Geosonnet 53

An opal is the desert’s hidden gem

Precipitating from a torrid brine

Geologists from arid zones condemn

Ideas that ice, not heat, can redefine.

The glacial polish, hiding in plain sight

Amorphous silica precipitate

Dissolved from glacial floured andesite

It coats the scoured rock with silicate.

Will Coober Pedy yield to Mawson Base?

Should new chums and their ratters venture south?

Probably not; a glaze on orthoclase

Will not put food in hungry digger’s mouth.

   For chemical erosion makes a rind

   So thin that only TEM can find

Geology 47 347

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Sierra Sequoias from space

I wrote last year about the big trees of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. One if the things that interested me was the ability of the Sequoia and the Sugar Pine to grow side-by-side, despite having very similar survival strategies- namely grow taller than everything else and live long enough for fire to clear our the shade tolerant trees so that your seeds can germinate.

Of course, as anyone who spends time on the forest knows, despite these trees having similar niches, they look quite different. The both have large trunks often bare of branches for the first 100 feet, but their vegetation has different forms. The Sugar Pine has very long, straight lateral branches, like the spars of a ship, while the sequoia crowns are more rounded. And because these trees are very large, it turns out that you can easily distinguish them in Google Earth. Here is a screenshot of the same grove I wrote about last year:

You can clearly see the long lateral branches on the pines (which also have somewhat bluer foliage). The larger, yellower trees with very wide trunks and rounded foliage are the sequoias.

Unfortunately, the sugar pine is in decline in many areas of its range, Here is a picture of dying trees in the national forest just south of the park:

The most obvious thing here is that the Sugar Pines are mostly dead. But there are other differences. Unlike in the National Park, here you cannot see the ground- the trees are growing too close together. One critique of the Forest Service is that it as lagged behind the Park Service in the use of controlled burns and recurrent fires. While I don't have the fire history of this exact area, the much thicker understory could be the result of decades of fire suppression. And if those trees are sucking up all the water, perhaps that has stressed the pines.

Molten metal metamorphosis

The Australian Aluminium smelting industry is having a rough time. Built to utilize electricity from Australian coal from the 1960’s through the 1980’s, our smelters are ill equipped to deal with the migration of the Aluminium industry to a rapidly industrializing China or cheap low-carbon energy areas such as Iceland or New Zealand. As a result, the Kurri Kurri smelter closed in 2012, the Point Henry smelter closed in 2014, and the future for the Portland smelter is currently uncertain, with the contract for electricity due to be renegotiated this month.

At the same time, Australia is lagging the rest of the developed world in the transition to low emissions electricity. Although certain jurisdictions, like South Australia, are making progress, the fragile nature of the grid connections and the intermittent nature on renewable energy is slowing its uptake, and potentially contributing to supply instability, as was seen during this winter’s South Australian storm.

The production of aluminium metal requires a huge amount of electricity. An aluminum smelter basically consists of a huge tub of molten salt, from which the enormous electrical currents basically force the electrons onto aluminum ions, depositing them on the cathode atom by atom at a rate that allows several tons of production per day.

 

As a result, aluminium smelters are typically located in areas where there is a large, cheap supply of electricity. Traditionally these have been areas of hydroelectric power, or in Australia’s case, cheap open cut thermal coal. With coal getting more expensive, and with concerns over the impact of CO₂ production on the climate, these coal-powered smelters are finding it harder to compete in high wage countries. So Australia has facilities which are designed to take a substantial proportion of the energy grid’s electricity, which are getting closed down just as the requirement for storage of large amounts of variable renewable energy is appearing.

One proposed solution of the “storage problem” is the use of a new technology known as the liquid metal battery. Like the aluminium smelting process, the liquid metal battery consists of a molten salt, which can have ions driven out of it to the anode and the cathode when power is applied. Unlike aluminium, the anode is a base metal instead of graphite, so instead of oxidizing the anode and making CO₂, the metal is deposited. This allows the battery to discharge by dissolving the anode and cathode back into the molten salt. So if aluminum smelters are going obsolete in areas which are in desperate need of battery storage, it seems like modifying the smelter to store energy is a option worth at least considering.

There are technical issues, of course. An industrial Hall-Héroult cell is the size of a city bus, and a smelter contains lots of them. The liquid metal technology is being developed by a small company, Ambri, which seems to be starting small (like bottlecap scale), and scaling up. So there is a bit of a gap between the emerging battery technology and the aging smelter technology. But it is in everybody’s interest to bridge it.

Ambri is trying to raise cash and start production. South Australia is still investigating their state-wide blackout.  Alcoa and Hydro have two shuttered smelters which they need to remediate or repurpose, and Portland has 11% of its population working at the smelter. In addition, Boyne Island and Tomago are supposedly facing similar market pressures.

Portland would be a particularly useful place for a pilot project, since the smelter is still operating, even though the pain of closing a big industrial center in a small isolated town looms. It is also located in prime wind power country, on the Victoria / South Australia border, close to the interconnector. So it would be nice if the union, the council, the state and federal governments, and the industry groups could work together to see if there is a solution that benefits everybody.

As for Kurri Kurri and Port Henry, the Kurri Kurri remediation plan comment period closed in August, but Port Henry is still open, even though the last public hearing was last week.Thus the rushed, not completely researched blog post.

The biodiversity of topography

The central Australian desert is an extreme arid environment.  For 20 million years, the continent has been drying, its rivers turning to playas, its ground water salting up, its inland plains and plateaus slowly disappearing under waves of sand.  The plant kingdom has not abandoned the continent, though, and thousands of drought-tolerant plants inhabit the red centre of Australia.  This aridity is a fickle thing, however.  In this wide brown land we call home, a slight increase in water availability, or a bit of shade from the noonday sun can make a big difference to a tropical, moisture loving plant.

A stunning example of this is the cycad.  As this global distribution map shows, cycads are mostly found in tropical to sub-tropical forests, and in Australia, they hug the wetter coastal areas.  But there is one species not shown on this map.

In the central Australian Macdonnell ranges, Macrozamia macdonnelli is found in ravines, at the base of south facing cliffs, and in rare desert oases, where ground water and sun protection allow it to cling to life as the continent dried out.  1500 km from the ocean and about as far from its nearest living relative, these cycads are found through the MacDonnell and Hartz ranges of the Northern Territory, where steep ravines channel water and shade the plants which grow within. Like an outlawed bushranger on the run from the law, this plant and its pollinator sidekick have been hiding out from the sun in the secret mountain waterholes for millions of years.  

The expat Chestnut

The story of the American Chestnut is a real-life ecological morality play, that I have been familiar with ever since I was young enough to recognize the red moldering logs for what they were.  Whole books have been written about the destruction of Chestnut forests, and internet summaries abound. Since then, I have moved to Australia, settled down, and, in due course, bought a house and started playing with the yard. Australia is renown for its biosecurity, and there is no endemic chestnut blight here.  A few years ago, I started a search to see if I could find some American Chestnut trees, to see if they would grow here. 

Canberra is not the ideal climate for chestnut trees.  The annual rainfall here is about half what it is in the eastern US, and there are soil fungi in some areas which will kill their roots.  Never-the-less, after a few years of false leads, last autumn, I managed to get my hands on a few seedlings.  I planted three in my yard.  The first, planted in the chook pen, leafed out in spring, but never really grew much, and during the February-March dry spell, it turned brown and shriveled up.

The second tree is in the western corner of the yard, where it is exposed to both the hot westerly winds and the cold southerlies.  While it didn't grow much, It did hang onto its leaves until the first cold night, and it is now changing color.  I don't know how it will cope with the native acacias around it, and whether their shade will help reduce evaporation or their competition for moisture will hinder, but it seems to have made it through the first year.

The third tree is in a more sheltered position, where it gets morning sun but is sheded for the rest of the day by the neighbour's hedge.  It has only just begun to change leaf colors, and put on a decent growth this year.  By North American standards, the Canberra winters are not particularly harsh, so hopefully these trees will enter dormancy, sleep well through the winter, and continue to grow.

The half-dozen or so North American trees commonly planted here have a mixed history.  The tulip trees tend to suffer and die off at their tops during drought years, and the sweet gums and pin oaks also suffer during long dry hot spells.  But there are quite a few upland oaks which are doing OK. Only time will tell how Castanea dentata fares in this strange new world.

How many?

"Sand people always ride single file, to hide their numbers."

That word doesn't mean what you think it means

Dear American advertising industry:

English is a wide and diverse language.  It has many different dialects, which have evolved their own vocabulary, spelling, and slang over the centuries.  However, with the invention of the internet, any of these strains of our language can be instantly be linked to each other.  This can be a benefit, but it can also be embarrassing. For example, I am guessing that whomever wrote this ad did not realize that in some forms of English, "root" is a synonym for "fuck" (especially the verb, but also the noun).

Mount Tsukuba

Tsukuba is a science and technology town, built by the Japanese Government in the 1960’s.  It features a number of research campuses, a university, and a satellite assembly facility.  Like many places built in the 60’s, it is not particularly culturally striking in the architecture department, and in fact it is ignored entirely by many tourists guidebooks that focus on Japanese culture. 

Tsukuba is also the home of Japan’s newest SHRIMP, so I was there for three weeks as part of a team that upgraded that instrument from single collector to multicollector. And as the research park and the downtown area were a bit utilitarian, a few of us decided to look for something a bit more distinctively Japanese on our day off. 

Luckily for us, 20 km north of Tsukuba is Mount Tsukuba.  This 800 meter peak dominates the eastern plains NE of Tokyo, and is significant in Japanese culture.

At the base of the mountain is a Shinto shrine.  I’m not up on my Shinto, bet the gardens were fantastic.  Even if there was still ice on the pond, the Japanese Cedar were stately, the arrangement and general attention to detail were striking and pleasing.  

I didn’t spend much time around the shrine itself- there were a fair few people praying there and I didn’t want to make an ass of myself, so I headed up the mountain to meet my colleagues for lunch.

The track up started off through plantation Japanese cedar, but got scenic and atmospheric as I got above about 450 meters and the snow deepened. The last half of the walk was a bit treacherous, but the forest gets more mature and spectacular on the steep upper reaches of the mountain.  

The Japanese Cedar, which grows in fantastic stands on the south side of the mountain, gives way to deciduous trees on the ridgeline and north face. Jules and James will note that the camellia was not blooming.  I don’t know what the signs said.  The first character is “mountain”, the second “fire”. I haven’t learned the next three yet; Bushfire blah blah blah.  Hopefully the message is less urgent with snow everywhere.

Mount Tsukuba has two peaks: Nantai-San (male) and Nayotai-san (female).  The top of Mount Nantai-san is topped by two shrines to the gods Izanagi-no-mikoto and Softbank. Mount Nayotai had fantastic views to the south and East, which disappeared in a snow flurry just as I reached the top.

Due to the icy conditions, we headed down on the cable car.  I then took another walk, this one going around the mountains base. This forest included Japanese cedar and cypress, but also had a fir species and some very large plum or cherry trees, which I could not distinguish without flowers or leaves. As this was my first weekend in the winter hemisphere, the snow was a welcome novelty after a very hot Australian summer.

Oh the rocks.  Well, it was my day off, and most of them were covered with snow, but here and there a coarse grained dolerite reared its pyroxinitic head.

Mapping while black

Happy Martin Luther King Day.  Dr. King, of course, was a pivotal leader of the civil rights movement, and was crucial in organizing African Americans to claim their rightful places in American society.   And while the civil rights struggle has continued in the decades after his untimely death at age 39, the progress of integration in geological sciences has been slower than in other areas.  So it seems that today is as good a day as any to discuss some of the potential barriers to racial integration in geology.

One little known problem is the issue of Mapping While Black.  Most people know what driving while black is, but a Google search for “Mapping while Black” reveals a bit less information.  However, in many parts of the world, including the US and Australia, rural land owners often have a tendency to be whiter, more racist and better armed than the urban population.  And this can put black field geologists into uncomfortable positions which their white colleagues never even conceive of. 

While I am not black, and did not experience any such events as an undergrad in the USA, my PhD research brought me to Brazil, where I collaborated with predominately African-Brazilian colleagues.    And while the most memorable event we had was not actually mapping, it does serve to illustrate the hairy end of what can happen if one tries to do geology with (or in the company of those with) low albedo skin.

My PhD research focused on an obscure type of diamond called carbonado.  Carbonado is found primarily in East-central Brazil and the Central African Republic, but a month after my PhD started the fall of Robert Mugabe in neighboring Zaire destabilized the CAR, making it off limits to my project.  So Brazil it was, chiefly the poor, black eastern part of Bahia state known as the “Chapada diamantina” (diamond plateau).

One of the elder statesmen of the (small) field of carbonado research suggested to me, at beers in a conference, to drop in on a man called “Oswaldo”, who owned a saloon in the town of Lençios. Oswaldo was a mid-level diamond trader; someone who bought raw stones off of garimpeiros, and then up sold the better material into exporters for cutting, while retaining the weird stuff in his collection.  I was interested in the weird stuff.

So, after three days of field work with and dealing directly with the local garimpeiros, in we went to Oswaldo’s.  Me, the very white foreign guy, a black Brazilian geologist, and our black Brazilian driver.  We sit down at a table.  A waiter comes over.  We say we would like to talk to Oswaldo about diamonds. No Oswaldo appears. Our driver starts looking nervous. “blah blah something something vamos,” says the driver. (I only had about 5 months Portuguese lessons before the field work, and they didn’t include the Bahian dialect or accent). 

My geologist colleague say to me, “we have to go now.” And gesture towards the rest of the room as he gets up.  Three of the four exits to the room are now blocked by tough looking Brazilian roughnecks.  My memory is blurry, but I think one of them has a gun.  The people at the table next to us start to move away.  And then everything was a blur, until I was in the cab of our truck and we were gunning the engine to get the fuck outta there. As we do, there is a yelp.  A dog (Oswaldo’s  we were never properly introduced, so I can’t say) had crawled under the ute to get out of the harsh November sun, and we had clipped its leg tearing up the street.  I feel bad about the dog, but we lived with that, and didn’t stop.  In fact, we didn’t stop until we were over the mountains, and then we hid the truck at a roadhouse where my colleague knew the patrons, and watched for pursuit for 20 minutes, before turning north and heading for Morro do Chapeu, 200 km away.

Years later, I related this story to the guy who recommended Oswaldo to me. He, a gruff, no-nonsense senior professor, was shocked, and appalled. He and his (white) Brazilian colleagues had been treated very generously by Oswaldo.  And it never even occurred to him that anything different would happen to us.

And therein lies the problem.  There isn’t much on the internet about this phenomena.  Many white geologists simply have no idea that you can get a gun pulled on you in the pursuit of knowledge simply by having the wrong skin tint.  If the field of geology wants to integrate at the speed of the rest of our society, we need to think of tactful and effective ways of identifying, discussing, and solving the extra hurdles raised by mapping while black.

这是一个语言的科学吗

Since the end of WW II, English has been the dominant language of science.  This was not always the case.  The late 19th century industrial and scientific explosion in Germany made German a potential contender before geopolitical events depopulated Germany of its scientists.  And earlier in the 19th century French, and originally Latin, were the languages of the day.

The reasons for this are simple.  England has long been a leader in scientific inquiry, and the post-war assimilation of European scientists by the USA and subsequent technological revolution there during the space race and information revolution has kept English on the forefront.

None-the-less, many scientists do still publish in their native languages.  And even when they do publish in English, there are many Journals, such as the Journal of South American Geology Earth Sciences, which offer abstracts in other languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, the dominant languages of that continent.  Similarly, Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research publishes French Abstract, since is is based in France and published by a French research organisation.

None-the-less, I was surprised to see that the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences is now publishing abstracts in Chinese for its English articles.  Australia is an English speaking country, and although there are small but locally important groups of immigrants who speak various Chinese languages, they are not over-represented in the Earth Sciences.  And while Chinese geologists compete internationally better than their scientists on other fields, and Chinese investment is important in the Australian mineral export industry, it is still a bold move by the AJES editors to pick Chinese as the next language of science.

p.s. If you can't read the title, check that your operating system has Asian characters enabled.

Odd-shaped lakes in Google Earth

I was goofing around in Google Earth this evening, performing an activity that started out as meaningful and quickly degenerated into a Game of "Ooh what's that", when I came across the following:
Note the very strange shoreline on this lake, with numerous straight line borders. The first time I saw this, I thought I was looking at some dams I didn't know about, but I quickly realized that such an interpretation made no sense.

 Instead, what I believe this image is showing is a mosaic from pictures acquired several years apart. One of those years was a wet year, while another must have been after a period of extended drought. As a result, the lake is ~90% full in some of the images, but almost empty in others. And the straight-line lakeshores are just the tile borders, which Google's new color autocorrect makes less obvious.

 I have no idea where WoGE is up to these days, but I left the co-ordinates off in case anyone wants to chase up the Reservoir.

Government by TV stunt

In an abhorrent display of incompetence and cruelty, the Australian Government has, without warning or study, suspended cattle exports to Indonesia.

Dry season cattle country, Northern Territory, Australia. Yes, there are cows in this picture. Squint, or click to enlarge.

The Northern Cattle industry works like this: In the Australian summer months, the summer monsoon brings plentiful rains to the northern third of Australia. This provides ideal conditions for cattle, which grow fat and multiply during the times of plenty. It is a good thing that these conditions suit them, because the rains also make travel very difficult.

Sometime around March or so, the rains taper off, and April through October is the dry season. During this time, little or no rain falls, and the vegetation goes dormant. The road also dry out, and cattlemen thin their herds by exporting animals from Darwin to various buyers in Southern Asia. As the creeks and playas dry out, the cattle become dependent on pumped groundwater, and eat the remaining dried standing grass and shrubbery from the wet season. The southern limit of cattle production in Australia is actually set by groundwater salinity- if the groundwater is too salty for cattle, then they can’t be maintained over the dry season and the area can’t be grazed. So the cattle which are trucked to Darwin for export are sent off their stations chiefly because the land is not able to sustain them through the dry season.

What happened this week is that, without any planning or deliberation, the government had decided to suspend exports to Indonesia, as a short-sighted response to a reality TV stunt which filmed the brutal conditions of some Indonesian abattoirs. This move is in itself a cruel thing to do, as it jeopardizes the careers of thousands of people in both Indonesia and Australia without any cost to the moralizing oppressors who demand this action. But to do it in the middle of the dry season without any thought to what do to with the cattle is wasteful.

A planned phase-out of this industry should start in the wet season when transportation is low, and pastoral capacity is high, and would allow for construction in Australia of meat processing facilities and/or the procurement of other export markets. As it is, we have tens of thousands of Brahmin cattle in or en route to Darwin, with a ban on transporting them, no facilities for processing them, insufficient holding facilities for keeping them alive, and no forward plan for letting the pastoralists destock through the dry season. How does this leave any person or cow better off?

Bye-bye butterfly

What sort of spider is this?

Dune-flood interactions

The pathological geomorphologists have been running a series on dune-river interactions recently, so I wanted to add this most recent TERRA image of the Queensland floods. The floodwaters in the Diamantina (top) and Coopers Creek (above centre) sections have now reached the longitudinal dunes of the Simpson desert. The full image has 250 meter pixel size, so it is easy to see individual dunes (which are generally a few hundred meters across the base and a few to tens of km apart). You will have to click the link for super high res goodness and detail- clicking the image only gives a medium resolution image.
These images are updated daily (weather permitting), so you can hop backwards and forwards to measure the progress of the flooding over the past month or so.

Floods from space

NASA's Earth Observatory has been posting some great pictures of the Queensland floods. East-Central Australia's ephemeral rivers have very low gradients, so floods can be tens of kilometers wide while being only a few meters deep. Using the correct spectral band, this standing water is easily visible from space. The flooded rivers in the above picture are (from West to East) The Georgina and Diamantina rivers, which flow together in Northern South Australia before entering Lake Eyre; Coopers Creek, which independently enters Lake Eyre, The Bulloo River, which is a closed drainage all of its own; and the various tributaries of the Darling, which runs south into the Murray river and eventually into the Great Australian Bight.

The Earth Observatory has a page showing a series of images from both this and previous floods.

When I was in exploration, we had a few tenements in Western Queensland. We were lucky enough to work some areas after moderate rain events, and got to see what happens when these places fill up with water. The following images are from the Georgina basin, and show how the Eastern Simpson desert changes with rain.

The characteristic longitudinal dunes are present in all
images, as low lines of orange sand (often overgrown).



When dry, there isn't much there aside from spinifex, mallee scrub, and arid animals (which are interesting in their own right).


When it rains, though, the waterbirds are spectacular. These are brolgas, but we also saw ducks, herons, gulls, and all sorts of other things which I can't identify.

The Real Dirt has this report on flooding of the Mulligan river, a Georgina tributary near where the above "dry" photo was taken (We had the uranium exploration rights to parts of their nature reserves). It is well worth reading.

Update: The most recent image is here.

The Lake Eyre Yacht Club

Lake Eyre is the terminal playa for Australia's largest drainage system. Most of the time, it is a salt pan, with or without some briny pools at one end or the other. However, every few years, it floods to a few meters depth, and a few times a century it fills up. It's ephemeral nature does not prevent people from taking an interest in sailing there. The Lake Eyre Yacht Club has a website detailing information on the current lake status, tips for navigating on remote, supersaturated salt water, and everything else potential mariners might want to know. Geoscientists often justify their work in terms of disaster mitigation, economic activity, or other serious benefits. But this shows that the layman's ability to use geospacial data is limited only by his imagination. There's a huge amount of hydrology and remote sensing science that goes into trying to predict lake levels. But I doubt any of the scientists who built these tools imagined that they would be used for catamaraning in the middle of a desert.

Will the new Australian national science curriculum teach Aboriginal creationism?

There have been some murmurings around the internet that the new National Australian curriculum, which was unveiled on Monday, will have a strong aboriginal culture theme imprinted into the science curriculum. In his generally positive take on the curriculum as a whole, Sydney Morning Herald blogger Tim Hawkes says:

Somewhat less defensible, in my view, is the inclusion of indigenous understandings of the natural environment in science. Although fascinating, I think this topic is better dealt with in an area other than science which, quite properly, should be dominated by the skills of empirical observation and measurement.

So what does the curriculum actually say? This is not a particularly easy question to answer. The new curriculum information is hosted at http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/
Some government websites here are quite well designed. Immigration and weather are particularly good. This one is a nightmare. The details to which I am assuming Mr. Hawkes refers are accessible via the following:
1. Register with the website.
2. click the explore tab
3. click the science curriculum
4. under the default settings, “Science as a Human Endeavour” should be the middle column. In years one through ten (but not kindergarden), this will contain several one-sentence sub-sections, one of which is “Science and culture”
5. click the green feedback button.
6. in the pop-up that appears, click the “content elaboration” tab.

The text that appears cannot be cut and pasted, and is not googlable. If there is a less convoluted way of finding it, I don’t know it. So I have had to resort to screen-capturing all 10 science and culture content elaborations. Where scrolling was necessary, screen captures have been stitched. Otherwise, this information has been in no way edited. I apologize if the text is too small to read without clicking through to the full-sized image. If that is not legible either, say so and I'll type transcripts if I ever get the time.

So, gentle readers, are the following appropriate for a science classroom? Discuss in comments.





















Creative common licence and distribution restrictions can be found here. As far as I know, I comply.

Some thoughts on the uranium cycle

Nuclear power is in the news again after the State of the Union speech, so here’s a few thoughts:

1. The current limiting factor of U production is the price of U. Finding sub-economic deposits is easy. Getting the tonnage and grade necessary to cover infrastructure costs is not.

2. Phosphate, which is currently mined for fertilizer production, contains a reasonable amount of U. It is currently uneconomical to remove it, so it dissolves into the H3Po4 during the phosphoric acid production, and stay there through ammonization until it eventually gets dumped on the fields that grow the food we eat (take a scintillometer to your favorite agricultural warehouse sometime). Somewhere around $100/pound it becomes economical to extract it to burn in a reactor instead. So correctly calculating the risk of increasing U production needs to take into account the benefits of not dumping the stuff on crops.

3. Radiation is very dangerous, and can easily kill you if you are stupid. Unlike the days of the Manhattan project and the cold war, we now know a lot more about how to mitigate the risks and how it behaves in the environment.

4. Knowledge isn’t going to help anyone unless it is used to craft effective regulation and enforcement. Corporate boards aren’t going to approve expenditure on non-profitable activities unless they are forced to do so.

5. Well-run, well-regulated projects can be safe. On our drill projects, the only radiation badge to register anything was the one that someone took home in their carry-on and sent through the ASP airport x-ray machine. The only radiation injury to occur was sunburn from solar UV. While skin cancer is a real risk for outdoor work in Australia, it presumably also applies to workers in the solar industry- and the person involved was not following procedure.

6. Making energy is dangerous! Coal mine accidents alone kill thousands of people every year (mostly in China), and even in well-regulated countries like Australia, there are still fatalities. So radiation hazards need to be looked at in the context of all the alternatives, especially other indirect risk factors like respiratory ailments from combustion, toxicity in silica manufacturing, etc.

7. Regulation works best in a culture of openness, trust, and transparency. Anything that inhibits these things, whether it be military secrecy, corporate paranoia, or activist stunts, will ultimately increase risk.

8. As in many other fields, we need to properly weigh the risks of numerous, isolated, unobtrusive injuries (e.g. asthma) vs. rare spectacular photogenic catastrophes (e.g. Chernobyl).

Inchworm my ass

Get thy antiquated units off of the internet. This, my friends, is a decimeterworm. I'm gonna assume that this is a larval Mothra, but if anyone has a more educated guess as to what this beastie will turn into, I'd love to hear it. LLLL was captivated.

Thanksgiving thinking

Over the past few years, my stuffing recipe has gradually evolved into a stable combination of cornbread crumbs, apples, cranberries, celery, and mushroom, with appropriate herbs. This year, however, we have bumper rhubarb and snowpea crops. I ain’t putting the snowpeas inside the bird, but is there a way to incorporate some rhubarb? Or is it best left in pie or crumble? And isn’t fresh spring produce for T-day weird?