Dali’s St John of the Cross

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Christ of St John of the Cross
The Salvador Dali masterpiece Christ of St John of the Cross first went on show at Kelvingrove on 23 June 1952, and has ever since aroused admiration, criticism and controversy. The striking angle of the crucified Christ on the Cross, the eerie contrast of light and dark, and the [...]

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Simplexity or why traffic jams happen

By Jeffrey Kluger
When traffic on a highway is very light, cars behave like the air molecules in the room, doing whatever they please. When traffic is very heavy, they collect into something closer to the molecule in the frozen carbon, going nowhere at all. It’s chaos at one extreme and robustness at the [...]

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Life Rocks

Earth’s ‘mineral kingdom’ evolved hand in hand with life

* 19 November 2008 by Marcus Chown
* Magazine issue 2683. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

AS LIFE evolved in all its abundance and diversity, so too did the minerals that make up Earth’s rocks. Two-thirds of the kingdom of minerals bear the traces of the presence of life – a view that could shake up our picture of Earth’s geological history and even help find life on other planets.
“Rocks and life evolved in parallel,” says Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington DC. “It’s so obvious – you wonder why we geologists didn’t think of it before.”
Quote:
According to Hazen, the story begins with a mere 12 minerals that existed in the dust grains of the pre-solar nebula – minerals such as diamond, created in the fury of supernova explosions. When the sun ignited, heat boosted the number to around 60. The formation of Earth and subsequent geochemical processes upped that to around 500, and the switching on of the conveyor belt of plate tectonics led to the creation of another 1000. “But it was life, which made its first appearance about 4 billion years ago, that made the biggest difference,” says Hazen. “It boosted the number of minerals to around 5000.”
Life brought profound changes to Earth’s atmosphere and ocean chemistry. Photosynthesising organisms created abundant oxygen, and in this environment the chemical processes of oxidation and weathering generated a swathe of minerals containing metals such as iron. “Four billion years ago, metals on the surface like iron and copper remained pure and shiny,” says Hazen. “The new atmosphere oxidised them, creating a host of new minerals.” Approximately half of all known mineral species owe their existence to oxidation or weathering.
Quote:
Gary Ernst at Stanford University in California describes the study as “breathtaking” and says it could revolutionise the way minerals are described. “No one until now has put the story together in such a coherent way,” adds David Saja, curator of mineralogy at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/…with-life.html

Anyone want to write the equivalent of the ancestor’s tale that discusses the co-evolution of minerals and life, and not only how coal formed but the feedback mechanisms that led to skeletons, gall stones and gout.

Biogeology?

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Palin et al

 Abe’s Challenge: Declare your faith in a hostile church, win beer!

 
ApostateAbe
 
This morning, I decided to go to a service of my local Pentecostal church. I was curious. According to a recent news story, Pentecostalism is the religion of Sarah Palin, and it is more dominant in South America than Catholicism.
The Pentecostal church I went [...]

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The Size of the Temple

Umberto Eco writes in Baudolino:
 
in the Acts of the Apostles it says that God from one man devised our humankind to inhabit the entire face of the earth, its face – not the other side, which doesn’t exist.
 
“I don’t know if you have ever studied the measurements of the Temple, well don’t, because it is [...]

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Chocolate

This is a web conversation I started a few years ago
 
Chocolate
On the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year about seven in the cool of the evening, the seven kings woodcraft folk were seated around a fire in the forest of Epping, having gathered the wood by hand (and added a few [...]

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