food
Friday fold: crinkled schist from Italy
AGU’s Chief Digital Officer Jay Brodsky offers up a fresh European fold for you today — and this one is on rather a smaller scale than Jay’s last Friday fold contribution… Click through for a bigger version. These are lovely crinkly folds in highly foliated rocks. I love boxy little crenulations like these. Jay tells … Read more
Beautiful Swimmers, by William Warner
The subtitle of this wonderful book is “Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay.” It’s an excellent account of crab ecology in the Chesapeake Bay as it stood in the mid-1970s, and simultaneously a sympathetic portrait of the lives of the locals who capture those crabs for sale to the seafood market. The writing is thoughtful … Read more
Friday fold: marble in a thermopolium at Herculaneum
It’s Friday. Let’s find a historic sort of Friday fold in the ruins of Herculaneum, Naples, Italy.
Mega-trace fossils in the floor of the Old Bushmills Distillery, Northern Ireland
We arrived at Old Bushmills at 4:06pm, and the last tour of the distillery for the day had left at 4:00. But all was not lost – We were delighted to see that the visitor center area was paved in slabs of shale with tremendously large, well-preserved trace fossils – sinuous burrows parallel to the … Read more
The Hidden Half of Nature, by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé
David Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, in Seattle. I’m a fan of his work in soil conservation and countering creationism, so I was very pleased to find myself sharing the “honoree” table with him in Vancouver the year before last, at the annual awards luncheon for the National Association … Read more
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver
Here’s a great book about one family’s efforts to eat as locally as possible for a year, sort of. Whether or not they’re evangelical enough in their southwest Virginia locavory (I would have made the same call with regard to olive oil and coffee!), Barbara Kingsolver and her family definitely are certainly inspiring. Their efforts … Read more
Friday fold: Folded Mountains Ale
My friend Eric Pyle drew my attention to this ale earlier in the week – I reckon that will do for this week’s Friday fold. Cheers! And Happy New Year!
A History of the World in Six Glasses, by Tom Standage
This week’s book was a survey of human history, from the dawn of civilization to the Cold War, of the various ways that societal, health, political, technological, and economic factors drove the adoption of various beverages, and how the presence of those beverages in human society generated ripples of cause and effect, propelling advances and … Read more
Honey crystallization as an analogue for magma segregation and cumulate textures
Check this out: Maybe I’ve got low blood sugar, but I think I see a magma chamber in that jar of honey. There is clearly some crystal settling going on there, and it appears that the more crystals there are, the easier it is to trap bubbles. When the clots of crystals get too dense, … Read more