Green Gabbro

Friday Mountain Blogging: Paleotopography of the Sierra Nevada

yami — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 04:39:33 +0000

No one quite knows how old these hills are. We know how old the rocks are, of course - it’s easy (or at least straightforward) to grab a chunk of granite, crush it up, and throw it in your handy mass spectrometer for a radiometric date. When dinosaurs roamed the earth 100 million years ago, these rocks were coagulating in a magma chamber several miles below. But when did they reach the surface? And how? And why?

The why of the Sierra Nevada is under particular scrutiny these days because they might represent a previously unconsidered kind of tectonic event: a mountain range’s bottom falling off. Large granite bodies like the Sierras are born with a sort of evil twin attached: a body composed of gabbro or eclogite, full of heavy elements like iron and magnesium. This “evil” twin is much heavier than the Earth’s mantle, while granite, the “good” twin, is lighter; joined together, they would sit in the Earth like a boat weighed down with cargo, the top just barely above water. About 3 million years ago, the heavy twin may have detached from the Sierra granite and fallen down into the mantle; if this is true, we would expect that the mountains rose up in response, like a hot air balloon losing ballast.

But an article by Andreas Mulch et al. in this week’s issue of Science places some significant constraints on how fast, and how much, the mountains could have risen in response to this event. Mulch and his co-authors looked at bits of 40-50 million year old clay, formed by weathering granites in the ancient course of the Yuba river. This weathering process takes water from the environment and locks it in to the clay mineral’s crystal structure, so the clay provides a record of the composition of water at various points in the Sierra Nevada of 40-50 million years ago. The water composition, in turn, is correlated with elevation. Their results suggest that the mountains 50 million years ago were about 2 kilometers tall, perhaps half a kilometer shorter than they are today.

Half a kilometer of mountain isn’t anything to sneeze at, but considering that others have proposed a veritable rollercoaster ride - 2 km of uplift, followed by subsidence, followed by more uplift - it’s hard not to be disappointed.

Isolated Wackiness, Shared By Everybody in the Whole Damn County

yami — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 19:14:34 +0000

Okay, I hadn’t heard about this Jewish family being driven from their home until reading Bitch Ph.D.’s post:

And my first thought was, “blog this.” And then I thought, “what for? The only possible reaction is “those people suck,” and it’s one of those atypical weird cases that, if anything, surely demonstrates that the country as a whole doesn’t think that way.” And, god help me, I thought, “it’ll just fuel the stupid idea that liberals hate Christians, blah blah blah.”

And then I realized, boy, that is some fucked-up thinking going on there. I don’t think I should draw attention to a 21st-century American pogrom for fear of offending Christians? I’m hesitant to stand up and object to anti-Semitism–and by “stand up,” let’s note, I mean only “talk about it on my pseudonymous blog”–for political reasons?

The discussion there goes on about Christian cultural hegemony, and it’s fabulous - what does it mean that entire towns full of assholes in nomine Jesu are routinely dismissed as “oh, they’re not real Christians”? Maybe it’s just that, as a non-Christian, I don’t have much interest in policing the ideological boundaries of Christianity, but I don’t think “can these people be accurately described by the label Christian?” is the important question to consider here.

Though but but, I’m more disturbed by the idea of considering this an “atypical weird case” than I am by the Christian boundary-policing. When I think “atypical weird case”, I think of a guy calling in to the local talk radio show to ask if it hasn’t all got to do with Jimmy Hoffa and Malcom X being undead zombie friends. But you can’t create the environment described by the complainants with just a couple of isolated kooks:

The complaint recounts a raucous crowd that applauded the board’s opening prayer and then, when sixth-grader Alexander Dobrich stood up to read a statement, yelled at him “take your yarmulke off!” His statement, read by Samantha, confided “I feel bad when kids in my class call me Jew boy.”
[…]
The crowd booed an ACLU speaker and told her to “go back up north.”

In the days after the meeting the community poured venom on the Dobriches. Callers to the local radio station said the family they should convert or leave the area. Someone called them and said the Ku Klux Klan was nearby.

You should really go read the article to get a good sense of what I mean. Like many intolerable environments, this one was created by countless small incidents which, taken individually, can be easily rationalized as too small to worry about, or the acts of isolated nutters - but taken as a whole, they’re horrifying. Makes it hard to extract a good pull-quote.

If there’s anything we should learn from history, it’s that this kind of mass cruelty is frighteningly normal. The typical high school lesson plan on the Salem witch trials involves asking students to relate the mass hysteria to everyday life in 17th Century Massachusetts; the history of the American colonies is hardly my area of expertise, but I’m not aware of any historians who dismiss the trials as “just one of those atypical weird cases” with nothing to teach us about its broader social environment. That the current political discourse leads us to think “oh, well, crazy mobs will be crazy mobs, tee hee!” is be a common and acceptable interpretation of a modern pogrom - well, ugh.

Boringness

yami — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 07:55:27 +0000

So the point of this post is to include a Bloglines claim verification code. Which is invisible. Doot doot doot doot.

The broader context, though, is that my Urge to Blogtinkery is on an uptick. If you’re not one of those types who never leaves their RSS, you may have noticed the new theme - do you like it? It’s got Google ads, which I have so far found to be entertainingly surreal - have you found them offensive? I’ve already filtered out one Republican campaign, I’ll filter more if I see any.

How’s your week going?

How Avis and the University of California are Destroying the Environment

yami — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 21:08:39 +0000

The corporate customer agreement between Avis and the UC system doesn’t include the “intermediate SUV” class. So the only way to get a vehicle with four-wheel drive and decent clearance, and be covered under UC’s insurance policy, is to rent in the “nonsensical gas-guzzler” class. (Note: there is a further class of SUV, the “giant honking monster powered by baby seal blood”, which is also not covered.)

Much as I mock SUVs, there are times when you need to drive on shitty-ass dirt roads, and it’s nice to have a vehicle that doesn’t scrape bottom on every washboard. But I don’t have that much equipment; I need a CR-V (22 mpg), not a Trailblazer (14 mpg). Will any of the major car rental companies lend me a CR-V? Noooo.

Gallons of gas wasted for this field trip: 16-20 ($50-$70)
Capitalism: sucks
Capitalism as modified by my dictatorial whims: would be much awesomer

Friday Rock Blogging, Interplanetary Breakfast Edition

yami — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:20:25 +0000

Pancake domes from Venus, blueberries from Mars, and a molasse basin from Earth… I need to go grocery shopping.

Images to Amend the Constitution By

yami — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 01:45:17 +0000

I’d like to send a hearty “fuck you” to Dianne Feinstein, whose views on the acceptable bounds of free speech were formed with all the careful consideration and sound judgment you’d expect from a middle school student:

For me–at that time as a 12-year-old–and for the Nation, the photo [this one, of troops raising the flag on Iwo Jima] was a bolt of electricity that boosted morale amidst the brutal suffering of the Pacific campaign.
…
This photo cemented my views of the flag for all time.

Well. If we’re going to amend the Constitution - or even waste time in the Senate talking about amending the Constitution - on the basis of emotionally significant photographs, I propose that we use the following:

Blissfully Unaware of my Peril

yami — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 07:29:52 +0000

Perhaps Kyso Kisaen will be a bloggy guide and muse through the Rite of Femminess otherwise known as getting hitched; she seems to have her priorities straight:

I already know shit like “less booze = less money” or “borrow stuff or make it, teehee!” Any dumbass knows that skipping a 4-tier cake-orgy in favor of a simpler cake is a cost-saver.

What I need to know is stuff like “How sanitary would it be to have an ice sculpture the guests can do shots from?” or “Do I need to get separate insurance against the damage my drunken guests will assuredly do to your building?”

So on the strength of her review I grabbed a copy of Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women from the library today.

I’ve just finished reading the introduction; it’s all well and good, standard breathless exposition about how married men are generally better off than married women and that couldn’t have anything to do with … gasp… sexism, could it? - but in the middle, Maushart throws in a completely gratuitous paean to evolutionary psychology:

Imagine a female examining her newly born baby in an effort to determine if he is ‘really hers’. Sexual exclusivity remains at the core of marriage not because men necessarily wish to repress women, but because they wish to know who their children are. The control of women’s sexuality is simply a by-product of this wish - a bonus, if you will.

The monogamy gamble pays particular dividends to non-dominant males who, under a more laissez-faire mating system, might never get the chance to breed at all. Females, for their part, sacrifice variety and freedom of choice for the protection of a male against other males.

If I only had a convenient generator, the power generated by my eyeballs rolling at that one would be enough to run a nice research outpost in Tanzania for a week. Fortunately, she stops with the handwavy chimpanzees after that and moves on to observations of actual people, about which she (and I) will hopefully have more to say.

Inconsequentialnesses

yami — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:37:59 +0000

Of passing amusement:

Everybody, giggle with me now: Nimrod orogeny! Hee hee hee hee hee.
Eco-art experiment? Or overly abundant faith in that axiom about trash and treasure?

SUNDAY June 25th - YIPPEE! Somebody almost took the futon today! It was rolled up and moved from the curb over to the edge of the sidewalk. Looks like it was just too heavy, what with the water and drool and urine and oil. So it’s still available, simply seething with friendly earthworms, snails, slugs, and perhaps a salamander or two. Experience Oakland’s sub-sidewalk ecology, with layers of fauna and flora which you might never have known would grow in a dark, dirty, wet places. So the value of your futon is enhanced by a slice of urban ecology!
I was sauteeing a portobello mushroom cap for dinner (mushroom + bell pepper + sharp goat cheese = sammich!); it was gills-down in the pan when I decided to smush it down a little with my spatula and lo and behold, it made fart noises! Farty-sounding enough to bring my housemate into the kitchen, wondering if I was going to die. Hee hee.

How I Rescued My Blog from Google’s Cache

yami — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:17:09 +0000

Detail-oriented readers may have noticed the sudden appearance of a full-fledged category list, which, if you explore, is the gateway to a fully populated set of archives stretching once again back to the misty pre-9/11 world of innocence and laughter.

After the cut: nerdy details of how I recovered, just in case anyone else has a sudden blog database failure.

Once I realized that my database backups were useless, I started frantically saving cached pages from Google. I ran through searches like inurl:greengabbro.net/2002/05 to save entries one month at a time; this was a huge pain in the ass and could probably be done more effectively with some clever wgettage. In the end, though, I had html files for all my individual entry pages.
I wrote a perl script to read through the html, pull out the important bits, and save them in Movable Type’s import/export format. This was the trickiest part of the process, as I’m not a native regex speaker. In addition to the regexing, I kludged together a system of toggle variables and scratch files to make sure everything was written out in the right order. I expect this system to be somewhat irritating to anyone trying to read the script (including myself, after a week or so) but nevertheless, if you’re interested, here it is.
Because I had 5 years of archives to contend with, and the WordPress importer can sometimes choke on large files, I split the import job into 5 files.
I used the WordPress import process just like any other person would if they were migrating from Movable Type. My first couple attempts didn’t work quite right, as I’d forgotten some essential parts of the Movable Type format when I wrote my script, but once I shook those bugs out everything worked like a charm.

Give Me That Old-Fashioned Heterosexual Privilege

yami — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 07:42:50 +0000

I’d put aside my thoughts of fish and bicycles when I moved up here for school. But two weeks ago, I snuck up to Seattle for the weekend, to see the Boy. We were laying around in the funny glow of the last day of vacation, talking about everything and nothing (as you do), when the conversation took a turn for the mushy. Not the kind of mush whose words you ever want to write down, but the kind where language quickly decays into pure sentimentality.

It was enough to bring back the bicycles, so suddenly that I almost vomited.

He asked me what I was thinking; I told him; he said yes.

Expected party date: sometime after quals. No, I’m not changing my name or giving any money to DeBeers (though I am installing a permanent shunt from my bank account to Southwest Airlines).

Below the fold: What does the iTunes random number generator have to say about this?

The Covering: Ramblin’ Rover - The Fables (A Time)

But gie me a ramblin’ rover,
And fae Orkney down to Dover.
We will roam the country over
And together we’ll face the world.
The Crossing: Talk About Suffering/Man of the House - The Chieftains w/Ricky Skaggs (Further Down the Old Plank Road)
The Crown: Trin For Trin - Onky - Vendt På Hovedet
The Root: Autumn Child / Heaton Chapel - Lúnasa (Otherworld)
The Past: Mushaboom - Feist (Let It Die)

I got a man to stick it out
And make a home from a rented house
And we’ll collect the moments one by one
I guess that’s how the future’s done
The Future: Creative Freakout - The Hellers (Creative Freakout: Advertising Protest Songs for those who protesteth too much)
The Questioner: Scrapple From The Apple - Mike Marshall (Into The Cauldron)
The House: Time - Pink Floyd (Dark Side Of The Moon)
The Inside: Clyde Davenport Tunes - Jenny In The Cotton Patch/ Sally In The garden/Callahan - Cordelia’s Dad (Spine)
The Outcome: Suuret Ja Soriat [Tall and Handsome] - Värttinä (Seleniko)

All others are graceful and handsome, but I am small and unsightly. I was made of charcoal and grime. Why was I ever born? Some day I will get a great bridegroom. He comes from the nether world and will not blame me for my appearance.

Verdit: we might accidentally turn into yuppies, if we’re not careful. But if I’m going to lose my soul to consumerism, at least I get a tall and handsome netherworlder in exchange.