Sliding Rocks of Racetrack Playa
One of the most interesting mysteries of Death Valley National Park is the sliding rocks at Racetrack Playa (a playa is a dry lake bed). These rocks can be found on the floor of the playa with long trails behind them. Somehow these rocks slide across the playa, cutting a furrow in the sediment as they move. Some of these rocks weigh several hundred pounds. That makes the question: “How do they move?” a very challenging one. The truth: No one knows for sure exactly how these rocks move - although a few people have come up with some pretty good explanations. The reason why their movement remains a mystery: No one has ever seen them in motion!
David Byrne
I believe I or others have mentioned David Byrne’s online journal in past posts, but in case you’ve never seen it, take a look. I’ve been following it for a couple of years, and it’s great. His writing is unusually direct and personal, and his insights are spot on. With each post, I feel like I’m reading a letter from an old friend.
Incredible Abilities
With so many superhero movies around, such as Spiderman or Hulk, we are used to see people with special abilities in fiction. But people with amazing abilities actually do exist in real life; here’s a list of 10 of the most amazing of these people!
Rest in Peace, My Friend
It is with sadness I note the passing of my friend Chris Horne. He and I worked together running wilderness trips at a camp in Virginia in my mid twenties. Our lives had moved in different directions and we hadn’t seen each other since a week-long backpacking trip in the Wind Rivers probably ten years ago, but he was one of the most decent, caring, humorous, and loving people I have met. This article in The Chattanoogan captures nicely the essence of him. He was a good man.
Goebbels’s Script
Goebbel’s script is one of the most difficult I have ever deciphered. Ordinarily German handwriting does not bother me in the least. When I first looked at the handwritten diaries of Joseph Goebbels cursorily I thought, “What regular, clear writing!” On closer inspection, however, the Goebbels calligraphy proved anything but easy to read.
From Louis P. Lochner’s introduction to his translated edition of The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
God Likes Big Flags
The record for the world’s largest flag now belongs to an Israeli banner produced by a Filipino evangelical Christian.
“God spoke to me in thunder and lightning,” Galindez-Gupana said. “The Lord said, ‘Make the flag of Israel, the standard of my people.’”
“This is a tall order,” she said, breaking down in tears.
Humanity “Shortening the Life of the Universe”
This startling claim, made by a pair of American cosmologists, has to do with observing dark matter. This is a “must read” article for those interested in the weirdnesses of quantum physics.
The shy, steely Ronald Firbank
Only this night I got to wondering, “Do my fellow ‘Flockers — and Friends — share my admiration for Ronald Firbank? Have they read — do they read — Ronald Firbank?” Answer came there none, and so here is Alan Hollinghurst on The shy, steely Ronald Firbank.
One of the first fellow novelists to write intelligently and gratefully about Firbank after his death was Evelyn Waugh. For Waugh, Firbank was a liberator, the person who had seen how to take the novel forward through a radical reconsideration of technique. This was very different from the Jamesian alternative, the ever-deepening interiorization of the novel through the elaboration of individual consciousness. Firbank achieved his highly complex originality not by expansion but by a drastic compression: instead of putting more and more in, he left almost everything out.
Poem–from news story just read
The bomb, which was hidden in a box of small birds, exploded Friday morning as Iraqis were strolling past animal stalls and bird cages at Baghdad’s al-Ghazl market. AP
Tied to the foot flying, this message: No small wing
so soft it can’t stoop, gain speed, and bring metal
talons to the eye before it sees. No small heart here
too delicate to be used.
Out in the sun the child asked for,
delight almost finds old days waiting like
dreamed parapets of gold. Then the flurry, the flush
contagious, pushed through wire.
Goldilocks Universe
Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue. The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
Kindle
Have any of you seen Kindle? I think I want it. Sony Reader has to connect to a computer (and doesn’t support Mac). Kindle doesn’t need a computer connection.
Connections
Yesterday at woolgathering Elizabeth Perry offered us her drawing of a tangle of cords, together with a meditation on connections and gratitude.
Funny. I think that’s what I had when I snapped this toy camera shot of my own connecting cords and set it as the ‘front wallpaper’ image on my phone.
An Offer Declined
I recently read a book of brief statements made over many years by Native Americans–Touch The Earth, compiled by T.C.McLuhan (Promontory Press, New York, 1987). It’s delightful and heartbreaking and vast in its many flashes of lives, and I recommend it. One passage in it seemed particularly appropriate to the subject of thanks on this Thanksgiving day:
On June 17, 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia negotiated a treaty with the Indians of the Six Nations at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Indians were invited to send boys to William and Mary College. The next day they declined the offer as follows.
“We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those Colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces: they were instructed in all your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods…neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counsellors, they were totally good for nothing.
We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind Offer, tho’ we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.”
Thanks
I am most thankful that Daryl still loves me after all these years, and that our Mia is healthy and happy. I’m also thankful for (in no particular order): NYT crossword puzzles; Austin; champagne; Mexican food; Mexicans; Mexico; veggie burgers and onion rings at Goldrush Cafe; zinnias; pad thai tofu no egg medium spicy; wavy glass windows; flannel sheets; the New Yorker; clusterflock; Bill Murray; Harper’s; The Daily Show; Vietnam (restaurant, corner of Bryan and Peak); Errol Morris; Cynthia Ashby jackets; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Vancouver; eggplants; eBay; Arche and Cydwoq shoes; 1940s linens; celluloid birds; days with no plans or obligations.
I’m a lucky woman.
“Slovenia’s Gandhi”
Slovenia’s President is a recluse. Told he had cancer, Janez Drnovsek moved alone to the woods and embraced his inner spirituality. His Government despises him but he is a hero to his people. It is not often that you ask a European head of state whether he has gone loopy, but in the case of Janez Drnovsek, Slovenia’s reclusive President, the question seems almost unavoidable.
Dear Rick,
In addition to the pyramid of gratitude upon which my thanks is based I am thankful for the near completion of a project upon which I have spent, fully, the last year and a half of myself.
Six Ideas That Can Change the World
They are making orange peel plastic and robots that can heal themselves. They are six researchers with six ideas that will one day change the world.
The Short List in No Particular Order
I’m grateful for
air
water
food
family
friends
Danny
y’all
Giant Sea Scorpion
The fossilised remains of a giant claw that once belonged to a sea scorpion roughly 2.5 metres long have been found in Germany. Researchers say the monstrous creature is the largest arthropod ever known – over 30 centimetres bigger than the previous largest specimen of the same species. Simon Braddy at the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues examined the 46-centimetre-long claw, found in a quarry in western Germany, and believe it belonged to a sea scorpion species called Jaekelopterus rhenaniae that roamed the ocean floors some 390 million years ago. Some palaeontologists believe that J. rhenaniae used its claws to reach out and grab passing animals, such as fish, to eat. “They were the top predators at the time,” says Paul Selden at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, US.
10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets
Some gadgets change the world. Others don’t. These ones, however, are very effective at one thing in particular: teleporting money out of customers’ pockets.
Noah’s Flood and European Farming
An ancient flood some say could be the origin of the story of Noah’s Ark may have helped the spread of agriculture in Europe 8,300 years ago by scattering the continent’s earliest farmers, researchers said on Sunday. Using radiocarbon dating and archaeological evidence, a British team showed the collapse of the North American ice sheet, which raised global sea levels by as much as 1.4 meters, displaced tens of thousands of people in southeastern Europe who carried farming skills to their new homes.
Renovation Update
I haven’t made much progress lately as I’ve been wrapping up the revised documentary, but here’s a picture of the counters I promised a while ago.
Casual
Grandmother
It makes me mad when people say I didn’t treat Grandmother well when she was sick. Maybe it was because of that one time I dropped her in the hallway when she had to go to the bathroom and I just stood there and laughed and laughed.
Warhol Eating
This was done, incidentally, by Jørgen Leth, one of the two directors in the fantastic film (I just saw it a few days ago) The Five Obstructions.