Callan Bentley What if geologists studied more than just Earth processes and history, but also how to go back in time and manipulate that history? That’s the job of the “cultural geologist” who is the flawed protagonist of Annalee Newitz‘s novel The Future of Another Timeline. (I’ve previously read her book Autonomous, and enjoyed it. I see … Read more
The Friday fold is a lovely little sandbox analogue model by Prof. Marco Martins-Ferreira, who posted it on Twitter this week: As deformation proceeds, you can see the layers develop folds that then morph into faults, shoving deeper layers atop more shallow strata. As a bonus, you can hear Marco’s baby cooing in the … Read more
This is the second novel in Chambers’ Wayfarers science fiction series, but it’s very different in plot structure from the first, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which I reviewed a couple weeks back. In this sequel, two of the characters from the first book, one minor and one major (but with her … Read more
Today’s Friday Fold comes from Edith Carolina Rojas, the dynamic geology professor at The College of The Desert in Palm Desert, California. She’s an awesome person, and also the sense of scale in this amazing image: Edith shares that this gorgeous structure is an anticline is located in Split Mountain Gorge in Fish Creek Canyon. … Read more
My most recent commuting audio has been this course from The Great Courses: Johns Hopkins professor Lawrence Principe‘s History of Science: Antiquity to 1700. I checked it out from my local library: 36 lectures, each about 30 to 45 minutes long. I found it quite interesting, well-paced, and insightful. Principe is an organic chemist-turned-historian-of-science, and … Read more
This book is a comprehensive account of everything unclassified that DARPA and its predecessor ARPA, has ever done. The subtitle is: “An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency.” It begins with testing nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll in 1954, where theoretical calculations about the Castle Bravo bomb’s explosive yield get a sobering … Read more
The Friday fold shows disharmonic crumpling in marbles of the Boyden Cave Root Pendant in California’s Sierra Nevada. The GigaPan image displayed is part of the digital legacy of Ron Schott, who passed away a year and a half ago.
Reader John Christian shared these folds with me via email last week. They are quartz veins in slightly metamorphosed Precambrian igneous rocks found near Sunflower, AZ in the Mazatzal Mountains. The second photo is a close-up shot of the curviest, cleanest batch of folds from the first shot. These are beautiful examples of folds in … Read more
Last night, I finished a wonderful little book of science fiction, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers. It’s the first book in a series of novels, called “Wayfarers” after the name of the ship whose crew are the subjects of the story. Like Joss Whedon’s TV series “Firefly,” the crew … Read more
A roadside boulder in the Bronx shows folded gneissic banding. It’s another guest-submitted Friday fold!