polity et pietat

Geopolitics are making things seem a little bit meaningless right now, and sorry that the world is going a little fascist—but this too will pass.
The media echo chamber and the own signature time dilation that the US regime is causing (weeks stretch out to full four year terms) seem insurmountable but provided that we are not complicit in our own destruction and hold tyranny to account, we won’t descend quietly into that unreality where bluster and bombast and magical-thinking (those essential oils are going to have to step up their game with the impending cuts to health care in America) become the standard tool-box for diplomacy, legislation and policy execution. Perhaps a papal audience was intended to be another petulant and hollow photo-opportunity but maybe Dear Leader, who has so far been rather impervious to the world—secure in his narcissism, might get a more transformative lecture than he was expecting.

caption contest

Dear Leader’s rabid supporters, Super Punch informs, have obtained the physical and virtual identities (including sexual orientation and religious affiliation) of thousands of Dear Leader’s detractors and have circulated the list, which comes with instructions on how to find and compile information on their ideological foils—a process called doxxing (a neologism document-tracking or version-control that is associated with on-line vigilantism).
The list itself comes from a legitimately anti-Dear Leader petition’s registry of signatories calling for the removal of the entire regime—which while one ought not be blindly committal to everything that comes along, as a petition could as easily be a honey-pot, it is a pretty chilling prospect that contact data could be so easily lifted and used to harass, intimidate and silence antagonists and their associates. Anonymity is the refuge of bullies and it’s not as if one’s politics are called out in stark contrast, but there’s also no requirement public requirement for disclosure in every context and forum.  This wouldn’t be the first time that a bait-and-switch and unthinking allegiance has gotten people in trouble—still there’s no equivalence with signing a document and threatening the people that did so. Despots already can invoke lèse-majesté laws to mute critics and shutdown dialogue—without the help of goons to do their bidding.  Be careful what you share, be careful what you click.

plumbum or better living through geochemistry

Mental Floss has a thorough and circumspect long-format profile on scientist Clair Cameron Patterson that’s a fascinating bit of triangulation among the applied sciences, scholastics and environmental policy that is a fascinating biographic study in its own right and especially timely in this contemporary political environment when science is under assault—as are policies and regulations that promote public health and safety. To summarise (but it’s worth one’s while to read the article in its entirety) Patterson joined the Manhattan Project early on at the facilities at Oak Ridge Tennessee and figured out how to use mass spectrometers to separate out uranium isotopes and create enriched batches of the critical mass to sustain a nuclear explosion. After the war, Patterson took a teaching job and like so many scientists were eager for the chance for purely academic pursuits after having in the spirit of project leader J Robert Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” and was given an errant mission from a colleague to accurately measure the age of the Earth for the first time.
Having advanced from three thousand years old, to over ten thousand, several hundred thousand to millions and even billions, the scientific community had a ball-park figure and the consensus was generally not beyond three billion years old at this time. From his days as a nuclear researcher, Patterson knew that uranium had a given half-life at which point it would break-down into lead, and postulated that by sampling the ratio of lead to uranium inside very old rocks, he might be able to derive a more accurate means of dating the planet. His mass-spectrometry technique might be able to tease out these numbers but wherever he looked—even under laboratory conditions—there just seemed to be far too much lead, and instead of concluding that the world was many magnitudes older than experiments suggested, Patterson investigated further. Parallel to Patterson’s life and career, the automotive and petroleum industry had been advancing a-pace and sort of like that proverbial old woman that swallowed a fly, to alleviate the need for cranking a car to start it, then to reduce the infernal smells of fuel additives, then to eliminate noxious noise from engine knocking, chemist finally settled on what seemed to be the ideal solution of adding lead to petroleum. This meant that especially in urbanised areas, lead pollution and poisoning (the body’s biology misapprehends lead for calcium with highly toxic consequences) were impossible to get away from. Going to great efforts after conducting environmental sampling from remote and pristine areas to disabuse the public from the idea (propagated by the automotive and oil industries) that these levels of lead in the air and in the blood-stream and household products (paint, food cans, shoe heels, plumbing—the Romans knew better, etc) was acceptable or within healthy tolerances, Patterson created the world’s first ultra-clean room, free from outside pollutants, not only calculating the age of the Earth to four billion five-hundred million years but also directly launching a campaign against lead contamination that went on for decades and has been championed by many others. Patterson’s research, though it was a tough battle against the industry who had government in their back pockets, eventually saw the gradual removal of lead from products and a marked improvement in public health as a result. Stories like these seem to make our backsliding all the worse.

taxia or great chain of being

While it may seem a bit early in the year for annual superlatives, the state university of Syracuse, New York’s International Institute of Species Exploration of the campus’ College of Environmental Science and Forestry releases its list of top ten candidates of the most unexpected, unique finds of the animal and plant kingdoms to roughly coincide with the 23 May (1707) birthday of Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the discipline of taxonomy.
Inscribed to this year’s rolls include a sort of wild spicy tomato that appears to bleed when cut from Australia that’s propagated by bush fires, a spider whose camouflage resembles the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter matriculation ceremonies and a new species of Xenoturbella, a primitive marine worm that either resembles the missing half of an orphaned purple sock or fried churro pastry, depending who you ask. At a time when biodiversity is in grave peril and we have no idea about the natural innovation and wonders that we are losing without even the most superficial acquaintance, the institute wants to showcase the bizarre as a reminder that less than an estimated twenty percent of all species on Earth have yet been discovered and described and fewer still with any detail.