DirtPriest-Too busy with school to read?

I am too busy to get anywhere near 75, but life goes on and I do what I can. I'm in both Early Western Civ and Mythology, both reading heavy with papers due weekly, Historical Geology with lots of things to remember (and another paper due in April), and Differential Equations which is going to be tricky. So far I've read a nice retelling of the Isis and Osiris myth in the Donna Rosenberg World Mythology: An Anthology of the Great Myths and Epics. That looks like a book I would have picked out just to read for fun.

Welcome back!

Hi Ryan!!

I am glad to see your new thread! Happy New Year!

Sounds like you are taking quite the heavy load this semester, but it all sounds very interesting.

I finally ordered the missing Foundation books from amazon with super slow free shipping and think they will be here by the end of the week.

I have been watching the NFL playoffs this year more than usual. I typically just stick with college, but I have been impressed by some of the amazing plays.

This weekend was pretty good. Lots of defense for a change. I've got the 49ers in the super bowl pool for the coveted Charlie Batch Trophy. Defense and ball control. This whole season has been about penalizing defenses so that scoring is high for TV ratings. The Bama LSU game was very low in the ratings and according to every commentator I heard on ESPN it was the worst game ever and neither team deserves the title. Touchdowns = ratings and $, defense = championships, unless and until the refs decide otherwise.

I put up the thread for the Foundation series. I am not sure if I got the books in chronological order or not. I have started the first book and Asimov lists them in chronological order in a note, but I guess I will double-check his list.

Already starred. Asimov loves to talk about his books. There is that handy list of all of the Robot/Empire/Foundation books in Prelude to F, which you have posted correctly in chronological order. I'm looking forward to it.

Oh, good, I am glad to see now that you checked my order and it was ok. I was confused (not unusual with me these days.) Anyway, it is a great read so far.

I've started pecking away at Prelude myself. Also, I forgot that I technically read another book for the year's tally board.


1. Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare
I took my nephew to the library last weekend and remembered reading this book in grade-school as a part of the Battle of the Books competition. Obviously, we were downstairs in the children's section and they had the new books featured on the wall for the competition this school year. So, I strolled over to the computer, found the author's name and grabbed it off of the shelf.

A reread showed my why I liked this book so much as a kid. In a nutshell, a boy and his father build themselves a cabin in backwoods Maine during the Colonial period, dad returns to Massachusetts to fetch mom, leaving a twelve year old alone in the forest for the summer. He is saved from disaster by an Indian, who asks that Matt teach his grandson to read. They teach each other about their respective worlds, Matt reads Robinson Crusoe to Attuan, and they become like brothers.

The book is semi-historical as far as the setting goes, brings up the fact that Indian tribes in America had an equivalent flood story to Noah, and is a good adventure story for its target audience (boys of around fourth grade or so). Not only is it an adventure, but a story of friendship growing out of dislike and distrust. It is a good feeling to read a childhood favorite and still enjoy it decades later. And no, it was not on the list for the competition this year. I didn't recognize any of the titles, but there was some kind of sequel to the Rats of Nimh. Now, I have to slap together a quick paper on whether I'd rather be an Athenian or Spartan, due in the morning.

I remember that book, but I can't recall if I ever read it. I wonder if we have a copy around here somewhere? One of these days I need to get my library up to date. I keep buying more books that don't fit.

So which did you pick, Athenian or Spartan?

Good luck with the Differential Equations. I never took that, stopping with calc. I always wanted to take it though. But I have heard that it is quite challenging.

I am a little over halfway through Prelude.

For me, DE was challenging, but it was more practical than previous calculus so I understood it better. The trick is to keep in mind the practicality and not get bogged down in the details of the solution techniques. I spent some long hours working problems for that class though! :)

Hi Ryan, just getting around to commenting on your thread - I like the look of that World Mythology book.

Good luck with your studies and it would be interesting to hear whether you chose Athenian or Spartan.

Athenian was the obvious choice. Sparta doesn't sound like much fun to me at all. None. My paper morphed into how shameful it was to history that the Greeks pretty much beat themselves to death and were overrun by Philip of Macedonia while still trying to decide what to do about him. How might the world be different today if the Greeks hadn't died of self-inflicted fracturing?

Dr. Dull made the fine comparison that the Greeks thought of the Macedonians the way we in lower Michigan think of the Yoopers. They're kind of Michiganders (or Greeks), but not really. They speak the same language, but markedly different, eh. ("Let's drive over to Ishpeming and get some Stroh's, eh!") And those silly hats with ear flaps. How hick is that! I say not very hick at all if your ears aren't frozen. Isn't Dr. Dull the worst possible name for a history teacher? She prefers Laura, but she does have a Doctorate in History from Notre Dame.

DE is a time eating monster. Parts of it are disappointingly simple, but a few parts are total brain-benders. The class is more about practicality and use than overdoing it on the method. Maintaining my President's list status is in serious jeopardy though I haven't done some of the techniques in almost 20 years. I just got integration by parts thrown at me (not hard at all after reviewing my old calc book after getting home) and matrix algebra, Eugen values and whatnot, which I was lucky to barely touch on in high school and haven't really seen since. We're still in chapter 2 of 9. I'll be OK if I stay on top of things.

The nice thing is my GPA doesn't really matter that much anymore at Delta College as I was accepted at Lake Superior State University last week. Yay!!!! This whole semester goes on my new transcript at LSSU as transfer credits, not as letter grades towards their GPA calculations. Plus, I think I've got enough already to start into Geophysics, and branch into the math through that route, only using what I need. Assuming I feel up for more brain-frying punishment...

LSSU is a 3-time national champion in hockey, by the way, including a 9-1 thrashing of perennial power Boston U in 1994.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to read my ramblings here at my lemonade stand of a thread.

Congrats on your acceptance! That is terrific! Lots of people here on LT facing big changes. It is exciting, but hard on reading time.

I just finished Prelude. I loved it.

Aw, the world wouldn't be much different, because the Romans were still the Romans, and they came in and showed the Greeks what's what. (Spoken like a true Latinist, eh?) :)

Oh, and congrats on the acceptance!!

Have I not updated my thread in three weeks? I guess not. I've been frustrated lately and I finally figured out why. I have to spend all of my study time doing things other than the geology that I really want to do. I'm overly eager to move on to a university with some serious students to challenge myself against. Hopefully there will be a absolute minimum of juvenile drama (a recent class problem) and no students that hate their classes. Yet, I'm not looking forward to leaving my little niece and nephews behind when I move up north in the least.

Differential equations has taken a turn for the better. Things are complicated, but I've got it under control. We're into systems of complex numbers, with real and imaginary parts. Something that seems so abstract yet it pops up in modelling electronic circuitry. Wonders never cease. Square root of -1.

We did a fun assignment in Western Civ, a top ten song list for Alexander the Great's iPod. The list of country drunkard songs that work for that is just enormous. Now I have to do a book review, of all things. Never done that before! I have 152 of them on LT. I'm reading The Crime of Galileo. Dr. Dull has her masters degree in Renaissance studies, so we'll just see how that turns out, grade-wise. 98.75% so far, and one of the 4 points I lost was a true/false question from a lecture that I missed while sick.

Thanks for the congratulations, again. I've been waiting far too long to do the university thing. If the Greeks had spent less time arguing amongst themselves and more time unifying their country, the world would be far different, but not necessarily better. Maybe the Greek ideas that launched the Renaissance would have been completely lost instead? One side thought that came to my mind on Athens vs. Sparta is the fact that every Army needs a Secretary of State, and vice versa. Those two cities could have worked together so well if they had trusted each other a bit.

One last thing... I never recounted the Charlie Batch Trophy drama. Comrade Timo had the worst season ever, by far, bar none. Absolutely and monumentally pathetic. Timo had barely half the season points of the winning team. Peyton Manning was just clutch. He finished 1-16, with his only win in week 1, by 1.5 points, when his opponent's RB left the game on Monday night in the first quarter. So, he had tenth pick of the teams in the playoffs and selected the Giants, who won the Super Bowl and he won the Charlie Batch. Never in nine years has the first or second pick won the trophy!



2. and 3. Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Two books that I think are classics. I'll put up an official review later, beyond the group read .

I found that my classes got more mature - both the students and the work - as I got into upper level classes. I hope same is true for you. At least it sounds like you're doing pretty well, grade-wise!

You'll almost certainly use a bit of complex numbers if you study earthquakes and wave propagation. Wave motion is easiest to do usung exponentials with complex exponents. The wave equation pops up everywhere in physics!

Stopping to check up on you and say Hi!!

Will you start your new school this summer or in the fall? I bet your family will miss you lots when you are gone.

Off in the fall but I may move up to Sault Sainte Marie earlier. We'll see after orientation in May. The family will be sad all around I'm sure. I lined up a campus work-study job tutoring math already too.

My diff-eq class is turning in to quite the fun time. Pretty much every serious student at Delta is in it, which is about 7 or 8 people, with 5 from Saginaw Valley State U. and at least one from Central Michigan. Other than that, every person I've talked to on campus despises math. They'll never play with wave equations. And it is everywhere. Periodic functions are omnipresent.

Just stopping to say Hi!! How is school going?

Hello! School's going just fine. I'm basically done, we have a part of a chapter to cover in western civ and that's it. Diff Eq got simpler each week and I have a test over the last few chapters. Basically, we started doing analysis in the long, roundabout (but basic) way, then learned a few shortcuts and simpler methods to wrap up the class. Other than that, a couple of geology tests, no comprehensive finals for the third semester in a row. I somehow feel cheated.
Honestly, I haven't had much to add to LT over the last few months. There's been a group read of Asimov's Foundation that I couldn't participate in, and I haven't read a book for fun since early February. Wait, I did...


4. The Permian Extinction and the Tethys: An Exercise in Global Geology by AMC Sengor & S. Atayman
This is an extended technical paper published by the Geological Society of America. The authors are examining the pinching out of the Tethys Ocean during the assembly of Pangaea ~300 million years ago. Basically, it became a land-locked ocean being subducted under the continents on all sides, in what is now Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. They analyzed extant sedimentary remnants from around the former basins from Turkey to Russia and Thailand, correlated the rate of anoxia (lack of oxygen) with water depth, showing that the oxygen went away over time from deepest basin to shallowest shelves, as it should. The modern Black Sea is highly anoxic at depth, preserving wooden ships from the time of ancient Greece, as nothing can live in such low oxygen levels. They also propose a spillway across Europe through Germany and Denmark which sloshed water back and forth between the shrinking Tethys and the global Panthallassa Sea. The conclusion of the book is that the life forms in the Tethys were stuck (or swam out while they could) and perished with their ocean, and the floor of the Panthallassa has been subducted away since then leaving a major gap in the fossil record. The Permian Extinction is assumed to be the largest extinction event known through fossils, something on the order of 90% of all families of life vanished. Still hazy. This is a complex work that I've barely touched on, really. Incredibly dense for a 60 page paper.

You can basically ignore A below, B shows the assembly of Pangaea, imagine the bits of Asia and Australia meeting and the sea between them and Africa (Tethys) being pinched out of existence.

So, Delta College is officially over. Graduation ceremonies ensue Friday evening. Happy and sad, there are a few friends and professors that I will miss a lot but I'm off to bigger and better things. Such is life.

I just felt like adding this as I noticed one of my favorite books had zero reviews...


Somewhere in Ireland a Village is Missing an Idiot by the (thankfully) incomparable David Feherty.

To be fair, this book deserves a review. I thoroughly enjoyed it years ago. David Feherty is a tragically funny golf announcer and this is a collection of magazine columns from a couple of mags that he wrote for over the years. Every story is funny, at least if you like funny golf tales from the dark side. A memorable favorite is one where Feherty is in a locker room at a tournament after hours and comments on how the players' clubs reflect their personalities and appearances. Justin Leonard's head covers had perfectly parted tassels, Nota Begay's putter was cowering in a corner because it had to go both ways, wink nod. Begay had the odd habit of putting from either side of the ball as necessary to have the break be towards him and never away. As far as I've ever heard, the only switch-putter ever, nothing to do with an assumption that you might make based on Begay's name, although the joke is doubly implied. Everybody should watch the ironically titled 'Feherty' on the Golf Channel on Monday nights. Just an FYI. "Tonight's guest is a golfer, writer, commentator and complete moron..."

I feel like adding a few more things in retrospect. I really got to like the Diff EQ class, but I had no choice as it ate up all of my free time for homework. I spent about 40 hours on two take home tests. The first was a 94% and the second one to end the class with the fascinating LaPlace Transforms was an awesome 100%. Those transforms are particularly interesting because you can skip all of the rigamarole of decoupling systems or vector analysis (which sounds easier than it really is!) and go straight back to what amounts to tenth grade algebra. Basically, you 'transform' the system using the coefficients and a few formulas derived in class, then flip-flop things around until you get L(y)=x/(s-a), and then take those numbers to make a y=xe^at power. That might not mean much to most people, but it was like a vacation after pounding through page after page of eigenvector analysis! The hard part is deriving the table of those basic forms with some moderately advanced calculus. There are ones for y=sine of omega*t, t*sine omega*t, and a few more. And to top it all off, they always work. Hard analysis methods fail if the problem is a discontinuous function (has a gap or jump in it) whereas the Laplace transforms walk right on by. It will be nice to have some free time back so I can watch the Tigers games without doing homework.

I might as well post my class Book Review on The Crime of Galileo by Giorgio de Santillana, which will be posted in a campus display over the summer. That's nice!

5. The Crime of Galileo by Giorgio de Santillana

The genesis Giorgio de Santillana’s book, “The Crime of Galileo,” grew out of his research for a translation of Galileo’s “Dialogue on the Great World Systems.” The author became drawn farther and farther in to a seminal moment of world history, the secularization of knowledge. De Santillana sets forth his research in an overly erudite and highly scholarly account of Galileo’s so-called crime, which is befitting of the Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1954 until his death in 1974. The author was born in Rome in 1902 and died in the United States.

The book is not strictly a biography, as it only covers the relevant periods of his persecution by the church. The first few chapters cover in great detail the events of 1616, when Galileo published his first of several papers proposing a mobile Earth, and Galileo’s reasons for moving from a low paying university position in Padua to a betterprotected position in Florence. The city of Florence was more insulated from the machinations of the Jesuit and Catholic monopoly on learning, which Galileo knew he would soon have to defend himself against. His concepts of heliocentrism (sun-centered) was counter to the carefully rationalized abstract system that the Catholic church had built every aspect of their world view upon. Any attack on this foundation would bring the entirety of church doctrine, and indirectly their authority, to the ground.

Chapter Three, “Philosophical Intermezzo,” is easily the highlight of the book, and should be circulated as a handy pamphlet. The chapter discusses both the system of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, as well as the Aristotelian system that the church believed in, both in great detail. An interesting point is that the church did not necessarily believe that their Aristotelian system represented the actuality of the universe, but an Earth-centered system was required as a prerequisite for their religious doctrines expounding the Earth as the God-favored center of Creation.

Chapter Four is devoted to the interesting character of Robert Bellarmine, a highly learned man of his age. While wholly devoted to his beloved church, he was reasonably well informed of the scientific research of his day. He was happy to plead ignorance as an excuse for not understanding the mathematicians of the day, but was clearly aware of contradictions between appearances and actuality. An example of such a contradiction is how a person riding in a cart sees buildings moving by but the viewer clearly knows that he and the cart are the party moving. Balancing this idea with a mobile Earth theory was the biggest problem Bellarmine had with Galileo’s writings, hence his willingness to feign ignorance as a solution. Chapters Five and Six explore the actual charges levied against Galileo in 1616, much of which were false charges brought before a church commission by biased officials who distorted facts and purposely misquoted Galileo’s writings. Galileo had presented a reasonable defense of himself using scripture, but much of what he presented was never read by the inquisition. Heliocentrism was officially declared a heresy, and writings on the subject were either banned, or ordered to revision to avoid any heretical ideas.

Following this is a short chapter of the years between his problems with the church, introducing a series of new characters. One of these is the new Pope, Urban VIII, who is the focus of Chapter Eight. In his pre-Pope days as Maffeo Barberini he had befriended and encouraged Galileo, but as Pope he became too busy with the Thirty Years’ War, and enriching his family on the side, to be bothered with free-thinkers such as Galileo. He could brook no opposition to anything Catholic during his difficult time as Pope. Urban VII ordered Galileo to stand trial for heresy in 1633 for his long-standing anti-church doctrines, and notably for the 1623 publication of his “Dialogues.” This work compares the two competing systems of the universe by way of a dialogue between Salviati (Galileo’s heliocentrism), Simplicio (The Catholic Earth-centered philosophical view) and Sagredo, a neutral observer. The “Dialogue on the Great World Systems” itself is the focus of a short Chapter Nine

The remainder of the book covers the trial of Galileo on “Suspicion of Heresy” in great detail, with chapters devoted to the summons to Rome, the difficulties of the Inquisitors, the actual trial itself is covered in Chapters Twelve through Fourteen. The sentencing to imprisonment at the whim of the inquisition and its swift change to permanent house arrest, followed by an epilogue comprise the remaining two chapters.

His prosecutors had a difficult time pursuing their quarry in the trial because they had such a difficult time understanding Galileo’s ideas. This, plus their bias towards Galileo ridiculing the church (via Simplicio) led to a heated trial based not on facts presented, but emotion and power. The Catholic church was mired in the divisive Thirty Years’ War and rational thinking was often set aside in favor of flash decisions and outbursts designed to bring about a predestined decision in the church’s favor.

In conclusion, de Santillana presents a case that Galileo made more trouble for himself than he needed to by publishing his works in common Italian, instead of dusty old Latin. If he had written in Latin, the unwashed masses of Italy would never have had their little apple-carts upset. Or, more likely, the church would never have needed to take drastic steps to curb Galileo, lest he upset those apple-carts. While too technical for everyday bedtime reading, de Santillana’s account will probably stand for generations as the definitive exploration of the trial of Galileo based on in-depth research into every character on every side involved in the trial and the excruciatingly detailed examination of primary sources. The highlight of the primary sources is a comparison of signatures. The first is the shaky writing of an old man terrified by the threat of lifetime imprisonment, the second is a confident and smooth signature of a man who has accepted that he had been somewhat one sided in his arguments of a decade earlier and had convinced his persecutors of this fact, which allowed for much leniency by the jury. De Santillana, a native of Rome, fluently goes through the Latin and Italian sources from the Vatican and throughout Italy to ferret out every possible detail of this critical moment in tradition versus free thought.

Ooh, that one sounds interesting - I've read Galileo's Dialogue, so maybe I should hunt this one down...

It's very scholastic and not for everyone, but it would be hard to find something more complete on the subject. Plus, it is from the 1960's and there are many editions out there that you could find for a few dineros online (abebooks, etc.)

Congrats on graduation and best of luck at your next school. Enjoy those baseball games! I saw that the Browns drafted Weeden. They seem to pick Big 12 QBs. I was hoping they would pick a WR myself, but I am biased. I am hoping for a recovery of the Longhorn team this Fall, but I am not overly optimistic.

Congrats on your graduation!!!

Thanks to both of you! I'm pretty excited but I haven't figured out exactly when I'm starting. The summer schedule is pretty sparse at LSSU but I would like to get out of town anyway, at least for the most part. I'll figure it out soon.

Congratulations!

Thanks Jane!

I've been having a hard time deciding on a book to read for the first time ever. Nothing has caught my interest over the last week and now I have a large pile of books to reshelve, complete with a few crushed dust jackets. Neither Fafhrd and Grey Mouser nor The Once and Future King was going to be any fun, frankly all of fiction seems too hard to grasp at the moment. I just can't get in to the suspension of reality mode. Apparently I need some geology real bad so I'm going to read my textbooks, which weren't used very much at all. So much for my mental vacation!

I forgot to comment on the Browns draft moves for BJ. It is fitting that the Browns might be the last bastion of a power running attack for the primary weapon on offense. The NFL has become such a pass happy league that it may or may not work. The Browns don't have the defense to shut down anyone and that style of power offense doesn't necessarily equate to lots of scores. having Trent Richardson can never be a bad thing though. What will probably happen to them often is being behind and not having the time or the means to score twice. Weeden ought to help but he has little to throw to, and he presents a major challenge to Colt McCoy for starting QB. Cleveland led the league in dropped passes by a wide margin last year and they didn't throw all that much. I am curious to see how things work for my sorry old team. They're so awful and have been for twenty years.

Maybe this will be the year! I trying to get optimistic about football. I was so mad at Denver for trading Tebow. I have not been a big Denver fan for a while, but I was one while Tebow was there. As you see, I don't actually feel optimistic about football, but by August, I will be ready.

I feel the same way. The question is, what would I do on weekends without it? I've been subjecting myself to high doses of football for thirty years but after the last five seasons I've said I'm done with it. Almost as bad as cigarettes!

I can't give up football, no way. I was raised on it.

Me too. I just want Sundays off.

6. The Warriors of Day by James Blish
I have to say this was disappointing. Not particularly bad, mind you but ok. Not particularly riveting for a book by a favorite author. A basic savior of alien race created by a demigod to save said alien race from interstellar destruction story. Sadly, not much else to say. I give it three stars only because Blish has a knack for holding my interest and playing with good ideas. Not very gripping SF though.

Champlain's Dream sounds much more interesting, which I'm reading alongside a late '80's Geology textbook.

So have you read any Arthur C. Clarke? I just got a copy of Rendevous with Rama and somewhere around here is my daughter's copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any recommended order to his books?

Well, other than the series orders, there really isn't any. They're not interconnected at all like Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation action. Rendezvous with Rama is fine by itself and it is pretty good. Like the 2001 books, the first book is far better than the sequels. Childhood's End is the best by him, so if you can snag it at the library you would have an outstanding "Trilogy," if you know what I mean. The basic outline is similar to that V series that was recently redone for television, only Clarke is better.

Thanks for the info. I have heard of Childhood's End and wonder if my daughter has a copy. I will ask her. Lots of her books are still around the house here (although many are boxed up). We turned her bedroom into our office, so the books had to be moved out.

One can only hope. It's the best of the three.


7. Paradise by Mike Resnick
Resnick's Birthright: The Book of Man is an old favorite of mine, painting a picture of how today's politics might play out over the span of a Galactic Empire. Paradise is nominally set in the same universe and has a similar tale to tell. Humans colonize an alien world and the tribal natives never adapt to the institutes of man that they are forced to fit themselves in to, like laws and currency. The planet quickly degrades into chaos and disorder as the ecosystems and economies fail. The nice thing about the story is the way it is written, from the perspective of a writer collecting information for a series of books over his lifetime. It is a fine story in the end, but depressing, like Birthright. Every resident that the author, or should I say narrator, interviews pines for the Paradise of the previous generation, back when things were better than what the person lived through. The connectedness with the Birthright universe is very minimal, almost to the point of name-dropping and nothing more. One of those books that doesn't really offer a solution to the crises presented through the story other than Man screws up every system that he interferes with. Resnick, according to the book jacket, owns the largest dog grooming kennel in the US. I think this illustrates the point that he has more hope for dogs as a species than people, which might have some merits.

Wow. i got some more reading done...


8. American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot by Craig Ferguson
I read the beginning of this on a whim late one night, hoping for a laugh or two. I got that and many more, as well as an interesting story about how a guy from Glasgow gets to Hollywood. He hosts the Late Late Show and I never figured out why he looked familiar until I read that he was the snotty English boss on the Drew Carey Show. The memory banks get awful dusty sometimes. Many other reviews summarize the story of school and counterculture in Glasgow, breaking in to showbiz and coming to America three times. I was impressed with the book.


9. Physical Geology by Skinner & Porter
This is a pretty good basic geology textbook, probably a bit dated but no glaring holes from new research that I could find. Not much to say other than it covers a wide range of general topics, from mineralogy to oceanography to planetary geology, and was probably a fine textbook in it's day. Lutgens and Tarbuck's current text seems to be the hot setup these days and it is more thorough and is more densely illustrated with photographs as opposed to diagrams and graphs.

I read American On Purpose last year and liked it. My memory is better than yours, but I watched Drew Cary regularly.

I watched it often, I'm just not a TV show or movie guy so I don't save the hard drive space for such things. That was one of the last network series that I watched often. 99% of showbiz information in my memory since 1994 is from Carson/Letterman/Conan and an occasional Tom Snyder show, not from any partaking in pop culture.

Enjoy your summer. Sounds like kids' baseball season is upon you!

"You know you are getting old when you bend down to tie your shoes and look around for something else to do while you are down there." -- Tom Snyder

10. Geology and Scenery, North Shore of Lake Huron by Card & Robertson
This is an excellent guidebook to the Canadian shoreline of my beloved Lake Huron. It has a nice chapter on the basics of the geology, a second chapter outlining several field trips to places accessible by car and a third detailing locations to search for specimens. If you think you need it then you certainly do. Some of the details are slightly outdated but in geology, the sequence is all that matters and rock hard dates are less important (Find the bad pun). There is a technical debate about the Jacobsville sandstone layer that underlies the sedimentary basin of Michigan's UP as to what era it belongs to. There are no fossils to pin it down with and contrary evidence from cross-cutting intrusions of magma in a few places so its absolute date is hazy. Older books like this one tend to put it in the Cambrian when obvious fossils began to appear but newer sources place it earlier. Either way it is preaching to the choir as it straddles an estimated border in either case. It used to be a popular building stone both locally and around the country. The original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was built with it, but the old hotel was torn down to build the Empire State Building. Wikipedia has a painting of the old hotel.

It would have looked something like this...


I'm off to Sault Sainte Marie to get my enrollment and registration sorted out, leaving in the morning. On Sunday a friend already up there and I are meeting our geology buddy in Munising and we are abducting her from a field trip she is repeating. The three of us are making the 3+ mile hike out to Chapel Rock. It is awesome like the Grand Canyon yet in a convenient and accessible size.

I love the rock on that building!

I hope you get the classes that you want.

11. Asimov's Mysteries by Isaac Asimov
A fine collection of mysteries penned in response to a perceived lack of mystery stories in the SF genre. Several have been reprinted widely, at least I have multiple copies of, say, Marooned off Vesta and I'm in Marsport Without Hilda. Still, each has some commentary about them. Asimov makes the valid point that it is easy to deceive the reader with bogus science in the way that Christie hides key information. However, the reader feels cheated as they may not expect the key to the solution resting on residual charge left by a transmogrifier. There is none of that here, just a series of whodunits that can be enjoyed by the most dyed in the wool Miss Marple reader.

12. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould
Several of the reviews of this book are critical of it and I can't figure out why. Now, Gould makes some far reaching conclusions, or better yet, possibilities, based on fossils from a single shale bed on a lonely mountain in British Colombia. The deal is, the Burgess Shale is one of a very few fossil beds that preserve soft-bodied creatures, anywhere in the world. (Another is the Mazon Creek formation, a about sixty miles from Chicago.) The other thing is that these fossils are from the Cambrian Period, the first named span of time that is based on fossil remnants. All rock layers below and before the Cambrian have no visible fossils, Cambrian and later rocks do (or can.) There are fossil remains in older rocks but nothing obviously from multicellular life. In fact, the sudden appearance of blatantly obvious fossils is referred to as the Cambrian explosion, so suddenly do they appear, relatively speaking.

Now, the trick is that, almost universally, only hard shells, bones and teeth are preserved. In the Burgess shale, soft creatures from the very dawn of multi-cellular organisms are preserved in great detail. (Fossils are only as detailed as the surrounding rock allow them to be and shale is very finely grained. Sandstone only preserves details bigger than the sand grains it is made of.) The interpretation of the shale itself is that it is formed from a mudslide that dragged all of the little bugs and worms down into the depths with it. This is called a turbidite and is based on the specific way the different sized grains sort themselves as the mud settles. Through fortunate happenstance this shale bed is exposed for study.

The interesting thing about the Burgess fauna is that there are around twenty different types of arthropods (insects, crabs, trilobites, spiderey things, etc.) that have no counterpart today, and are only known from this one isolated fossil bed. These are theoretically regarded as completely new and unique phyla with no relatives today. Gould's hypothesis challenges the traditional view of evolutionary progress. Not the mechanics of change over time, but the origins of different phyla and classes. He proposes that a wide range of basic plans were able to try their hand at populating an empty ecosystem and that the phyla we have today are the few survivors of this original Cambrian explosion. He refers to the commonly taught 'cone of diversity', one point branching out and up, as probably being off base. Strictly based on this fortunate preservation and a few others, he proposes a concept of decimation, where one point branches out into many parallel branches, some of which survive and thrive but most don't. There are no five eyed arthropods around today, for example, but there is one in the Burgess record. I know, I know, this is a big jump based on such a small sample, but when that small sample is completely contrary to common theory, then that theory needs a good tweaking. Obviously, any topic of evolution is stirring the pot of controversy in the first place.

Gould goes into great detail as he is an evolutionary biologist and high ranking paleontologist. Also in Wonderful Life, Gould discusses the people involved in deciphering the Burgess fossils, including Charles Walcott, the discoverer and apparently a forgotten titan of American Science. All in all, I have to rank this as one of the best science books that I have read, right up there with Sagan's Dragons of Eden and Gleik's Chaos: Making a New Science.

Gould's Wikipedia page may be worth a look. He was a far thinking and controversial figure in a controversial field of science.

Opabinia
Hallucinagenia

I have gotten more or less situated with LSSU. My friend up there is arranging an off campus apartment and I am waiting to communicate with the geology professor so I can enroll in classes. I am going to like it up there. The town is neat, but everything closes at nine except for the bars and the only affordable grocery store is Walmart. I'm not a fan. Many people seemed stand-offish and not overly nice but they are probably tired of tourists flooding their town all summer, hogging all of the parking spaces. We'll see. We did find an awesome restaurant out in the sticks in Brimley. Wow was that a good dinner of fresh-from-Superior whitefish. I don't even remember the name of it but Midland is so devoid of mom-and-pop places like that, it was like going back in time to when there were no applebees or bennigans. One nice side note for me is that Sault Sainte Marie is only forty-some miles from the Mackinac Bridge, I thought it was more like another hour drive. Midland is almost three hours of I-75 from Mackinac.

I need to get a decent digital camera. There are two old churches at the Soo built of that Jacobsville sandstone, as well as several other buildings around town. It is nice all around. There are even two good bookstores, one used and one new.

Sounds great!

I have always wanted to read some Gould but somehow never got around to it. I have a couple of his books around here somewhere.

Hope you get some interesting classes with fun field trips.

Gould can be a bit dense, but it is worth the effort. A little prior familiarity with the subject would be most helpful. He usually explains technical terms once, but some things are left undefined. He seems to have been quite the thinker.

My classes should be fun, at least for me. My first year will consist of structural geology/mineralogy, and a full year of chemistry and physics. That should free up my second year for whatever I want as that covers all of my requirement bases. Apparently at LSSU they have class in the field a few days in the fall and spring, plus a plethora of field trips all over the country. Three weeks of mapping the Badlands is the standard senior project, etc. Wheeee!

You seem to have survived the heat in Tulsa, BJ. It was even hot up here. The odd thing was when we get that level of heat it is usually very muggy and this recent spell was not that humid. I would call it tolerable in a recreational sense, but working on a road or digging a ditch would have been close to unbearable. The heat popped my rear-view mirror off in my new van. Thanks for piping up BJ, it has been quiet around here lately.

I have a bad feeling that I will miss most of the college football season at least this year. I'm not paying for cable off the bat. But on the other hand the apartment we are moving in to is across the street from the hockey arena and Michigan State roll in to town in October, Ohio State in November and U of M in January for conference play. Two night double headers even. Sadly the Big Ten teams are leaving the CCHA to do their own six team conference schedule.

13. Michigan Geography and Geology by Schaetzl, Darden & Brandt
So, not something for a casual reader here. This is an outstanding collegiate textbook, consisting of forty-some chapters covering a broad range of topics specific to the state of Michigan. Geology of all sorts, glacial features, iron formations, the myriad soil types, water systems, fish and wildlife, the changing forests, land uses, agriculture, even some history of the Indians, as well as the automobile and mining industries. The only problem is the lack of an index. Each chapter is a separate 'paper' by a specialist(s) in the topic, so they are just collated and printed. Still, the amount of data is staggering. I will admit to academic skimming of a few chapters (paragraphs filled with italic Genus-species names of trees that don't even exist in Michigan anymore aren't my thing), but my goal was to reread the geology and then see what else was contained within. If there is a better Michigan specific reference out there then I would like to see it. The only thing close is the 1970 Dorr and Eschman Geology of Michigan. It is dated in terms of the geology (no mention of tectonics, problems with the sand dune chapter, etc.), but still excellent in the fossil and outcrop location department. It is specifically geology related though.

The heat in Tulsa did come surprisingly early this year, and it has been really hot, but still not as hot as the year before. I hear the El Nino is back, so maybe we will get more snow this winter. Parts of Texas are getting lots more rain, which helps with the drought.

Maybe it would be possible to see football replays on the internet. Still no Longhorn Network for me, which makes me sad.

I could go for some snow right about now, if only for the water. We're having drought issues up here and the soil in my area gets baked and very hard which means the rain evaporates before it soaks in. I saw some funny corn growing, the bottoms of the stalks were dead and the tops were bushy like a palm tree. Major crop loss, never seen the like. For the record, a large percentage of US sugar production is from beets in the Saginaw Bay area, so hopefully a staple like that doesn't get ruined. They are grown in much wetter soils though. Without getting too technical, those fields require a drain tile system to wick excess ground water away, they are literally only a few feet higher than Lake Huron and very muddy.

El Nino patterns have less effect on Michigan than any other state. The snow tends to be more south of here than normal and the air a bit warmer, as the jet stream doesn't pull the cold high arctic air down south as much. However, it does allow that air into your area, Oklahoma/Kansas kind of gets our winter and we get a taste of yours. Michigan tends to have winters much drier and a wee bit warmer than average is all. There is more effect from seasonal variance in North Atlantic systems that route storms to the north (or not). Reading that Michigan Geography text is already paying off.

The internet football is possible, but my computer is decrepit and too old to play video. I may settle for watching the UM games at a local watering hole and what little NFL I care to watch on broadcast TV, mostly to keep pace with the fantasy league. I plan on being busy with homework and geomagnetic research projects.

Watcing football at a sports bar is what we used to do all the time when we did not have satellite. That is a great idea. Thanks for the explanation of el nino. That was the best I have ever seen. I have read long articles and still been confused.

We are having more heat than Austin and Houston. Weird. But we had a great storm last night with tons of rain. Our trees are so happy.

Thanks for the links to the classics. The classics are my favorite books to read.

14. Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak
Simak is climbing up the ladder as one of my favorite golden age SF authors. Just on City alone I rank him ahead of Bradbury. EmScape has a good summary on the review page. This is the best I have read by Simak other than City.


15. Bob Dylan: The Illustrated Biography by Chris Rushby
This is basically a decent photo album of Dylan from his earliest days in New York up until the release of the Modern Times album in 2008, with a light biography in caption form. Nothing too special other than an excellent discography as an appendix. Well worth the $2.50 I paid for it at B&N.

I've been pretty busy in the last month. Moving almost 250 miles from home, starting classes, going back home to get the rest of my stuff, unpacking and settling in. My first trip up involved a shared trailer and I was able to pack everything but my bookshelves. What a depressing week with all of my books sitting in boxes.

Classes look good for me, Dr. Kelso in geology seems pretty cool. I like it so far. Plus, a friend from my differential equations class back down state at Delta College has transferred back up here and she is in my Physics class. We seem to make a decent team. Chemistry is slowly getting underway, we haven't gotten past rounding and significant digits yet.

Sault Sainte Marie seems to be an interesting town, a bit on the sleepy side other than the college kids flooding the bars at night. We'll see how things are during the winter. Wilcox's Restaurant is hands down the best dinner out there to be had, well worth a half hour putt-putt drive west of town.

I'm intrigued by the situation of my apartment. There is nothing more than a fence and about twenty feet of grass between the drive and the shipping channel that runs to the Soo Locks. I could literally hit the big freighters with a dirt clod. The Ontario side is a bit unsightly, with a big steel mill across the water, but so be it.

Hope you get settled in and Good Luck with school!! And don't fall in the channel!!!

I don't think I could fall in unless I jumped the barbed wire fence that is supposedly monitored by the US Customs! Thanks for the well-wishes. I've been woefully neglecting the LT chat pals that I have made over the last few years. Thanks for taking the time to check in on me. Good luck to you in whatever you feel the need to use it for!

16. Animal Farm by George Orwell
What can I say about this book that hasn't already been said? In a nutshell, it is 1984 disguised as a children's book. The animals, led by the pigs, plan a revolution against their farmer, Mr. Jones. After it is successful, they set up some basic commandments and things go downhill as the pig in charge become just as bad or worse than Mr. Jones the everyman farmer. The rules are changed on the basis that the animals are too dumb to remember what the old rules were, events are questioned, etc. We have always been at war with Oceania, in a lighter form. A very quick evening read as well.

Are you going to visit Ontario?

I am glad that you are enjoying your classes. Is it cold there yet? Things have cooled off here and it is just wonderful. No fall colors yet. The lack of rain could hurt the color, but we have had rain lately.

We were just over to Ontario Thursday for a field mapping exercise on St. Joseph's Island, which is in the St. Mary's River between Lakes Superior and Huron. Next week we go to the Huron shore for more mapping work. Nothing in the way of fall colors just yet, but there are hints and tints, literally from green yesterday to signs of yellow today. Temperatures around 60, lows about 40, slightly below average for the area. Fall in Tulsa has to be a major relief! Up here it means a serious winter is close.

17. Agates Inside Out by Karen A. Brzys

Aaah, agates! Everybody loves them, but boy are they hard to find on a beach. I find it hard to believe that a better book an formation of agates can be found without getting too textbooky. This has a nice chapter on technical aspects of silica crystallization that can be skipped over if it is too much, but it does engender a respect for the delicacy and beauty of a fine agate. There are chapters on types and general locations of agates across the country and a few world spots. General enough to get you to the right area but not so specific that the best beaches get picked clean. Brzys is the owner of the Gitchee Gumee Museum in Grand Marais, Michigan, which is down the street from the appropriately named Agate Beach on Lake Superior. The agates from Superior are highly prized world wide and among the finest to be found anywhere. I don't know how difficult it might be to find this particular book outside of Michigan, but with the internets I'm sure it can be done.

**The photography by Thomas P. Shearer is absolutely world class and the photos alone make this a treasure!**

I have that book in my library & I acquired it from a dealer at our Rock & Mineral club's show last April. I am still reading it & finding it very interesting. 8^)

I noticed that you were one of the four members with that book catalogued on LT. It is outstanding, and I plan on driving over to Grand Marais in the spring to meet the author at her museum. I noticed that I have been slacking on geology information posts, which replaced my formerly-more-numerous book reviews. I'll think about something cool to post, maybe a few photos.

So, this is the view from behind my apartment complex, an ore freighter heading out into Lake Superior.


This is an ominous mailbox on the road to Whitefish Point


Now, for some geology. I drove back out to Tahquamenon Falls, which is one of the more famous natural wonders of Michigan. One place that is definitely more famous is the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, of which I posted a few photos from last year. However, Tahquamenon Falls actually displays the same two-layered set of Munising Formation sandstones that make up Pictured Rocks. Plus, they have some handy geology lessons on signs at the Lower Falls, like this one... The star is a 'you are here' marker.


Here's the upper falls where you can see the lower layer of sandstone. It is the Chapel Rock member, for those interested, and the higher layer (above the falls, hidden behind the trees) is the Miner's Castle layer. A google image search of those layers ought to find you a series of photos of those landmarks from the Pictured Rocks. A further technical point, the lower Chapel Rock sandstones are eroded from the southern part of the Munising Sea (see above sign) and the upper Miner's Castle sandstone is from the northeastern shore, based on technical analysis of the sand grains. Some people like me have nothing better to do than put puzzles together! The layers, when visited in person at the PRNL, have distinctly different characteristics, colors and bedding textures. You can see this in a typical photo of Miner's Castle, look at the difference in rock a few feet above the lake.


Here's Miner's Castle, to illustrate the easily differentiable sandstone members. (Not my photo, but I wish it were!)



And one final stop, this time in Ontario near the town of Bruce Mines, an hour or so east of the Soo. Here we see the intensely folded Espanola Formation, a basic sequence of alternating limestone/shale/siltstone, caused by changes in water depth. Limestone is a deeper water sediment, shale is shallower, then silts and finally sand/gravel near the high energy beaches. These marine sediments have been significantly crumpled and folded by the Keewenawan Igneous Intrusion of about 1.3 billion years ago, give or take several tens of thousands of baseball seasons. We had to map a portion of this mess for a Structural Geology project, each team of two assigned to a room-sized area.

I surely love all the photos!

Not a good year for football for Longhorn fans. The team appears in complete disarray. Wow.

Things seem dismal for the horns, and no game against A&M to salvage pride. So be it. At least they trotted out the wishbone one time for coach Royal. I apologize for being tardy in responding, my computer is out of action and decided to check LT on a whim after consulting with my lab partner at the school library. School is going well other than the ubiquitous college-student-with-no-money action. Have a fun time on Thanksgiving everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving Ryan!!!

Happy Thanksgiving to you!

And I guess you know that A&M broke my heart leaving the conference. It will not be the same on Thursday.

Happy New Year Ryan!!! Hope all is well with you!!!!

Not sure what the proper procedure is for bringing up a post of yours from 2010, but here goes:

In that 2010 post you wondered "Why did the Sumerians call a violent storm a Hurakan?" This intrigues me because, having read many of the myths in Black et al's The Literature of Ancient Sumer, I have the distinct impression that the Sumerians were terrified of violent storms. They seem to have been considered a disaster comparable to drought or flood (only with more destruction) and war, and to have been a favorite imprecation. I don't associate violent, rainy storms with what I know of current mesopotamian weather, which is why the references jumped out at me.

Having said all of that, my purpose in posting is simply to ask whether you remember the source for the "hurakan" thing.

Of course I do. It was in Ignacious Donnely's Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World. I will look it up to be exact when I get home tomorrow night. There is a chapter or section on cross-atlantic word similarities that supports his theory that a central civilization had a part in both old and new world origins. It may not even be accurate, in the sense that I do not know if the author's sources are listed for that particular datum. I have to get to bed, I have a four hour drive home on the morrow, then I will follow up more directly. Happy Arbitrary Point In The Calendar to you too, TJ! All is quite well, other than my first A-.

Bad reference on the Hurakan word, basically Donnely copmpares Mayan legends to Chaldean, then makes some shaky linguistic leaps across Europe to 'show' that there was a cross-Atlantic contact in pre-history to share a word.