2012 Woo Begins. Part 1: the "Leap of Faith"

Today, 21 December 2011, is exactly one year from the end of the earth. Or at least that is what many woo practitioners would have you believe.

The 2012 End of the World phenomenon is just getting into high gear, and we in the skeptical community can expect to be amazed by what will transpire over the next 365 days, as bad craziness seeps into the mainstream media, and even well-adjusted people begin to worry.

This has been building for a while. For years David Morrison of NASA has been answering a flood of strange citizen fears about 2012 and "Niburu." Morrison does a spot-on job of explaining why this is all nonsense here.

One particularly unique manifestation of this end of the world paranoia is is the "2012 Leap of Faith" promulgated by Sedona, AZ, lawyer Peter Gerston. Gerston, well known for UFO-related legal filings against the government, makes the startling promise that he will leap off a prominent cliff near Sedona on 21 December 2012 at exactly 4:11 am.

Under normal condition, such a leap would result in death. But Gerston claims that instead his leap will rescue humanity when a galactic portal opens. Citing evidence as varied as the third Indiana Jones movie and Steve Martin's movie Leap of Faith, Gerston argues that he will not perish in this fall.

Although he isn't directly asking for additional jumping volunteers, his "invitation" page clearly says, "Your presence is requested to witness this event." An invitation to a suicide surely takes the cake for strangeness. But there is the danger that even if Gerston, at the last minute, finds some reason not to jump to his death, other individuals may be inspired by his Leap of Faith and themselves commit suicide.

This is the problem with woo. Some practitioners may actually believe what they say, others may be simply be in it to make money from the gullible... but in the end, what matters is that third parties change their behavior in ways that hurt them, whether that is stopping chemotherapy while expecting crystals to heal you or giving away one's life savings to fund billboards to encourage others to donate. Woo--all of it--is a health hazard.

hooray!

It's not every day you see an article about the use of isotopes in environmental tracing (a topic I happen to love), but today's NYT had this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/science/rare-krypton-81-isotope-helps-track-water-in-ancient-nubian-aquifer.html?src=dayp

This job does a good job of explaining just how geologists think about groundwater movement measurement using isotopic tracers. Gee, actual science news in a mass media outlet? Who wudda thunk?

misusing science on the phantom LA subway

An interesting AP article--"Beverly Hills bids to halt subway tunnel at school"--discusses recent stirrings toward expanding Los Angeles's inadequate subway system. This article does a good job of summarizing the myriad reasons why LA's people-moving system--and we can think of cars and subways and pedestrian walkways as all part of one large circulatory system--is so deeply broken.

To wit, people seem afraid that the proposed expansion, in a path under Beverly Hills High Schools, would:

--shake their houses

--risk the tunnel's collapse

--risk a methane explosion

But earthquakes are a big focus of their fears, with some subway advocates declaring, "It would be dangerous to have it under the school--God forbid, if we had an earthquake."

Well, LA is going to have earthquakes. Large earthquakes. There are few things in the world as certain as the continued seismic activity in California. But subways survive pretty well in quakes; in 1989, the Bay Area's BART system was largely unaffected. Where BART may be affected in the future are those points where the BART system connects to the land--elevated sections of track, hoisted up into the air on pillars placed on poor soil; the tunnels themselves will likely be fine (with the exception of one section that directly crosses the Hayward Fault). But the LA project is going to be entirely underground, making the "egg-shell" curvature of tunnels something that will reinforce their strength.

In any event, the unscientific approach of subway critics is shown by their insistence that things would be okay if only the subway were moved slightly away, toward the area of the Santa Monica Boulevard. Just not near their houses.

This is geologically ridiculous. What LA faces most acutely is shaking from blind thrust faults, which riddle the subsurface of the LA basin like cracks on a broken car windshield. Moving a location a few hundred meters one way or another will make virtually zero difference in shaking intensity.

The situation here is not analogous to the Hayward fault area, where a few hundred meters could make a difference between houses sitting directly on the fault being torn apart by the expected 2 meters of movement, while those some distance away might "only" come off their foundations. Thrust faults, by contrast, often do not cause surface disruption; the shaking is the prime danger, and a big quake will ring the entire LA basin like a bell hit with a hammer.

So in short, once again misunderstandings of geology are being used to promulgate non-rational ideas. Many great cities have great transit systems--London, NY, DC. These system move people efficiently and swiftly, and don't shake the ground or cause methane to explode as trains pass. If one wants to oppose public transit because one doesn't want "those people" in one's neighborhood, fine--be honest and explicit with those sentiments. But don't misuse science in the service of such ideas.

What’s Wrong with Scientific Presentations

I’ve just finished attending the 2011 Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis, which means that in addition to giving a couple of talks about creationism in science education, I’ve sat through scores and scores of technical presentations by other scientists. While many of these talks were very well done, quite a number suffered from a set of similar mistakes that severely detracted from the speaker’s ability to get his or her points across.

It might therefore be worthwhile to consider some of the ways that scientific presentations fail to communicate, and how they could be better crafted for a conference such as GSA. Of course, I pontificate with this unrequested advice without hope that anything will ever change; because the majority of presentations repeat these errors, there is something deeper going on here, some mysterious magnetic force of obfuscation pulling presenters toward ineffective communication and away from talks that are clear, cogent, and concise.

Here, in my opinion, are some ways scientific talks could be made more effective.

Introduce yourself.

It sounds basic, but in almost no cases did I observe speakers taking a moment to say their name, their university affiliation, and what they do. Something as simple as, “Howdy, I’m Kilgore Trout, and I work on cephalopod paleontology at Miskatonic University” could work wonders toward helping the audience understand just who is talking to them. In most cases, I’m lost a minute into the presentation; I don’t remember who this person is, I don’t understand what he or she does, and I’m certainly lost as to the topic he or she is going to talk about.

State the main point. Repeat the main point at the end.

I can’t emphasize enough that scientific presentations tend to be detail-rich but context-poor. Many presentations begin with a long recitation of data in a table. The audience is left wondering, “What does this mean? What is this about? Why should I care?” Such questions are never answered. There’s just this continuous stream of data without any context. Audiences need the big picture, right up front.

If I were talking to the presenters one-on-one, I would stop them and ask, “Hey, hold on! Give it to me all in just one sentence.” This sort of big picture sentence is key in other industries. Movie pitches come in various lengths, including the “elevator pitch” that is a one or two sentence shot during a very brief social interaction, such as sharing an elevator ride. Scientists need to use more elevator pitches to communicate what they do.

A good presentation should start off with a sentence that explains what it’s all about. And don’t fear repeating this sentence. This is about the big picture--we need the big picture. In fact, the big picture may be the only thing that most audience members take away from a talk; they cannot, of course, absorb tables of numbers flashing by, but they might remember a major point--if

that point were ever articulated.

Lose the blue background with yellow text.

Too many slides are blue with yellow text; it's become a visual cliche. If I had my way, the option for a blue background would permanently disabled from all copies of PowerPoint (with the possible exception of UC Berkeley-related presentations. Go Bears!).

I do not know why blue is such a prevalent color in our society. People wear blue shirts; people wear blue jeans. The sky is blue; Miles Davis was kind of blue. Everywhere we are awash in blue, blue, blue. Enough with the blue already! Let’s have one thing in this world that isn’t frakking blue!

A significant percentage of the talks I've seen have one of these two backgrounds:

Both are distracting and over-used. Having a bad background to your talk is like trying to give your talk in a whisper while a hyperactive child is moving in front of your podium; no one is going to hear what you say with all that cranky business going on.

A white background with black text is perfectly acceptable; a white background with grey text looks pretty cool and Apple-like. Or a subtle textured background, like paper, with a faint three-dimensionality to it, can be very soothing to the eyes. Steve Jobs favored grey gradients for his presentations. All of these backgrounds work--just please stop making your background monotone blue with yellow text. There are other colors in the EMR spectrum.

Make the pictures bigger.

Almost every picture in the presentations I saw at GSA this year--and for that matter, at every scientific conference I’ve ever attended--was way too small. I think this “small picture syndrome” derives in a McLuhanesque way from the technology we use to construct presentations. People sit a foot or a foot and half from their computer screens; from their perspective at the keyboard, the details of the picture look fine. But for someone seeing the picture for the first time, it’s too small and becomes confusing. The audience leans forward in their seats trying to see what the picture shows. No one can really make it out. Then the slide changes and the process repeats, until the end of the talk. No one has really understood what the pictures were trying to show.

People also try to cram three or four pictures on every slide. Making a presentation is not a contest to maximize space; in fact, having open, unused space is preferable. Don’t crowd every slide; give the talk breathing room.

What makes the most sense of all is to use one picture per slide, with the picture taking up all the screen space. If you think a picture is important enough to put in your talk to other scientists, then blow it up big enough so they can actually see it. If it’s small enough to be ignored, then it’s unimportant enough to omit.

Another good strategy is to take a “detail” of a picture. This is what art books do; they show the whole picture, then follow with pages of details to help the reader see what’s going on in the painting. If you have a graphic taking up a lot of space, but you want to show a small sliver of it more detail, then making a transition slide that magnifies that sliver is a great idea, especially if you then drop back down to the original size to give context.

Make the figures bigger.

This is a general failing. I can’t remember how many times this year I saw speakers turn to a slide that had some figure on it, then apologize by saying, “You can’t probably can’t read this, but it says…” Urgh. If the audience can’t read it, why put it up at all? If the figure was so trivial that the audience did not need to see it, why waste time putting it up at all? If the figure was vital, why not make sure that people could actually see it?

I understand why this happens. People are dragging and dropping figures they’ve used in papers. They don’t want to remake the diagram. But it’s easy to remake your diagram in a way that will more clearly show what you’re talking about. Consider that for every major figure you have, you should make a “journal diagram” that will go with the submitted paper, and a simplified “presentation diagram” that is appropriate for slides.

Make the text bigger.

As with the size problem for graphics, most people make their presentation with their computer screens right up in their face. When it comes to the presentation, the font size that seemed right on their screens is now too small in the auditorium, and no one can read the slide.

It’s a typical fault. The solution is to grit one’s teeth and bump up all the font sizes larger than you think they need to be. I know that it looks wrong on the screen a few inches from your face, but when it’s projected on a screen a hundred feet from the audience, it will look fine.

Also, a note about PowerPoint: Microsoft likes to make fonts change size as you add more to a text box, and this can be gruesomely fatal to the look of your presentation. You need to turn this feature off and use only one font at one standard size throughout your presentations. Some may say, “Steve, I need to put more words there than will fit at that big font size.” To which I respond, “No. No, you don’t. You’re giving a talk, not writing a book. Use a word or two to prompt you, but speak the talk, rather than read the talk.” This point segues me to...

Don’t read slides word for word.

This is an embarrassingly-frequent problem. So many presentations consist of nothing more than the speaker reading, word-for-word, lengthy text. I know why people do this: they’re nervous they won’t know what to say, so they write everything out, word-for-word. Overcome your fear and learn to give a presentation.

This problem speaks to the need for required speech courses as part of everyone’s undergraduate curriculum. In my required speech course at Suisun Community College, I remember that the instructor spread consternation among the class when she announced that most of the talks would have to be done without notes of any kind, just speaking from memory. This is useful, and every college student should be forced to learn how to do it. The crutch of notes makes many presentations unlistenable.

In an ideal presentation, each slide would contain just one or two prompt words, perhaps to give the audience the spelling of an unusual word. But the screen would be filled with a large graphic that will capture their eyes. The speaker’s job is to use the laser pointer to explain what the graphic is showing. Every slide needs to have a graphic; however, in many presentations, it’s just blocks of text, one block after another, all of it read out loud by the speaker.

Because by necessity I can, like many academics, speed read, it takes me only a few seconds to scan a slide full of text. By the time the speaker has spoken the title, I’m done with the slide. So I sit there, my arms crossed, patiently waiting for the speaker to finish reading all the text. (I find these pauses a good time to make a move on the multiple WordsWithFriends games I have going on my iPhone.) Then the slide changes, and in a few seconds I’ve read it all, and the process starts anew. It’s unbearably boring. Reading to the audience makes the presentation deathly boring. Be the anti-Nike and Just Don’t Do It.

Use sans-serif fonts for titles, serif fonts for text.

This is a rule of thumb, not to be followed strictly, but it can be useful when thinking about laying out text. Headlines have much more visual punch when they are a narrow, closely-kerned sans-serif font. Text reads smoother to the eye with serifs.

A word of caution, though, is to avoid using more than two types of font on each slide. You can get away with a headline font and a text font, but if you go much beyond that then it becomes painful to the audiences’ eyes and distracts from the presentation.

An ideal font is one that balances readability with visuals aesthetics, all the while fading into the background like the soundtrack to a movie. If your audience thinks about your fonts, you’ve failed. If you audience gets distracted by your fonts, you’ve failed. Make the fonts as integral to the presentation as the calm tone of your voice.

Lose the centered text.

One of the first rules one learns in graphic design courses is to avoid centering text. Centered text looks juvenile; it’s something kids like to do. But as adults, we have better options. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t seem to hire people with graphics experience to put together its software, so a centered headline is a common default on PowerPoint themes. People can be forgiven for making their talks this way; in a McLuhanesque sense, they’re being directed to do so because it’s how their software wants them to do it.

But chose a better option. Left-justified text is fine; right-justified looks even more interesting. Choose one and stick with it.

Whatever you do, don’t mix type justifications on one slide. Make all text justified one way--left or right--and stick with that unless you have a very good reason. (One possible justification is to wrap text around a graphic, but that should be a rarity, no more than one slide per presentation.)

Use bullet points sparingly.

I just do not understand the thinking that goes into the design of Microsoft products. On almost every PowerPoint template, when you click in the text box to write what’s going to appear on your slide, the first thing that automatically happens is that you find yourself writing in a bulleted list. This is wrong on so many levels that there’s not space here to explain, but suffice it to say that bullets should be the rarity rather than the default; bullets have a place, but not with every line of text.

Microsoft’s default here pushes users toward making horrible-looking slides, in which all their text is arranged in some sort of half-assed, bullet-determined nested hierarchy. This is no way to make a slide. Avoid bullets and simply make your text justify without unneeded ornamentation.

Lose the “talk identification” on the first slide.

Many presentations started off by giving the date and the conference, in addition to the speaker. I’m left wondering: “Does this speaker think I don’t know where I am? Does this speaker think I am unaware of what day it is?” These completely unnecessary distractions need to be removed.

Lose the speaker/university/page number crawl along the bottom of each slide.

Some talks seemed to prepared according to some institutional template, so that each speaker has an identical looking slide, with the institution and slide number along the bottom. I can’t say enough how bad this looks. It’s as if the talk is some sort of branding exercise.

A talk is a performance. Anything that distracts from that performance needs to be burned away, until the only thing left is the core of what you’re trying to say. Distractions such as slide numbers are an egregious visual annoyance; frankly, when a talk has those, I find it hard to listen to the talk and my eyes are drawn away from the slide material to the bottom. Instead of hearing the speaker, all I can do it keep thinking to myself, “Jesus, that looks bad. Why would anyone do that?”

Lose the copyright symbols

A significant number of talks have little copyright symbols along the bottom of the page. The pretension that someone would actually want to steal your slides is preposterous. Also, if anyone did actually steal your data, then you would have proper legal recourse, even without a distracting and unnecessary copyright symbol.

Thoughts cannot be copyrighted, in any event, so once you’ve said something out in public then everyone else has fair rights to it. In the modern era, a good rule of thumb is that if you speak it or put it on the Internet, then it has now become public domain, in fact if not in legal practice (I’m one of those who thinks the openness of the Internet should change laws more than laws should change the Internet). Instead of imagining that a copyright symbol on the bottom of each page somehow protects you, a much better viewpoint is that the purpose of scientific conferences is to share information, openly, without restriction.

Lose the lengthy institutional thanks.

Many of the talks ended with a slide thanking all the people who helped with the project. That’s fine, but speaking at a scientific conference is not the same as winning the Oscars.

While I understand thanking individuals for their personal help, what makes even less sense are the institutional thanks. Sure, your work was helped out by an NSF grant. Fine. But do we really need to have our time taken up talking about this? Are presentations really the place for such a thing? If so, when does that stop? If I corner you outside in the hall and ask a few questions, which you answer with knowledge you gained in part from an NSF grant, are you then obligated to thank NSF after answering my questions? Is it something like the Intel duh-do-duhduda jingle that has to be chimed whenever Intel’s name is mentioned in a commercial?

There’s a time and place for thanks. And scientists should be thankful for the research money they receive (though I might argue because many grants are so small and miserly, some of that thanks might be given a bit tongue in cheek). But a presentation is a performance. You’re on stage. Seconds are counting down. Do musicians thank all of their music teachers after each concert? Did Picasso paint a thank you to his mentors at the bottom of each painting? When the amount of time thanking institutions who are not even there competes with the talk itself, it all seems a bit much.

Finally, don’t use PowerPoint.

Many academics use Macs, but of these, the majority still use PowerPoint to write their presentations. This makes a certain amount of sense; people keep doing what they are accustomed to doing, and PowerPoint has been around a long time. But there is far superior presentation software available, Apple’s Keynote.

In every way, Keynote runs smoother, quicker, and can do a lot more than PowerPoint. Using a Microsoft product on a Macintosh is like swapping out the engine on a Porsche with the engine from a Yugo. Sure, the car may still run … sort of. But there’s no reason to use such a primitive, clunky, and underpowered program as PowerPoint on a race car computer such as a Mac.

One downside to using Keynote to write talks is that most computers are PCs and therefore only run PowerPoint. A simple solution is to export your finished Keynote presentation as a pdf; this preserves your slides exactly as they appear to you. This can also be a good way to make sure you don’t have any font issues; you may use a splendid ornate font that is installed on your computer, but if you transfer your PPT to another computer that doesn’t have that font already installed, then it won’t display correctly. Pdfs are a good way to overcome this.

Pdfs also load up fine on PCs, and you can run them full-screen simply by changing the View to View Slideshow. Pdf files do not preserve transitions, but you really shouldn’t use a lot of cute transitions--text bouncing into place, or swooping all over the screen--unless you are 12 year-old who finds such distracting gimmicks amusing.

Well, that’s it. Over the years, I've made all these mistakes in my own presentations (and may still do so in the future!). But creating talks that are even a little bit clearer will help communicate science.

Scuttling Our Fleet

Last week, the final mission of space shuttle program completed with the safe touchdown of Atlantis in Florida. With this landing, the American manned space program came to an official, ignominious end. This bitter defeat comes not from a foreign enemy, or from a technological failure--but from the conscious, deliberative, mistaken choice by America to withdraw from space.

Historians regard with bewilderment at the 1433 decision by China to destroy the immense treasure ships of Cheng Ho, and to abandon its flourishing trading routes throughout the Indian Ocean. The size and scale of Cheng Ho’s expeditions is best grasped by the fact that nearly a century later, when the European explorers of Magellan’s voyage first entered this region of the world, many of the locals still prized artifacts, such as fine porcelain, acquired by trading with Cheng Ho’s fleet. Despite the potential of this empire building, one day in 1433 China inexplicably chose to discard its budding empire and withdraw from the world for over five hundred years.

Historians may look upon the end of the space shuttle program, 21 July 2011, as a similar day for the United States.

Generations of Americans have taken for granted the possibility that our best and brightest might one day achieve the dream of becoming an astronaut. Now we no longer have a manned spaceflight program, though it is possible Americans may still travel to the ISS--as passengers on Russian craft. The unearthing of irony is one of the prime motivators for historians, yet this irony is so hyperbolic as to strain credulity.

Astronaut Story Musgrave put it this way:

“Why are we so poor in our vision and so poor in our project management that we come to a point where it's reasonable to phase out the current program and we have no idea what the next one is? … Washington is in total failure that this has happened.”

Just as America has decided to abandon the frontier of space, American science stands at a precipice. American students are fleeing from science; enrollments in scientific disciplines hover in the lower single digits, while more lucrative fields--business administration, accounting, finance--swell with students. But the problems of American education are not restricted to science education.

Americans are spurning higher education, though advanced training has never been more vital to high-paying employment. The United States used to be first among other nations in the percentage of 25-34 year-olds who had earned college degrees; now we are number twelve, behind Belgium and Russia. One-third of universities saw graduation rates fall in the years between 2002 and 2008. Instead of helping this problem by lowering college costs, we are choosing instead to make it more difficult and expensive to attend college; in 2009, the University of California, one of the largest public university systems in the world, decided to raise tuition 32% in one year, making even a public education unaffordable even for many students born in the lower middle classes.

We like to imagine that America is first in every field, but in science the real figure is number twenty-nine; American students rank 29th in science abilities, behind Croatia and the Czech Republic.

Even as we are choosing to fail, other countries are choosing to thrive. The People’s Republic of China is rapidly gaining ground in the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers published English; it is estimated that by 2013, the PRC will publish more scientific papers than America.

Yet this crisis elicits not even a dim reflection of the panic that consumed the country after the Sputnik launch. There are no calls for massive funding for education, no calls for increasing the number of federally-funded scientific research positions, no call for augmenting the number of science professorships at universities so that some of the PhDs snared in perpetual post-doc hell can finally begin their full research careers instead of spending all their time bumping from one temporary job to another. Such fixes are not even remotely part of the discussion.

Instead, on the same day that Atlantis touched down in Florida, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives informed the president that he was ending negotiations over the increase of the federal debt limit, a once-trivial formality needed to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States. Instead of addressing the problems of science, political leaders are consumed with petty games of chicken. Just as during the invasion of Iraq, Americans workers setting up the occupation infrastructure were forced to follow OSHA regulations in the middle of an active war zone, our entire government now seems paralyzed with meaningless theatre while an ominous threat looms. It is as if the captain of the Titanic ordered his officers to make sure their compasses were in calibration even as the ship sank.

Manned spaceflight is not the only scientific casualty of these misplaced priorities. In April, an important radio telescope array in California was forced to shutter its operations for lack of funds . For scientific discoveries in astronomy, or paleontology, or high energy physics, one must increasingly look outside the United States. We have decided to withdraw.

Who would have thought that as scientific research blossom elsewhere--in the PRC, at CERN--the United States would be pulling back? Who would have thought that a little over a half century following Sputnik, the Russians would have finally fulfilled Khrushchev’s taunt and buried the United States?

But then, during the height of the treasure fleet, how could Cheng Ho have known that the forces of irrationality and incorrect decisions would so easily overwhelm progress?

new landslide hazard map

The California Geological Survey has released a new map of landslide hazard that reinforces some of the incontrovertible facts about the equation that governs landslides in the Bay Area:

slope angle + clay expansion + weak rock + rain = landslide

The last variable, rain, is one that is peculiar in the Bay Area. We're moderately arid--not as many inches as Seattle, far more than Barstow. But the signature of Bay Area rains is that they come all at once, in catastrophic storms that funnel into the Bay Area across the Pacific as if by a pipeline. The effect of this is saturation, and the effect of saturation is overland runoff, water literally unable to soak into the receiving clay. This runoff can have an ferocious erosive effect, transforming stable slopes in a matter of hours to undercut, unstable, moving landscapes.

As the San Jose Mercury News has reported, this is bad news for Marin County. Marin is blessed with steep, interesting hills of schist and serpentinite and chert. But the vertiginous fractured Franciscan landscape are both weak and steep, simply waiting for a slight nudge, in the form of water weight and lubrication. And unlike the East Bay, where the mountainous regions are sparsely developed, Marin has extensive building on very steep slopes.

As bad as this is, it gets worse. As was recently discussed at a conference in Sacramento, California faces a risk from periodic "megastorms," called ArkStorms, which can deluge the state with biblical rain.

Earthquake predictions, and the coming storm

Citizens of Rome are frightened that an earthquake is about to occur:

Thousands of people are reported to be staying out of Rome for the next few days, over fears the city will be hit by a huge earthquake.

The panic was sparked by rumours that seismologist Raffaele Bendandi, who died in 1979, predicted the city would be devastated by a quake on 11 May ...

But many people said they were leaving the city to be on the safe side.

There are reports of an 18% increase in the number of city employees planning to stay away from work

The magnitude of this silliness is shocking.

Earthquake prediction has never been able to pinpoint an exact day and time of a quake. This may be a goal forever out of reach of seismologists; the same nonlinear dynamics that make short-term weather prediction impossible more than about a week ahead are involved in the dynamics of earthquakes, meaning that very slight changes in initial conditions produce very different results.

But, in a very real way, this doesn't matter.

Geologists still know 1) where earthquakes will occur in the future, 2) how large they will be in the future, 3) approximately how many people they will kill in a given urban area, based upon existing buildings, and 4) a range of time, in years, when the earthquake, based on past events, is most likely to occur.

For example, on the world's deadliest urban fault, the Hayward Fault, geologists know exactly where the fault lies. In fact, its traces through the San Francisco East Bay are unmistakeable, in thousands of offset foundations, building cracks, and sidewalks buckled by creep. We know where the fault is, and because the subsurface geometry of Hayward goes (unlike many other faults) pretty much straight down, we have a reasonable idea that epicenters will be focused along the fault trace.

We also know approximately how large the coming quake will be. Right now there is thought to be enough stored energy in the rocks to produce a >6.7 Mw quake. That will be quite devastating in proximity to so many homes. We know that the tens of thousands of unreinforced brick buildings in the Bay Area will likely mean casualties on the scale of Japan's 1992 Kobe quake, which killed 1994, which killed over 6400 people.

We also know when we can expect the Hayward to rupture, based on trench work that has revealed a long-term record of past events. According to the great work of Jim Lienkaemper, of the USGS, the recurrence interval of the Hayward ranges from about 161 years, plus or minus 65 years, to 170 years, plus or minus 82 years. For the five most recent big quakes, however, the recurrence interval is only 138 years, plus or minus 58 years.

The last big Hayward Fault event was the quake of 1868, which was 143 years ago. That means by the last-five measurements, we are squarely in the time zone for the next quake, though we, in fact, entered the lower range of this in 1948. By 2064, we are virtually guaranteed to have the quake, though it most likely will occur well before this. Likewise, with the 161 and 170 numbers, we long ago entered the time zone where the quake is primed and ready to occur. This is not good news for us, but it is a prediction, one verified by much scientific research.

So when people ask when the next big quake will be, we can tell them that geologists know where, when, and how bad it will be. This usually comes as a surprise. People are looking for some sort of 3-day warning, which does not exist. People--and municipalities--need to start preparing for the guaranteed seismic event in the near future, rather than imagining scientists are somehow going to come up with a warning as they would with an approaching storm.

quakes can drop land

We often think of sea level as the height of water relative to the land. But geologists know that the land is also in motion, somewhat complicating measurements of rising sea level. (Alaska, which is tectonically rising, records less apparent sea level rise than elsewhere, for example.) In cases where land is subsiding, sea level rise may actually seem augmented. And no part of the Earth underwent a quicker subsidence than areas of coastal Japan during the great quake of 11 March 2011.

As a recent story confirms,

The March 11 earthquake that hit eastern Japan was so powerful it pulled the entire country out and down into the sea. The mostly devastated coastal communities now face regular flooding, because of their lower elevation and damage to sea walls from the massive tsunamis triggered by the quake.

One of my professors of geology remembers camping on a beach the night of the 1992 Mendocino earthquake, and finding in the morning that the coastline had been visibly uplifted, exposing mussell-covered rocks now well-above the high tide line, dooming their sessile molluscan tenants.

While we human like to imagine the solid land as solidly fixed in one place, the reality is far more complex, though our short life spans rarely allow us to the opportunity to observe changes first hand. This the nature of deep time; we can see the long term effects of geologic changes but usually only indirectly observe them occurring.

Japan is an exception:

Some areas in Ishinomaki moved southeast 17 feet (5.3 meters) and sank 4 feet (1.2 meters) lower.

"We thought this slippage would happen gradually, bit by bit. We didn't expect it to happen all at once," says Testuro Imakiire, a researcher at Japan's Geospatial Information Authority, the government body in charge of mapping and survey.

The now permanent situation in Japan should give those of us who live in California a moment of pause to reflect on how quickly the land around may one day change.

magma ocean on Io

Students always come to intro geology courses with the misconception that beneath our thin, rocky crust, there exists an ocean of magma. Intro geology students imagine that volcanoes are simply breaches in this ocean, where pressure forces this liquid rock to spew out.

The reality, of course, is that the mantle is solid, not liquid. The mantle's ability to flow over time makes it seem liquid-like, but it is in fact quite crystalline. Beginning geology students have no end of trouble over this distinction; maybe it's something wrong with the way I teach it, but I'd say at least a quarter of students just never quite get this fundamental fact about the earth. And when I throw in decompression and flux melting, students really start to have difficulty.

Now, to add to the confusion, it seems that Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, does in fact have a "magma ocean." In fact, estimates are that about 10% of the volume of Io involves liquified material. This may account for Io's strikingly-intense volcanic activity. Compared to our relatively tame planet, Io has frequent volcanic activity.

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.

Dam Failures

One of the worst ways to deny science is to ignore hazards to health, hazards which are well-understood by science. One of the least known dangers we face is from dam collapse.

During the early part of the 20th century, America's rivers became dammed at a prodigious rate. Virtually every major American river is dammed at multiple points. Virtually every dam is silting rapidly behind the dam, as the normal sediment flow is interrupted.

All dams are temporary, geologically-speaking. And our nation's dams, like so much of our infrastructure, are not holding up well.

As this recent report in the New York Times details, if you have water flowing out of your tap, you live downstream from a dam. You might not be directly in the flow expected from a dam failure, but many of your neighbors are.

Britain, the peninsula

When sea level started rising from its low point 17,000 years ago, the coastline of the world were dramatically changed. According to this recent BBC report,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12244964

Britain remained a peninsula, connected to Normandy, until 6,100 years ago, when a titanic tsunami inundated what would become the English Channel. So much for those wankers who say Britain shouldn't be in the EU.

Cops, or Libraries?

In reality this is not an either/or choice, but the police union in Los Angeles has just officially come out against libraries.

The union that represents LAPD officers came out strongly today against Measure L, an item on the March 8 ballot that would set aside funding for the Los Angeles Public Library system.

In a statement, Los Angeles Police Protective League President Paul Weber said the measure "will create more problems than it solves"

Although this seems typical for a state that spends more on its prison system and its university system, yet it is remarkable to see such posturing to plainly.

One way to guarantee disorder and strife is to create artificial scarcity. Scarcity pits cops against libraries, university students against administrators, families against banks. Only by reforming the financing of such institutions as libraries, universities, and the police force can we hope to end such useless, futile conflicts. It is the current chaotic financing system for public institutions that should be shut down, not libraries.

Academically Adrift

A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, offers refreshing insights into the problems plaguing higher education. Based on information from over 2,000 students on 24 United States campuses, Academically Adrift paints a disturbing picture of the failures of modern education.

In short, students are not working hard enough:

1. Students are not spending enough hours studying : only 12-14 per week. Most of that time is spent in “group” study sessions that are little more peer socializing with a veneer of self-deceptive justification that studying might be occurring. The study also found that solo studiers fared better.
2. Students are not learning enough in some majors. Business majors, for example, showed far fewer educational gains than those in liberal arts. This reflects the non-academic, vocational emphasis of business courses compared to the intellectual challenges offered by courses in literature, rhetoric, and philosophy.
3. Students are not being required to read or write enough. This is hardly a surprise, considering that so many college students are unable to form even basic ideas into coherent sentences.
4. Students involved in fraternities and sororities learned less. This is, again, no surprise, as such socialization can only detract from time available for studying.
5. Arum & Roska’s work concludes with the damning statistic that 45% of students see no improvement in their first two years of college work, and 36% fail to have improvement over all four years of college.