Geology
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The long run
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And… Continue reading
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Short Attention Spasm Theater
This post is a hat tip toward Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs, which I learned about from Clay Shirky during a digressive conversation about the subscription economy (the paid one, not the one Rusty and other free spirits operate in), and how lately I’m tending not to renew mine after they run out, thanks to my wife’s rational… Continue reading
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The Holy Mountain of Montserrat
To an window-sitter accustomed to flying over the American West, Catalonia from altitude looks like Utah. On the northern horizon the Pyrenees, like the Uintahs, run east-west above a dry landscape of settled alluvium, much of it reddish as the San Rafael desert. While the shapes of the ancient towns below are clearly old world in… Continue reading
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Wanted: Just-the-Facts Maps
In Google sets out future for Maps — Lays down gauntlet to Nokia with plans for personalized, context-aware and ’emotional’ maps in future, in Rethink Wireless, Caroline Gabriel begins this way: Google may be feeling the heat from an unlikely source, Nokia, at least in its critical Maps business. The search giant has put location awareness… Continue reading
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Loving the Alps of Los Angeles
I orient by landmarks. When I was growing up in New Jersey, the skyline of New York raked the eastern sky. To the west were the Watchung “Mountains“: hills roughly half the height of Manhattan’s ranking skyscrapers. But they gave me practice for my favorite indulgence here in Los Angeles: multi-angulating my ass in respect to… Continue reading
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Plantings in pictures
It’s interesting to see where photos end up (or start out, or re-start out) when one puts them in position to be used and re-used with minimized friction. The one above, of a coal-fired power plant in Utah that supplies electricity to Los Angeles, and which I shot from a flight overhead in January 2009,… Continue reading
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Some perspectives in time and space
First, time. Earth became habitable for primitive life forms some 3.X billion years ago. It will cease to be habitable in another 1 billion years or less, given the rate at which the Sun continues to get hotter, which it has been doing for the duration. Species last, on average, a couple million years. Depending… Continue reading
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And Earth is a bigger target
A comet is headed for Mars. Now approaching at 125,000 miles per hour, it will explode with the force of 35 million megatons of TNT if it hits. That’s a third the size of the collision that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which famously erased the dinosaurs and ended the Mesozoic, around 66 Million B.C. It… Continue reading
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Let’s put Echo Cliffs and the Kaibito Plateau in Wikipedia
I say that because I didn’t find those entries when I went looking for them yesterday, when I was putting up and annotating this photo set here. If I get a chance later I’ll put some links here. [Later…] And now there is a Wikipedia entry, thanks to Phllip Stewart, @pmsyyz, who improves Wikipedia as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pmsyy. I just made… Continue reading
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Digging Blackhawk Slide
One day, back around 15,000 BCE, half a mountain in Southern California broke loose and slid out onto what’s now the Mojave desert. The resulting landform is called the Blackhawk Slide. Here it is: It’s that ripple-covered lobe on the bottom right. According to Robert Sharp’s Geology Underfoot in Southern California, it didn’t just flow… Continue reading
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Catching up
Some links and thoughts on a Saturday night… The Matrix is still my favorite movie of all time. I explained why here in Linux Journal, back in 2006. Spoke to the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, of the U.S. Naval War College earlier this week, in Southbridge, Mass. The session was three hours… Continue reading
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The biggest picture
I want to plug something I am very much looking forward to, and encourage you strongly to attend. It’s called The Overview Effect, and it’s the premiere of a film by that title. Here are the details: Friday, December 7, 2012 – 5:30pm – 7:00pm Askwith Lecture Hall Longfellow Hall 13 Appian Way Harvard University Cambridge, MA The world-premiere… Continue reading
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The only issue that matters
Geologists have an informal name for the history of human influence on the Earth. They call it the Anthropocene. It makes sense. We have been raiding the earth for its contents, and polluting its atmosphere, land and oceans for as long as we’ve been here, and it shows. By any objective perspective other than our… Continue reading
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One of the world’s great craters
When I visited the Upheaval Dome in 1987, I was sure it was an impact crater. But roadside displays and printed literature from Canyonlands National Park said otherwise. Clearly, they reported, this was collapsed salt dome. Since then German researchers have found evidence, through shocked quartz, of an impact. That now appears to be the prevailing theory. The… Continue reading
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Circular quoting
So I’m writing about financialization. Kevin Phillips‘ prophetic book on the subject, Bad Money, is open on my desk. (He published it in early 2007, in advance of The Crash.) But it doesn’t contain the definitional quote that I need. So I turn to Wikipedia. There, in the Financialization entry, we are treated to this… Continue reading
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Many years of now
“When I’m Sixty-Four” is 44 years old. I was 20 when it came out, in the summer of 1967, one among thirteen perfect tracks on The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. For all the years since, I’ve thought the song began, “When I get older, losing my head…” But yesterday, on the eve of actually… Continue reading
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World wide puddle
Nicholas Carr is ahead of his time again. The Big Switch nailed computing as a utility, long before “the cloud” came to mean pretty much the same thing. His latest book, The Shallows, explored the changes in our lives and minds caused by moving too much of both online — again before others began noticing how… Continue reading
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Been there, still doing that
One hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, the scene above had no water in it, besides the Santa Ynez river, which barely flowed most of the year. Looking down on that scene was William Brewer, who led a survey sent out by Josiah D. Whitney, who had recently been named California’s state geologist, and… Continue reading
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Earthquake turns TV networks into print
An 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan yesterday, and a tsunami is spreading, right now, across the Pacific ocean. Thus we have much news that is best consumed live and uncooked. Here’s mine, right now: Not many of us carry radios in our pockets any more. Small portable TVs became passé decades ago. Smartphones, tablets and… Continue reading