Update: … and it’s fading away. The weather was cloudy most mornings before Thanksgiving week, so I didn’t see it when it was bright. At least I caught PanSTARRS with my camera earlier this year.
Category: Science
800,000+ mph
I gather that there are a bunch of football games going on today on planet Earth. The game I’m interested in is happening about 93 million miles away less that an hour from now.
Update (1:08 p.m. CST): It’s not looking good for ISON.
800 tons of mercury
Just another weekend at Mt. Etna.
Man-made vs. natural disasters:
During the last year or so I have had reason to study Sweden’s largest environmental disaster, the Nautanen Mining field. The Nautanen mines where active from 1902 until 1909 and in comparison to other Swedish mines the Nautanen field is puny. Still it releases more heavy metals into the surrounding waters than all other Swedish mines, historic and present, put together. It is estimated that if Nautanen is left without any measures taken somewhere in the range of 50 to 100 tons of heavy metals (mainly copper) will be released into the surrounding waters….
Let us go through what was released during [Pinatubo’s] VEI-6 eruption. While reading the numbers keep in mind the Nautanen maximum figure of 100 tons of heavy metals. Pinatubo produced 800 000 tons of zinc, 600 000 tons of copper, 550 000 tons of chromium, 300 000 tons of nickel, 100 000 tons of lead, 10 000 tons of arsenic, 1 000 tons of cadmium and 800 tons of mercury. All of it in the form of ash that was spread not only locally in layers tens of meters thick, it was also dispersed across the globe.
The concentration of heavy metals is so high that it causes birth defects, cancer, neurological disorders, liver and renal failure, heart and lung deceases and the list just goes on and on. It has been estimated that Pinatubo has shortened the lifespan on the island of Luzon by as much as a decade. That equates to 7 000 000 people in mortality if we recount the lost life years into average human life expectancy in the Philippines.
195 mph
I’ve been watching Haiyan the way I watched Katrina in in 2005. This is going to be much worse. (Click the graphic to see the animation. Note the bakeneko that forms above the core of the storm.)
If this were a tornado, its sustained winds would make it an upper-end EF4. With gusts up to to 235 mph — well, you just wouldn’t want to be there.
Something stinks
Okay, for the sake of a story, I can suspend my disbelief in sentient submarines and ships. I can accept “mental models” of these vessels that look like adolescent girls. I can even believe that stuffed bears eat carrots. But I cannot believe that any military would store vital materials on Iwo Jima . “Sulphur Island” is the tip of a rapidly-inflating volcanic resurgent dome, and it’s rising out of the sea at an average rate of about eight inches a year, rendering any harbor or dock temporary. Soon, geologically speaking, magma is going to meet seawater, catastrophically. The creators of Arpeggio of Blue Steel need to do better research.
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Shin Sekai Yori depicts a future in which adults are frightened of children. We’re already there. (Via Ace.)
Miscellany
Guys und Panzer:
(Via the Borderline Boy.)
The Sailor Senshi meet the Jetsons. (Via Project Rooftop.)
“I think that when a human engineer lives a good life, he’s reincarnated as a beaver.”
Full disclosure: I am a creature of the sinister right-wing Koch brothers, just like Michael Mann. Both universities I attended, plus the one where I studied and photographed ballet and the one where I took part in the annual Renaissance Faire, have all received money from the Kochtopus.
Don’t expect a Calvin and Hobbes movie.
You probably shouldn’t expect another VEI 8 blast from Yellowstone, either.
I haven’t had a haircut in 20 years. Perhaps that is why I’m still alive despite riding my bike every day on the wild streets of west Wichita.
Notes on growing biochemical weapons.
Pride and Prejudice for academics.
Today’s musical interlude, lunatic bassist edition:
Hot times in Kyushu
Things are rather dusty in Kagoshima right now. Sakurajima erupted violently this weekend with possibly its largest explosion in almost a century.
(Picture from here.)
Odds and ends
After two summers of desert heat, we now have a summer of tropical monsoon rain. The Little Arkansas River, which runs north, west and south of my place, is the highest it’s been in years. More rain is predicted.
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It occurs to me that comparing Stella etc. to Girls und Panzer is misguided. Yura has more in common with such painfully self-conscious characters as Inu x Boku SS‘s Ririchiyo and Tsuritama‘s Yuki than with with Miho, and the story thus far has been more about Yura learning to play well with others than about girls playing with guns.
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Ryutaro Nakamura, who directed Serial Experiments Lain and Kino’s Journey, recently died. Jonathan Clements’ appreciation is here.
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Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita‘s Mediator should beware the dangers of undead hair.
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I generally consider “critic” to be a subset of the category “pompous fool.” Here’s an example why.
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One of my pictures was yesterday’s Botany Photo of the Day.
Miscellaneous links
It’s taken years, but Miku is at last coming to the Mac.
What can you say about nothing? Quite a bit, actually.
Orwell is not the only writer who comes to mind when I read the news these days.
Iwo Jima, one of the less hospitable places on earth, might not be around much longer. Also, Kyushu is an exceptionally violent place, geologically speaking.
Anthony Weiner and his ilk would do well to consider the example of John Profumo.
Exploding princesses, etc.
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
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In my ballet training, I had no enemy but myself. Especially when I would watch myself in the mirror in the studio and execute my ballet routines, I often envisioned myself as Son-Goku struggling with the enemy. When I would fail, my hair would look darker; when I would triumph over a seemingly impossible task, my hair would appear blonder than it is.
Whenever people watch me dance, I hope they see the character I’m trying to impersonate onstage. I might be the noble prince from Swan Lake or the Prodigal Son; I might be a beggar or a soldier. In reality, I am just a geek owing everything I can do to an ape alien named Son-Goku.
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The Man Who Was Thursday was one of my favorite books years ago. I thought it was a fantasy, but apparently it is one of the most realistic spy novels ever written.
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Presenting George Herriman and Krazy Kat, with appearances by archie and mehitabel.
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Killer trees? Poisons aside, I don’t think so. Killer bromeliads? Perhaps.
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What is the worst Bob Dylan song? I’m tempted to say all of them — Zimmerman, to my ears, has a modest talent for doggerel and none whatsoever for music — but some of his songs are worse than others. I’ll nominate one that’s a bit obscure nowadays (though not obscure enough), “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”
Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful bounding leap
And foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst
If you perceive anything in the lyrics beyond the clanging rhyme, you need to detox.
Bulletin
Etna is doing her thing right now (10 p.m. CDT). You can watch the fireworks here. Also here (you might need to manually refresh the view periodically) and here.
Update: The show’s over for now. There’s a spectacular video taken close to the vent here. There’s also this snapshot of a less familiar sort of volcanic activity.
Dance on a volcano
For fans of Genesis and Steve Hackett:
From the observatory
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day might look familiar to fans of Mouretsu Pirates.
Faint visitor
The sky was mostly clear this evening, so I tried to find Comet PanSTARRS. I couldn’t see it myself — it’s not a bespectacled-eye object in Wichita skies, though possibly someone with better vision than mine can spot it — but my camera did.
Miscellany
If you’re a creative sort, you have an opportunity to collaborate with Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately, the deadline is next Monday. I wish I’d heard about this earlier.
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Coming attractions: Pixy might be able to see Comets Lemmon and PanSTARRS now. The latter should be visible to those of us in the northern hemisphere soon.
There are more comet pictures here.
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Vertical, Inc., is considering whether to translate Yusuke Kishi’s Shin Sekai Yori. If an English-language copy of the novel would be worth $25 to you, go to Vertical’s Tumblr page and “like” it. They need 4500 people to express an interest before they’ll undertake the project, and I was only #699.
Kishi does have one book available in English translation. I’ll probably include The Crimson Labyrinth in my next Amazon.com order.
If you’re not watching the anime Shin Sekai Yori, you’re missing one of the finest — and most nightmarish — science fiction stories ever broadcast.
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Bambi Meets Godzilla, rebuilt:
You can watch it in 1080 if your computer can handle it.
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Professor Mondo‘s novel is now available as pixels at Amazon.com. I just got a new pair of glasses, so I’ll probably wait for the print edition and read it the way books were meant to be read, on dead trees. You can read one of his short stories here.
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A note on current events in the Catholic Church: everything you read in the secular press is complete and absolute BS. Don’t believe anything you read. I suggest checking in occasionally with Elizabeth Scalia if you want an informed perspective.
Meanwhile, here’s the Vatican version of March Madness, and Christopher Buckley’s introduction to simony.
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Which famous British poet is this? The answer is here.
(Via Eve Tushnet.)
Nonsense and stuff
Presenting the Pulp-O-Mizer.
(Via dotclue)
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While researching jurisimprudence, I came across some additions to The Rules:
Cunningham’s Law – The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
Muphry’s Law — The principle that any criticism of the speech or writing of others will itself contain at least one error of usage or spelling
…
Chuck Jones’s Law – If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a bunny.
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Via the professor, here’s the Monty Python “Happy Valley” skit. which I hadn’t come across before.
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I quit watching teevee decades ago, so I missed this classic commercial. (Via Robbo.)
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When assembling a web page, be sure to close all tags. (How large a monitor would you need to read the final line above the footer?)
(Via Dustbury.)
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Even rapidly-flowing, basaltic lava, such as that which Tolbachik is currently erupting in Kamchatka, is dense stuff, as illustrated by the process of taking a sample, above.
Here’s a spherical panoramic movie of a helicopter touring Tolbachik. You can click and drag to change the direction of view.
Since lava is so dense, is it possible, with the appropriate footwear, to walk across a fresh flow? Sometimes, if conditions are right:
At Etna you can walk on small lava flows with good hiking boots (it might be their last hike, though), because the lava is more viscous than on Hawai’i. However, you won’t try on a larger flow because heat radiation is so huge.
You go first.
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Mt. Rainier erupting the Milky Way.
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Some true rock music, made with volcanic phonolite.