Tag: stoopid

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earthquake stoopid volcano

Italy in Geological News

First a volcano-related item: How did the victims of the Plinean Eruption of Vesuvius die – a summary from io9, of an article assessing how the victims of the Vesuvius eruption died. It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with how freaking scary pyroclastic flows are that they died from being flash-cooked by the extreme heat of the flow, rather than suffocated by it.

And then, Italian scientists who failed to predict L’Aquila earthquake may face manslaughter charges. Argh. Argh argh argh. Considering how inherently unpredictable earthquakes are – more unpredictable than volcanic eruptions or tsunami – I was primed to be ticked off from the instant I read the headline. The article mentions foreshocks (one of them a 4.0) but the problem there is that you can only really classify a foreshock in hindsight. Was the magnitude 4.0 the prelude to a bigger earthquake, or an earthquake in its own right? There’s no way of knowing for certain until after you get hit by (or fail to be) by a much larger quake.

“Those responsible are people who should have given different answers to the public,” said Alfredo Rossini, L’Aquila’s public prosecutor. “We’re not talking about the lack of an alarm, the alarm came with the movements of the ground. We’re talking about the lack of advice telling people to leave their homes.”

This is the ultimate in damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations. If you warn people to leave their homes because a natural disaster is imminent and it doesn’t happen, you catch flak – think about the complaining that came after the tsunami that did hit Hawaii wasn’t the monster wall of water that makes up journalistic wet-dreams. But if you don’t tell people to clear out of their homes because there’s the possibility of an inherently unpredictable event occurring, then you get in trouble for that as well. Hindsight is 20/20, particularly when it comes to earthquakes. Though this:

At a press conference after the meeting, government official Bernardo De Bernardinis, deputy technical head of the Civil Protection Agency, told reporters that “the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable.” In addition to the six scientists, De Bernardinis is also under investigation.

Also really doesn’t help. Small earthquakes might release some stress on a fault, but that also might add stress to a different portion of the same fault, or another fault nearby. The environment of stress and faulting that goes on beneath us is too uncontrolled and not well mapped enough to allow for the incredibly accurate modeling you’d need to be able to say something like that. So if that’s something the seismologists in question were telling the government, shame on them. But I also have a hard time imagining any geologist worth his or her salt saying that unless they were simultaneously on some kind of mind-altering drug regimen, so I’d really like to know just who in the “scientific community” De Bernardinis was referring to. For all I know, the “scientific community” is a bright blue space elf that only he can see.

What a horrible situation. And way to make “Italian seismologist” a very unappealing job title.

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conspiracy theory stoopid

More HAARP conspiracy nuttiness

Chavez says US ‘weapon’ caused Haiti quake

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a ‘tectonic weapon’ to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week.

And:

Venezuelan media have reported that the earthquake “may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate.”

The absolute breadth of the stupid leaves me almost speechless. Almost.

I’d love to know exactly how people think an atmospheric research facility – even if we’re nice and allow the conspiracy nuts the notion that HAARP can somehow effect climate via it interaction with the atmosphere, which it can’t – can manage to effect the Earth’s crust, 10 km below the surface and almost a hemisphere away. You know, we think the atmosphere is pretty awesome, probably because we couldn’t live without it. But let me break it to you – tectonic forces really don’t give much of a shit what the atmosphere is doing. In fact, it’s really the tectonics that get the final say on what the climate is doing, not the other way around.

Otherwise, what kind of tectonic “weapon” are we proposing? Secret injection well that’s putting highly pressurized fluid in to the fault to lubricate it? Nah, too plausible. Underground atomic explosions? These are the sorts of things people would tend to notice.

It makes my brain hurt. But we also know that conspiracy nuttiness of this variety requires no plausible mechanism. And in this case, not even a vague understanding of geology.

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creationism stoopid

Science fiction makes you godless and evil

Well, I guess if you have a fundamental problem with science in general, science fiction becomes a sort of terrifying, wordy mass of horror. I’m waiting for this guy’s next installment, when he attacks the fantasy genre for being polytheistic and glorifying witchcraft. And elves. Because everyone knows that elves are really just thinly disguised tree-worshipping hippies.

Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists.

Um… Sagan as an astrophysicist, wasn’t he? Asimov was a biochemist. Neither of them were biologists. Or maybe this is the bit where we conflate all science with evolution, because it’s a buzzword for EVIL.

It kind of reminds me of the bit in Stuart’s 2009 Colorado Skepticamp presentation, when he was showing some clips from everyone’s favorite creationist blowhard Ken Ham. One of the clips referred to the “evolutionary science of comets,” at which point I almost fell out of my chair. While one can talk about a comet’s “evolution,” it was pretty plain that they were in fact attaching the word “evolution” to anything they didn’t like, to mark it as one of those evil things that doesn’t support a literal interpretation of the Bible.

That aside, I totally want to read this guy’s review of Twilight. It would be like two things I hate coming together and creating something mind-blowingly fantastic.

Categories
2012 stoopid

Even real Mayans think the 2012 Apocalypse is BS

2012 isn’t the end of the world, Mayans insist

It also sounds like the Mayans who aren’t too busy trying not to starve to death are also getting very annoyed about the whole thing. Considering this is basically the white people stealing a bit of their culture and then shellacking it with the Christian idea of a global apocalypse, well, I’d be really annoyed myself. Particularly when said thieving white people are dishonest hacks that are trying to make money by scaring people half to death, or just by making really stupid-looking disaster movies about it.

And sadly, I bet no one will listen to a real Mayan calling it BS. This is one of those unsinkable (and stupid) rubber duckies – if you call BS on one disaster theory, another springs up in its place. Or the believers in it just ignore you and move on. Which I honestly wouldn’t have a problem about it if they weren’t apparently running around and scaring the heck out of fourth graders with this stuff.

The article does a pretty good job of summing up a bunch of the disaster BS that’s going around and at leas throwing in some quotes to let us know that scientists think it’s total BS. Phil Plait even puts in an appearance!

Most of the 2012 stuff hinges on astronomy, which is why I don’t have much to say about it. I just listen to the lovely and talented Dr. Plait, nod, and say “F*** yeah!” at appropriate times. But thanks to Yahoo News, I now know one of the proposed geological ways the world is supposedly going to blow up.

The stupid. It burns:

Another History Channel program titled “Decoding the Past: Doomsday 2012: End of Days” says a galactic alignment or magnetic disturbances could somehow trigger a “pole shift.”

“The entire mantle of the earth would shift in a matter of days, perhaps hours, changing the position of the north and south poles, causing worldwide disaster,” a narrator proclaims. “Earthquakes would rock every continent, massive tsunamis would inundate coastal cities. It would be the ultimate planetary catastrophe.”

History Channel, I would demand that you feel ashamed, but we’ve known for a long time that you don’t have any shame to begin with. Anyone who has taken even the most basic geology course should know that this is complete, gleeful fabrication. The entire mantle of the Earth shifting in days? Are these people on drugs? The part of the mantle known as the asthenosphere is capable of plastic deformation, but it’s made of hot rocks under high pressure, not freaking marshmallow fluff. The mantle has convection currents that move the crustal plates, but come on – when we’re getting a few centimeters a year out of one of these babies, we think it’s really cooking. India is experiencing the most rapid movement out of any of the plates, and it’s moving at 5 cm/year. Not exactly the stuff of horror.

Also, to the best of our knowledge, the magnetic field is determined by currents within the Earth’s core. Not the mantle. Not even close.

Again, I repeat – are these people on drugs?

Categories
stoopid

Within the heart of every mountain, there slumbers a pyramid.

I’ve still got a cold, so I’m going to keep this pretty short and sweet. I’m having a hard time writing anything even vaguely coherent. But here we go.

From the people who brought us pyramids in Bosnia: Pyramids in Romania?

No.

That was easy.

Okay, not quite that short and sweet. Looking at the small blurb of text to go with these three rather lovely pictures, I’m not sure if it’s the cold medicine or the contents of the text that’s making my head feel all funny.

Joo DenesBudapest, Hungary PYRAMIDS IN ROMANIA? Attached is a holographic picture of the Mountain CEAHLAU in the Eastern Carpathians, near the artificial lake Bicaz (or “Spring of the Mountain”). This picture formes only on August 6th every year (the 49th day after the summer solstice called Day of the Sun), with superposition of four shadows of the mountain-pyramids: the peaks Toaca, Lespezi, Shepherd Stone and Volcano Stone. The photos were made from the peak Toaca,

I’m not entirely certain what makes these pictures “holographic.” They look like normal pictures to me. Pretty ones, but still normal picture. I’m also incredibly confused by the use of the word “superposition.” Maybe he or she means “juxtaposition?”

Either way, the excitement seems to be that these mountains cast very straight-sided shadows, like the shadows that you’d expect from pyramids. So it doesn’t even seem to be a case like the so-called “Bosnian Pyramid,” where the mountain in question at least has a couple relatively straight sides and looks vaguely pyramidal when approached from the right angle. I took a quick peek at an aerial map of the area, and it all looks like pretty normal mountain topography.

The thing is, when the sun is at a low angle – as it appears to be in these pictures – all mountains produce pyramidal shadows. It’s just how the optical properties of the angles involved work. The mountains in question may produce more clearly pyramidal shadows because of the surrounding topography that the shadows are cast on, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary going on.

So basically, if we’re going to start calling mountains “pyramids” based on the shadows they cast, at sunrise and sunset, every mountain is a pyramid. Get digging, boys.

Categories
stoopid

Monkeywrenching geology

Monkeywrenching the Batholiths

I saw this item on Pharyngula, and it just kind of blew me away. I mean, you hear about animal rights groups going after biologists all the time, but I’d always thought at least academic geologists were safe from this kind of interference with their experiments.

There were several things about the exchange that really struck me.

First of all, Dr. Hole is incredibly patient in his replies. Far calmer and more patient than I could ever manage, though admittedly I also tend to have an explosive temper.

I’m very surprised that Ingmar Lee didn’t get himself hurt, or blow up a significant chunk of the landscape he so loves. Seismic shots are explosives, pure and simple. Messing with them is pretty risky business.

I was also struck by the apparent misunderstanding of how seismic shots work. Now, I wouldn’t want to be standing on top of a big one when it goes, but the point of them is to direct the explosive force downward into the ground, in order to create seismic waves. If seismic shots set off classic surface explosions like you see in the movies, they’d be worthless, they’d cause a lot of destruction, and they’d probably cause damage to the receiver arrays. If seismic shots are set properly (and not messed with by people who don’t know what they’re doing) then there’s no surface damage and no surface danger.

From what I’ve been able to come up with, research-wise, the biggest environmental concern caused by seismic surveys is actually in the wear and tear on the plant life that all the necessary vehicles cause – and the potential of scaring animals away. You do have to be able to get all the equipment out there and back, and that’s going to take vehicles. A survey done with explosives is actually far less disturbing to the environment than one using seismic trucks. One thump from the explosives, and it’s done. Considering the area is often subject to lightning strikes and its own natural earth quakes, the seismic shots are negligible in comparison to those.

I’m sure the mental image of hapless residents (and cranes) being cartoonishly thrown from the ground by enormous explosions is very dramatic, but in this case, it’s just silly.

I think the crux of this is Mr. Lee’s accusation that the data from this project will somehow be given to Big Oil, or that Big Oil has its evil little fingers in this scientific pie. Since most seismic surveys are probably done by oil companies (they have more money to do expensive things like that, after all), I can’t really blame him for the initial suspicion. However, basic knowledge of geology would prove that notion wrong, considering the area that the seismic is being shot for is chock full of igneous rocks. It’s a project looking at batholiths (giant intrusive structures – mountains, basically) which are not known for their rich oil reserves. Oil is found only in sedimentary rocks.

Hating oil companies doesn’t make this sort of dangerous vandalism at all okay, though. It also doesn’t help the efforts of environmentalists who are fighting oil companies, when someone associated with them goes after a permitted scientific research project while sounding like a self-righteous jerk – and one that could use a little extra geology education, at that. I certainly don’t advocate blowing up the landscape. I like the landscape. It’s where I keep my stuff. And it has surface processes! But that was never a danger here, at least not until Mr. Lee broke the top off the charge tube.

It really makes me wonder how people like Mr. Lee would have reacted to this very cool project, which determined the age of the Amazon River by drilling into its sediment fans. Well, it involves drills, so it must be evil and associated with the oil companies, right?