In 2003, while I was still living in the dorms, there was a weekend night I couldn’t sleep. About 2 in the morning, I heard a big commotion outside and brushed it off- closing time, drunks going home. It was only later I found out I’d missed my chance to see a huge bolide that streaked across three states.
Thanks, Yesterday’s Big Midwest Fireball, for reminding me to continue kicking myself.
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We spruced up the page some— including fixing some nerdy stuff you don’t care about and adding links to some pretty pictures (up top) you might.
Also, they found spinel on the moon. I think (and Wikipedia confirms) that spinel, besides being a metamorphic mineral, shows up in chemically primitive mantle rocks, like peridotite, so it makes a little sense to show up on the volcanic, olivine-rich moon but, still, not something they were expecting to see.
Spinel, from Wikimedia Commons (through NASA)
In other not-expecting-to-see news, I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the future but, for some reason, it appears that even though they redshift as expected, quasars don’t show time dilation. That sentence should make cosmologists uncomfortable six ways from Sunday.
In local news, my father noticed this hole in a pipe near Pixie Falls.
Looks pretty gross— iron, oxidizing from the inside of the pipe, dumping right into Whatcom Creek? The same Whatcom Creek that people fish beneath Dupont and C Street? I guess that the Olympic Pipeline disaster didn’t stop them to begin with, but, again— pretty gross.
In global news, pretty disturbing to come home to news of poor Poland’s terrible tragedy. The extent of the experience lost alone is devastating— looking at the list of people who died and thinking about the psychohistorical significance of the place it occurred, it’s akin to Barack and Michelle, Hillary Clinton and two of her deputies, Rahm Emmanuel, Mike Mullen, all of the Joint Chiefs, the head of the NSA, a famous actor in his seventies (Robert Redford?), multiple famous historians (Ken Burns? The Team of Rivals guy?) and a group of Bataan Death March survivors and their relatives all dying in a plane crash flying into the Philippines to attend a commemoration. Only, really, the analogy breaks down at the psychohistorical point; I can’t think of anything like Katyn as close to our own borders and involving a neighbor with whom we have as complicated a relationship as the Warsaw-Pact-plus-things-like-Katyn-and-Solidarity Poland-Russia cagematch. Very sad day— cross your fingers that it was “just” a plane crash and not something that lends itself to conspiracy in the least.
Here’s a real email I received at 7:56 today, the first day of labs for the quarter.
“(My name),
I made a very bad mistake thinking my lab was thursday and just realized i missed the first day, so I was hoping that you could tell me what I missed and where to go from here, possible even meet sometime to get what i missed. I emailed Dr. (Professor) already, so i could appreciate if there’s anything you could do for me or what i need to do. THank you, (his name)”
And here’s a completely real event I heard about for the first time today.
Later that decade, Davis led a quasi-covert operation that recorded the vaginal contractions of ballerinas with the Boston Ballet and other women, then translated this impetus of human conception into text, music, phonetic speech and ultimately into radio signals, which were beamed from M.I.T.’s Millstone radar to Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti and two other nearby star systems… The Air Force soon found out about the million-watt Poetica Vaginal broadcast, as Davis calls it, and shut it down.
..
“The images of humans placed aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft show impeccably groomed men that lack any facial and body hair,” Davis hoots, “and women with no external genitalia.” Poetica Vaginal was in part a response to this curious censorship. “By making this attempt to communicate with the other,” he explains, “we’re really communicating with ourselves.”
The top photo is the hunk of quartz I’m going to carve up for the inestimable Boy Sam, who took me out to see the hallowed Phyllite Pile this weekend. This is the smaller of two pieces that I’m going to clean up with a steel carbide pick and etcher (thanks Fred Meyer 50% off tool sale!). The picture on the bottom is a close-up of some feldspar that showed up on some of the quartz chunks; microcline?
Sam and Devin dot com 