UC Corruption

The highest-paid officials of the University of California have decided that they're not being paid enough.

Specifically, 36 of the top 200 earners in the UC administration have recently threatened to file suit if their retirement packages are not recalculated to avoid a $245,000 federal limit. Because these workers earn more than that, they feel they should be entitled to have their retirements recalculated based on their current incomes rather than this federal cap. They are demanding this despite the financial chaos of the last few years, which have seen a 32% increase in UC feeds in 2009, and an 8% increase in 2010. And they want the money retroactive to 2007.

The average wage in 2009 was $49,777; a retirement benefit above $245,00 would be, therefore, almost five times what the average worker makes.

Such superstar compensation might make sense if these leading UC administrators were actually doing a good job. If they had, for example, used their political contacts and influence to prevent the state of California from cutting its education budget, then they would have earned their salaries. Police union representatives certainly earned their salaries, as they were so successful in preventing cuts to bloated law enforcement budgets. But it seems no one is there to help defend education. Not only did these administrators fail to force Sacramento from making its draconian cuts, it seems as if they hardly even tried.

A more just and equitable system would be this: Let the salaries and retirements of the top 200 UC administrators from this point forward come entirely as bonuses paid from the funds they prevent from being cut. If Sacramento cuts the UC budget, they receive nothing. Perhaps this would motivate them to take the battle to Sacramento with the same enthusiasm Sacramento has displayed for destroying public education in California.

Those executives would argue that such a salary structure change would, as they put it in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, "jeopardize the system's ability to recruit top employees." The unasked question is--are these really the "top" employees, when they so miserably fail to protect their system? And what is it they do, anyway, that justify such salaries?

Let Obama Be Obama

In the West Wing episode (Season 1, episode 19) 'Let Barlet Be Barlet,' the fictional president Jed Barlet is failing.

On every front, when facing challenges from opposing Republicans and the military brass, Barlet choses to make meaningless gestures, "dipping his toes in" rather than fighting for his values. He lets one of his aides have a meeting with military officials about gay members of the military, but makes clear that this will not lead to repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Barlet half-heartedly considers appointing reformers to the Federal Election Commission, but realizes that Congress has already staked claim to the openings.

After a confrontation with his devoted chief of staff, President Barlet realizes that he needs to start fighting now if he ever hopes to achieve his agenda. The episode concludes with all staff members pledging to follow their president's wishes.

President Obama should Netflix this episode and watch it twice.

The tragedy of the first two years of the Obama administration is not that this highly-talented, fiercely-smart president was unable to achieve his legislative agenda; the tragedy is that he did achieve it, and that the bar he set himself was so low.

A half-hearted health care reform was passed, but without the critical components that would have made it a truly monumental reform. Don't get me wrong--it's great that more kids will be eligible to be insured, but the individual mandate means that by law their parents now must buy unaffordable insurance. Obama took the bold--and obvious--solution of expanding Medicare to everyone off the table very early, before it was ever seriously considered.

Obama also acted prudently to keep the US economy from plunging further into financial chaos. But while the "stimulus bill" helped banks, it did nothing to create jobs. We now creating a small fraction of the jobs we need each month just to keep pace with population growth; projections are that twelve million jobs would need to be created just to reach the point we were last at when the economy collapsed in October 2008. Instead of taking the bold--and obvious--step of revamping the Works Progress Administration and directly hiring unemployed people, Obama's talk of tax credits for businesses sounds limp.

Obama could have done much more. And now, with his enemies poised to usurp the House, he will have the chance to do far less.

In many ways, Obama is Barlet brought to life. Both are Nobel laureates. Both brim with intelligent and verbal clarity. Both are fundamentally good people. Here is what Obama wrote in his book Dreams of My Father:

"I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children in Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder--alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware--is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism, dooms us all."

Obama is of the mettle of Lincoln, for no other modern president has been so eloquent and empathetic, and of all qualities in a person, empathy is the most important, while eloquence shows the quality of thought. After the nightmare years of the inchoate Bush reign, Obama's mind is a like waking up and taking a breath.

Let us hope that, like Lincoln, his victories will be more plainly seen in retrospect. During Lincoln's terms, one could have mistaken his tactics for chaos--an unruly cabinet, disobedient generals, a war stalled in its early years. The martyred, brilliant Lincoln is hardly the pre-Appomattox Lincoln, who was widely mocked and criticized almost until the moment when he achieved total victory.

But if Obama is not to enjoy Lincoln's post-assassination apotheosis, then he needs to start fighting for his values now. It is great to win a game, and unfortunate to lose, but it seems as if Obama has not even suited up. He has punted the ball on third down. It's time to get in the game.

Why TSA needs to change

A bladder cancer survivor has his urostomy bag ripped open by a TSA agent untrained to recognize such objects, and the cancer survivor is soaked in his own urine as a result; a TSA representative then insults him on television. A frightened, shy 1o year-old boy resists a TSA screening, and has his shirt taken off in public. An ABC producer reporters that she was groped inside her underwear. Victims of sexual assault report that the aggressive, invasive probes they receive at the hands of TSA agents are bringing back flashbacks of their assaults.

Something is deeply broken with our passenger screening process--and this new process does nothing to keep us safer.

According to Isaac Yeffet, former head of security for Israel's El Al airlines, these invasive patdowns are pointless and a waste of time. El Al knows a thing or two about security; Israel faces much greater daily threats of attack than the United States. Yet despite the danger Israeli airlines face, El Al's remarkably effective techniques do not involve "touching the junk" of passengers. We should consider learning from what works.

Flying involves lying to passengers. Every flight begins with a ridiculous video about exit procedures, and the location of floatation devices in the event of a "water landing." A water landing is otherwise known as crashing into the ocean. With the exception of Captain Sully's famous landing, and one other such event in the 1950s, every other such landing has been fatal to everyone on the plane. And in the case of Sully's landing, people did not rely on floatation devices. So untold hours have been wasted on the tarmac listening to an absurd broadcast about a scenario that has almost zero chance of happening.

One of the most pernicious lies, however, is that our checked baggage and shipping parcels have been adequately screen. As we learned from the recent Yemeni bombs, it is relatively easy to get timed bombs on planes In the case of the Yemeni bombs, they were only detected because of an tip from the Saudis--hardly an intelligence resource we can rely on in the future.

TSA needs to consider the needs of sexual assault victims. TSA needs to guarantee that those who are viewing images of naked Americans, including American children, have been screened for pedophilia. As things stand now, it's like the Wild West has taken over our airports, and no one is accountable for the indignities visited upon those with the temerity to want to travel in their own country.

Today's strangeness comes courtesy of Treeosaur.com, a site which expounds on the idea that theropod dinosaurs hunted by blending in with trees.

Okaaay then.

Money Well Spent

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he famously declared that the University of California system should not subsidize intellectual curiosity. What he meant is that taxpayers should not pay for the education of California students.

Several years later, Sen. Proxmire of Wisconsin began his annual "Golden Fleece" awards, where he pointed to what he considered to be examples of wasteful federal spending. These examples sometimes included scientific research, and in this vein Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain have released a new report, titled "Summertime Blues: 100 Projects that give taxpayers the blues."

First, the word "taxpayer" is often trotted out as if had magical power. The phrase "as a taxpayer..." is spoken as if this incantation conferred special rights. But everyone is a taxpayer, and if everyone is part of a group, then no one individual in that group has any special claim.

The use of "taxpayer" is meant to stake a claim that as someone who has money automatically taken out of your paycheck, you have a right to decide how that money is spent. Nothing could be further from the truth. While you nominally have power to elect someone to decide how your tax money is spent, in reality unless you are a corporation capable of making substantial donations to PACs, then you have no say about how your money is spent, and no influence on who your elected official is. So right at the outset we should dispense with the fiction that "taxpayers" have some sort

Second, the Coburn/McCain report harps upon job creation as the standard for usefulness. In section after section, the report mocks expenditures in areas with unemployment, without mentioning the rather obvious point that this money is employing people. For almost every conceivable project, payroll expenditures constitute the majority of the budget. So criticizing such projects for not creating jobs is simply untrue.

Third, much of what is in the Coburn/McCain report is legitimate, useful scientific research. Here are some examples:

The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $2 million to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and east Africa, to capture, photograph, and analyze thousands of exotic ants.

...has received a stimulus grant for an experimental applied science project to assist indigenous Siberian communities in engaging Russian policymakers in local civic and environmental issues.

...$435,271 to develop iPod Touch or smartphone apps to teach introductory biology to high school students

...$266,505 in stimulus funds to continue its annual science education workshops for reporters

...MSU received a grant to send students to work with researchers at the Natural History Museum in Hangzhou studying various dinosaur eggs and other fossils.

...$300,000 in stimulus grant money to examine computer simulations to follow the formation of galaxies through the period 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang.

Really? Researching the Big Bang and the evolution of our universe is somehow unworthy of support? Sending kids to study dinosaurs, and possibly inspiring them into a career in science, is a wasteful expenditure? We should not fund workshops for reporters to communicate science better? We shouldn't explore using new technology to teach biology?

I could go on and on, but I'll leave you to read the Coburn/McCain report for yourself. It is a damning documentation of manifest philistine contempt for education, for learning, and most of all, for science itself.

Anti-Vaxxers Showing True Color

Anti-vaccination groups have reached a new low. The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) is a group of conspiratorially-minded science deniers so intent on keeping people from getting vaccines that they have now stooped to harassing the parents of a baby who died of whooping cough:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/12/2951629.htm

According to this article, 32-day-old Dana McCaffery died last year due to pertussis. She was too young to have received the vaccine, although her parents later came out in support of other children being vaccinated. That was too much for AVN, which started harassing the parents, and sought to prove that pertussis could not have been the cause. It might have beens something else, they claimed, another disease that was now being hidden so that young Dana might be used as a poster child for pro-vaccination forces.

This shows the anti-vaxxers true colors: they are willing to exploit suffering of all kinds, and to wish for more of that suffering in the world, in pursuit of their irrational, anti-scientific, paranoid mission.

cool slow-mo landslide

A very cool video of a slow-moving landslide:

http://sorisomail.com/email/42722/ja-viram-desmoranar-uma-montanha.html

Serpentinite Expelled?

Oh noes! Teh iz coming foar mah rx!

"California may drop rock, and geologists feel the pain." As amazing as it sounds, the official state rock of California, serpentinite, is in jeopardy of losing its status, due to a bill by LA Democrat Gloria Romero. Romero rightly points out that California's state rock is chock-full of chrysotile asbestos, and for this reason she finds it inappropriate for this lovely, lime-green rock to be so honored by the Golden State.

The New York Times article on this--which repeats the common mistake of referring to the rock (serpentinite) by its group of mineral (serpentine)--correctly quotes a USGS geologist as saying, "There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock."

People have a hard time getting their minds around this, but we Californians are frequently exposed to asbestos fibers without demonstrably increased rates of cancer. This is especially true in the serpentinite-rich Bay Area (the alleged elevated breast cancer rates in Marin are not connected with this fact). But if we're breathing asbestos in normal air, why aren't Californians who don't smoke dropping dead of lung cancer?

For one thing, chrysotile asbestos is not the most carcinogenic asbestiform mineral--that honor goes to "blue asbestos," crocidolite, and "brown asbestos," amosite.

But unlike these two forms, chrysotile's fibers are slightly curved, meaning that they cannot penetrate quite so deeply into the small passages of the lungs. When lungs are exposed to mineral particles, they react as if these particles were viruses or bacteria; a robust immune system attacks these particles with a toxic brew of chemicals. In a way, our immune system is too good at doing this, because in the process of trying to "kill" the mineral, neighboring cells are damaged in ways that, given enough time, can turn them cancerous. The longer mineral particles remain, the longer the immune reaction occurs; the problem with asbestos fibers is that they lodge so deeply, it is very difficult for them to be dislodged.

I don't want to minimize the health hazards of asbestos, or imply that it does not cause cancer. But it's important not to exaggerate the ill effects of hazardous substances, and to understand what actually does cause harm. It should be noted that one of the more inert substances in nature--silicon dioxide, which in a mineral form is quartz--can also cause a particularly vicious lung disease called silicosis. The bottom line is that you don't want to inhale any mineral particles if you can help it; asbestiform minerals are particularly bad to inhale, and within this mineral group, amosite and crocidolite are the worst. Since most industrial asbestos was chrysotile, this means that the efforts to remove all asbestos from places such as schools has been largely an unnecessary effort, meant to placate fears more than actually protect people. Sure, less exposure is better--although by removing the material, that increases its dispersion and people's exposure.

On a side note, the first half of the South Tower of the World Trade Center had its beams wrapped in asbestos fibers. (This fact alone shows the lie in the EPA's post 9/11 statement that the air quality was non-hazardous.) This fireproofing could be literally sewn around beams in such a way that a sudden jolt--such as an earthquake or a plane

impact--would not knock it off. While the WTC was being built, however, the use of asbestos was discontinued. The North Tower and the upper portions of the South Tower were sprayed instead with a fireproofing foam. There wasn't much science to the amount added; workers recalled that they were instructed to just eye-ball it. No one expected that something would happen to the towers that would knock this insulation off the support beams, exposing them directly to fire. Had they been wrapped in asbestos sheets, this would not have happened. Can we infer therefore that asbestos insulation would have saved the WTC? No, that goes too far--but it might have bought a little more time before the collapses.

Romero's bill has good intentions, but does not take good science into account, but instead plays upon people's fears of a substance they little understand. Moreover, it overturns a tradition, and for that reason if for nothing else, it deserves not to pass.

Why Aren't Students Studying?

According to recent research by UCSB economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, the amount of time spent by college students studying has dropped:

1961: 24 hours/week

2009: 14 hours/week

Moreover, the total time spend on school (attending classes + studying) has likewise diminished:

1961: 40 hours/week

2009: 27 hours/week

What's gong on here?

As every college counsellor tells students, they should expect to be responsible for studying 3 hours for every hour in class. At many schools, students are considered full-time with as few as 12 units/week, which translates roughly (not counting labs) as 12 classroom hours per week. At 12 hours/week, the 3x multiple works out to only 36 hours. Added to 12 hours, this means a total time spend on school of only 48 hours/week.

This squares with my experiencing teaching undergraduates. Assign reading, and 90% will not do it. Test on this required reading, and still 90% will not do it. I get the sense, while grading midterms, that the majority of the class has spend less than one hour preparing for the exam. There are good students, students who diligently study, even in freshmen classes. But they are quite the rarity.

It seems to be the diminished number of hours actually spent studying may have a lot to do with declining academic standards, which are hidden only the band-aid of grade inflation. There is something seriously wrong going on here.

New gravity map

Gravity maps are way cool and help us picture the 4th dimension, which often we forget. Check out this new grav map:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8767763.stm

The Woo is a Lie

It's hard to think of a stranger article than the recent piece by Dr. Robert Lanza which appeared in the Huffington Post.

Titled "What are we? New experiments suggest we're not purely physical," this piece might have offered some actual new experiments; instead, we are presented with tired, hackneyed cliches about quantum theory and how this, supposedly, proves the existence of something other than reality. It is quite simply nonsense.

While arguing, "part of us exists outside of the physical world," Dr. Lanza does not offer any real evidence of this. Instead, we're retold old stories about the spookiness of the quantum world, mixed with assurances the scientific community is "trapped in an outdated paradigm." Kuhn references are the last refuge of anti-science scoundrels.

Quantum mechanics is strange and counter-intutive. But simply because phenomenon occur in ways unexpected to our normal experience is not an argument against the nature of reality. Quantum mechanics simply is. Electromagnetic radiation exists both as a wave and as a particle. There is no why. Extrapolating from quantum mechanics to a New Age, woo-ish interpretation of the world goes far beyond what the evidence actually suggests.

Dr. Lanza writes:

The world was once wondrous.

And indeed it still is. Learning science should not reduce one's wonder about the world; rather, it is through science that we develop an appreciation for just how wondrous reality is.

Dr. Lanza philosophizes:

My colleagues tell me we're just the activity of carbon and some proteins; we live awhile and die. And the universe? It too has no meaning. They have it all worked out in the equations -- no need for woo.

Now we see the crux of the matter. If Dr. Lanza wants to argue that we are something other than carbon molecules, the burden of proof is on him to produce evidence for it. Perhaps there is "something else"--we cannot absolutely rule out such a possibility. But science does strongly suggest that there need not be anything else in order to explain the world and the things that live in it. Therefore to argue that some unnamed "new experiments" are producing reality-shattering paradigm shifts about the nature of reality is, quite bluntly, wrong.

Tracking research vessels

Research ships are very cool. It's a small environment crammed with smart people, visiting beautiful places to do interesting work. Imagine that several times a day someone brings up a mud core--tens of millions of years old, which no one has ever seen before--and plops it down for you to start analyzing. Although prudish American ships are dry, European ships more sensibly understand the importance of the free-flow of alcohol. So where are all these ships?

Sailwx.info has a handy site allowing you to track the world's research vessels:
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/researchships.phtml

You can see, for example, that the Polarstern is right now half way between Iceland and Greenland. The Thomas Thompson, from which science writer Wendee Holtcamp is blogging, in Deadliest Catch waters. It is interesting to think of all this cool research going on simultaneously around the world.

the slick

NASA has just released a spectacular picture of the BP spill taken on 19 June 2010:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44375

BTW, not that these pictures come courtesy of a governmental science agency. Remember that the next time some anti-science politician suggest cutting funding for science and leaving all innovation to the private sector. Imagine if the satellite that took this picture were owned by a corporate giant who owned BP... I suspect in such a case we wouldn't be seeing any such pictures at all.

plastic weathering

Geologists tend to think differently about pollution than scientists in other fields. To an oceanographer, plastic pollution in the oceans is a huge issue because such plastic may take as long as 400 years to degrade. Four hundreds years is, of course, below the resolution of many geologic dating techniques, so in the geologists' mind 400 years seems like the +/- slop that is part of every calculation. This doesn't mean the immediate, current plastic problem is not deadly to marine life now; but in the long run, if we were to stop plastic pollution, in a time period measured by geologic thinking, things would be back to normal fairly quickly.

Now, as this article in New Scientist points out,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627651.900-drastic-measures-save-plastic-treasures.html

20th century plastics are degrading faster than anyone thought. This includes works of art sculpted in plastics that are now disintegrating.

fast erosion

Creationists will no doubt take solace from the way this article is phrased:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100620155748.htm

Sometimes erosion does occur rapidly. In a river such as the Colorado, for example, long periods of little erosion are punctuated by rapid erosion during peak flows. This does not, however, mean that all of geology is wrong and that the drainage of Noah's Flood carved the Grand Canyon.

Science writers should take better care to understand the ways in which their headlines will be misused.

very cool graphic

A quite cool graphic showing the highest mountain, the deepest trench, and everything in between:

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/infographic-mountain-to-deepest-ocean-trench-0249

Anakin Skywalker--borderline personality?

A new paper argues that Anakin Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, displayed classic signs of borderline personality disorder.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/06/05/psychology-darth-vader-revealed/

If true, this could be the first time the prequels had any correspondence to the way people actually behave.

Time Lapse Glaciers

An excellent site, the Extreme Ice Survey, showing graphics of retreating glacial ice.

http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/index.php/new_gallery/

Shake Maps

Predicting earthquakes on a short time scale is impossible. However, we know in the long term where earthquakes will occur, and we also know pretty well how the ground will behave.

This site details recent work modeling how Southern California will respond to the next big quake. It's just a matter of time.

http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2010/clear-with-a-chance-of-tremors/

Is Lady Gaga puppet of the Illuminati?

Everyone knows the Illuminati control everything. So it should come as no surprise that Lady Gaga is controlled by them, too.

http://www.disinfo.com/2010/03/lady-gaga-puppet-of-illuminati-mind-control/

This site of tin-foil hat paranoia is as crazy as it seems. To cleanse the mental palette, indulge yourself in a site that attempts to analyze Lady Gaga from a literary theory perspective:

http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/

world stats

Scientists love quantification. Although not every aspect of science lends itself to numerical description, when you've got solid numbers, that makes it much easier to sell your idea to other scientists.

Here is a great site of real-time statistics about the world:

http://www.worldometers.info/

I particularly like Society & Media section--it's spooky to think of the amount of info being generated each second of each day.

Biblical commandments

A brilliant response to Dr. Laura:

Subject: FW: Can you own a Canadian?

In her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, she knows that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 , and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination ... End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan.

James M. Kauffman, Ed.D. Professor Emeritus, Dept. Of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia

Now here's a title

"Bat fellatio causes a scandal in academia."

See below for gory details:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18916-bat-fellatio-causes-a-scandal-in-academia.html

May 18th is the 30th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the most documented and dramatic volcanic eruption on US soil since the founding of the republic. (Mt. Shasta may have erupted in 1776, but California was not yet part of new country; Lassen in 1917 was rather small.)

David Johnson, seen here in the picture to the right, is the eponymous geologist killed in the eruption near what is now called the Johnson Memorial Ridge. He was one of many people surprised by the sideways, lateral blast that carved out St. Helens' north side.

In many ways, I became a geologist because of this eruption, which at the tender age of 10 struck my consciousness like few things had before. I still have the dog-earred National Geographic magazines detailing the event in dramatic photos, and I spent many long hours staring intently at the glossy pages.

MSNBCS has a nice set of photos commemorating the event:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37199772/from/ET/?beginTab=1&beginSlide=1

Madness in SF: Rules for Bay to Breakers & Sit/Lie

Tomorrow, San Francisco will host its annual Bay to Breakers race, which is not so much a race as an extravagant parade composed of some of the stranger sites in an already strange city. The "race" began in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake as a way to promote civic pride. For decades, it was a wonderful raucous celebration, involving drugs, copious alcohol, and the necessity of open public urination. (San Francisco, for those of you unacquainted with the city, has almost no public restrooms, so public urination is something practiced by necessity even by embarrassed tourists to our fair city.)

We're a long from the glory days of the Bay to Breakers. Tomorrow will be a corporate-sponsored, corporate-managed event carefully scripted to avoid any of its original vitality or fun. The race is now the "ING Bay to Breakers," ING being the acronym of the Dutch Internationale Nederlanden Groep.

It is unclear why this annual event of civic pride needs corporate sponsorship,

but for whatever reason, ING has sought to ban the very things that make the race worthwhile: floats, nudity, alcohol, fun. ING probably won't succeed in imposing all of the draconian restr

ictions it wishes, but the race has nonethele

ss lost its meaning. Perhaps in the future, citizens should organize an alternate parade--say, on the Saturday before the Bay to Breakers, that will simply be a flash-mob of people wishing to celebrate the original Rabelaisian spirit of the race.

At the same time that the Bay to Breakers is being strangled by Taliban-like bans, San Francisco is wrestling with a new "sit/lie" ordinance.

While the Bay to Breakers restrictions seek to impose unreasonable order, this sit/lie ordinance is being opposed by unreasonable advocates for the homeless. The reality in SF is that many areas of the city are so overrun with homeless sitting and lying on the sidewalk that no one in his or her reasonable mind would wish to go there.

The sit/lie ordinance is a rational first step toward cleaning up the city. There should be no right to camp out on city sidewalks, especially when that camping is so unsightly and disruptive.

Yet this sit/lie ordinance garners a tremendous about of vehemence against it by those who would protect the rights of violent, aggressive homeless against the rights of citizens and those increasingly-few tourists who wish to spend much-needed money in San Francisco.

SF needs to clean up--starting with the sidewalks. SF also needs to protect its unique cultural identity by not surrendering events such as Bay to Breakers to puritanical corporations such as ING.

Touching Home

Touching Home is a new movie starring Ed Harris, about the relationship of identical twin boys with their estranged, alcoholic, self-destructive father. The film is based on a true story, and stars Noah and Logan Miller, who produced, wrote, and directed this marvelous film.

In an age of Iron Man 2--ridiculous special effects meant to distract the viewer from the utter lack of character and story--Touching Home shines as real art. Movies have become too much about explosions, too little about the experience of living in this broken world among broken people. Touching Home speaks to these deeper issues, and does so unflinchingly, and at time, painfully

We see the self-destructive behavior without varnish. At the lowest point in the film, when Ed Harris' character robs from his own children to fuel a drunken gambling binge, we see what, for many families, is a total reversal of the nurturing role, a descent into familial parasitism. Cuttingly, we see the character of the grandmother watch Ed Harris as he steals from his son--she watches without comment, two generations of extreme dysfunction on pathetic display. And yet there is love, complicated love, the love of children sleeping indoor and pursuing their dreams while knowing their father sleeps under the redwoods in his truck.

Noah and Logan Miller are the stars of this film are utterly convincing and honest in their acting. One would never know that this was their acting debut (which probably says something about how claims of acting being a difficult profession are self-serving). Honest acting, acting without pretense, comes across plainly on the screen, just as false, ridiculous acting (Twilight, anyone?) is also easy to spot.

Touching Home was probably shot on a shoestring budget. But this, if anything, makes it the better film and multi-million dollar masturbatory festivals of explosions and cliches. Watch Iron Man 2 this weekend if you cannot manage an independent thought; watch Touching Home if you want to be moved. No one leaves this film with dry eyes.

non-California hazard zones

Living in California, we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that we're the only state with significant natural hazards. Here is a Wired article about some of the non-California danger zones.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/five-us-earthqu/

Of particular interest to populations are the dangers of the Pacific Northwest and Salt Lake City. Probably very few residents realize the full magnitude of the peril.

The View From Above

Ever wonder what the view of Earth is like from space? Happily, the International Space Station has a live webcam of the view from orbit:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html?param=station

To find out where the ISS is at a given moment, check out:

http://iss.astroviewer.net

To find out when a good time to see the ISS with your own eyes will happen,

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/skywatch.cgi?country=United+States

The ISS's passes are brief, but for a couple of minutes it's the fastest, brightest thing in the night sky. And it's a strange thing to look up a speck of light and think that there are human living right up there in space.

New maps

We don't often hear from the California Department of Mines & Geology (probably because of their low funding). However, today the CDMG came out with two new maps, both new-fangled Google Maps mashups. Check them out:

http://www.quake.ca.gov/gmaps/GMC/stategeologicmap.html

http://www.quake.ca.gov/gmaps/FAM/faultactivitymap.html

These are pretty generalized, low-resolution maps, but sometimes that's what you want to see the big picture.

The recent quake off Taiwan, together with the quakes in Haiti and Chile, and the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, have some people wondering--Is this the beginning of the end of the world? Is this the start of the coming 2012 apocalypse?

In a word, no.

Most people feel only a few quakes in their lifetimes, and most never directly see a volcano erupting. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, residents might feel one or two earthquakes in a year. Yet numerous small quakes are occurring in the Bay Area every day. This site, quake.usgs.gov, shows Bay Area earthquakes in near-real time. As of this moment, 261 quakes have occurred in the Bay Area within the last week--almost 40 per day. Yet most of these would be difficult to feel unless they occurred right underneath you.

Likewise, if we look at an earthquake map of California, we see 1357 quakes within the last week. That's almost 200 quakes per day. This week is more active than usual, but even in an average year, California receives 25-30,000 quakes.

There are fewer volcanoes erupting around the world, but many are in a constant state of eruption. On the Big Island of Hawaii, for example, an eruption near the Kilauea area started in 1983--and hasn't stopped since. If you go to Hawaii today, you can see lava flowing right into the Pacific.

The bottom line is this: Eyjafjallajökull, Chile, Haiti are the normal state of the Earth. The world is not undergoing some End Times cataclysm. And 21 December 2012 will end just like every other day, with busy Christmas shoppers scrambling for last-minute deals.

SkeptiCal 2010 at Berkeley

Today, Bay Area skeptics were treated to the annual meeting of SkeptiCal at Berkeley, where we heard talks from Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, David Morrison of NASA, and Kiki Sanford, among others. Chris Hoofnagle of ScienceBlog's Denialism talked about his denialist deck of cards, and John Conway talked about misconceptions of the Large Hadron Collider.

Altogether, some good talks and discussions about science and skepticism.