Sunday Funnies: Civilization Edition

What is the opposite of civilization? Objectivism!Lawyers, Guns and Money
Dr Boli
So Much Pun
Bits and Pieces
Lolcats
Pundit Kitchen

Clay Bennett
Sober in a Nightclub
What Would Jack Do?
Buttersafe
The High Definite: "Justice League: The Adorable Version."
The High Definite
Senor Gifs
Engrish Funny
Roflrazzi
The Far Left Side That should be "do" in the first line, but I'm not going to get all anal over a gag this funny. Just kinda anal.
From Lawyers, Guns and Money, a writing class assignment: above, an uncaptioned comic, below, the "clear and unambiguous winner:"

Married to the Sea
Roflrazzi
Comixed
Walking in Squares
LolDogs
Hacked IRL
The Daily What: "Keep your Boehner out of my uterus."
Above and below from Dark Roasted Blend
Speaking of which, there have been a number of stories about a syndrome in which baby penguins fail to develop feathers as they should, and for which scientists do not yet have an explanation. Physics/humor blogger Swansont knocked the ball out of the park with this clever headline: Scientists Baffled By Naked Chicks.Slowpoke

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Sober in a Nightclub

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Abstruse Goose
Comic JK
Sober in a Nightclub
Indexed
Bit and Pieces

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Sober in a Nightclub

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LolScience
Sober in a Nightclub
The Far Left Side

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Sober in a Nightclub
Bits and Pieces

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Bits and Pieces

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Non Sequitur
Clay Bennett
Sober in a Nightclub

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Happy Birthday, Packy!

Portland Zoo's Packy was born there 49 years ago today. I have to say, he looks very much the patriarch in this clip. (Source and article) The latter half of the clip sets out some of the research findings that have come from the zoo, Packy, and his family over the course of nearly half a century.

It's pretty amazing to me that this elephant is only two and a half years younger than I am.

Followup: Oregon Live has a nice write-up too, with the additional tidbit that "...Asian elephants typically live well into their late 50s." Glad to hear it; I admit I was wondering.

Saturd80's: Bagpipes Edition

AC/DC: It's a Long Way to the Top if You Want to Rock and Roll:

Rare Air, Reels:

Steve Earl, Copperhead Road:

My understanding on this one is that the bagpipes are sampled and played digitally via keyboard.

Geo-Mystery

Interzone friend Katie, who will soon be off to Connecticut for her PhD in psychology, sent me an interesting link yesterday to the Wikipedia article on The Devil's Kettle at Judge C. R. Magney State Park, Minnesota. Take a look at the picture and spot the problem:
The Brule River splits in two just above a waterfall and falls in two cascades. That's not all that unusual; in fact it's pretty common. What's odd here is that one of the streams falls into a pothole. But wait! Even though that made me do a double-take, reading the text really blew my socks off. See, no one knows where the water goes, and a number of obvious tests have been done to solve the problem without useful results:

One [theory] is that, after dropping down the pothole, the river runs along a fault underground, or as a variant, that it enters an underground channel and comes out somewhere under Lake Superior. Both of these ideas have one valid aspect in common: they recognize that water must move downhill! But the main problem is creating a channel or conduit large enough to conduct the impressive flow of half the Brule River! Faulting commonly has the effect of crushing and fracturing the rock along the fault plane. This could certainly increase the permeability of the rock - its capacity to transmit water - but the connected open spaces needed to drain half the river would be essentially impossible, especially for such a distance. Furthermore, there is no geologic evidence for such a fault at the Devil's Kettle. Large, continuous openings generally do not occur in rocks, except for caves in limestone terranes. The nearest limestone is probably in southeastern Minnesota, so that doesn't help... Maybe the Devil's Kettle bottoms out fortuitously in a great lava tube that conducts the water to the Lake... Unfortunately for this idea, they are not the right kind of volcanic rocks! Rhyolites, such as the great flow at this locality, never form lava tubes, which only develop in fluid basaltic lava. Even the basalts in this area may not be the "right kind", being flood basalts that spread laterally as a sheet from fissures, not down the slopes of a volcano. No lava tubes have been found in the hundreds of basalt flows exposed along the North Shore. Furthermore, the nearest basalt is so far below the river bed, and even if it did contain an empty lava tube (very unlikely after its long history of deep burial) the tube would have to be both oriented in the right direction (south) and blocked above this site so that it isn't already full of debris. And there are no reports of trees or other floating debris suddenly appearing at one spot offshore in Lake Superior. The mystery persists.

Wow. This is a delightfully puzzling planet.

Tuesday Tits

Tufted titmouse, Baeolophus bicolor. Image from South Dakota Birds and Birding.

Awash in Anniversaries

As I mentioned yesterday, and as you've most likely seen elsewhere, today is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight around the earth. (Today's APOD is a beautiful salute to that accomplishment) However, there are a slew of others coming across my radar:

• It's the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle flight... kind of mind boggling that it was only 20 years from the first manned space flight to the shuttle. And 30 years later, we're still using the shuttle. NASA today also announced the future homes of the soon-to-be retired shuttle fleet.
  
• It's the 150th anniversary of the shelling of Fort Sumpter, and the opening ceremonies for the Civil War.
• Five years ago today, Mitt "Mittens" AKA "Willard" Romney signed ObamaCare RomneyCare The Massachusetts Health Care Bill into law. And hasn't stopped running away from it since.
• 113 years ago, Marie Curie announced her discoveries relating to radioactivity.
• 66 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt died, leaving his VP Harry Truman the task of ending WWII.
• Finally, 200 years ago today, a team from John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company landed on the southern shore of the mouth of the Columbia River to establish a trading post; the community that grew up around the site is now called Astoria, Oregon. No biggie, right? Well, oddly, for me at least, this may be the most important item on the list. Money quote:

  "Without John Jacob Astor sending the party to establish a trade outpost in 1811, Oregon, Washington and Idaho would very likely be part of Canada today. The group he sent beat a group of Canadians by about a month."

And in Recent News...

This Modern World
Some Guy With A Website... Hey! Is that Paul Krugman in the second panel? Why, yes, I think it is. (Yes, that IS eight links in two sentences, but go read them... you'll thank me.)

Moonday: Miranda

I meant to kick this off last week, then got distracted by other shiny things. My intent is to post a weekly image from that under-represented group of solar system citizens, the moons. And I vow to keep doing this right up to the point that I don't anymore. This happens to be an auspicious day to start the series: tomorrow (which is already today in the Eurasian borderlands) is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight around the planet, and the dawn of manned spaceflight.

Here's my first selection: my favorite known moon, Miranda, which orbits Uranus. This was posted last week at The Astronomy Picture of the Day (a site which regularly features some out-of-this world geology- see today's pic, for example), with the title, "Verona Rupes: Tallest Known Cliff in the Solar System." The lighting angle and orientation are odd, but the cliff face is toward the lower right, and faces toward the bottom of the image. See that flat, bright surface? That is an estimated 20 kilometers of vertical. Miranda's gravity is much lower than earth's and it is thought that the 12-minute fall from the crest to the bottom might be survivable with the appropriate air bag at the bottom... presuming you could hit it. Click that last link to read more, and click the pic there for a larger field of view. Or click here to see a full-disk mosaic of Miranda. Or both, if you like.

Why I Live in Oregon

This is the geology I grew up with... (Geology Rocks) ...and this is the geology I've lived with for just over 31 years:
(Oregon Geologic Data Compilation) Any Questions?