Something In Us Loves a Witch

Posted on April 14, 2013 by gymnosperm

Something in us loves a witch. We’ve already explored the irrational behavior demonstrated by Prohibition and the Salem Witch Trials. See “Global Warming and Prohibition”.

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The nature of the human condition is that we are constantly confronted with forces beyond our understanding and control. Floods, droughts, pestilence and famine, the fickle finger of fate.

Maybe more so after the agrarian revolution as frantic fingers furrowed and God-Kings postured. There were sacrifices, both animal and human. Kings posed as interpreters of kindred spirits, decreed rituals,  and so you see the kings were actually witches.

Skeletons of children beneath the threshold footings of Druid houses, our Easter Lamb, assuage the incomprehensible that we might have a bountiful harvest.

Yet, we must manifest the incomprehensible tangible by proxy. God-Kings, witches, sorcerers…prophets. Sacrifice a prophet?

Fingers to the bone, nasty brutish and short.

 

Posted in Anthropology, Climate, History, Metaphor | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Edge

Posted on April 7, 2013 by gymnosperm

It never ceases to amaze how quickly in any research endeavor one reaches the edge of human understanding. Research by search engine in any subject is like peeling back the skins of an onion. First comes the chaff, and then the facile answers as if we understand it completely, then the layers that make the complexity of the subject clear, and finally the edge.

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All this came to mind because research into fluorouracil, a treatment mentioned in the prior post, yielded first that it was in a class of drugs called anti-metabolites. Now that name got me thinking it worked on mitochondria, but it does not. The next layer of the onion revealed that we understand its function completely and it interferes with the transcription of RNA. This is the facile layer. While some of its effect probably is copied to RNA, it definitely does not generally interfere with RNA transcription, and in fact may rely on RNA to perpetuate its action deep into tissues.

The next layer is  “thymineless death“, and the edge. It was discovered in the 1950’s that E. coli grown in a thymineless substrate would just up an’ die. This was noteworthy because substrates without adenine, guanine, and cytosine were limiting but not fatal.

There are theories but my own suspicion is that sticking that Fluorine on like a spike allows the uracil to function normally  in the pyrimidine pathway, binding on one side but preventing expression on the other.

Fluorine is bad stuff.

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El Patron, El Sol

Posted on April 2, 2013 by gymnosperm

This is what I will be looking like soon. The wages of a Nordic phenotype who spent his life in the sun. Not so much at the beach, although there too when I was younger. High altitude sun, Radon and X-rays from granite monoliths I was climbing, a ridiculous amount of time over 12000′ even as the ozone was waning.

Brad Armstrong

This picture is of Brad Armstrong from his YouTube you can’t miss if you Google Fluorouracil. He looks a bit like me and I love his attitude and shoot eatin’ grin.

I’ll post my picture when I get to week two. No sequestration, no mercy for the bewildered. I’ll tell everyone I’m trying out Halloween costumes, joined a punk band, that it’s the new rage and everyone will be doing it soon.

March bravely to meet your fate.

The first miracle cancer drug from the seventies turned into a skin cream ferrets out hyperactive cells, and may just save us boomers from one of our indulgences.

Posted in Anthropology, Biology, Wilderness | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Wine, Volcanoes, and the Dioxides

Posted on March 24, 2013 by gymnosperm

Making wine teaches important lessons about the wee beastie soup we live in, call it the dim sum. It also holds lessons about Carbon and Sulfur. Carbon and Sulfur were instrumental in the evolution of life on this planet, and likely by no coincidence oxides of Carbon and Sulfur are the second and third most prolific exhalations of volcanoes, after water.

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Most folks understand the fundamental role of Carbon in the chemistry of life, and many that one of the more plausible scenarios for the terrestrial evolution of life involves reducing Sulfur in the anaerobic environment of oceanic hydrothermal vents . Those so inclined may draw a volcanic metaphor for life.

NOAA hydrothermal vent

For billions of years life existed only in the oceans as a microbial soup I like to call the dim sum. One can also think of it as wine. Lest we underestimate the industry of our wee predecessors, they are currently found in our deepest holes drilled into the crust and in the highest reaches of the atmosphere. Our human ancestors discovered that the fungi we now call yeasts quickly turned mashed grains into beer and bread, and collections of fruit into wine.

The dioxide of Carbon became the basis of a balanced economy of photosynthesis and respiration we consider ourselves the culmination of. The dioxide of Sulfur, however, is the evil twin, the anti-life.

While many beasties, including yeasts retain the anaerobic Sulfur reducing metabolic pathway for tough times, the usual resultant, Hydrogen sulfide is extremely toxic to aerobic creatures and is an unpleasant component in wine. Research on selecting yeast strains to eliminate Hydrogen sulfide has demonstrated a previously unknown reducing pathway that produces free Sulfur.

The antimicrobial use of Sulfur in winemaking is at least as old as the Romans and Sulfur was our primary antibiotic as recently as World War I.

When I hear the Carbon wags expostulating about  volcanic Carbon dioxide causing mass extinctions, I yearn to bring them down to earth with a whiff of my stock sulfite solution.

Skull Crossbones

Posted in Anthropology, Biology, History, History of Life, Metaphor, Ocean Acidification | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Duty of Truth

Posted on March 17, 2013 by gymnosperm

Those who work at public institutions owe the public, their patrons, a duty of truth. Private citizens are free to engage in any foolishness that suits them, but public servants must be held to a higher standard.

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The graph above was recently published by Shaun Marcott et al in Science Magazine. It is a graph showing world temperature as recorded by some “proxies”, 18O in the shells of sea critters and such, for the past 2000 years. It involved some heavy statistical techniques and it seems to show a dramatic spike recently.

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But here is the same graph from Marcott’s PhD thesis a few months earlier that shows no recent spike.

There is no excuse for a paper in a premium journal to not at least offer an explanation for this change in results. It has become clear that the dates of data points were changed to create the spike.

This is scientific misconduct and a cynical abrogation of the duty of truth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Here’s the Beef, Or the World Economy Explained by a Billion Cows

Posted on March 9, 2013 by gymnosperm
Cattle on the alp

Cattle on the alp (Photo credit: Darkroom Daze)

Grasses coevolved with ungulates (we can call them cows). About 30 million years ago due to declining temperature, humidity, and atmospheric Carbon dioxide a bunch of plants including grasses evolved a more efficient form of photosynthesis called C4. This allowed them to keep their pores open longer and suck in CO2 faster without drying out. This was a tremendous advantage and these plants proliferated. The cows were loving it of course.

Fast forward to maybe 50,000 years ago and we humans follow the herds out of Africa. First during wet oscillations we follow them into the Sahara. Then during dry intervals some of us follow them north and east out of the desert and you know the rest of the story…

Posted in Anthropology, Climate, Climate Change, Economics, Geography, History, History of Life, Paleoclimate, Salvation from Cows | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Hawaii

Posted on March 3, 2013 by gymnosperm

By incredibly good luck I’ve been spending lots of time in Hawaii lately, on business no less. I stay in this unbelievable house.

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One really gets the sense of being out in the middle of the ocean in Hawaii, at least I do. Then of course it is necessary to have a look to see what this place is really all about.

Hawaii

Ok, so the Hawaii we think of is way down at the right bottom of the blue gravity boomerang. It is just the latest in a series of seamounts that has been continuously burning a hole in the ocean floor for about 85 million years. The very oldest one is up near the strange inflection point where the Aleutian Trench meats the Eurasian trench system.

The pronounced bend at the Mendocino Fracture Zone technically separates the Emperor Seamounts from the Hawaiian chain. Although the volcanic ages of the islands  move smoothly through this bend, something important happened here. The islands are smaller and more sparse and they haven’t pushed the crust down enough to create a gravity low. You can see they have been offset a bit

Before they ran into the Mendocino Fracture Zone, both the hotspot and the ocean floor were moving. You almost get the feeling the fracture zone stopped it. After the fracture zone towards Hawaii the trend is normal to the direction of the ocean floor movement, and the hotspot may not have moved very much as the ocean floor above just sailed by. Hawaii is the end of the line now, but it will be just a few more islands in the procession in due time.

Gotta get back to work, but don’t feel too sorry for me…

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Posted in Geography, Geoid, Geology, Gravity Anomalies, Oceanography, Plate Tectonics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Half Dome then and Now

Posted on February 25, 2013 by gymnosperm

The first time I went up the cables on Half Dome was in July, 1974. I was skiing the Muir Trail during Christmas vacations, hiking it for the second and third times during the summers, and going to school in between.We looked like bikers then.

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We wore enormous boots suitable for ice climbing.

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Just generally loaded for bear.

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And not afraid to hang ten on the nose.

Many years passed. Many wonderful trips introducing the kids to wilderness. Our first trip below. Eleven days up Goddard Creek. Expedition style, hike the kids up, go back and ferry another load.

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But loads have a habit of shifting. A new world emerges. In 1974 we got to Lake Tenaya at two in the morning, left the next morning, spent a night and climbed Half Dome without a permit. Today there is a lottery for permits and an armed ranger at the base of the cables. Your papers had best be in order.

I would have been trying to figure out a way to sneak up there in the moonlight, but each generation rises to it’s challenges and my son entered the lottery and got a permit last August. The load has shifted. Regulation and wilderness is an oxymoron. To preserve our dignity we left in the dark and did an illegal bivouac to get an early start.

I was less afraid on the cables this time, even though a bit of rain made the granite very slick on the way up.

The load has shifted. My daughter, recovering from ACL surgery did it in a knee brace.

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My son on the nose.

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I am proud to pass the load on. Maybe they will ferry loads for me when I am too doddering to carry any of it.

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California Great Central Valley as a Cretaceous Sea of Cortez

Posted on February 18, 2013 by gymnosperm

I was travelling the world as I often do in Google Earth, pondering how strange it is that the Hawaiian Seamount chain created a gravity low its entire length, when I noticed this:

Great Valley Sea of Cortez

Probably just because gravity lows are a nice deep blue and when you look at this on a regular map the Sea of Cortez is blue of course, but the Great Valley is green or brown and it is harder to see the similarity.

It makes nothing but sense. North America has been in the vanguard of the advance of continents to reclaim the planet from the Panthalassic Ocean since the breakup of Pangea. Strike slip conditions like those that cause the San Andreas Fault today have prevailed for most of this period. Huge chunks of western North America are paleomagnetically out-of-place and the subject is so controversial that geologists are required to check their hammers at the door when they meet to discuss it.

It is safe to say that generally slivers have been getting ripped off and sliding northward relative to the continent for a very long time. What seems to have happened is active spreading moved further south and the San Andreas system moved Baja California north, sealing the Sea of Central Valley off at the bottom in the form of the Transverse Ranges.

Active seafloor spreading in the Sea of Central Valley like that taking place in the Sea of Cortez today would explain the mysterious ophiolite (read ocean floor) sequences around the valley.

Then again, it could just be a figment of my imagination.

Posted in Geography, Geology, Gravity Anomalies, Paleogeography, Plate Tectonics | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Bad Hair Days and Magnetic Excursions

Posted on February 16, 2013 by gymnosperm

This picture of a model simulating the weakened and divided magnetic field during a reversal should be in the thesaurus when you look up “bad hair day”.

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If this is anywhere near correct it should be no surprise that the nano compass needles in sediment cores drilled at different places around the globe point to different magnetic north poles and indicate different paths for the pole during the excursions. Imagine trying to navigate by compass on that puppy.

Here is a part of the path of magnetic north during the 41kya (thousand years ago) reversal in the opinion of Black Sea sediments from data very kindly provided by Norbert Nowaczyk. the background is the gravity anomaly and seafloor isochrons with some subduction slab Benioff contour depths for good measure.

Polar Wandering

The black path is from Dr. Nowaczyk’s Black Sea data. The view is centered on the Canadian Arctic and the red path is Magnetic North since A.D. 1600 according to NOAA. I’ve discovered a lot more Ocean Drilling Project data for excursions I intend to create Fusion Tables for and plot in Google Earth as time and patience allows.

One can see the start and end points for the 41kya excursion very near the modern path. It is also quite clear that jiggy behavior is normal and like lightning the field makes false starts and trial runs before flipping fairly quickly. The 41kya path went off the bottom of the picture all the way to Cuba before backtracking across the U.S. in the lower left. It got out in the Pacific, zigged a bit, and shot down to Antarctica for a complete reversal in the opinion of the Black Sea. Sediments from the Bahamas show a different path that never becomes a complete reversal.

We have a lot to learn, but the current northward path of magnetic north is not making my hair stand on end. Bad hair days are when it heads south.

Posted in Gravity Anomalies, Magnetic Reversals, True Polar Wander, Virtual Geomagnetic Pole (VGP) | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment