This is a photo of a great black wasp, Sphex pennsylvanicus, solarized of course, taken at the UIC greenhouse the other Friday. Incredible animals.
A recent estimate of the timing and duration of Proterozoic glacial periods. Note that great uncertainty surrounds the dating of pre-Gaskiers glaciations. The status of the Kaigas is not clear; its dating is very insecure and many workers do not recognise it as a glaciation. From Smith (in press).
Sometimes
3 years ago
Monday, September 21, 2009
The Great Black Wasp
This is a photo of a great black wasp, Sphex pennsylvanicus, solarized of course, taken at the UIC greenhouse the other Friday. Incredible animals.
Friday, September 18, 2009
The End
I remember the moment I saw that issue of Astronomy Magazine in the drugstore. The cover story read "Curtain Call". It was a story about how the sun would heat up gradually over the course of its evolution to a red giant...the same way it has been heating up for the last 4.5 billion years. In a mere 500 million years, maybe sooner, perhaps a bit later, the Earth will be such that no multicellular life can live here, a place of near-boiling oceans and thick cloud layers. Clouds, on one hand, reflect light back into space, forestalling the inevitable. On the other hand, water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas. The Earth will play a strange game of back and forth for perhaps a few tens of million years before the balance finally tips to steam, the oceans will evaporate, and this globe will become truly hellish. It is quite likely that, just like Mars, Venus had an ocean early in its history. This ocean was likely very short-lived, vanishing in our Archaean or Hadean, but perhaps an abode for Venusian life. The water vapor is almost all gone now, lost to photodissociation over the billions of years, the little that remains being cometary or volcanic in origin, and about to depart as sun's rays split the water molecules into component parts, the hydrogen ultimately escaping.
I was terribly depressed. So much so that I did not even buy the magazine. Most of what I just wrote I have pieced together since then. Until that moment of lost innocence, I imagined that multicellular life on Earth had a languid summer vacation of five billion years to creep and crawl about this orb of ours, evolving into intelligent creatures perhaps once or twice more before the inevitable demise at the fate of our own sun, billowing into a red giant. No more. Now, we have but a fifth, or some miserable smaller fraction of that time. What will we do with ourselves? No time for snails to evolve great cities now, is there? Perhaps the gastropoda were doomed never to develop big brains by their limited neurological development, perhaps the cephalopods are too ecologically limited and too lacking in exadaptation for land, too burdened by predation and semalparous reproduction to crawl out of the oceans to dominate the globe with iron tentacles. Maybe, just maybe, the great armies of rodent species will crawl out of hiding, invade every empty terrestrial niche left by our great mass extinction, and evolve big brains themselves. What matter of other things might transpire? The globe might see another icehouse Earth before things are through, then a hothouse. Maybe strange new invertebrates will crawl from the seas, a new flourishing of animal, plant, and fungi, and new things never imagined by me or anyone else. There is still enough time for continents to drift into strange new configurations, at least one new supercontinent, maybe two, before the oceans boil to nothing and make continental drift impossible, because no seabed means our geology will become more like that of Venus, with periodic "Global Resurfacing" of belching volcanoes and temperatures hot enough to liquify the land.
When the sun turns red giant, such a brief but beautiful star it will be, will it be hot enough for a flowering of life on distant Titan?
Thursday, September 17, 2009
autumn
autumn again, season of strange breezes that bring with them the promise of frost, of halloween nights, bedecked in makeup and sparkling with shiny moments of drug-fueled dancing, or cider fueled handing out of comic books and toothbrushes, autumn mornings are cold enough for sweaters here and autumn afternoons are warm enough for short sleeves and foraging butterflies. They are here still, the cabbage whites making the best of catnip and overgrown kale, the forlorn bumblebee workers, born extra small because their queen is on the verge of giving up, their selfish sisters waiting it out in some mouse burrow hive waiting for frost and snow and tulips and finally summer again, their day to shine, and ours to reflect on those cold winter days when the egg of our own future fate could barely be transported in a carseat through the glacial frost, air so thin space come down and crush us under its weightlessness, and two pumpkins grow in the thick of all these promises, heavy and green and lewd in their own strange ways. Is it time for cider yet? Property taxes? New friends at school? Steamy windows in coffeehouses and over-thumbed paperback books? Long black coats with pockets full of various useful supplies? Not yet, but soon, and the axial tilt of the earth will ensure that it keeps happening long after the continent beneath me is worn to a nub. Somehow, life will survive the mass extinction in front of it, these same ragweeds and earwigs will rise to repopulate the planet, and new creatures will greet the fall.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
where devas dwell
if there is a cloud layer of beings above this world, invisible and perfect, because space is finite, non-euclidean, and homogeneous, a torus parallel to a sphere, a klein bottle intersecting itself, and if the beings there live 80,000 years, abstaining from meat, and sex, and all manner of the voluptuous, for how can such desires arise in the formless realms?, it is probable that the beings there exist in a perpetual photosynthetic bliss, mitotic in their propagation and autotrophic in their abnegation, basking in the heavenly glow, devoid of desire because, spore of god and fruit of godhead, their mindful roots weave and unweave unearthly tactile patterns upon a dreamy skyscape. daydream seems to be the only intersection with this etheral manifold, because night dreams are full of carnal lust and overworked concern, darkly lit and perhaps carrying the smell of old textbooks, worlds of buxom librarians and misparked cars.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Concerning Gnomes
I hate gnomes because they are full of "clever antics." I once new a gnome who liked to go invisible and start switching around the money in people's wallets, giving to the poor from the rich, and other such crap. Hippie. They impersonate garden statues. Fully half the time you walk by one of those charming garden gnomes, thinking it to be just a statue, it is a real gnome, with a glamour put on itself to resemble a statue...standing very still. They think this is clever. I find it to be banal. The Travelocity gnome is actually very rich, and very drunk, right now. I used to be friends with the guy...trust me, he drinks, he drinks a good deal. This whole business of mailing garden gnomes around the world and photographing them was a gnome plot for some free kicks. No harm done, except that gnomes bring their weird little games with them wherever they go. I knew this gnome that made mushrooms spring up wherever he went. Half the fungi were exotic, psychadelic, and obnoxiously cute. Amanita muscaria is a favorite gnome mushroom....the smaller gnome varieties shellac the fruiting bodies and live inside their tiny little houses, smoking little pipes, collecting pointy hats and such. As I mentioned earlier, gnomes hate Einstein's theory of relativity, because it contradicts the gnomic view of the universe, they also detest bacon, constrictor snakes (for obvious reasons), and of course, goblins. Gnomes hate goblins, and have a perverse antipathy for any person who does not also hate goblins, effectively dragging everyone else into their business. In the SouthWest, huge gangs of gnomes, on minature motorcycles, called "gnomercycle gangs" roam the backroads, pretending to be badasses. Mostly, they do this invisibly, leaving a trail of tiny beer cans along the road. They run like hell when goblins show up.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Why We Rock
Yesterday, I was listening to Old Man's Child....it must have been the sixth or seventh play through Vermin in 24 hours.....lost in the dark melodies and blast beat drums. Eeevvvvillll, except, I was installing a baby security gate. Come to think of it, I put Ruby to sleep with Metallica's Death Magnetic last night, it replaced Kreator's Pleasure to Kill, which is too discodant for a lullaby. Eeeeevill. Did I mention that I almost teared up to Rush's "Time Stand Still" in a Mc Donalds drive through line a few days ago? I acutally hate that song, it is from what must be Rush's worst album. Still, I knew all the lyrics from my dorky youth. Laaammmme. The ones that really get me come from out of nowhere. It was Johnny Cash's "Solitary Man" once, and, notably, Scorpions "Winds of Change", in MN, turning the inition key to leave my grandmother's old neighborhood, now gentrified...This is why we rock. This is why we rock.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Now
> Hello Dr. Molumby, > I attended your bio 101 class last year. I had a weird insight today > and I had no idea who to go to, I just want to know what you think of > it. I saw a squirrel on my front lawn and I realized that a lot of > small animals like squirrels and rabbits tend to make very quick, > jerky movements and they seem to react very quickly. Then, an image > popped into my mind of a large godzilla moving very slowly. > > Then I asked myself, how would godzilla perceive the way humans move? > Then another thought came up; Do different animals have a different > perceptions of time? Maybe to a squirrel, we humans look very slow and > cumbersome as we see godzilla, but I have no idea how anyone would be > able to see how other animals perceive time. Another strange > correlation I came up with (based on my general knowledge and > generally speaking) was that some quicker moving animals seem to have > a shorter lifespan than animals that move slower. This may be a very > loose correlation, but I thought of squirrels being the quickest, > humans in the middle and then land tortoises as the slowest/longest > living. I just find this interesting. If you know of any information > or have any opinions about this please let me know! I'd also like to > add that I enjoyed your teaching style as well as the content of the > class; fortunately i was in your rare discussion class due to > Veronica's schedule conflicts, I enjoyed that as well. > > Thanks for your time, > Steve....
hi, i think you are on to something in that large animals move slowly. plenty of physics in that.....muscles and bones do not scale evenly as an animal grows. it is energetically inexpensive for an elephant to move long distances, compared to a mouse, but accelerating and decelerating are very expensive. Godzilla cannot be made out of flesh and bone because even thick bones could not support a 600foot reptile, on land at least. Oddly enough, we suspect that there are differences in time perception as well, because the nerve impulses from my fingers take a fraction of a second to reach my brain, eye impulses less time, and the brain smoothes it all out to create the illusion of simultaneity......so maybe an instant is shorter to a shrew than to a leopard, yes. as for lifespan....on one hand, all animals share a similar superchiasmatic nucleus, a brain-timekeeper, so all animals perceive time, in some sense, but long term perceptions of time must also depend upon memory, which varies. Tortoises have incredible memories for some things, yes, but I doubt that they construct a narrative of the past like we do. My money is on Elephants, for having the longest view of now, and gobies, shrews, or finches for the shortest. Not sure if now exists at all for an insect. great question...keep em coming. (Will post question and response on my blog if you do not mind, will remove yr name...) a
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Snowball Earth
Evidence is fairly strong that, at various times from 600 million years ago to one billion years ago, the Earth underwent several glaciations that enveloped the entire planet. Think about it the next time it snows. Ice and snow are reflective, casting much more light back into space than seawater or forest. One of the reasons the Arctic is melting so quickly today is because the feedback loop goes in the opposite direction now...more dry land begets higher temperatures, melting more ice. I observe the same phenomenon in miniature every warm summer day in Chicago...it only gets "nice" here during the winter when the snow cover is gone. Chicago winters arc ice ages in miniature, including the threat that, someday, spring, or an interglacial, will never come again. It is not increasing snowfall that promotes glaciation, it is those patches of snow that never melt in spring. Each is potentially the nucleus of a glacier.
It turns out that, when the ice sheets combine with sea ice to cover latitudes lower
than 30 degrees, nothing can stop them. They rush to the poles and lock the world in ice. The Marinoan glaciation might have been such an event, lasting for a million years or longer. The Sturian was probably a series of lesser events, all severe enough to lock the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia in ice, maybe, we do not know for sure about any of this. There are, however, eerie dropstones from sea ice carrying wedges of rock, broken off terrestrial cliffs and then moved to sea by glaciers, at latitudes very close to the equator during this time.
From an evolutionary point of view, the mass extinctions inevitably brought by this make a certain amount of sense....there is a strange lack of transitional biota between the old, hydrothermal vent and anoxia remnants of the archaean, and this brave new world of multicellular life that came about in the wake of Icehouse Earth. In fact, repeated glaciations, and crazy-hot interglacials that followed, as CO2 from volcanos brought about an end to the icehouse, may have reorganized the biosphere to favor increasingly complex protists, multicellular life, and us.
This round of glaciers is every bit as extreme, or more so, than the ones of the Permian, Devonian, Cambrian. A million years from now, an icebox episode could happen again.
| Snowball Period |
|---|
| (millions of years ago) |
|
Tips for Urban Living
I wrote this shortly after I returned to Chicago in 1999. I think much of it still applies, but I have noted certain things that have changed since then.
Tips For Urban Living
First and foremost, avoid being stabbed. Being shot is usually worse than being stabbed, of course, but there is an inevitable element to a bullet wound. They seem to be preselected for us, like phone numbers. Stab wounds, however, are imminently avoidable. A stabbing is an intimate dance in which both parties participate. There two types of people, those who have a propensity to get stabbed, and those who do not. I belong to the former category, personally, though I have avoided the fate so far. Most people do not know their status concerning this issue, despite two useful predictors 1) if you are a stabber, sooner or later you will be a stabbee, 2) if anyone has ever threatened you with a knife for any reason, you belong among the potential stab victims as well. Owning knives seems to have nothing to do with it, the problem seems to be the act of thinking about the act of stabbing.
Second, don't do crack. Crack leads to stabbing, and to various manifestations of toothlessness.
Third, don't do meth. As above, but faster and more inevitable in consequences. It was not necessary to write this in 1999, because meth was formerly restricted to hillbillies. The club kids have brought it downtown since then.
Don't, drink bleach either. Not for any reason.
When you go to the ER, because you've been shot, or stabbed, or are flipped out on crack, tell the story right. Emergency rooms are not the place for spin doctoring. Don't say "I wasn't drinking at all, I just stopped in a corner liquor store for a bag of chips....". Everyone else in the ER was doing something equally stupid (these are tips for urban living, make note). Tell your friends and loved ones to tell the story right as well. We all know the truth. Lying about it informs us of the inevitability that a permutation of the same event will happen again soon.
Late summer and early fall are the killing season in Chicago, as are the first warm days of spring. People dish out a lot of stray phone numbers those times. These random numerals fall in a hazy cloud around certain vehicles and addresses. Avoid Monte Carlos and Olds Cutlasses during killing season (that was 1999, in 2009, avoid men in white T shirts). Having anything to do with people who routinely stand on the street for no apparent reason, all day long, will cause the phone numbers to follow you in a wispy stream. Don't park near them. Avoid knowing their names.
It never hurts to seem a little crazy, in a halfway-house kind of way. Develop a nervous tic.
One other thing-rats are harmless, perhaps even allies. I prefer to think of them as "mobile rent control technicians". This also applies to cockroaches, although I know few people who can stomach a different rent control arthropod swimming in their coffee every five minutes. Neither species carries any important pathogen that is not also streaming from a five-year-old's fingers.
Speaking of that, avoid hospitals. That is where the really scary microbes hang. Refer to tip number one. Make that hospitals and IV drug users, which reminds me, don't shoot up. If you are so concerned about wasting a drug that you cannot simply smoke it, then you already have a serious drug problem.
That said, there is ALWAYS enough money for a 40 ouncer. It is the unstoppable calculus of urban life that any substance that falls into the food and entertainment budgets simultaneously is imminently affordable if it comes in a 40 ounce container and gets you fucked up. Each brand is a different sensory adventure. I strongly recommend a couple of hits of marijuana, an UP-Time, and a 40 ouncer of St Ides. This high costs six dollars, and , when combined with the Beastie Boys "Check Your Head" is better than a hundred dollars worth of cocaine off some asshole's table.
"Why do drugs at all?" you ask. Read no farther, you are not living an urban adventure, you are wasting your life.
Speaking of the above, pick a transient hotel. Find out how much it costs to stay there, and if there is a deposit. Even if you never spend a night there, it helps to know where to go if you become down and out, probably because you broke rule number three or four. In Chicago, the Ascot on Belmont, the Mark Twain on Division, and the Diplomat on Sheffield are three fine choices. You can probably do better. (Since 1999, the SROs have perished. The new alternative seems to be the friend's couch. There seem to be more couches here nowadays).
It goes without saying that you should avoid cops. The act of disliking them, however, seems to draw them to a person. They can smell contempt. If you encounter cops, make good eye contact and speak in full sentences, this will convince them you can hire a lawyer if you need to (Never say lawyer in their presence unless they are arresting you, or it will anger them. Not wearing a shirt also attracts police.
One other thing, you don't have any change. Read it aloud I DON'T HAVE ANY CHANGE, SORRY MAN. You can't break a 10 either. In fact, you can't count and are suspicious of strangers. Anyone who asks you to break a bill has pegged you for a fool. People who actually need to make change walk into an Amoco station and buy a pack of gum, or better yet, a 40m ouncer.
One other thing. If anyone approaches you, and is stuck, their family member in the car, needing to get to the hospital, but out of gas, you only speak Czech. Or Tongan. Maybe Afrikaans. This person is a con artist and there is no reasoning with them. Do not make any attempt to help them because the help they need is to be truly in the same plight and to discover that their behavior has created a world where nobody can risk helping anyone else. Anyone who needs train fare to get out of the city to some clinic or shelter, same thing. They never know the actual fare, test this if you wish. They rarely know which train they need to take to get there either. There is some sport in fucking with these people, but that puts you inevitably into the category of people likely to get stabbed.
The human drama of urban existence is absolutely free for the taking. Comcast will not charge you for it. I recommend spending time in any district where pushcart vendors routinely roam, especially if the signs are not in English (Daley has eliminated most of these, like the rats, since 1999. Douchebag.) Wear sunglasses, so that the woman with the infant over her shoulder band the cases of beer in her stroller does not notice you watching as she jaywalks across 4 lanes of heavy traffic. (Note to readers, except for gender, the stroller, and the jaywalking, I am now this person.)
This all brings me to the subject of diners. Diners are magical places.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
7--11 Diary
I wrote this over ten years ago. I intended to write a much longer memoir, but things happen. This, I think, is worth reposting from the molumbia.com site....
Two-Fisted Consumer Commando,
Sheikh of the Liquored Night,
Zip Gun Target,
My Life as a 7-11 Clerk
I first called the 7-11 jobline the day after a job interview in
I was living in
My job interview was by telephone. 1-800-711-JOBS put me right through to an automated job interview system. I felt a brief flash of futureshock as I entered my social security number, years of education, and desired salary into the machine. I was briefly put on hold as its automated decision making process considered my qualifications. Hire an eccentric, out of work PhD, evolutionary biologist, with no obvious criminal record? By all means, yes. We'll make a man out of him. I was hired.
My first training session was about 20 miles south of where I lived, in a forlorn, White-Trash neighborhood at the Denver City Limits. I remember counting a dozen different 7-11's along the way.
The Southland Corporation liked to train in certain, "model stores" which were in particularly good shape. These places would get their pick of the new employees and, of course, remain model stores. That location was indeed stocked with the cream of the 7-11 crop. Clean-cut young people with nothing in particular to do with their lives, they worked 7--11 more out of ennui then anything else. All of them lived at home, I was to discover. These were next year's air conditioner repairmen and cellular phone representatives, but for now, they kept the cups stocked and the driveway immaculate.
I was entitled to free coffee and soda, I discovered, and immediately indulged in a 7-11 French Roast with hazelnut creamers. I sat under the pay phone and stared at the used car lot across the street. It specialized in vintage classics, and sported a 57 Chevy, and Edsel, a 62 Caddy, and of course, a '72 Charger. What might it be like to work the desk here for long enough to buy one of those cars? How many biweekly 350 dollar checks would it take? 40? My classmates started showing up ten minutes later. We were exactly the weird lot you might expect of a 7-11 training crew. There was a distracted young woman with bleached blond hair, a tough looking moustached man with leathery skin, an alert looking young man who could have been a boy scout, a young mexican woman with a smattering of gang tattoos, a pimply kid who rode up on a motorcycle, and myself, in a yellow bowling shirt and stubble. The eager young man and I set up a few long tables in the storeroom. It was just barely big enough to squeeze 7 places to sit, and even then, a person had the side of their head mashed into a box of cheetos or a case of toilet paper. The eager young man proffered a hand. His name was Damien. He had a firm handshake and was entirely too happy to be in a storeroom of a 7-11 at 9am on a Thursday morning.
Forty-five minutes later, we were shifting uncomfortably in uncomfortable folding metal chairs. Our trainer was the sort of woman who should be performing a child's puppet show for right wing single moms who want their children to love Jesus. I would spend the next three days trying to visualize how she looked topless.
There was a Byzantine amount of paperwork to be dealt with. Within a half hour, I had assumed liability for any conceivable civil suit, denied that I had a drug problem, agreed to let them fire me for any reason, on a moment's notice, and signed a document that seemed to permit them to implant a microchip into my head. To this day, I am probably on a watchlist for potential drug rehab clients. Halfway into the paperwork, the leather-armed man squinted and joked "so when do we piss into a cup?" We were cautiously informed that 7-11 does not drug test. Instead, there is a phone number to call if we need help.
We were not drug tested.
This came as an enormous relief to every person sitting at the tables. The question asked and answered, our shoulders loosened, and some people began to look relaxed. As a long-term and enthusiastic dope fiend, I was as happy as everyone else, though I had been abstaining from the cannabis simply for economic reasons. Too bad,
Five minutes later, at our first break, I was to earn just how far people will go to avoid giving up drugs long enough to pass a drug test. Several people had come to the training session with small bottles of other people's urine, which they discarded gleefully in an overfull dumpster just outside the store. Others had dipped their fingers in bleach before arriving, counting on the remaining residue to foil the chemical assay. The Native American woman was a bleach dipper. She had once eaten Draino to foil a drug test. She seemed to think the technique was effective, but also confessed to spending three days in the hospital later, an event that seemed curiously uncorrelated in her mind. Someone lit a joint, and there outside the training session, we passed it around and confessed to a few of our vices. We all smoked pot. Without potheads, 7-11 would have to close its doors worldwide-end of story. Three of the seven were regular meth smokers, two smoked crack every now and then, "but never with the kids in the car". All of us drank pretty regularly. Damien and I were the only 2 who were not basically functioning alcoholics. I was later to learn that Damien had just gone off about six types of medication, including thorazine.
The rest of the training was three straight days of exquisite, pedantic, uncontrollable boredom. Sitting on those folding metal chairs, pressed up against a long table with a peeling faux-woodgrain finish, time passed more slowly than any other syllable of recorded history. Staring at one idiotic instructional videotape after another, I was reminded of Albert Camus' advice concerning "how not to waste time"
"Stand in long lines at the bank, take the slowest bus across town, wait for water to boil.." anything to slow one's perception of time massing to a bug crawl. Convenience store clerks waste less time than any other people on earth.
The training consisted primarily of telling us not do things that might get the Southland corporation in a lawsuit, and having us sign forms that would put all responsibility on us. We went over armed robbery scenarios, learned how not to sell beer to a minor or a person with slurred speech, and that the convenience store world was one big happy interracial family. This was all fine with us, because at the first sign of trouble, most of us intended to slip out the back door with a case of Milky Way bars and never come back.
I know this because, during cigarette breaks, I was indoctrinated into the seedy underworld of the retail underclass. The fresh-faced blonde woman with two children and a Meth habit had felt compelled to let her old boss feel her up every now and then. I tried to hide my enthusiasm as I imagined myself "supervising her", unzipping her green and black frock and sliding my fingers under her lacy black undergarments, all in the name of checking for shoplifted cigarettes and gum. She left her last job at circle K after her supervisor became possessive, imagining that perhaps the customers occasionally had easy pickings to the merchandise. She just walked out-with a case of 3:2 beer, and drank it in her car on the way home.
Not once during the training did we learn anything of practical value. Never did we step behind a cash register or restock a shelf. 7-11 had paid serious money learn to implement three important policies; never keep more than $30 in the cash drawer, keep the stores enormously well lit, and spend 24 hours on each employee to cover their asses from liability suits.
Next..the time I was almost robbed.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Dear Ruby
I have just given you an iclicker to play with. There is a sharpie around here somewhere too. Perhaps your mother would rather you not play with that. You are underfoot in my office as I type, content to explore the pleasant shape of the clicker, and test its endurance by throwing it on the tile floor. I approve. This world here is like a run-down version of the cities I imagined to populate the moon, in distant 2009, as a boy, entranced by science fiction illustrations featuring rocket ships, fuel tanks bulbous and engines flaring. I warned you about the absence of Titanotheres earlier, but earlier in the day, I was able to show you fancy guppies and ball pythons, bichirs and society finches. I never got to go to the moon and visit those cities. It turns out that the resources necessary to colonize that airless orb would have demanded cooperation on a scale that our species is not capable of yet, Maybe your generation will get to that.
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