Category Archives: wtf

Wednesday Geology Picture: Eye-Of-Sauron Basalt In Fire Coral

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One dreary Wisconsin day right before Christmas, D and I drove down a grey country road towards Manitowoc. We stepped out of the car for a minute and, to our chagrin, the car kept going without us. Suddenly, stop lights appeared out of nowhere and we followed the vehicle as it continued forward through these newly-lighted intersections narrowly avoiding collisions with giant pickup trucks and snow plows. Shortly before we caught up, huffing and panting, the car had veered off into a field and crashed into a barn, its engine block having been spit out onto an unsuspecting and now very bludgeoned-to-death cow. Distant screams and wails indicated that other parts of the car had landed in a farmer’s home and caused further death and dismemberment. Oh no, what had I done now? A surge of pain and fear went through me and the ghost of this rock appeared before … I woke up.

It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? A trifecta of geology. Basalt, fossil coral and iron staining of the fossil. Snorkeling off the Kona coast, D and I saw thousands upon thousands of live Milleporidae (fire coral) and Faviidae (brain coral) growing on basalt boulders washed out to sea. Often, I’d come up to clean my mask, put it back on and then half-submerge it to visually straddle two worlds – Planet Of The Apes above and The Life Aquatic below the water line of the Hawaiian islands. Next time, I will have a waterproof camera on me.

I found this piece of that underwater world on a Kona beach and decided to keep it. John G asked if I knew what I was doing; did I really want to incur the wrath of Pele by taking a piece of her off the Big Island? When I brought the rock back to Waikiki, John’s assistant freaked out as well and said I was welcome to mail it back to her if my luck started to sour. Some of you may have heard of the belief that taking rocks off the Hawaiian islands results in bad luck. It’s big on the islands, having taken deep root even in otherwise rational people. Scientists don’t believe in any of that pish-posh hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo, or at least we ought not to. And, moreover, I’m a geologist, one who understands and appreciates Pele and her rocks, and didn’t take it from a national park, so I get a pass.

Then why the sinking feeling inside each time I consider this sample? And that dream! If you break it apart logically, I was involved in a really scary car wreck almost exactly four years ago to the day, D and I are driving up to Wisconsin for Christmas, we are going to be forced to make a hard decision soon and, for Pete’s Pele’s sake, I have bags of Hawaiian beach sand that didn’t bother the Hawaiians and don’t don chains of Christmas past and future and haunt me like this damned rock. Pele is possessive of her rocks, but not their constituent minerals? What kind of dumbass logic is that? And yet, almost every single day since we have returned from Hawaii, something has gone south to the point that yesterday afternoon, I had to sit down and declare to the universe, “OH COME ON.”

To top it all off, the thing is in the shape of an eye. Just staring at me. Like from on top of Mordor. With Sauron, laughing at me as I recount my dream of cow murder. “You killed Milky. Milky, nooooooo! Hahahaha*snort*hahaa!” (Actually, that’s what D says to me each time I bring it up.)

Respect Pele and send it back? Or put on my big girl socks and keep it? Let me know.

(I’m probably going to mail it back to John as an experiment. If things continue to flounder after I’ve repatriated the offender, then it’s just me and life being, you know, life.)

Lowe’s Knows – Updated

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Updated December 12th, 2011: Today’s USA Today has a column on the “All-American Muslim” controversy written by an American Muslim. In it, the author is asked by an Ohio man if Muslim girls can own dolls. It’s a valid question and understanding starts with honest curiosity, respectful interrogation and civil cross-cultural dialogue, which also seems to be the purpose of the show. But, Ohioans are no strangers to super-conservative Abrahamic sects whose women have to cover their heads and are subservient to the males of their culture, and that have crazies who form cults and conduct acts of physical and sexual violence. They’re known as the Amish. If “normal” Americans in Ohio and Pennsylvania are willing to tolerate and live side by side with the American Amish, why not extend the same courtesy to American Muslims? More importantly, if Christian Americans cannot recognize within their own religion what they object to in others, then it’s not unAmerican precepts and acts they fight against in Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus but just the fact that they are ethnically different. Those of us who are non-Christian are then absolutely being judged by the color of our skin.

Again, I keep pointing things like this out because an overwhelming majority of non-Christian non-whites who live in America are just trying to make it to tomorrow like everyone else, without some nosy, jobless, hateful assholes trying to chip-chip-chip-chip away at our American-ness and peace of mind because we happen to be superficially Other. The economy sucks, one-third of the families without shelter in America are in Florida and the FLORIDA FAMILY Association is busy fighting a television show called All-American Muslim, which in all likelihood was invented to educate and prevent against just an ignorant situation such as this. And there you have it.

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Washington Post: Lowe’s stands by decision to pull ads from show about Muslims despite growing backlash

Lowe’s is planning to stick by its decision to yank its ads from [TLC’s All-American Muslim] despite the growing opposition the home improvement chain is facing over the move.

But Lowe’s knows that the consumers they alienate will shop there anyway for, unless Khalid the halal butcher branched out into nationwide hardware stores, where else are they going to shop?

This started over “American liberties and traditional values” and the Florida Family Association’s seeming obsession with them. Phillygrrl over at Sepia Mutiny has more suggestions for the American Wholesomeness Crusade.

I applaud the strongly-worded email you sent to the FFA, in which you wrote, “While we continue to advertise on various cable networks, including TLC, there are certain programs that do not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe’s will no longer be advertising on that program.” I definitely agree with you that unless a certain program accurately displays every single variation of a certain demographic it has no place on American television. Incidentally, while we are on the subject of advertising, may I humbly suggest a few more dumb reality shows that I believe could benefit from your advertising guidelines? In no particular order:

  1. 19 Kids and Counting. The Dugger family. Super Christians. Super fertile. Super nice. But this show only profiles Christians who appear to be somewhat ordinary folks while excluding those fringe-radical Christians that pose a clear threat to our American values.
  2. Sister Wives. One man. Four wives. Sixteen children. This show purports to innocuously depict a harem of weepy, cake-baking mothers. But it riskily hides the Mormon agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.
  3. Strange Sex. Glamorizes strange sex acts without fully portaying the dangers that can accompany certain fetishes. Erotic asphyxiation is a silent killer, people.

Read the whole thing, it’s pretty good.

And why should Lowe’s hog the media attention? The following companies – Bank of America, the Campbell Soup Co., Dell, Estee Lauder, General Motors, Goodyear, Green Mountain Coffee, McDonalds, Sears, and Wal-Mart – have also pulled advertising support from All-American Muslim.

Hope you’re happy, true Americans! Traditional values have been kept alive where values equals the constitution minus the smelly bits that, by the way, assure that you can practice your own religion in this country without harassment! Merry Christmas!

Speaking of Christmas, did you know that Sikh-Americans are single-handedly killing Christmas in Stockton, California? Fox & Friends says so! Never mind that Sikhs got Republican Nikki Haley elected to the office of governor in South Carolina.

OH NOES NON-CHRISTIANS HAVE JOINED THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND SUPPORT AMERICAN LIBERTIES AND TRADITIONAL VALUES … uh … wait a second.

The thing is I’m not going to stop shopping at Lowe’s because of this. If I were to boycott all the American companies that forget human rights, decorum, cultural sensibilities, community relations, i.e. the true American values, I couldn’t shop anywhere. Go over to Home Depot instead? The ones with a strong union-free policy and who sell old-growth lumber? As I was saying, I’m not going to stop buying Lowe’s hardware, Dell laptops or Campbell’s soup, Republican Sikh-Americans aren’t going to stop watching Fox News and we’re not all going to give up habits that support large, multi-national companies which put mom-and-pop shops with real values out of business.

And these companies are fully aware of it, which is why they get away with this shit.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, Google (Reader)

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Yesterday, Google released the overhaul of its feedreader, Reader, which features increased integration with Google’s relatively new answer to Facebook, Google+. If you like auto-spamming your Facebook or Google+ timeline with links to articles minus context or, in general, do not think of the internet as a space in which to share information in a thoughtful and meaningful way, stop reading now. If you are tired of another company’s sorry attempt at imitating Facebook in the absence of a proper platform and especially don’t want it interfering with great features that work for you and your community of friends, colleagues and readers, keep going. Even better, if you work at Google or know someone who does*, there are a few suggestions below that I would like implemented to make the internet a happy and safe place for information sharing once again.

I use Reader to:

- quickly access and read the latest blog posts and online magazine articles from feeds that I have bookmarked in the reader,

- organize these feeds into the folders of Geology, Geophysics, New Orleans, Science, Science Blogs, Technology and Visualization; share links to individual folders (bundles) with interested parties;

- share specific blog posts or articles either on Shared Items or by publishing them to this blog inside the Recommended Reading sidebar widget (simple list of hyperlinked titles of shared items) ALL IN ONE CLICK and

- share and DISCUSS items inside Reader with a specific group of WILLING followers who can passively join my Followers list and I theirs.

Now:

- access is really slow with increased load times; furthermore, the feed refreshes and displays the latest set of posts while you’re still reading previous ones,

- folders are still there and users can still create and share bundles,

- you +1 (instead of share) a post which then goes to a +1 page on your Google+ profile (complete with a Buzz tab that we are warned will be going away in a few weeks). Note that you not only have to create a non-pseudonymous Google+ profile in order to share Reader items, but also have to point your friends, colleagues and readers to the location of the +1 page, and

- once you’ve publicly +1ed the Reader item of interest, you have the option (which works on a PC desktop, works for crap on a PC laptop and not at all on an iPad) to create a post on Google+ to let your Circles know that you, Google+ user, have shared yet another article which is going to take up more of their screen real estate than is really warranted.

This, i.e. what used to be feedreader + Twitter + del.icio.us + publishable outside of Google space + all self-contained in terms of size and community,

has become this for archival:

along with this for sharing and discussion:

Instead of going from my blog to the article, the pathway has now become my blog –> my Google+ +1 list –> the article or my blog –> my Google+ stream –> the article. Archival? That’s right out the window.

Because all we need are more gates and gatekeepers between us and the information.

The Official Google Reader Blog explains these changes: “Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.”

I don’t understand why Google has to cancel one set of features in favor of another, unless it is to force users into Google+. Some argue that the social integration with G+ is something that they look forward to, which is great, but why not host a +1 button for G+ users as well as a Share button for those who do not want to utilize Google products socially?

Which brings us to the fundamental difference between the two: signal to noise. As I said on a G+ post this morning to which not a soul responded (probably because it drowned in the sea of re-re-re-re-re-shares of Rick Perry’s “drunk” speech – QED):

Along with the tremendous amount of white space, the signal-to-noise ratio of content is already very low at Google+ which is why I also don’t hang out at Facebook much other than to comment on other folks’ posts (when I find them in the noise there) or to make short throwaway posts myself. Now, folks sharing their Reader items here without context makes it even more noisy and unreadable.

Congratulations, Google, you have succeeded in sacrificing internet meaning – content in context – for more internet clutter in a silly attempt to reproduce Facebook, and in the process really pissed off a bunch of scientists, bloggers and internet users who, until yesterday, happily utilized Reader as a staple of simple, one-click, high signal-to-noise sharing and discussion. You just can’t have this in Plus.

Garrett Guillotte sums up for me:

Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus — and shit no they haven’t, and it doesn’t look like they will — the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can’t remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can’t efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.

Some suggestions for Google:

1) Please help us publish our +1s outside of Google+ via a “shared feed.” All you have to do is build a “Share This On Your Blog” embed utility into the +1 page.

2) Please replace the “Note In Reader” bookmarklet with a +1 bookmarklet. What if I want to +1 an article published on a website that doesn’t use +1 buttons? And, no, they’re all not going to add the +1 button to their websites/pages, just like they didn’t “Facebook This” or “Tweet This.” Give it up.

3) Can we go back to refreshing feeds as we did two days ago? I would really appreciate the page not cutting to all white and then repopulating itself with new material, all while I am in the middle of reading something.

4) Please don’t let this become your version of what Yahoo! did to GeoCities.

Functionality over mediocrity. Tremendous usefulness over killing useful features. These should be internet mantras. Ultimately, there is just no need for another Facebook, which is itself far from perfect (and, in fact, on the quest to completely confuse the hell out of its users). But, a utility that can be Facebook, feedreader, Twitter and Pinboard/delicious to many and in the doses that they want? Now THERE is a gamechanger.

Who do you want to be, Google? Figure that out first.

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* The guy who engineered the Google+ Circles model and I went to the same high school years apart. And what am I going to say? “Hey, fix this or I’ll stuff you in your locker.” We were a bunch of nerds who would have all been stuffed in lockers in a normal high school and we didn’t even lock our lockers.

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Related:

Brian Shih | Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? “The closest analogue might be if Twitter made it so that 3rd party clients could use the Retweet functionality to push Retweets to a user’s stream — but only allowed you to consume Retweets on twitter.com.”

Not Preventing Terrorism, But Preventing Blame

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After boarding a couple dozen flights in the last few months, I am an old hand at the opt-out and full body pat down. One doesn’t have to be a statistician or a mind-reader to figure out why underpaid TSA hands “randomly” pick me for the millimeter-wave scanner. These workers are so used to passengers robotically (and tiredly) doing exactly what TSA tells them to do that it’s an opportunity to remind that there is such a thing as “a right to opt out.” There’s also a certain humor in the government running its latex-gloved finger around my jeans waistband before I board a domestic flight when I’ve paid for and used the United States Global Entry program, “a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States.” Government waste that’s a-ok with certain parties because it’s done in the name of national defense obviously. We are all safer from my pre-approved, low-risk behind being patted down for everyone to see when fake pilot IDs and uniforms are now enough to bypass airport security.

So, why the security theater?

A new study published by the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes shows that despite the ton of taxpayer dollars spent on decision analysis and modeling the likelihood of terror events, it’s all for naught because the [voting] “public will largely neglect normative likelihood considerations when judging the actions of policy makers.” In other words, because “people have particular difficulty dealing with probabilistic information for small likelihood events, like those for terrorist attacks” and politicians are more interested in the votes of these people than preventing terror, actual threats with higher likelihood of occurrence go ignored.

Schneier himself brings this back to the TSA and their airport practises: “Are they doing their best to mitigate terrorism, or are they doing their best to ensure that if there’s a terrorist attack the public doesn’t blame the TSA for missing it?”

Of Interest On January 26th, 2011

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Scientific American | Obama spotlights science in his State of the Union address

For innovation, Obama noted how, when Sputnik was launched in 1957, the U.S. did not have the science to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. The space race triggered a series of innovations that created new industries and millions of new jobs. And he gave shout-outs to Google and Facebook in noting how the more recent rise of the Internet enabled new businesses to flourish.

Man, that was one weak, flickering spotlight.

So, does this mean when the Russians make it to Mars, we’ll revive our space program? Until then, it’s Facebook? Lord help us all. Because you know all those Farmville skillz will come in handy come the Martian revolution & we’re the space commissars. *rolls eyes*

Also, if the president uses “winning the future” in a sentence one more time, I am going to hold that he is a Bears fan against him.

Obama: “We will win the future with cheap, flying cars that run on clean coal made by kids with perfect standardized test scores before they leave for Afghanistan.”
Me: “Your quarterback couldn’t even handle a little sprain.”

Jeffrey nicely (and quickly) takes apart the rest of last night’s pantomime.

Does Paul Ryan really sound like an upper-midwestern version of Bobby “Poindexter” Jindal or is that just how he comes across on NPR? As for his rebuttal itself, I love how it talks about limited government over and over again while those pesky specifics are conveniently missing. Mark my words, they’ll never cut Medicare and Social Security.

D and I skipped the SOTU address in its entirety and watched this really cool, three-hour documentary on the making of the Airbus A380, while I made six pieces of jewelry. Talk about time well spent.

Blogs, Newspapers, Your Arm, Whatever. Just Write.

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Bora Zivkovic: “Not all bloggers want to be journalists.” Bora talks about science blogging in particular, but you could apply his explanation to any discipline.

I’d like to add that those of us in New Orleans in late 2005 learned quickly that if we didn’t blog, many local and national journalists would write a limited or outright false narrative for us, not stray from it even if evidence arose to the contrary and repeatedly drum it into the minds of the rest of the nation and world. Following that, actual policy, rebuilding solutions and national slogans would be based on this manufactured consensus reality, these prevailing but rather shaky premises. *shudder*

Again, it’s not just about controlling your message, but keeping in mind that what you put out there has very real consequences, such as the information and reactions of very real people. A lot of perspectives then in many different voices is a good thing. As Ed Yong said just today, once again with respect to science but immediately applicable to your area of expertise, “We’re all aware of the problems of mainstream science reporting. It’s not all bad. I reckon most of it is probably quite good. But it could be a lot better. And scientist bloggers have the potential to make it a lot better.”

As blogging versus/as journalism is brought up again (for some unknown reason – thought we buried this dead horse some time in 2006), it’s important to read a recent post by Mark Folse. For those of you who don’t know Mark, he is a former ink-stained wretch and current poet-author-blogger who has published newspaper articles, books and blogs.

Blogging is a category so generic as to be almost meaningless. It would be like calling all writers “bookers”. If anything, this bit of the Internet has evolved from a sort of cork-board of odd pictures and moments into something else, just as Wet Bank Guide evolved from an exercise in explaining Katrina and the Federal Flood into one of explaining New Orleans.

Journalists wanting to be bloggers. Bloggers wanting to be journalists. Oh, enough already. Take my advice: Your knowledge and your voice. Take it and just write. Write for whatever reason makes you want to write and don’t let anyone define writing or blogging or tweeting or next-big-thinging for you. Write your heart out regardless of format, word count or number of readers. Just write.

Coming back to the holy/holey narrative, how many of you scientists or science lovers began to blog as a direct result of crappy, but more importantly, spineless, agenda-based science reporting in major newspapers and cable news? Check these out: Memo To Scott McClellan: Here’s What Happened and The Smithsonian Defends Censorship. You, blogger, journalist, whatever you call yourself, don’t have to belong to the Catholic Church Of Journalism if you don’t want to. You don’t have to give in to “We were afraid for our jobs, funding and continued existence, so caved to whatever demands those in power placed on us.” You can sack it up and tell it like it is.

What is the heart of journalism really, other than love and respect for (ferreting out) information and getting it out there to as many people as possible with as little pretense and fanfare as possible? He who ceases to be a student was never a student. Let’s concern ourselves more with the content and less the form and, yup, just write.

P.S. As long as anyone gets all uppity about what blogging should or shouldn’t be, what posts should or shouldn’t include and OMG The Internet Is Serious Business Journalism With A Capital J, I will include images of LOLcats in any post on this topic. Peace out.

Arizona Shootings

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Fight, Gabby, fight hard. Lots of energy coming your way, dear lady.

Not much to add, other than:

1) As a geologist, let me assure you I’ve never had to “take a stand” or “reload” when using a theodolite.

2) I would never have even thought of Sarah Palin in relation to this shooting had her camp not hastily taken down all of her related online materials as immediate response. If they’re just words, let them be, own them and, um, it’s not always about you.

3) On the inevitable gun control debate: It’s very dangerous on the part of the left to let the right own the Second Amendment, especially in the manner the right has been carrying on. Any gun owner and user knows that the language surrounding guns and the weapons themselves ought to be used with caution, respect and responsibility. Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and many in the Tea Party have been very callous and irresponsible with the way they bandy about guns and their lingo, by lecturing to people to “arm themselves, “to reload” and “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment solutions.” Guns need not show up to rallies and other public places as symbols, totems and toys. They ought not to be trivialized like this, especially not partisan-politically.

Where then is room for a liberal like me who is very much in favor of the second amendment and opposed to gun control in response to this horrendous shooting? A liberal like me who believes that real, sane, stable gun owners know when and how to use their weapons and for BOTH sides (yes, that includes Republicans) to use gun language to set partisan tone in response to this tragedy is abhorrent and, again, irresponsible.

Life’s Not Long

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People die of illness and accident all the time. But to have five people you know pass away in the span of a month.

This is all too much.

Betty Ann Davis, friend and partner of Morwen Madrigal, passed away last night after a long illness. Sweet, quiet Betts, until she got behind a pool cue or shot glass, and then you’d best watch out. Morwen herself has been very ill lately and I worry about the effects Betts’s passing will have on her.

This right after putting last night to rest. Last night, when D and Mark returned from burying our friend Pete, who died very unexpectedly last week after foot surgery. I hear the waiting line at his wake stretched around a freezing Door County, Wisconsin block and that his church service was standing room only. Pete, you popular, fun-loving goofball, we were counting on you to be our fourth at Lambeau on the 26th.

Before that, we lost our dear friend Leo on Thanksgiving evening, family friend Mrs. Patel on November 30th and great old next-door neighbor on December 6th.

It’s not fair.

How much more can we bear?

Why does this all surround us at the end of an already-sketchy 2010?

It is very easy at this point to step onto those treacherous roads of thought. So I stop there.

You. Just take care of yourselves and come back to me.

Unrequited Motivation

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Folded SchistThese are all the things I should be blogging, to clear the virtual backlog as it were:

1) The rest of the Ireland trip. More specifically, the stroll through an old monastery and an older glacial valley in Glendalough. I can’t get over how quaint-gorgeous-inspiring-calming this experience was and that I need more days like that in this life of mine, but GAH the time and will to write a proper post with pictures. It is not to be had.

2) All these thoughts about the imploding American physical and educational infrastructure: misplaced priorities, lack of meaningful consequences, the wrong conversations on rebuilding New Orleans and America and the death of the apprentice. Not to mention close encounters of the Mama Grizzly Buckeye kind.

3) An Evening With Anthony Bourdain in Columbus over a year ago and meeting him after the show. I’d let it go but how can phrases like “felching Mrs. Butterworth” and “throwing up on a plane when 6-foot-4 not be immortalized on this here blog in full context?

4) Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson in Cleveland and his funny-thoughtful lecture on science through the ages and American science literacy.

5) All the books I didn’t read this year. The ones I did like Charlie Stross‘s delicious Atrocity Archives (“squamous and rugose” FTW) and Why We Suck by one Dr. Denis Leary. The one I am in the middle of and need to review before the science in it is moth-eaten. (As an aside: “antediluvian” no longer exists in my vocabulary because Which Flood?)

Welcome to Seasonal Affective Disorder combined with the mountain of Real Work (TM) I have to plow through by the end of the year.

But, I’m never above cheat-posting with a pretty picture. So, for your trouble: What you see at the top of this post is a chevron-folded schist (note relatively straight limbs) along the Green Road Walk in the Glendalough region. 2€ coin for scale. Note how cool it is that the lichens follow foliation.

==

Update: Help me out here. Pick one of these five topics. What do you want to hear about? And I’ll write that up as best as I can.

And … Scene!

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Live Science | Republican Fiscal Plan Could Slash Science Budgets

… Those agencies include the National Science Foundation, which funds about 20 percent of all federally supported basic research in America, and which would lose 18.8 percent of its budget, or $1 billion. The Department of Energy‘s Office of Science would be set back $835 million, or 18 percent of its budget.

Also hard-hit would be the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NOAA, which is involved in weather and climate monitoring as well as fisheries management and coastal and marine research, would lose $324 million, or 34 percent of what the Obama administration requested for its budget in 2011. NIST, which has a mission of advancing measurement science, standards and technology, would lose $207 million, almost 30 percent of its budget request.

Also facing cuts under the plan is the National Institutes of Health, which would lose 9.1 percent, or $2.9 billion of its requested 2011 budget.

Please also read Obama Calls For Historic Commitment To Science from early 2009. The door closes just as it re-opens.

Good luck with those sutainable and meaningful jobs. They’re going out of this country.