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Geology sonnet roundup

Firstly, I would like to place all six science week sonnets (plus the bonus poem) in stratigraphic order.  That is, youngest rocks described at the top. An analysis will follow the poetry:

A pox on all those proxies non-unique

Which make interpretation hard to do.

Magnesium to calcium we seek

Sea temp'rature, and not pCO₂.

So lithium, uranium are used

to disambiguate the Mg curve

O. umbonatus data's not recused.

Antarctic ice growth isotopes observe,

But whence the melting in the Miocene?

Here isotopes of carbon join our tale,

And sedimentary burndown in marine

Organic carbon makes the icecap fail.

  Antarctic ice was thawed by CO₂

  Let's try repeating this effect anew.

Just Sixty-six million short years ago

(Though Deccan volcanism coincides)

The Yucatan was smote a cosmic blow

And the Gulf shelf collapsed in those fell tides

Late Cretaceous sediments were scoured,

Deposited as “boundary cocktail.”

Unsorted forams, lime mudstone, powered

By Chicxulub-induced collapse of shale

The wildcatters call the seismic line

“Middle Cretaceous Unconformity”

Not middle, end; deluvian, malign,

Complete destructive uniformity

  The Mesozoic ended with this splat

  So Gerta Keller, please hang up your hat

The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province

Erupted tholiitic and potassic.

C O two upset atmospheric balance.

Eco-collapse ended the Triassic.

Green sulfur bacteria’s isotopes

Show photic zone euxinia prevailed.

Stomatal size decreased (show microscopes)

And carbon biomass was soon curtailed.

Compound-specific isotopes will tell

Which phytoplankton thrived in these tough times,

While wax from leaves and calcite from a shell

Record recovery in clastic slimes.

  The Triassic ended as it began

  Can those extinctions be surpassed by man?

Australia is a dry and stable land.

No mountain range, no active slipping fault,

And yet this plain had lava seas erupt.

We call them Kalkarindji flood basalt.

It’s hard to know just when these rocks were formed.

The weathering and rock type complicates

Radiometric dates of dykes that swarmed

When seas contained the first protochordates.

For ten long years they searched the outback rocks

For grains unhurt since fossils first were formed.

In hopes the nucleii-related clocks

Survived half billion years, still undeformed.

  510 MA, a date of some distinction.

  Flood basalts can lead to mass extinction.

Enough with carbon, climate variation

Let’s look at rocks from a far older time,

Which lacked much copper mineralization,

And when anorthosites were at their prime.

Earth’s middle age- boring for a reason?

Tectonics were remarkably unchanged.

Ice and iron were both out of season.

A billion years of uniform exchange

Of isotopes, strontium, and S

The active margins ringed the continent.

Slow, steady mantle cooling caused the process

Strong lithosphere held melts incipient

  It ended with Rodinia dispersion

  Which led to Earth’s exciting, current version.

Nobody studies fucking iodine.

The halogen too rare for us to care,

But iodate to carbonate’s inclined

So we might have a useful proxy there.

This IO₃ requires oxygen,

And thus does not exist in reduced seas.

Its presence in old carbonates means then

Ozone and oxygen were in the breeze.

Archean carbonates do not have I,

But it appears when O first graced the air.

And thus another tool is forged, whereby

Our planet’s past can be unearthed to share.

  This gas we breathe controls the biosphere.

  We’d like to know what made it first appear.

The Schrödinger bacteria’s Barsoom,

Where robots scan the wadi of the Styx.

There died, or never lived a microbe bloom

When déjà vu and Dejah Thoris mix,

Her hungry eyes fixed on Hadean seas,

Lowell’s canal dream just an aquifer.

The playa droid with X-ray vision sees;

Areocalcrete Earthings soon infer.

With carbonate and opal intergrown,

Australia’s prayer of cheap uranium,

As vengeful Ares, orbited by drone

Blends nukes and life within his cranium

  Thus Opportunity grinds sands of time

  Which mortals fancy Ceres made of lime.

Thus ends what is possibly the least effective science awareness effort ever. I made it.  A sonnet a day, pulled from the pages of Geology, for the last 6 days of Science Week. And a bonus one earlier today, to try out some ideas I had while thinking up this post. If I wanted to kid myself, I would say that my failure was that I picked something too popular, and that the sonnets got lost in the celebrity gossip and other pop culture frivolity that haunts this form on the internet.  If only I had gone for American Mineralogist Villanelles.

This is not an entirely honest assessment. It was a tricky brief.  For the first few sonnets (1, 2, 4), I was basically seeing how well or badly I could jam technical terms and concepts into the structure without irreparably breaking the sonnet form, and still extracting the basic gist of the paper.  With 3 and 6, I was trying to show what it was about the study that was really clever- trying to channel the scientific genius in verse, with less of an emphasis on the story or terminology.  And with 5, I was aiming to show the difficulty in getting any data at all for that system, and emphasizing the blood, sweat, and tear aspect of research. Still, there are some core issues relating to good poetry and science writing which remain unresolved.

Others have written at length on the place of metaphor in science writing.   Personally, I think that it can be dangerous, and easily done misleadingly. Science is more like a murder mystery than an allegory. The particulars of who knows what when and how they determine it are generally more important than the anthropomorphisation of the interpretation of the day, but that isn’t always easy to put in verse. 

On the other hand, poetry without metaphor ain’t all that. It is worth at least linking Poe’s Sonnet to Science, which kind of set the mold of science as imagination-killing dreariness.  But the thing that he never realized, is that the universe is stranger and more bizarre than our imaginations.  So it is worth at least trying to convey the breadth and depth of a natural world which is stranger and more wonderful than anything we can possibly imagine without studying it, and then let our feeble human brains decorate those secrets which our scientific labour finally pries from the Earth. Furthermore, most poetry these days doesn’t really aim for accessibility or exposition.  So for 7, I maxxed the metaphor and theme, and didn’t even try to explain.

Overall, it was a fun exercise, and the overwhelming density of explanatory prose evident in the 3QD metrics makes me glad I tried, even if it was too obtuse and catless to interest much of the internet.

Geosonnet 7

The Schrödinger bacteria’s Barsoom,

Where robots scan the wadi of the Styx.

There died, or never lived a microbe bloom

When déjà vu and Dejah Thoris mix,

Her hungry eyes fixed on Hadean seas,

Lowell’s  canal dream just an  aquifer.

The playa droid with X-ray vision sees;

Areocalcrete Earthings soon infer.

With carbonate and opal intergrown,

Australia’s prayer of cheap uranium,

As vengeful Ares, orbited by drone

Blends nukes and life within his cranium

  Thus Opportunity grinds sands of time

  Which mortals fancy Ceres made of lime.

Geology 42 359

Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

3QD blogging contest metadata

The long-lived, old-school blogging site 3 quarks daily is holding its annual science blogging contest  They have nominated eighty-five blog posts upon which one can vote to advance it into the finals round.  In theory, this means that everyone voting should read all 85 posts, and make an honest choice.  If that doesn't work, then they should at least skim each post- OK, how about simply clicking the links and glancing at them?

Having done the latter, I doubt more than a few percent of the people who actually vote will do the former.  Because, in addition to clinking the links, I have gone the extra mile micron and extracted their metadata.  And this is how I’m pretty sure not many people are going to read all 85 entries this week- they total over 128,000 words, more than a hefty novel, or two skinny ones. I will summarize it here, for potential voters who want to pretend to be voting knowledgeably, but are too lazy even to look at text summaries.

With the exception of a song (complete with ukulele chords) and a dialogue, the nominated blog posts are all expository prose.  Most of them are written in a serious tone, although there is a smattering of snark, cutsiness, and metaphor. One is written in Spanish, the rest are in English.

Figure 1.  The log of science post length, showing a high end tail.

The length distribution of the nominated blog posts is not normal.  In fact, it is not even log normal (figure 1), as there is a surplus of nominees in excess of 2000 words and/or a deficit of nominees less than 700 words (incidentally, that is the length of a standard print newspaper column). The lengths range from just over 300 words (the song) to just shy of 5000 words, with a mean of about 1200 and a median of about 1500.

  

All but seven of the entries are illustrated. Nine have imbedded video, sixteen list references, two have data tables. Seven entries feature text grabs- featuring (machine unreadable) text presented in image format.  The type of text presented this way varies widely, spanning twitter screengrabs to scanned informal handwriting to page captures of ancient books.

The relationship between the number of images and the number of words is not clear.  I have (arbitrarily) divided the posts up into two groups (figure 2). A small, highly illustrated group, in which the number of illustrations scales with the length of the post, and a main, less illustrated group, where the number of illustrations is essentially unrelated to text length. In the highly illustrated group, there is about one additional figure per 400 words, but the zero word intercept is still quite high- six.

Figure 2. Post length vs. number of imbedded images (embedded text excluded). Groupings are done via eyeball, not statistics.

Hopefully this summary will inform your choices of which articles to read and consider.  Please don’t make any voting choices solely on the metadata.  You are, after all, a human, and not a Facebook algorithm. And sure, if you want to nominate this post for the 2015 contest, I won’t stop you.

A summary table is below:

site	title	words	images	video	text grabs	references (1=present)	table
3 Quarks Daily	The Dictionary is not Literature	2539	1
Action Science Theater	How to fall and miss the ground	541	4	1
Aeon	Cows Might Fly	3473	1
American Science	The Curious History of the Paleo-Diet, and its Relationship to Science & Modernity	2194	3
An Evolutionist's Perspective	The Woes of Capitalism:  Kinship, Sociality and Economy	1433	0
Ars Technica	Could dark matter be hiding in plain sight in existing experiments?	1085	1
Babies Learning Language	Shifting our cultural understanding of replication	3158	0
BBC	The quest to save the Hollywood bison	1443	4
Beach Chair Scientist	Mother Nature vs  Santa Claus	711	0	1	4
Brainwaves	Searching For The Elephant’s Genius Inside the Largest Brain on Land	1502	1
Charismatic Minifauna	Bats have sparkly poop	606	4
Chemically Cultured	That love-hate supervisor relationship	411	0		12
Cocktail Party Physics	Seen and Unseen:  Could There Ever Be a “Cinema Without Cuts”?	2400	2	4		1
Comparatively Psyched	The Robin's Song	1302	2			1
Curious Meerkat	Eating Insects	1827	3	1			1
Eat Your Brains Out	Science and the Supernatural	3802	4		1
Ecology & Evolution	And to the victor the spoiled	474	1
Ecology & Evolution	The Heat and Light of Science Communication	1045	1			1
Ecology & Evolution	The Science of Scientific Whaling	1207	2
Ecology & Evolution	What is(n’t) palaeontology like?	884	2
Ecology & Evolution	What’s it like to study Zoology?	896	1
Errant Science	Tradition, in Science	767	2		1
Eruptions	So, You Think Yellowstone Is About to Erupt	1295	1
Genotopia	Hail Britannia! (Dorkins Reviews Wade)	1759	1
Genotopia	On city life, the history of science, and the genetics of race	2298	3
Grrlscientist	Influenza:  How the Great War helped create the greatest pandemic ever known	2088	4			1
Hawkmoth	On Wildness	494	9
Huffpost	A Few Short Rules on Being Creative	1313	1
Illumination	GMO Leukemia Outbreak in China	471	1		4
Inkfish	Scientists Ask Why There Are So Many Freaking Huge Ants	913	1
Leaving Plato's Cave	The Meta-lympics:  a catalyst for scientific discovery	1076	4
Limulus	Living Fossils	771	8		8
Napoli Unplugged	Procida:  Picture Perfect	881	12
Napoli Unplugged	Vesuvius at Night	897	4
Nautilus	The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face	1599	5
Neurobabble	Parasitic wasps vs.  zombie cockroaches	785	1
Neurobabble	Technology and the adolescent brain	1112	1
Neurobabble	What sign languages have taught us about our brains	1198	2	2
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense	When the going gets tough, mutualism gets going	885	3	1		1
Pacific Standard	Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland	782	1
Patrick F	Clarkin, PhD:  Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem	4343	3			1
Pen Sapiens	Monkey See, Monkey Yawn	764	1			1
Peter Pearsal	A Desert Orogeny	995	5
Planetizen	The Wicked Problem of Urban Biodiversity, pt 1	897	0
Psychology Today	Love, Love Medulla:  The Neuroscience of Beatlemania	1181	6			1
Preposterous Universe	How Quantum Field Theory Becomes “Effective”	3553	5
Preposterous Universe	Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics Is Probably Correct	2525	2
Prophage	Modest Data Reported From Oxford Nanopore's Exciting MinION Sequencing Platform	724	2			1
Scicurious	Addiction showcases the brain's flexibility	1086	1
Science Explained	Knock, Knock Who’s there?	423	4
Science Sushi	Did Allergies Evolve To Save Your Life?	1925	3			1
Science Sushi	Muscles Love Oxytocin:  So-Called “Hug Hormone” Important In Muscle Regeneration	767	1			1
Sexual Selection and Life History Evolution	Aesthetics, mathematics, physics and biology	1255	3
Skulls in the Stars	How *do* cats land on their feet when falling, anyway?	2336	14
Slate	Promiscuity Is Pragmatic	1054	3
Space	Hazard, Risk, and the Steelhead (Oso) Landslide in Washington	1099	8
Space	Real Atmospheric Science in Stargate:  Atlantis	1696	9
Starts With A Bang	22 Messages of Hope (and Science) for Creationists	1555	14
Starts With A Bang	How is the Universe bigger than its age?	1488	11	1
Stuff About Space	The Strangest Star:  A Neutron Star Inside a Red Giant	1021	2
Synthetic Daisies	Playing the Long Game of Human Biological Variation	1021	6			1
Synthetic Daisies	The game of evolution	3507	17			1	2
The Bleeding Edge	Butterflies	2252	1
The Book of Science	Photosynthesis	355	0
The Conversation	Despite metamorphosis, moths hold on to memories from their days as a caterpillar	988	4
The Conversation	The ancient Greek riddle that helps us understand modern disease threats	902	1
The Conversation	Why cold-blooded animals don’t need to wrap up to keep warm	608	1
The Last Word On Nothing	What Luis Alvarez Did	1654	2
The Loom	The Wisdom of (Little) Crowds	1726	1
The Mermaid's Tale	Are bees intelligent?	1416	2	1
The Mermaid's Tale	The visible colors and the falseness of human races as natural categories	2479	2
The Mermaid's Tale	Whooza good gurrrrrl? Whoozmai bayyyy-bee boy?	1839	10		1
The Neurocritic	Existential Neuroscience:  a field in search of meaning	1838	5			1
The Neurocritic	When Waking Up Becomes the Nightmare:  Hypnopompic Hallucinatory Pain	1161	5			1
The New Yorker	The Power of the Hoodie-Wearing C.E.O.	1267	1
The Philosopher's Beard	Love's Labours Lost:  How Robots Will Transform Human Intimacy	4822	2
The Trenches of Discovery	The human machine:  obsolete components	2572	4
Things We Don't Know	Squid Lady Parts	1350	5			1
Too Long For Twitter	New neuroscience on why we dream	3052	2
Tree Town Chemistry	How One Scientist Broke in to Professional Craft Brewing	847	1
Unthink	Five Things Scientists Know About Romance	913	0
Weekend Adventure	The Wild Inside	1298	5
Wired	Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?	3328	5	1
Wired	What is brain death?	1603	1
You've Got Some Science On You	Infection:  It's all a matter of perspective	973	2
Total		128775	283	13	31	16	3
mean		1515	3.33	1.4	4.4	1	1.5
median		1207	2			1	1.5