wither agate?

Well, it's happening again.

The great state of Louisiana is poised to enact a geological injustice. This time the victim is agate, which has held the distinction of being LA's state gem. Now under consideration is a much-debated proposal to downgrade agate to LA's state mineral.

The irony is that because agate is cryptocrystalline, it's borderline to call it either a gem or a mineral. "Gem" is a geologically-meaningless term synonymous with a mineral, which is an inorganic, naturally-occurring compound assuming a regular, orderly crystallinity.

But when you look at agate under a polarized light microscope, what you see is... well, not much. The crystals are so tiny that even under high magnification, what you mostly see in thin section is an iridescent swirl that reminds one of a CD refracting light. You could say these individual crystals are minerals, but the nature of agate as a whole is more amorphous than mineralic.

Nonetheless, more for the sake of convenience than consistency, geologists do classify agate as a mineral, a gem, or a rock, depending on the circumstances. And just as California should not have considered removing serpentinite as its state rock, so too should Louisiana refrain from offering any geological insult. Geologists vote... and we carry rock hammers, too.

anti-wolf, anti-science

Fear of wolves is one of those irrational, deep-seated human traits. As Farley Mowat and others have pointed out, wolves pose virtually danger to humans, and little danger to livestock. Yet in the West wars over the classification of wolves take on an unusual prominence.

As part of the unfortunate budget deal Obama agreed to last Friday, a hostage negotiation with the operation of the federal government on the line, Obama agreed to a small, little-noticed rider that allowed Congress to change the endangered status of wolves in Montana and Idaho.

Now there is nothing wrong, per se, with a species being taken off the Endangered Species list, if the evidence warrants such an action. But the process established by Congress does not--until this week--allow for political machinations to override scientific consensus. Now the status of every animal on the list is on the table, with congress members vying with each other for which animal--stubbornly confounding some development project with its insistence on living--is to be taken off next.

The issue is science denial. Do we have a system where scientists come to a conclusion based on evidence, and then take action on a species' status, or do we have a system where politicians make these decisions, based on their own economic interests?

In the reality based community, scientific facts have meaning and relevance. In the world of science denial, facts are as fungible as opinions, because at their core denialists do not accept the idea of an objective, rational world outside their own subjective experience. They engage in magical thinking at its worst.