No Passing

(map and road cams from the ODOT TripCheck page)

So today we need to get back across the Cascades, and of course the weather is being uncooperative. Here it's a mix of snow and rain, with the temperature around 35. Up on the Route 20 passes (Santiam and Tombstone) it's snowing heavily. Throughout the region, the wind is gusting up to 30 miles per hour. It's been howling all night.

And the cables that my sister and brother-in-law bought for their rental van are not fitting well. Each of them have broken a link. We've wired down the loose pieces, and they seem to be working well, but none of us are experienced with chains/cables.

We're considering driving up to the Gorge (I-84), which goes through the Cascades at just above sea-level. The problem there is that we've got to get to the gorge, which might also require chains.

So our choices are 1) Head straight over the mountains, and hope that the chains hold for an hour to an hour and a half. If they break we may have to come back to Sisters or Bend to find traction options, and waste several hours. 2) Take the chains off, and head north on 97 toward the Columbia River Gorge, hoping we don't hit areas where chains are required (more importantly, truly needed). And if we have to waste time putting them back on, will they hold? Not only does the latter option add 115 miles to the trip, we might end up in exactly the same position as we could by just trying to dash through the Cascade passes.

As I've commented several times, Corvallis has spoiled me. It's mild and we just don't get winter weather, with unusual exceptions. The temperature there now is low forties, with a predicted high of 47 degrees today. I have enjoyed the snow here in Bend, and taken many pictures of it over the last few days, some of which I will post sooner or later. But I've had my fill, and snow is great as long as you're just admiring it. Actually dealing with it is a pain in the butt.

18.9

Inches of snow Portland has seen this month as of late Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. That's the most in December since the state started keeping records in the 1880s.

(From Oregon Live)

And according to the Mt Bachelor website (as of this writing), they have had 168 inches of snow this season. Less than two weeks ago, I was worried they might not have enough by Christmas; there were only 8 inches on the ground, and 18 are required to open. So 160 inches- over 13 feet- have fallen in the last two weeks or less. (In fairness, that has packed down to only 67 inches.)(picture from the Bachelor website photo album, Christmas day)

I'll bet Corvallis has set a record too, though from what I saw on OSU webcams today, it didn't look like they had a white Christmas there.

And the Bend area is expecting more snow tonight. Hope we can get home safely Saturday.

Merry Christmas!

Can you say it too many times?
Christmas sunrise over Newberry Volcano, moments ago, from our porch.

No Sign of Santa

But Merry Christmas anyways! You all have been a great gift all year (I started reading blogs regularly in late '07, but didn't start blogging myself until May), so I don't really need to wait up for the jolly old elf. Have a good one!

The Growth of Continents

This month's Accretionary Wedge topic is "What recent geological advance has been most important to your geological work?" I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically my understanding. I had been thinking about writing on paleomagnetism, but the roots of that sub-discipline go back to (if I remember correctly) Cox in 1956- please don't quote me on that: I'm trying to dredge up memories from 20 years ago. (Late Note: See this article excerpt- I have a little more confidence now. Note particularly, "Paleomagnetic results for the Mesozoic and early Tertiary might be explained more plausibly by a relatively rapidly changing magnetic field, with or without wandering of the rotational pole, than by large-scale continental drift.) So the early work in that area predates my birth. Furthermore, the results that have been most important and, yes, inspiring, to me all focus on a particular topic: accretionary tectonics, or as we used to call it when I was an undergrad, "flake tectonics."

Oregon is composed of a fairly large number of discrete terranes, or "flakes" that have distinct and different histories up to a certain point in time. After that point, the geologic history of a particular terrane and its neighbors are congruent and coherent.

As a brief aside, note that "terrane" refers to a particular tectonostratigraphic unit, while the word "terrain" refers to landscape.

So to choose an imaginary but typical example, picture an island arc volcanic system. In the above cartoon, subduction is under the arc to the left, and is consuming oceanic plate between the arc and the continent to the right. Sediments (in tan/greenish?) are accumulating in the basin between the continent and the arc.

The volcanic arc continues to approach the continent, and the basin accumulates more sediment.

As the arc approaches the continent, the sediments continue to accumulate; thrusting and folding start to thicken the sequence. Ultimately, when the oceanic crust is consumed, subduction ceases.
The overlying sediments are severely deformed; while not of the same magnitude as the India/Asia continental collision, the processes are similar. The now accreted island arc and the continent to which it is attached will henceforth share the same sedimentary and tectonic history. In a practical sense, that means events and sediments can be correlated between the blocks. And in reference to my first idea for a topic, they will share similar (basically identical) paleomagnetic histories. Often, subduction will resume on the outboard of the newly accreted block in an opposite direction. This has been called a "polarity reversal," but with a very different meaning from a magnetic polarity reversal.

Geologists will immediately see that I have grossly simplified the diagrams above. For example, the magma rising in the subduction zones that does not reach the surface will crystallize to granitic rocks. Much of the sediment and volcanic rock will be metamorphosed. Faulting and folding will jumble things terribly. A further complication is that an accreted terrane may itself be composed of two or more terranes with independent histories up to a certain point, but share discernible spans of history prior to continental accretion. This is the case in terranes of the Klamath Mountains of southwestern Oregon and northern California. Back arc spreading following a polarity reversal in a subduction system (as happens between the second and fourth cartoons above) can emplace ophiolites- again, this can be seen in the Klamaths.The above diagram shows schematically the kinds of terranes that have formed much of western North America. The article in which I found it has a larger version, and discusses some of these ideas with respect to the Klamaths.

I had the privilege to take a field trip to the Snake River Canyon area with Tracy Vallier toward the end of my undergrad years; the geology there is somewhat less complex than the Klamaths (at least it seems that way to me), but is still best described as "a mess." This article focuses primarily on Idaho, but provides plenty of insight into northwestern Oregon as well.

The accreted terrain with which I am most familiar was referred to as "Siletzia." I say "was" because I haven't really followed the professional literature; I'm not certain that it still is. Actually, quick check, it does look as if it still is- see here and here. This block extends from approximately Coos Bay, Oregon northward to the southern end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The eastern margin, as far as I know, has not been tightly constrained, but probably lies along the eastern edge of the Cascade forearc basin, or along the western edge of the Cascade arc; in either case it is buried in basin sediments and older Cascade volcanics. At a first level of approximation, it consists of oceanic crust, apparently thickened by hot-spot volcanism, overlain by a thick sequence of turbidites (the Tyee Formation, correlates, and similar units of slightly different ages), then a shallowing sequence of marine sediments. During the time I was getting my degree, extensive research into the provenance of these sediments, along with paleomagnetic analysis of units of varying ages, showed that the history of this block was far more complex than the essentially simple sequence of rocks would suggest. Paleomag showed that the oldest rocks were oriented about 90 degrees counterclockwise from their modern orientations- that is, this block, approximately 150-200 km by 700-800 km, originally had its long axis in an east-west orientation. It now has its long axis in a north-south orientation. Progressively younger rock units show progressively less deviation from the modern orientation. Provenance analyses of the sediments suggest that the bulk of the Tyee turbidites were derived from the Idaho Batholith or chemically and isotopically similar granitic rocks, since hidden, further south. Given the age of the Tyee (Eocene), and hypothesized drainages in the northwest, it has been suggested that the drainage from the Green River Basin (home of the marvelous fossil fishes, and an enormous amount of petroleum reserves in the form of oil shale) was the stream that carried these sediments to the head of the Tyee fan.

When I was doing some volunteer teaching for OSU's experimental college, the way I explained this to (non-science) students was that the rock sequence is easy to describe and understand, but if you want to describe where the rocks came from and how they got where they are, it gets very messy very fast.

So even though I don't consider myself a professional geologist, and can't claim that there's any particular breakthrough or advance that has had great implact on my career, my avocation for the last few decades has been to try to make sense out of Oregon geology. When I started my education, tectonics was used primarily to describe the cause of the Cascade arc. By the time I finished my education, accretionary tectonics was considered fundamental to making any sense at all out of Oregon's geologic history.

C'est Moi

My mom gave me an early Christmas present: a digital camera! A pretty nice one, too. It's the one she's had for a while, so there's been some confusion over the manual (found it online), the camera to computer data transfer (couple of trips to Wal-Mart- or as my brother calls it, Wally World, and a little common sense), and coming up to speed on digital vs. film technology (mostly I've just used auto-everything so far; as I have more time, I'll play with other variables and learn how to take advantage of them). But I have managed to get a not-too-flattering self-portrait, which I have now loaded.

I've been spending most of my time with my family, several of whom are also not skiing, so posting has been light, but I'll try to get up some pictures and descriptions of the magnificent vacation area soon. Since all my family is on the eastern part of the continent, I don't see them too often, and they're my first priority right now.

Only Oregon

Well, here I am in Bend. We do have wifi here and I'm showing my nephews, Kris and Garette, how to write a blog entry. Maybe soon I'll show them how to start their own blog. My other nephews and I went over to the coast yesterday. It was rainy and stormy, but we had a good time. We got to Florence, and I was reminded of this video from about 1980.

Yeah. Only in Oregon

Holiday Hiatus?

My family is scheduled to start arriving today, and I think the rest come in tomorrow. We'll be driving across the Cascades to Bend, staying for Christmas at Inn of the Seventh Mountain. Much snowboarding at Mt. Bachelor will ensue. I enjoyed falling down in the snow in my younger days, but my balance is uncertain, my bones feel frail, so I won't be falling down the mountain with younger sibs and nephews. I will take my laptop, and WiFi seems likely, but I don't know for sure. This blog may be out of coffee for a week or so.

So if you don't hear from me, just know I wish you the merriest of Christmas's, the most joyous of Soltices, Kwanzas... whatever your inclinations may be, enjoy them.

No, Virginia...

...I hate to be the one who has to break this to you.

1) No known species of reindeer can fly, but there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under 18), but since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload by 85% of the total - leaving 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there is at least one good child per house.

3) Santa has 48 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different times zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000 th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc. That means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, at tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming each child get nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the "flying reindeer" can pull TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth II.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized in 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subject to acceleration forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force. In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents of Christmas Eve, he's now dead.

The above was one of the very early gag emails circulating... it's hard to believe that's nearly 15 years ago. I was thinking earlier this week that I should try to find a copy and post it, but the LOL Science blog just posted it again; I have made a couple of minor alterations.

Sorry, kids...

Yes

is the answer to the question asked in a headline from The Guardian yesterday: "Is George W Bush the worst ever US president?" DCap has a much better analysis than I could offer.

But what really troubled me in The Guardian article was this quote: "And if the US president is to be regarded as a figure of moral authority, embodying the nation's values and beliefs, then Bush's personal behaviour has been exemplary compared to many incumbents, and notably that of his immediate predecessor, the intern-challenged Clinton."

Got that? It's OK to lead the nation falsely into war, killing (at a minimum) hundreds of thousands of people you claim to have "freed;" it's OK to subvert the constitution and undermine the very foundation and structure of power in your country, setting the ground work for who knows how many crises; it's OK to hold prisoners without charges, indefinitely- heck, it's even OK to torture them, 'cause 1 in 10 might know something of use, as long as you say "oops, my bad" to the other 9- and actually, even that's not really necessary; it's OK to stage a photo-op with your good buddy McCain and his birthday cake while thousands of people drown or barely survive in third-world squalor- and it's fine to ignore the aftermath for years; it's OK to lie about "the controversy" surrounding global warming, evolution, endangered species, toxins in the environment, ad nauseum; it's OK to give cushy jobs to buddies that are absolutely unqualified for them, and come to that, it's OK to be absolutely ignorant regarding actual, established facts on every single issue pertaining to your own job (beyond how to run divisive, lying and ultimately successful campaigns)- after all you just decide: you don't need to know anything but your gut. It's OK to obstruct every option we might have had regarding oversight on our economy; it's OK to underfund the SEC and every other government arm intended to keep some restraint on the rapacious greed of your base, the haves and the have mores. It's perfectly OK to fuck 95% of the people in this country (and it's looking like the rest of the world too), in fact, according to this jackass in The Guardian, all of those things and more are "exemplary."

But for God's sake, don't have consensual sex with an intern, because- gracious!- that would be immoral.

I See Spam People

One of my much-loved bloggers recently made her comment policy explicit. I hereby follow her example:

ALL COMMENT SPAM WILL BE DELETED.

I am deeply irritated by advertising, and one of the great joys of the blogosphere is that you can get away from it. I will not host Google's ad (non)sense on my blog, and I will not allow anonymous spammers to use my space for their own enrichment. A number of people have posted links in comments that are relevant and interesting- and that's wonderful: another perk of the bogosphere. But I won't have commercial BS on my site.

Tsunami Tstudy to Tsave Tseaside Tcitizens

Well, that title got out of hand. There's a very interesting article in Oregon Live about a new mapping and computer simulation study being done alone the Oregon coast to look at the potential impacts of tsunamis. This is exactly the kind of stuff that geopeople need to be touting as evidence of our impact on society. A line that caught my attention was this: "The new maps are based on updated computer models that take into account the lessons geologists learned from the deadly Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004." In other words, the horrific events of Dec. 26, 2004, are already well-enough studied and disseminated that understandings created in the aftermath may be turned around and save lives half a world away, less than four years later. The article also links a PDF (600 Kb) pamphlet with the resultant map, evacuation routes, and (supposedly) safe areas.

I guess I'm not so keen on putting a building up on stilts to keep it safer in the event... false confidence and all.

Many coastal Oregon communities are on uplifted marine terraces, well out of direct danger from tsunamis. Whether landslides and solifluction are an issue for many of these (in the event of a Cascadia earthquake), I don't know. But a number of communties, such as Cannon Beach and Seaside, are just a few feet up on sand bar and dune substrate. In addition, many communities are based around estuaries- harbors and fisheries are among the major sources of income along the coast, along with forest products and tourism. So for example, Newport, the town on the coast directly west of me, is mostly at an elevation of between 100 and 150 feet, but the bay and surrounding lowlands, while small in area, are pretty heavily built up. So having a good sense of the maximum flood extent of a tsunami could save many lives, even in communities that are mostly out of harm's way.

Incidentally, the project and pamphlet cover Cannon Beach; Seaside (Tseaside is, I guess, the Japanese spelling) is the next community north.

Cool and Hot!

Oh this is going to be be interesting! BBC is reporting that a few years back, geothermal energy drillers in Hawaii unexpectedly drilled through into a chamber of dacitic magma. The magma rushed 5 to 10 meters up the shaft before cooling effects of the drilling fluid solidified it. As a result, they now have samples of undegassed, unaltered, quenched magma.

I think you'd need a fair background in geology to understand how important this is, but simplifying, Hawaii is composed of a first generation melt from the mantle, similar to ocean crust- both are dominantly one flavor or another of basalt. To get something like the composition of continental crust, you either need to remove (by fractional crystalization) 95+ percent of the original basalt, leaving the lowest melting temperature fraction behind, or you need to remelt the material one or more times. The latter has the same effect as the former: segregating the materials with the lowest melting temps from those with the highest.

Dacite is much more like continental rock than it is like basalt.

Further, as noted above, the material still has its initial volatile composition (gases such as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide, and water). While it may have been contaminated by the drilling fluids, we know exactly what the composition of those fluids are: we can subtract that contaminant out. We also know where the magma chamber is; we can sample various spots to see how composition varies from one place to another.

I expect the geoblogosphere will be all over this in the next few days, but only a fellow geo-nerd can really understand how interesting this is.

Another Black Eye on the Bush Administration

Apparently during the ruckus following yesterday's shoe-lobbing event (event in the sense of "occurence", not in the sense of "Olympic competition," though we could consider the latter), a microphone was slammed into White House Press Secretary Dana Perino's face. My first alert on this was at buzzfeed:

A quick Google turned up this photo at Huffington Post, among several others, from a news conference this morning.
MSNBC has a tongue-in-cheek report that actually describes what happened (you're so hopelessly out of date, MSNBC. Don't tell people what actually happened- we need to know what she was wearing, and what various pundits think the long-term effects will be.), and it's about what I had guessed. They also report that Perino is referring to it as her "shoe-venir!" Ha, ha, ha! She's just so perky and cute!

Frankly, though, there's a pattern here. 1: Bush commits awesome mistake that 2: Pisses someone off, who 3: Commits poorly-advised violence, the effects of which 4: Fall entirely on unrelated innocent bystanders.

The difference here, of course, is that Perino is complicit with BushCo. nonsense and doubletalk. She is its chief spokesman. Sometimes, despite the machinations of Bush, Cheney and Rove, what goes around does come around.

White With Ice

Most of the snow we were to get fell by 9 or 10:00 last night, and the forecast called for highs in the mid 30's today. I don't think we broke 30, let alone freezing. Places that got a little bit of sun- yes, it broke through intermittently during the midday- melted back a little. Places in the shade either stayed fluffy snow, or if they were trampled or driven on, compressed and became icy. So all the yards are still nice and Christmas-y; all the sidewalks and streets are ice rinks. I only have 3-4 blocks to get home, but I really don't want to end up on my butt.

I also suspect that I used more electricty last night in heat than I've used in the last two months combined. Exaggeration, maybe, but it's actually the first time since I moved in to this apartment in May 3 1/2 years ago, that I left the baseboard heat on all night. Mid-fifties is OK by me; mid-forties is not- and at that point I'm risking freezing pipes in outer walls.

We're supposed to get down to mid-teens this evening, the coldest it's been here in maybe five years. In reality, it's pretty cloudy right now, and if they don't move out, I'll bet we don't get down to 20. Cold for the rest of the week, though highs and lows both are predicted to slowly climb, and snow showers from time to time, but no more major accumulation.

And yes, the cat was very happy when I let her back in about 10:30. I'm sure she'll be happy to see me come home this evening.

Scylla and Charybdis

In Greek mythology, two monsters that resided on either side of the Strait of Messina. Scylla was a monster perched on a rock that would eat sailors off their boats; Charybdis would swallow vast quantities of water, creating a whirlpool that swamped passing ships. These classic references have come into colloquial English as "between a rock and a hard spot." According to Toles, we seem to have encountered the whirlpool.

It Can Get Smelly When Floodwaters Recede

David Sarasohn at Oregon Live puts his finger on exactly what's been worrying me about the Madoff story. I've alluded before that I feel like I know enough about economics that I can think it through intelligently for myself, but (believe it or not), I'm uncertain about speaking out most of the time. In this particular case, I get little pleasure and a lot scared from seeing someone saying what I've been thinking.

Other Milestones

Today the Electoral College electors all get together and work out their schedule for Winter Term... no, scratch that. The electors all get together and vote for president. Think you vote for president? Nope. You vote for an elector, a representative from your state, who casts a vote in the Electoral College. They are the ones who actually vote for the president. This all gets very confusing to me, and I have never liked the system. I know, I know, there's at least one reason to work it this way. I still don't like it, but it is what it is.

A question I have frequently discussed with others, but never had definitive answers to, was finally adressed by DCap (front page here) back in October: What happens if a nominee becomes unable to serve at various points in the process between the party convention and the inauguration?

He highlights, with his wonderfully cynical humor, four key dates:

-November 4th, 2008 - the general election. Remember we are voting for electors from each state – NOT the candidate directly.
-December 15th, 2008 - the electors casts their votes. Remember technically the electors (who are party loyalists) can vote for whomever they want.
-January 6th, 2009 - the opening of the joint session of Congress. The electoral votes are officially counted, certified and the winner is declared.
-January 20th, 2009 - Inauguration Day, when the winner is sworn in by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

I've been meaning to link to this post for a while- it's a bit confusing, but it's important to understand: This is the way we run our country! I have learned more about US politics and history from DCap than from any teacher, and I highly recommend his blog if that kind of thing interests you. I would have forgotten that today was the electoral vote if another blogger hadn't mentioned it.

Long story short, whatever you may have been led to believe, today is the day we find out who wins the presidency for the next four years. We'll see if any of the media (outside the blogosphere) bothers to report on it.

Followup: Yay! MSM comes through in the form of KATU, a Portland TV station. KUDOs, KATU! Oregon has voted for Obama (7 whole votes!).

Milestones

Oh Boy! I just realized that my last post was number 300! And I'm within two or three days of my 3000th visitor! So on average, each post has been read 10 times- if I assume each visitor reads only one post. Why the devil is it that we are so pleased by nice round numbers? Just think, if we had evolved with only 8 fingers (or, technically, six fingers and two thumbs), I could have had this celebration at 192 posts. Conversely, if I had 10 fingers and 2 thumbs, I would have to wait for post number 432.

What the hey. Whee!

Gracious Thanks

Lifted with glee from E.B. Misfit:

A buddy in an email list suggested that people find the nastiest, filthiest shoes they can and send them to George W. Bush. I think it's a great idea, so see if you can find an old shoe along the side of the road or at a second-hand store. Pack them up and sent them to George Bush.

The Hon. George W. Bush
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

President George W. Bush
c/o George W. Bush Presidential Lieberry
Southern Methodist University
6425 Boaz LaneDallas TX 75205

Don't forget to put in some note about the shoes are in recognition of his service to this nation.Let's flood Bush with filthy footwear!

I do think this would be a fantastic way to show our gratitude for his brilliant leadership and hard work over the last eight years.

Followup: Interesting tidbit on CNN this morning, before I came in to my favorite coffee shop... I trust CNN with my news like I'd trust an alligator with my cat, but still. Apparently the shoe bomber is being treated as a hero in Iraq- not officially, but by the media and on the street. Opinion is split, but those who think the journalist should be punished feel that he comitted an offense against Al-Maliki, the Iraqi president. Under Islam, a person who has been welcomed as a guest is to be treated, essentially, as family. No matter whether the guest is a sworn enemy of your nation or your people. Assaulting a guest is the equivalent of assaulting the host- in this case, though the shoes were clearly aimed at Bush, they were (symbolically) also targetting Al-Maliki. In the minds of the Iraqi people, and according to CNN, under Iraqi Law, this is the issue that will be sorted out. I have to say, there's a sort of je ne sais quoi to this that I'm really enjoying.

Followup 2: I suppose this was inevitable. (GIF animations of other stuff being thrown at Bush.

Followup 3: And the ensuing hilarity just keeps... umm... ensuing. (Flash game- shoot the shoes out of the air before they hit the prexy.)

Followup 4: The NYT has an article backing up much of what was reported on CNN. Again, note that few, if any, are condemning the act itself, but those who do condemn the symbolism inherent in the act feel it violates the Islamic concept of hospitality.