Filed under: Altithermal, book, climate change, coral reefs, deep time, Hot Earth Dreams, Uncategorized | Tags: asteroid strike, climate change, Wilkes Land gravitational anomaly
Another little post, this one on a news item a few months old. Whenever someone spots a gravity anomaly in Antarctica, people get silly, write things about how the tinfoil hat brigade think it’s a UFO, or an alien base, or NAZIs. They’re so silly. Of course it’s shoggoth (not sure what the singular or plural is. Since shoggoth is sort of like concrete or nanotech, is it singular, plural, collective singular, collective plural, or what?). Anything that close to the Transantarctic Mountains has to be. it’s canon.
More seriously, there’s some potentially interesting science buried under the ice. Continue reading
Since spring has Sprung with a vengeance around here (See this, for example), I’m wearing my botanist duds and getting away from the computer quite a lot. Which is a good thing.
In the meantime, here are a couple of articles on the actions of the current Republican Administration. Someone said that was the calm way to have a discourse without empowering you-know-who, and I’m beginning to believe that True Names are those where ad companies send you revenue and eyeballs when your name is used. But I digress too much.
The title’s in reference to the Reichstag Fire. Hopefully it will make sense by the end. Continue reading
Filed under: Permaculture, Real Science Content, sustainability | Tags: composting, greenwaste, parasites, recycling
I don’t know why Agent Orange’s First Official Joint Session made me think about parasites, but there you have it. This is actually something I’ve been dealing with for awhile now, and since the problem is only going to get worse unless (and until) we innovate our way out of this particular pickle.
The problem is fairly simple: if you want a sustainable society, you need to recycle almost everything. The problem with recycling stuff, especially organic materials, is that it makes controlling pests, pathogens, and parasites very, very hard, because they move very well in streams of unprocessed materials. After all, a large majority of species on Earth are parasites (per Zimmer’s Parasite Rex), and we, erm, they, evolved over the last billion-odd years in a world where the elements of organic matter are recycled extremely well, give or take some oil and coal fields. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that our attempts at recycling and repurposing are spreading parasites and pathogens all over the place. Continue reading
Putting the life back in science fiction 