts may not be as elaborate as this one, but I think I have enough samples to keep this going for a while... and I can always go get more! I'm also considering a "Friday Fragment" post, which would be about interesting rocks I have known.

Thanks for the Memories...

you effin' asshat.

9/11, two wars, Katrina: 'We had fun', says Bush

From The Guardian. See also DCap's windup, here.

In more hopeful news, I'll be able to take down my little GWB ghoul in only 8 days.

Arctic Blues, or, Our Blue Arctic

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) issued a report a few days back that I've been meaning to get to. Most often when I put these post ideas on the back burner and allow my compulsive reading to consume all my time, the articles start to seem dated and obsolete, and I just forget about them. On occasion though, someone will do a much better job of blogging about it than I could hope to do. Happily, this has just happened.

Dr. Jeff Masters, at his "Wunderblog," has posted a lengthy but excellent piece that starts with the sentence, "The top climate story of 2008, as it was in 2007, was the extraordinary summertime sea ice retreat in the Arctic." I'm guessing that most people heard about the 2007 retreat, but if they had heard about this past summer's ice retreat it was in the context of being so much less extreme than 2007's. Indeed, this past summer and fall's data seems to me to have received the most attention from climate change deniers. And it is true that the minimum 2008 ice coverage was 9% more than 2007's minimum.

It's also true that the 2008 value was 34% below average. And that in 2008, for only the second time in recorded history, the fabled Northwest passage (between the Arctic Ice cap and Canada) was open: you could sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean north of Canada. It's also true that the ice thickness was probably at a historical minimum, which means the ice volume was also at a record minimum. Which in turn means it will melt off that much faster this coming summer. And the final truth (at least right now; I can only stand so much truth at a time) is that for the first time in history, the Northeast passage was open north of Russia! For the first time in history, probably since before the last ice age, the Arctic was an island!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.

We can pretty much kiss the image of Earth we grew up with, the one where both the polar regions are white, goodbye. Sooner than anyone thought possible, let alone likely, the north pole will be blue, open ocean, except for a few winter months.

And in other news, Santa Claus has just purchased the island of Tasmania from the Australian Government.

Amazing Proof!

I've always suspected something like this, but now I have proof (swiped with a modification from Christie Lynn at Observations of a Nerd):

Girls=Time+Money

Money=Time

Girls=2money

Money=Root(Evil)

Girls=2Root(Evil)

Evil is negative, Therefore...

Girls are imaginary. QED.

You Are Here

That would be a good name for a blog, wouldn't it? But the thing I want to point out is this amazing image at today's APOD: (Click over for full explanation; click the pic there for full-sized gloriosity) Yes indeedy! You are Here!

"But wait," I hear you plaintively complain, "Earth doesn't have rings! Isn't that Saturn?"

"Well, yes," I reply. "But look closer."
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.

You are here.

Regrets

We've all got 'em.

But the Sucking Sound Told Him the Wrecker Was Too Late...

A picture from my last post (or next one, if you're reading from most to least recent) hollered out for LOLz fixing...
Do I tag this with "astronomy?" I guess I should; they're the ones who will enjoy it most.

Rocks That Make Me Feel All Funny Inside

So Rawley was teasing me yesterday, asking if I'd seen any "orgasmic outcrops" recently. As I said in the post he was referring to, I don't very often describe outcrops that way... I like to save that particular phrasing for very special outcrops. But Dark Roasted Blend posted a piece today about "The Most Dangerous Roads in the World," and there are scads of photos of outcrops that I'd definitely make out with if given the chance. Wouldn't drive the roads. But I'd absolutely walk them out.And this one cracked me up:These are just two pictures of many; if these don't make you uneasy enough, note that this is Part 6 of an ongoing series; other posts on this topic can be found here.

Another "outcrop" that I posted a while back is not one that I would like: a bit too much of the femme fatale in this one for me to feel comfortable. In fact, the first time I watched it, this video made very, very uncomfortable, and I remembered it as about twice as long as it really was. If you are a geology person and a mountain climber, you will love this. If you have an issue with heights or balance, be ready to click pause or close the window. I just had to track down another copy- the version I had embedded has apparently been disappeared by the internet police. So I had to watch it again. You know what? It still makes me woozy. But the rocks are very cool.

The location is El Caminito Del Rey, "The King's Little Road," in Malaga, Spain. Part of the nerve-racking aspect of the video is that the photographer is fearless and nearly jogs through the mess. So here are some still photos that are less stressful. Massive exposure of vertical bedding is a serious turn-on to most geologists.
See that little line three quarters of the way up the picture? That's the pathway. EEK! And those little tiny dark spots at the left side of the path? Yep, dem's people up dere.
The pathway was created to allow workers to move back and forth more easily between a pair of hydropower projects, a little more than a century ago. I don't know if the above picture shows the process of constructing the path or what workers used before the path was constructed.
Dignitaries touring the path after its completion- see now, that I could deal with. I'm glad to see from the Wikipedia entry that Andalusia is hoping to restore it; it is (or was, before it fell into disrepair) an amazing piece of engineering. I would love to walk this path if, you know, it had railings, and if it was mostly there.

Now all these are great outcrops, but it's mostly the scale of exposure that makes them appealing; I can't really tell if the rocks themselves are all that amazing. Perhaps the most amazing, yes, orgasmic, outcrop I've ever seen wasn't all that big, maybe 150 feet along the Klamath River in northern California. It was a somewhat overgrown roadcut, so exposure was not great, though not terrible. In that 150 feet were 1) Ultramafic rocks cooked to serpentine, talc and chrysotile asbestos; 2) Seafloor basalt cooked to a fairly coarse amphibolite schist; 3) Seafloor chert; 4) Calc-alkaline rocks representing slightly metamorphosed sandy limestones; 5) More or less unaltered greywacke. The environments represented are, respectively 1) slightly metamorphosed upper mantle 2) heavily metamorphosed ocean crust 3) deep ocean oozes (far from land, no land-derived, 'terrigenous' sediments) 4) warm shallow marine, close enough to shore to have sand. 5) near shore, heavy sedimentation, probably associated with mountain-building on shore. So, in other words, a transect representing maybe 10 to 15 miles vertically, and at least hundreds, possibly much more, horizontally, all accordioned into an exposure you could walk through in seconds.

It's the kind of thing that can make any red-blooded geologist swoon from heart-stopping passion.

A Message From Jay-Zus

So Dr. Monkey reminded me yesterday that I can use my I Can Haz Cheezburger account to caption pictures in LOLz style. (I had forgotten this one) Then Samurai Frog posted a picture just screaming for such treatment... and VOILA!

Today's Trivia

Wow. The stuff you learn reading international news never ceases to amaze me. What are Barbie's middle and last names? (yes- Barbie the doll) Answer at the Guardian. Those British newspapers... I tell ya.

And? And? And?

From BBC:

"Chuckie" Taylor, the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been
sentenced by a US court to 97 years in prison for committing torture.

OK, so now I'm waiting on news regarding "Georgie," the son of former US president...

Yeah, right. I know, I know... but I'm entitled to my dreams. And the irony is painful:

A Liberian minister told the BBC the verdict sent a message that nobody -
regardless of how powerful they were - could get away with unspeakable
crimes.

And We Get Their Leftovers...

as the dishes slowly turn green and mouldy over the next year or few.
From Oregon Live

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)