Scientist (Paleontology, Geochemistry, Geology); Writer (Speculative and Science Fiction, plus technical and non-technical Science); Mom to great boy on the Autism spectrum; possessor of too many hobbies.
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – What is your favourite Valentine’s Day candy?
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I’m kind of an oddball among women, as far as what manner of candy I prefer. (I’m an oddball in lots of other ways, too, but that’s not the topic of this post!) Chocolate seldom ‘does it’ for me. If I had my druthers, I’d eat cinnamon hearts all day. Or cinnamon bears. Or anything cinnamon-y.
Alas, something like ten years ago, I developed an allergy to cinnamon. No more cinnamon for me. (OK, I have some occasionally, and my lips, gums, and tongue swells and I remind myself not to do that again. But, CINNAMON!)
Given that caveat, I’ll opt for those candy conversation hearts instead. The white ones are my favorite. They’re spearmint, or something similar, that I just love. My least favorite ones are the yellow, banana-flavored ones. I try to choke those down first (or pawn them off on someone) then savor the white ones last.
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – What is your ideal Valentine’s Day celebration?
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How would I like to celebrate Valentine’s Day?
I’d like to laze about and dine on chocolates. I’d like a card and some flowers – early in the day, so it’s clearly not an afterthought.
I’d like TV. Just because I never watch TV.
And to be warm.
An excuse to dress up. Too bad it’s February. All my dressy clothes are a little meager for the cold weather. Maybe I should wear one of the gowns I’ve made. Hmm.
How do I celebrate Valentine’s Day?
I pull out my diploma and pat it gently before putting it away.
In 2000, I defended my dissertation on Valentine’s Day. It was the only day I could get my six-member committee together. Plus, I’d had a rough go of the whole ‘love’ thing, and decided that getting my doctorate that day would make the day worth celebrating.
One of the things that comes up when someone talks about climate change is the apparent cyclicity of climatic changes. The Earth has been through several rounds of ice ages and warming in recent millennia, how is this new episode of this warming not just part of that? Well, let’s look at the cycles.
Temperature change over the last 400,000 years. Notice the approximately 100,000 year cycle. Modern conditions are on the right end of the graph.
What we see here is a repeating 100 thousand-year cycle of glaciations and warming. We’re in a warm spot, having just come out of an ice age about 10,000 years ago. If we look at the pattern for the last three deglaciations, we see sudden, rapid warming, followed by cooling into another ice age. We’ve already warmed, and have been warm for a while, so we should be cooling down now. That’s why, back in the 1970’s, people were being warned about the coming ice age.
According to the glacial cycles, that’s where we should be heading. Things should be getting cooler. And they were up until about 50 years ago. Then we started seeing increases in annual temperatures. When looking at this graphically, we get what has been referred to as the “Hockey Stick.” You can read more about where the Hockey Stick comes from here.
The “Hockey Stick” showing recent rapid warming. Northern Hemisphere only. Modern conditions are on the right end of the graph.
What causes these glacial cycles? What is this 100,000 year periodicity? This pattern is caused by Milancovitch Cycles, changes in the intensity of the sun that hits the Earth due to properties of the Earth’s orbit and rotation about its own axis. There are three (or four) parts to Milancovitch Cycles.
The first of these is an approximately 21,000 year cycle called precession. This is where the Earth’s rotation axis wobbles, much like how a top wobbles as it spins. This changes the position in the Earth’s orbit at which the equinoxes take place.
Obliquity is a 41,000 year cycle in which the tilt of the Earth’s axis varies from 21.5° to 24.5° from perfectly vertical relative to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. With greater tilt, the difference between the seasons becomes greater.
The shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun shifts from being closer to circular to being more oval. This shift is called eccentricity and varies on scales of 100,000 and 400,000 years.
Milankovitch Cycles
Each of these (precession, obliquity, and eccentricity) have an effect on the amount of sun (insolation) that hits the Earth and therefore Earth’s climate. The term for this is solar forcing. We can take the individual impacts on solar forcing for each of these and add them up to summarize solar forcing at any given time. We can then compare this, and the individual forcings, to the pattern of glaciations. What we see is an approximately 100,000 year cycle of glaciations, which coincides with minima (or low insolation) in the 100,000 year eccentricity cycle.
Solar forcings due to Milankovitch Cycles and their relationship to temperature changes over the last million years. In this chart, modern conditions are on the left hand of the plot.
As we are approaching a minimum in the eccentricity cycle, we might expect to be heading into an ice age – though it might be a few thousand years off. What we are seeing instead is rapid warming. Perhaps we should be concerned.
Gilbert of Herongarde is a scholar and a warrior. He has a deep and abiding interest in the sciences, especially physics. He is recognized as among the finest of Herongarde’s tacticians, whose opinion will immediately sway that of the King himself. Gilbert takes great pleasure in improving designs of war machines such as trebuchets, catapults, and ballistas. He is also a master swordsman charged with the training of all those who would one day bear the Mark of Herongarde, and for the continued training for those who already carry the Mark. His swords are among the most polished and sharp among warriors. Gilbert is perhaps the most fastidious of the Mark-Bearers, always of clean and tidy appearance.
I raced home from work after teaching my morning class, hoping to miss the worst of the road conditions. I did.
The calm before the storm.
Then it got bad.
Photo taken not one hour later.Looking the other way. There’s a major thoroughfare down there somewhere.
I took a little walk to pick up the boy from day care up the street.
NY State Highway 104 and Townline Road.
After we got home, one of the plows came by.
Town of Williamson snow plow.
And because the plow blocked the driveway with snow, I went ahead and cleared the whole thing. By then we had seven fresh inches of snow. In 4.5 hours. That’s rapid snowfall.
The skeletal remains of King Richard III were found under a parking lot in Leicester.
Richard III
They were identified in part by DNA (comparing it with known descendents of the King) and by skeletal features (Richard was known to have had scoliosis, resulting in a deformity of the backbones).
Richard III
Of course all this resulted in a bunch of jokes, too.
Richard III officially announced as “1485 Hide and Seek Champion”
“Someone said they were going to build a carpark in Leicester. I said ‘over my dead body'” Richard III’s last words.
This title is a little mis-leading, in that what’s been found is thought to be the common ancestor of placental mammals – the mammals that are not marsupials nor egg-layers. Mammals, as fuzzy animals with three bones in the middle ear, had been around for millions of years before this common ancestor of placentals arose just after the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
But that’s ok. We’re still talking about a little shrew-ish mammal that is ancestral to whales, elephants, squirrels, and man. It’s still an important critter.
Protungulatum donnae
The beast is called Protungulatum donnae. It’s called ‘obscure’ because it’s a rare little mammal that doesn’t have the ‘coolness’ factor to have even a colloquial or common name. I guess I deal in obscurities because I’ve known of Protungulatum for nearly 20 years. Gasp.
What makes this study unique is that the scientists involves used modern genetic information, plus morphological information to determine what, most likely, the common ancestor of placental mammals would be like. This study used 4500 different characters (traits, if you will, whether genetic or the presence or absence of a specific structure on a bone)! Such studies are difficult with 50 characters. 4500 means that they’ve covered their bases. It’s an impressive piece of work!
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – Describe your ideal date night.
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My husband has been asking me to do this for years. What do I consider a perfect date night?
A good, not-rushed meal. Almost every restaurant speeds you in and speeds you out again, dumping your food in front of you faster than you can eat and enjoy it. Seriously, what’s the point of an appetizer if you’ve hardly eaten any of it when the main course appears? Why can’t you wait until after I’ve actually eaten the salad before bringing me the entree?
Conversation. Especially conversation without cell-phone preoccupation. Yes, I’m guilty of it too: checking my phone, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails. That stuff needs to be put in silent mode and hidden. And, no, I don’t want to talk about what’s right or wrong about our relationship. I want to talk about cat videos, major events, and work. Mundane conversation is fine, as long as it’s two-way and mutually interesting.
An activity. This is especially important if dinner was the typical rushed meal that one gets at restaurants. Honestly, I don’t really think of seeing a movie as a good date activity, because you’re not interacting really with the person you came with. I mean, if you are interacting with your date during a movie, maybe you’ve wasted your money. You may as well go and watech TV together. You don’t even need to dress up to go to a movie. No challenge there. No, I want something interactive. Bowling would be better than a movie (unless you really hate bowling – and I’m not a big fan), because you’re doing something and it’s kind of expected that you’ll talk to each other. Going to a play is fine – you actually have to dress up, which involves some effort. Even a car show is fine, provided you don’t ignore your date. No one wants to be the fifth wheel.
Seems simple enough, but it’s hard to accomplish. All meals are rushed these days. Life is full of distractions, so it can be hard to have just an ordinary, mundane, ‘how is the weather?’ kind of conversation. It’s all-too-easy to ignore your partner when on a date (especially if you’ve been together for a while), which makes finding an activity difficult.
Not to mention the fact that there’s always a good reason NOT to go out in the first place. We’re too busy! It costs too much! What will we do with the boy?
But when I reflect back on the best dates I’ve ever been on, these three things seem to be most important. Maybe there’s something to that.
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – Do you remain friends with ex-boyfriends/girlfriends after you break up?
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Breakups always make me sad. I always think I can stay friends. It never works out. The ones I wind up bumping into later on, I am able to be civil with, but the friendship and the trust are gone.
Whenever I have been in a relationship, I have fought to keep it, if only to avoid the inevitable loss of a friend should it fall apart. How about you?
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – How old were you the first time you fell in love?
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The first time I fell in love. Ugh. Was it really love? That relationship fell apart, but it did last two years. And we were engaged for much of that…
Anyway, that was back a long time ago. I was 18. I was a freshman in college. You know that age. Back when you knew everything and thought you could handle life as an adult. Dang, I was clueless.
We actually had a decent thing going, but two things conspired against us. Things that I wasn’t aware of until much, much later. One was his inability to commit. There were things going on in the background of his life that made it impossible for him to actually commit to a wedding date, or even admit to his family and friends that we were engaged. Yeah, that’s a problem.
The other thing is my own anxiety. Yeah, I was a postdoc and married before I found out that I have a significant problem with anxiety. Both OCD and social anxiety (and yet I sit here and share my life with you all). Anxiety is still my greatest challenge in all aspects of my life and is often the source of conflict in my marriage (which has lasted nearly 12 years despite me!).
That first love was real ‘love,’ I think. But it was doomed. We both needed to grow (a lot). We really had no idea what life was about. I’m still learning…
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 