#well technically a geologist but close enough

[monsieurenjlolras]

mulled wine/gluehwein drunk is the closest drunk to being stoned. ypu can trust me on this I'm an intoxication scientist

[saberswordseabass]

A Hidden Danger pt:1

Being a human in this strange universe was not as easy as it had used to be. Earth has been gone for a while now, most of the species being kidnapped by pirates or giant snake people, and now being treated like a dainty flower that would break to the lightest breeze by Carrion's guardian, a large bipedal bovine woman, called Trish.

"I am telling you it'll be fine! I'll be careful. Besides, it'll be amazing to see a new planet that not even the rest of the community knows about!" The twenty year old human states in an excited tone before grumbling at how uncomfortable the suit Trish was making him wear was.

"I know you'll be careful. We all will, but it's more of I don't want you harmed." Trish sighed as she looked down at her charge that came up to the middle of her brown furred torso, although the protective suit hid most of her features, besides her horns which were curled into a similar shape like a Terran's highlander cow.

"Technically, I should not have allowed you to go on this expedition in the first place. I can get in major trouble, I am supposed to be helping you." Trish states as Carrion looks back up at her and gives a tired sigh. Her ear flicks slightly as the door to the steel box they were in opens, allowing the rest of the expedition crew to arrive.

A large bipedal bear steps through the door, their belly straining against the protective fabric of the Hostile Environment Neutralizer Suit. In the padded hand of their suit, they carried a large briefcase like box. This was Tur. They were the group's expedition biological field agent. "Ah, it is good to see you are both already prepared. All we have left is to wait on Nellion, our geologist, and the surveyor of the expedition."

The geologist was another humanoid figure, only having an inch on Carrion compared to the over two feet the other two had him. Someone here didn't make him feel too small for once. An epicene voice rumbles through the speaker system of the suit.

"Trish, it is wonderful to have you with us again. We missed you." Nellion turns to Carrion, stepping closer to the human, allowing him to see the feline like eyes barely through the darkened glass of the helmet.

"It is good to see you as well, Nellion. This is my -" Before Trish could finish, Nellion interrupted, causing the guardian huff in annoyance.

"You must be Carrion, our new archeologist! It is wonderful to meet you, I am sure you will do wonderful." Nellion gave Carrion as Cheshire smile before heading to a free corner of the steel box and pressing a button.

The elevator they were in began to slowly lower, bringing them to the vehicle bay of the small explorer ship. A rover large enough to fit them all laid on it's dock bed, prepared for it's mission. The group of four take up their seats as the engine flared to life, blue glowing from it's center. The exit ramp lowered as the hover pads raised up the rover a good foot of the ground.

Before them laid what was an empty wasteland, consisting of nothing but jagged stone and harsh winds across the sandy stones. "Wow. I thought we'd be landing on one of the jungle areas." Carrion states as the wind fills the bay, the sand plinking of the glass ineffective in scratching or otherwise damaging it.

"This is as close we could get to one of the older plant species on the planet. The station needed to see if we'd be able to use it for better structural support in upcoming colonies." Tur spoke loudly as their speaker rumbled out, but it was barely heard over the howls of the sand. Nellion, who was driving the rover, had begun to pilot the rover to a break in the fury that was the wind.

"Trish?" Carrion rumbled out to his guardian that was sat to his left. His helmet turned to face her.

"Yes?" Her helmet turned towards him, the inside beginning to fog up slightly from each word spoken.

"This is a lot dif-," He began to say before stopping and leaning his head to look around her, his eyes squinting at something distance. Trish turns her head to look over to her left. A short red blip broke through the torrent of sand.

"Hey! Something is over there!" Carrion shouts, pointing at the blip. Nellion squints before turning to Tur. "Let's check that out first. We have a few days to get the sample. This planet was supposed to be uninhabited."

Tur nods in agreement. Nellion begins to type onto the console, and the rover begins to hover towards the red blip. Upon getting closer to the blip, allows them all to see it is a red light connected to the side of the rock face. A large metal door that looks like it was sandblasted for a hundred years also rests in the rock face.

"Nothing to indicate sentient life was found when we scanned the planet earlier." Tur hummed in a curious tone as Carrion climbed out, much to the surprise of Trish who climbs out with him.

Getting up to the door, it was more visible to see the sand had grinded the once air-tight door enough so something could find more purchase. "Trish. Think you'll be able to open this?" Carrion asks as he runs his hand against the sanded door.

"I appreciate the compliment on how strong you think I am, but if it's a standard blast door, I ain't opening it." She states as she could just feel the puppy eyes from Carrion. "Ugh, fine, I'll try. Stand back in case something breaks horribly."

Carrion stands behind her as she hooks her padded fingers into the groove. The door lets out an ear grinding screech, but it opens none the less. Upon opening, the doors lock, no longer needing her to force it. The way down almost horribly dark. Carrion flicks on his H.E.N.S.' built in light, about to step in.

"Wow, there! I go first, as I have to keep you safe." Trish places a hand on his chest as Nellion and Tur step out of the rover. Carrion blinks before allowing her to go first. The rest of the team was not far behind them.

After setting down the grimy steel hallway that was illuminated by their suits' lights, the entrance groans. The locking mechanism snaps loudly, releasing the door. It closes, sealing them in.

Turning around after it was too late. What Nellion said next was lost on Carrion as his universal translator.

This is my attempt to throw a hat in the ring of @wolven91 's amazing universe him and a few others are making. If I have anything wrong with in the lore, please let me know! C&C very much welcomed.

[fatehbaz]

why are you against the use of the term anthropocene

Well, I’m not totally against its use; I think it can be useful, especially in discussions in popular mediums outside of academia. But I do think that academic discussion of and much of the popular discourse around and involving that term, especially among Euro-American scholars, is Eurocentric and pedantic. Eurocentric, in the sense that the discourse ignores Indigenous criticisms while simultaneously appropriating Indigenous cosmologies and accepting funding/concessions from (neo)colonial institutions. Pedantic, in the sense that the discourse is too focused on finding a specific start-date; too focused on fossil fuels and not enough attention is given to the arguably more-influential role of industrial-scale agriculture throughout human history; and not enough discussion of the human institutions (social hierarchies built to facilitate empires and resource extraction) that inflict social and ecological destruction. I do sometimes like the term as a rhetorical device, but prefer terms like “Plantationocene” which are more specific about which institutions and imperial cosmologies are most influential in provoking both violence against humans and ecological change and apocalypse.

You have probably heard of alternate proposed names for the same era of human influence: Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Cthuluscene. I agree that the distinction matters, and many people (especially Indigenous people and others from Latin America and the Global South) have written about the importance of this name. Indigenous writers and scholars have, in my opinion and not surprisingly, offered the most biting criticisms of Anthropocene discourse. From the perspective of North America, I enjoyed the writing of Dwayne Donald (Papaschase Cree); Zoe Todd (Metis); Kali Simmons (Lakota); and Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi); all of whom write explicitly about the Anthropocene, the ethics of ascribing a name to this era, its Eurocentric discourse, and alternative Indigenous interpretations of global environmental history. And if my rambling is annoying and if this post seems too absurdly long to read, then I would recommend reading what Zoe Todd has written about the importance of how the name of the era influences narratives told about human social and ecological stories; she also addresses other shortcomings and Eurocentric aspects of the Anthropocene concept: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” December 2017. 

—–

Here’s how I feel about the term “Anthropocene”:

Assuming we agree that the intertwined forces of colonialism, imperialism, industrial-scale agriculture, resource extraction generally, and the hierarchical social institutions which support them (including forced labor, severance of community connection to ecosystems through closure of the commons, racial and gender hierarchies, and Indigenous dispossession) are basically the major influences on global ecological change now and over the past few centuries or millennia (including the present-day, the era of overt European colonization across the globe, and earlier manifestations in historical “classic” state-building and early ancient hydraulic civilizations): Instead of looking for a specific date sometime around 1822 in Europe when fossil fuel emissions scarred the soil, like a technical geologist might, I instead try to ask at which point industrial-scale resource extraction (especially including agriculture and deliberate devegetation campaigns even in its ancient manifestations), supported by and to the benefit of social hierarchies and imperial worldviews, begin to alter soils at vast continent-wide scales enough to be the planet’s leading driver of change in soils, vegetation, oceans, and atmosphere?

Did it begin with the advent of industrial specialist guilds in Mesopotamia, when kings would bribe irrigation engineers not to help a farmer water their fields until the farmer had paid tribute or rent? Did it begin in Zhou-era or Warring States period China when deliberate devegetation campaigns, large forest-clearing projects, and flood-prevention dam infrastructure installation led to local extinction of tiger, rhinos, and elephants? Rome? The Columbian Exchange, institutionalized slavery, and plantations in seventeenth-century European colonies in the Americas?

Is an Isconahua community in Amazonia’s forests equally as responsible for global ecological change as a multi-billion-dollar American mining corporation?

This is an example of what might be the most common criticism of the term: The Anthropocene term, by invoking “anthropos,” is imprecise because rather than identifying the actual source of global ecological change (certain systems, institutions, and practices) it implies that blame be ascribed to humans-as-a-species for provoking this global ecological apocalypse. This criticism (”Anthropocene obscures responsibility”) is just one of many.

These are probably my major issues with Anthropocene: (1) According to Indigenous scholars and many writers from the Global South and especially Latin America, the name obscures responsibility and doesn’t adequately imply which human systems and institutions are responsible for global ecological catastrophe, erasing and obscuring the ongoing violence which those same institutions continue to enact, both upon ecosystems and human lives. (2) And given geologists’ common focus on fossil fuels as the key indicators of Anthropocene start-date and human influence on environment, I think that this distracts from the arguably more influential and more important role of agriculture (and associated devegetation for purposes of settlement, rangeland, etc.) as perhaps the more dramatic human influence on global ecological history. Fossil fuels didn’t kill the bison and change the entirety of the Great Plains from boreal climates to the subtropics. Empires seeking resource extraction, accomplished through violence and dispossession, killed the bison and changed the continent. (3) The concept is the result of Euro-American academic discourse and does not adequately incorporate Indigenous and non-Western criticisms. And while paying superficial lip-service to “decolonization, the same academic departments maintain relationships with (neo)colonial nonprofits and government agencies while the discourse also simultaneously engages in continued appropriation of Indigenous concepts. (4) Finally, if we agree that industrial-scale resource extraction (including agriculture) and its associated social institutions are (or at least were, for most of the past) the major human influence on altering ecology, then assigning a specific start-date is extremely difficult and probably just an exercise or thought experiment, because at what point in history did these extractivist cosmologies reach “critical mass” and become the leading worldview through which (some) humans disproportionately exercised so much power over altering landscapes?

—–

I’ll recycle something I’ve previously said:

“Did the Anthropocene begin in 1821, or 1822? Did the year 1821 mark the definitive shift into a global expansion of urbanization and monoculture plantation crops, or was it the year 1822?” These are, to some degree, technicalities. This is not, or should not, be the point of “Anthropocene.” I mean, it is often important to know some specific dates; like the specific date that Russian settlers first encountered Steller’s sea cow; the specific date that English authorities issued permits for corporate monopolies on guano trade in Peru; the specific date that deliberate fire-setting dispossessed Indigenous people in Borneo and signaled arrival of palm oil plantations; the specific dates that certain agricultural, colonial, and imperial institutions invaded, expanded, or consolidated their power. But “the single date when imperial cosmologies achieved critical mass as the dominant ecological force”? I think that’s more ambiguous.

I appreciate that some popular venues or forums like academia, occasionally, are at least attempting to openly discuss a 12,000-year-old trend towards imperial power consolidation which relies on social hierarchy, disconnecting communities from local native species and landscapes, Indigenous dispossession, and the commodification of ecological systems. Glad it’s being discussed. But the discourse has issues and I think we can do better than “Anthropocene” as a term. Even if we treat Anthropocene more like an informal thought experiment, and improve it by renaming it “Plantationocene” or something, I still don’t think formally defining a specific date or “Day 1 of the Anthropocene” is as important as clearly identifying which systems and institutions actually provoked centuries of dramatic ecological change and the current ecological collapse. I think that identifying a technical start-date for a geological epoch is comparably a distraction from the discussion of ecological degradation and extinction; a distraction from the concept’s implied-but-inadequate criticism of imperial cosmologies; and a distraction from how global ecological collapse and crisis is closely related to and deeply intertwined with social hierarchies, institutions, and violence against other humans. 

–

Thank you for the question :)

[sasuhinasno1fan]

I think I’m starting to like you- Klance Week Day 1

I've got filming for a virtual musical coming up, this and Zutara week are the only things keeping me alive and sane. @klanceweek Summer/Beach Day/Swimming

“Welcome everyone to Metro Island. It’s 3 pm and a gorgeous 30 degrees Celsius outside. On behalf of the whole crew, we thank you for trusting us with your flight. We will touch down in a few minutes.”

Lance felt groggy. He blinked his eyes open, seeing Keith waking up himself from across him. Hmm, what was Keith doing here? He barely looked around to see Adam waking up, Shiro stretching and Pidge leaning over in her seat.

“We’re here! Wake up!”

Here? Oh wait, he remembered.

Keith, his…boyfriend, had practically kidnapped him and Adam from work – thankfully on a Friday – and after dressing them in clothes for warmer weather than was left in their city, shoved them on a plane to New Caledonia. In a normal situation he would love being spoiled but his…relationship with Keith was, odd.

For one, he was part of this famous social group, the Paladins. 4 teens, all children of famous and influential people. Keith’s mother was the CEO of the biggest company that had fingers in every pot. Shiro was a famous potter, the son of one even more famous. Pidge’s parents owned the biggest tech company and she headed one of their sectors at 16. Hunk’s grandfather was a well-known and well-liked former President of the State. Hunk kept the same kind air, known for his amazing cooking and his love life with geologist Shay Balmera. Lance by chance, was offered a scholarship to the school they attended Garrison Academy. He had apparently saved an important member of Keith’s company. All Lance remembered was seeing a guy close to fainting in the middle of a changing crosswalk and just ran. People turned their noses up at him, all children of famous, influence and rich parents, but Lance didn’t care. He did catch the attention of the Paladins though.

Thing about the Paladins, everyone wanted to please them and they could change their tune in a second. Someone bothering them at school? No problem, that person just committed social suicide. Someone under the protection of the Paladins? Everyone wanted to be that person’s friend, whether they wanted it or not. Some words had gotten mixed up and somehow, everyone thought Lance was the new target of ridicule. Attacked at the swimming pool, his desk defaced every day, getting tomatoes thrown at him? His life was starting to become hell and he snapped, finding Keith and screaming at him in the middle of the hallway. Once Keith said out loud he never said to do that, people got silent and then disappeared. He offered to make it better and announced that they were dating to keep people away from him. It meant that he had to let himself be dragged around by the 4, feeling like a pet.

Keith must have found getting yelled at hot because he started to take their fake relationship seriously. When an attack had gotten bad, bad enough he had to spend the night at Keith’s mansion, Keith personally went to his home to let his parents know he was taken care of. When he wasn’t being a rich jerk, Keith was actually kinda…nice. Of course, it didn’t help he was still dealing with his minor feelings towards Adam, his best friend. They were starting to fade though, with each event that lead him to spend time with Keith.

He could do without the excessive spoiling though. He was starting to feel like a bought woman or something. He liked it better when he took Keith to experience life without spending every cent. But they were at a tropical island, if the view outside was anything to go by, so he’d let it slid. This time.

                                                 _____________

Their rooms were overlooking the water, the gleaming sun making it shine. Lance almost couldn’t keep his eyes off of it when Keith handed him the key to his room and sent him off. Of course, it was right next to Keith’s, but he was able to forget that when he saw the room. It was big and expensive and beautiful. He couldn’t help but love it. The bed was covered in flowers, as well as the bath and even though he didn’t love how Keith would spoil him all the time, the way he felt so relaxed here was making up for it.

He was sitting on his bed when he noticed someone had come in standing next to him.

“This is pretty amazing, I’ll admit.”

Keith sounded smug. “I know.”

Lance rolled his eyes but stared out at the water, “I feel like I’m floating on water.”

“Technically we are.” He must have seen the look Lance was giving him because Keith gestured for him to follow. They went out to the balcony and he pointed to the set of stairs. That lead straight into the water. The room – houses really – where on stilts obviously, but they were on the water. Lance remembered a picture that had been the family computer, that looked just like what he was seeing now. He always dreamed of wanting to go to a place like that.

“Where are we?”

“Metro Island. It’s our vacation spot. I know you wanted a beach day, so I thought I’d bring you.”

“Our? Wait, beach day? You remember that?” he had mentioned that in passing ages ago, when he went to Keith’s house for the first time during a charity auction. Keith had won him the goggles of one of the best swimmers in the world.

“Yeah, ours. The Blade Corp. owns most of Metro Island. And of course, I remembered.”

The way he said it, like it was a known fact. Lance didn’t know what to say to that. It was starting to get hard to not like Keith like that.

“Come on. We’re going to have a tour of the place before we head to our favourite hidden area.”

“Hidden cause you guys found it or hidden because ‘my mom payed for it, go away’.”

“I’ll let you take a guess.”

Lance rolled his eyes. Rich people, he swore.

                                               ________________

Lance couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off of Keith as he played volleyball with his friends, letting Lance just relax with Adam. Keith was usually poking to get his attention all to himself so this was, interesting to say the least. He kinda wanted his attention now. What did that say about him now?”

“I can hear your mind going a mile a minute.” Adam said, face still turned to the sun. “What’s wrong?”

Lance pushed his sunglasses up and huffed out a sigh. “we’re here because of me.”

“Um, yes Lance. I know that. Kinda hard to not know when your ‘boyfriend’ is one of the richest people in the world.”

“No, I mean, I told Keith I really wanted a beach day a while ago, and how I just wanted to I don’t know, float on the water. He remembered and brought us here.”

“ohh, sounds like he likes you.” Adam teased. He was expecting a rebuttal like usual but this time Lance was silent. He finally looked at Lance to see him biting his lip, looking guilty. “And you clearly like that. Lance, wow.”

“I know, I know! When I first met him, I thought he was like all the other students and I didn’t want anything to do with him, especially seeing how he treats people sometimes, me included, even if unintentional. But…every moment I spend with him, where I think I’m going to hate it, I don’t. I like it and I’m starting to like him.”

“Heads up!” Hunk called and Lance looked in time to duck the oncoming ball that Adam caught.

“Lance, are you ok?” Keith called, looking like he wanted to run over.

“I’m fine.” He took the ball from Adam and threw it back to them. “Be more careful.” Keith looked guilty at that.

“If you want my advice, if you like him, then just go for it. I can’t see it going wrong, at all.”

Lance looked over at Keith, who’d been happening to be looking at him before he was hit with the ball by Pidge. Maybe there could be something.

[tyrantisterror]

This might be a bit of an odd question, but how would you personally improve Prometheus?

I’m assuming you mean the movie and not, like, the mythological titan.

First improvement: scrap every character except David and start over, because they’re all boring, inconsistent, and terrible.  David is also inconsistent and terrible, but he’s at least interesting, so if we just make him consistent and well written, he’d be fine.

Since the expedition consists of scientists, let’s actually make them ACT like scientists, as opposed to either 1. creationists or 2. poorly written strawmen.  Let’s have them actually be competent in their fields, instead of, say, having a geologist who gets lost in the building he mapped out or a biologist who’s afraid of a corpse but NOT a hissing nightmare penis cobra.  Let’s give them more well rounded personalities than “has an obvious character flaw, like being an asshole or a coward, which shifts in and out of their characterization depending on how we need them to act for a scene rather than being consistent.”

Let’s also have most if not all of the people actually WANT to be on this expedition - it’s a lot more interesting/dramatically ironic if these people are all SUPER PUMPED to explore new worlds and seek out the life they might find there, only to have it all go horribly wrong.  Most of the characters in the film seemed disinterested in the expedition at best and downright resentful that they were there at worst, which resulted in most of the character building moments being “MRAAH I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE ADVENTURE SUCKS,” which 1. isn’t endearing and 2. doesn’t really provide a character arc, since they basically go from “I THINK THIS MISSION SUCKS” to “YEP THIS MISSION SUCKS ALRIGHT,” which isn’t really good for character growth.

I don’t want to brainstorm a bunch of entirely new characters to fill up the cast right now because that’s a lot of work for a tumblr ask, but that’s what I’d have to do first and foremost to make this story not suck.

Let’s move onto the plot. The plot of Prometheus is simple at its core but made into a jumbled mess by its execution, which is what happens when you hire Damon Lindeloff.  So let’s cut to the core a bit: at its center, Prometheus is about people finding evidence that aliens visited earth, and using ancient clues Nicholas Cage style to track those aliens down.  They find an alien world that hides dark secrets and stumble into a whole slew of monsters.

Now, one of the ways Prometheus makes this needlessly stupid and convoluted is that they make the ancient aliens the creators of “all life on earth,” with some bullshit about how humans have identical DNA as the Engineers and all that.  It’s the kind of thing that sounds like it makes sense to people who paid no attention in high school biology and thus only know what DNA is from pop culture.  While this plot point is technically important for the whole “stressful parent/child relationships” theme that the movie has going on, it’s also intensely stupid and I hate it, so it’s getting cut.  Sometimes a theme must suffer for the sake of telling a good story.

But now we have to rejig things to accommodate for that major change, and rejig we shall!  So here’s how things start out instead: archaeologists discover evidence of ancient aliens, complete with what seems to be a star map.  Their corporate financial backer, Mr. Weyland (or was it Mr. Yutani?  I forget which one was involved here), who’s a bit of a wacko, decides to fund a rushed expedition to the planet in the star map.  He thinks these aliens must have created humanity (which the other scientists rightly think is a kinda stupid hypothesis), and wants to meet them to bring humanity to the next level.  An expedition of ambitious experts is assembled, and off to space they go!

They get to the planet and discover that, while it’s technically habitable, all life on the surface is dead.  There are corpses of all sorts of different creatures littering the surface, decayed and partially fossilized.  Some look much like terrestiral life, but a good deal more look very Giger-esque.  Most of the corpses are not in one piece, showing their deaths were pretty violent.  Something horrible clearly happened here.

But our heroes proceed, disturbed but willing to risk the danger in hopes of discovery.  They find an Engineer building and search it, discovering vague holotapes showing chaos on the ship and the creation of various Giger-esque monsters.  They find laboratories filled with strange monsters - David in particular is intrigued by this, as the idea of other artificial life intrigues him.  While the other explorers are trying to find kinship with the Engineers, David finds it all to easily in the monsters they created.

We eventually discover two things: first, the planet isn’t as dead as it looked, as there are a lot of strange monsters living within this building.  The many different monsters in Prometheus were, in my mind, its greatest strength, so my take would push that even farther - we’d have an entire ecosystem of Giger-esque nightmare creatures here.  When first discovered they’d be in a state of suspended animation, but the explorers broke the “seal” when they entered the tomb, allowing the Giger beasts to get active again.  The building quickly turns into a living hell.

Second, we learn the Engineers were nowhere near the benevolent precursors Mr. Weyland/Yutani believes them to be.  They didn’t create life on earth, nor did they visit earth to help us out - they’re colonialists who spread from planet to planet like a virus.  They did tinker with humanity’s ancestors, but it wasn’t so humanity could have some grand purpose - it was to make us better hosts for their bioweapons.  We aren’t children of the Engineers - we’re their petfood.  While Mr. Weyland and the other explorers are disheartened by this discovery, David understands it totally - after all, he was created to be a disposable tool, so why wouldn’t humanity follow a similar route?  The anger and frustration the explorers have at this revelation inspires him, though - after all, if they won’t accept their purpose, why should he?

The opening of the building has also been noticed by the Engineers, and soon enough an Engineer ship arrives on the planet to figure out who popped open their preserved bio-weapons.  The Engineer ship blows up our explorers’ spaceship, stranding them on the planet.  A squad of Engineers enters the building to destroy the remaining explorers and seal things up again, wearing biomechanical suits that make the Giger beasts nonhostile towards them.  We’d have at least one shot of an Engineer in its elephant-face-mask armor walking calmly through a sea of different nightmarish Giger monsters, all of which treat him with absolutely no animosity, because I think that would be a very eerie and interesting visual.

While the Engineers kill a few of them, the surviving explorers eventually figure out how to retaliate, killing all the Engineers in the building and taking their suits as disguises.  The fact that the Engineer’s host form resembles a human very closely is once more a meaningful plot point, albeit in a different way than in the original.  David also joins the group, hiding in the Engineer travel craft with some very familiar looking eggs.

Our heroes then sneak into the Engineer’s ship and try to take out all the remaining Engineers so they can use the ship to get home.  The plan succeeds thanks to David’s secret weapon, but unfortunately all of our human explorers are taken out in the process - either by the Engineer’s hands or, in the case of the final survivor, by stumbling into one of David’s alien egg traps and getting a good ol’ facehugger.

Now the only person left alive on the ship, David returns to the Engineer Building and basically loads up on eggs and other monstrosities, then sets off with plans to spread them as far and wide as he can.

And that’s how I’d change Prometheus.

[smartmoneygains01-blog]

High-grade Uranium Explorer is Poised for New Discoveries

As countries around the world reduce their dependence on fossil fuels nuclear reactors are projected to increase by 76% over the next decade. Investors have an opportunity to take advantage of the expected improving uranium price environment and acquire investments for a fraction of what they will soon be with. After achieving the low of this cycle at around US$17/lb, uranium is now in a bull market, having risen by almost 40% since last year’s lows.

Our analysts have discovered a mining exploration company that is well funded, has a strong management team and has many promising Uranium projects . The company’s operations are situated in the Athabasca Basin in Canada, the world’s leading source of high-grade uranium mining location that currently supplies about 20% of the world’s uranium. For any information related to stock market, you can do Stock Market Research.

The company’s share price is up 30% year to date and their plans for 2019 coupled with their recent high grade discovery make this our top Uranium exploration stock.

ISO Energy

CVE: ISO

Market Cap: $33,130,000

Shares issued: 55,217,368

 The company is focused on the acquisition and exploration of uranium mineral properties, principally in the Athabasca Basin of Saskatchewan. The company recently made a discovery at the Larocque East Property (100% owned) and is currently waiting on remaining assays.

The company’s winter drilling confirmed that presence of a high-grade uranium deposit that is 150 m long x 38 m wide and is up to 8.5 m thick. With uranium mineralization found in 11 of 12 drill holes and the follow-up drilling campaign this summer should further expand the deposit. When you consider the amount spent on the winter program and the potential value of this size discovery, management’s strategy is providing large potential shareholder value.

The company is fully funded for ongoing exploration with an extensive drill program planned for 2019. IsoEnergy is founded and backed by NexGen Energy the company that holds the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the Athabasca Basin, Arrow Deposit (Indicated Mineral Resource of 256.6 M lbs of U3O8 contained within 2.89 M tonnes grading 4.03% U3O8).

 6 Reasons we believe IsoEnergy is poised for a breakout

1. The company controls a substantial claim position in the world’s preeminent Uranium mining district.

2. The Uranium bull market is at its infancy and prices are projected to increase further.

3. The company has a team with an extensive technical focus and uranium background, the team has been a part of the discovery of over 400Mlb of U3O8. All full time employees are geologists and recent acquisitions and discoveries are a clear example of their effectiveness.

4. The $5.5 million bought deal in December 2018 provides the firm with enough funds to continue their exploration objectives.

5. IsoEnergy has a very small float and a very tight share structure with NexGen owning 53% and institutions/ strategic investors owning close to 25%.

6. The Hurricane Zone is wide open for expansion, and there are 5 ready drill targets in proximity. The company is going to be very active with drilling and Geophysics work and more success should drive their stock up higher.

  Bottom Line

IsoEnergy has proven itself by being able to raise money and acquire assets in a very weak uranium market. They have built a substantial land package and have the capital to explore it and expand on their discoveries. With the Uranium bull market upon IsoEnergy is perfectly positioned to be one of the big Uranium Exploration winners. For latest financial news, visit Smart Money Gains.

[irregularwebcomic]

[Irregular Webcomic! #1946 Rerun](https://ift.tt/2HOWMwT)

Glasgow isn't quite in the actual Scottish Highlands, but it's close enough for some giant snakes.

Go find a map of Scotland. Wait a minute, what am I saying? This is the Internet! Here's one. :-) This map is copyright-free, since it is produced by the C.I.A., and is available in full from the astonishingly brilliant Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas.

Okay, had a good look? Scotland is at the north end of the United Kingdom. The Scottish Highlands cover the entire rugged looking region north of Glasgow. Note the intriguing feature of the geography, in that Inverness and Fort William are connected by an obvious straight line cutting across the peninsula. Along this line lies Loch Ness, the second largest but probably the most famous lake in Scotland. Loch Ness itself is highly elongated in shape, running directly along the line previously mentioned. This line is actually a long series of valleys, known as the Great Glen, cutting right across Scotland from one coast to the other, and bisecting the craggy highlands that rise on either side. All in all, it's a rather striking geological feature.

The Great Glen in fact, as some of you have no doubt realised by now, marks the location of a major fault in the Earth's crust. The land north-west of the fault has slipped northwards relative to the land south-east of the fault. And it doesn't stop in Scotland. The fault runs right through Ireland as well, straight through the bay near Londonderry that you can see on this map, and out the western side of that island.

Okay, now let's go even further afield. Take a look at this map of north-western Europe. (Click it for a larger version.)

There are mountains in Scotland. Where else do we see mountains? There's a whole big chain of them running up the back of Norway. In fact, with a tiny bit of imagination, you can picture the chain of mountains running along Scandinavia as continuing across the North Sea into Scotland. It makes a nice arc.

In fact, the mountains of Scotland and Scandinavia are part of the same mountain range. This immense range of mountains was produced during an event known as the Caledonian orogeny. Caledonia is the ancient Roman name for Scotland, and orogeny is a technical term combining the Greek oros, meaning mountain, and genus, meaning generation.

The generation of the mountains of Caledonia and Scandinavia occurred roughly 400 million years ago, at which time the continents of the Earth were in very different locations to where they are now. They were so different, that we can't even sensibly refer to them with our familiar names. At that time, there was an ocean known as the Iapetus Ocean. Don't go looking for it on a modern map, because it doesn't exist any more. On one side of the Iapetus Ocean was the continent of Laurentia. On the other side were two landmasses known as Baltica and Avalonia.

The movements of plate tectonics slowly but inevitably caused the shrinkage of the Iapetus Ocean, with Laurentia moving closer to Baltica and Avalonia, until the fateful period of history when these continents collided. In exactly the same way as the collision of India with Asia has more recently produced the crumpling of the Earth's crust that we know as the Himalaya Mountains, this titanic altercation gave rise to a great range of mountains.

The now combined landmasses of Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia eventually formed part of the single supercontinent of Pangaea, which existed around 250 million years ago. So this collision and mountain building was by no means a sudden thing; it took many millions of years to occur.

Pangaea eventually broke apart again into pieces, to form the continents with which we are familiar today. Baltica and Avalonia were essentially the forerunners of what is now Europe. The mountains of the Caledonian orogeny can be seen today, weathered and eroded into less spectacular peaks than the Himalayan heights which they may well have reached shortly after their birth, running down the spine of Scandinavia, across Scotland, and...

What became of Laurentia?

Take a look at this map. (The big version - click on this small one.)

Norway, Scotland... look west...

Look for mountains.

The Appalachian Mountains. That enormous range of mountains running diagonally across the eastern USA. You can mentally extend them north-east, up the peninsula of Maine and New Brunswick, across the Gulf of St Lawrence, across Newfoundland, and then... you are forced to a stop by the Atlantic Ocean.

Only imagine the ocean isn't there. Slide Newfoundland across to nestle next to Ireland. Then the Appalachian Mountains can continue right through the Scottish Highlands and on into Norway. We were looking for Laurentia. We've found it. Laurentia is North America.

The Appalachians are the same mountain range as the Scottish Highlands and the mountains of Scandinavia.

How do we know this? Because we can see the evidence in the rocks. If you examine the rocks and fossils of the Appalachians, you can see that these mountains were also generated around 400 million years ago, in an event known as the Acadian orogeny. So at this time, the Iapetus Ocean closed up, Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia collided, and produced an enormous range of mountains. Later, the movements of the plates of Earth's crust separated Laurentia from Baltica and Avalonia again, sundering the mountain chain in the middle, and producing the new (and still expanding) Atlantic Ocean between them. But let's have a closer look at the area where these great landmasses were ripped apart.

On the American side we have the island of Newfoundland. Here's what it looks like from space. Remind you of anything?

Have another look at Scotland (at the top of this annotation). Remember that Great Glen fault line running right across the country, from north-east to south-west? There's also a major dislocation running across Newfoundland, from north-east to south-west. It's so big, it almost separates the island into two pieces. Only a tiny isthmus remains to connect the bulk of the island to the irregular blobby peninsula dangling off the south-east corner. Note also that many of the obvious geographical features run north-east to south-west, just like the Appalachian Mountains, and the arc of Scotland to Scandinavia.

Now here's the really interesting bit. If you go to Newfoundland and have a look at the rocks and the fossils contained in them, you find that they confirm the idea that the island is really an extension of the Appalachian Mountains. The rocks and the ages of the fossils all match. Except for that almost-detached peninsula on the south-east of the island. There, the rocks are strangely very different. What's more, the fossils in the rocks are completely different to the fossils found on the rest of the island.

The fossils of the time when these rocks and mountains were laid down include a lot of graptolites and trilobites. These are great fossils for palaeontologists to find in rock beds, because they were very prolific across the world at the time, and because they varied with geographical distribution. The graptolites and trilobites found in one part of the world were noticeably different from those found in another part of the world. In particular, the fossils found on the Baltica/Avalonia side of the closing Iapetus ocean were very different from those on the Laurentia side. In other words, the graptolites found now in the Scottish Highlands are different to the ones found in the Appalachians, and to the ones found in Newfoundland.

Except for that dangling peninsula. The graptolites there are an exact match to the ones found in present-day Scotland. What's more, the rocks of the peninsula themselves are of a type not found elsewhere on Newfoundland, or in the Appalachians, but are precisely the same as the rocks found in Scotland.

Well, not all of Scotland. The rocks and fossils found in the highlands west of the Great Glen are very peculiar. They don't look like anything seen anywhere else in Scotland. What they look like, in fact, is rocks and fossils from the western side of Newfoundland.

When Laurentia collided with Baltica and Avalonia, the Laurentian side ended up with a characteristic set of rocks and fossils, and the Baltica/Avalonia side gained a different set of rocks and fossils. Hundreds of millions of years later, when the Atlantic Ocean ripped the melded continents apart once more, it didn't use the same boundary to separate them. Laurentia left behind a part of itself. The north-western part of Scotland used to be part of what is now North America. And the south-eastern tip of Newfoundland used to be part of what is now Europe.

Anyone who knows Canadian geography reasonably well will know that that part of Newfoundland is called the Avalon Peninsula. It was the evidence from this part of Newfoundland that allowed geologists to piece together the history of the North Atlantic and the continents on either side, and this is why they decided to call the proto-continent that would later become the bulk of Europe: Avalonia.

2019-03-23 Rerun commentary: I must admit my own knowledge of Canadian geography before writing this annotation wasn't quite up to scratch. I could tell you roughly where Newfoundland was, but didn't really know much beyond that and a basic knowledge of the other provinces and a handful of major cities. Usually, unless you're visiting, there's not really much need to know geography of foreign places. It's nice to know, but not knowing isn't really going to bother most people. Geographical knowledge is highly concentrated in the areas where you live and work. You know names of streets, and intersections, and where certain businesses are located, and even finer details like where you can find mailboxes and bus stops and a bench to sit on. And expanding your circle, you probably know the names of all the cities and towns within a few hours drive, and you have a general idea of places in your own country further afield. But think about a country on the other side of the world and you may be lucky to be able to name the capital city, let alone any of the political subdivisions or second-tier cities and towns, or identify any of them on a map. In the future, people living on Mars are going to know all the craters and valleys and stuff around them, but won't be able to locate North America on a map of Earth.

[mindfulwrath]

HTCIC Excerpt: The ISV “Valiant”

I had the day off from work and this is what I made.

"I've got a space-ghost story," Cameesha said. "If anybody wants to hear it."

"Fuck it," said Emma.

"Is it from this station? Because I can't take any more bullshit from this station," said Sam.

"No, it's an old one. It's about why they don't use the UCB queck frequency in subspace anymore."

"Oh shit, I know this one," Sam said. "It's the Valiant, right?"

Cameesha nodded. "International Space Vessel Valiant," she said. "One of the very first worm-drive ships ever built. Before they really knew how subspace worked. It's also why all subspace vessels are required to carry six tons of liquid hydrogen and have impulse thrusters."

"Okay, I have interest," Sasha said. "Tell me this ghost story."

"Well, the first bit isn't a ghost story, it's fact," said Cameesha. "The Valiant was trying to get to Proxima Centauri from Earth. Simple trip, should've taken . . . fifteen days. Day and a half, from the crew's perspective."

"But?" said Emma.

"But," said Cameesha. "Their ion tanks popped a leak somewhere along the way, and they couldn't slow down to get back out of subspace. There's nothing in there to exert friction, so. . . ."

"They just kept going, like the damn Energizer bunny," said Sam. "And quecks don't work, between subspace and real-space, y'know? Regular communications definitely don't. So they couldn't radio for help."

"Cut to sixteen days later, Team Earth knew something had gone wrong," said Cameesha. "But, again, this is one of the very first worm-drive ships ever. We weren't sure if the queck had broken, or what. We didn't have anything that could go after them prepped. By the time we got something together, it'd been three months."

"Oh, no," Sasha said, shaking her head.

"Yeah," said Cameesha. "Not that bad, from a subspace perspective, only nine days, but all that meant was nobody had died yet. Well, we popped a ship through with a queck on the UCB frequency, also headed for Prox, and got the story. By then the Valiant was nearly thirty lightyears off, and it turned out those popped ion tanks had shoved them off course, but because there's nothing to navigate by in subspace, nobody knew by how much or even in what direction. The rescue ship couldn't stay in subspace more than a day, so they popped back out at Prox and told Earth what was going on. Everybody did everything they could, but—well, there was just nothing that could be done. They were gone. Nothing could catch them, nothing could even find them. They were just stuck in subspace. Forever."

"It was fucked," Sam said. "Because like, y'know, time is shorter—longer? In subspace?"

"Technically denser," said Cameesha.

"I'm too drunk for that bullshit," said Emma.

"Point is, like, one day in subspace is ten days up here. So a ship, right, a ship with enough supplies to keep everybody alive for—for—for three months, right, that's nine hundred days, up here. That's like three years. For three years, every time you popped into subspace, you could talk to the Valiant on the queck."

"Except it wasn't three years," said Cameesha. "It was two. Because one day the Valiant stopped responding."

"Here's the ghost story," said Emma. "Oh boy, here we go."

"It wasn't that the queck was broken, right, because quecks don't break," said Cameesha. "They just stopped talking to us. Nobody knew what'd happened. It'd been a matter of hours for them, couple of days for us. But something changed. They weren't communicating with Earth anymore."

"This does not sound like ghost story," Sasha said. "This sounds like other, much better kind of story. Nobody knows what is in subspace. Maybe they got communication. Maybe somebody else found them, rescued them."

"Oh, just wait," said Sam. "Just wait, because this is fucked up."

"Earth was pretty desperate to find out what'd happened," said Cameesha. "And yeah, maybe partially it was because of the possibility of communication—we hadn't even found Akaste at that point—but the Valiant just. Wouldn't. Answer. They'd been adrift for about two months, their time. Supplies would've been running thin, but they shouldn't've been out yet. People'd been speculating for months about whether they'd all kill themselves or if they'd resort to cannibalism or some combination of the two. Jonestown versus Donner party, sort of a thing. You know."

"I do not know either of those things," Sasha said.

"You don't want to," Sam assured her. "Cult mass-suicide versus wilderness cannibalism, nasty nasty stuff."

"Oh," said Sasha, wrinkling her nose.

"Unpleasant. Most people were hoping for Jonestown, honestly, because it would've been neater," Cameesha said. "But okay, here's the thing: the Valiant wasn't responding, but the quecks were still working. People in subspace started hearing things. Voices. Conversations. Coming through the quecks. Like there were people talking in the same room, but not actually to Earth."

"Did they figure out what happened?" Emma asked, sounding queasy.

"No," said Cameesha, "that's the thing. People listened and recorded and analyzed all to hell, but the best they could get was a few words here or there. There was some kind of distortion, which shouldn't happen, because, y'know, quantum entangled communicators don't get interference. That's the point. There's no signal to interfere with."

"From what we understand," Sasha muttered. She had a sip of moonshine-laced root beer.

"Sure," said Cameesha. "Anyway. This went on for about a year, our time. We figured that's about when they should've run out of supplies. Maybe they could've made it stretch for another few months, especially if they went full-on Donner, but it shouldn't've been much longer than that. We kept trying to communicate. They kept not responding. We kept hearing voices."

"And?" said Emma.

"And we kept hearing voices," Cameesha said, her voice dropping menacingly. "For ten. Years."

Emma's eyes got very big. She gulped. Even Sam got a tingle in the pit of her stomach, despite having heard the story before.

"The same thing. On and on, just those distorted voices coming through on the Valiant's queck frequency. At one lightyear every four days, they were over nine hundred lightyears out."

"Shit," said Emma. "That's like—that's like intergalactic, right?"

"Not even close," said Cameesha. "It's at least twenty thousand lightyears to the edge of the Milky Way from Earth. Even if they'd been going perpendicular to the plane, that's still, like . . . I dunno, a thousand lightyears? But they weren't going perpendicular. The galaxy's really fucking big, yeah?"

"Fuck," Emma said under her breath, apparently having the vastness of space dawn on her anew. Sam was a little staggered herself.

"Still," said Cameesha. "Really goddamn far. Farther than anyone's ever been, or likely to go. Whatever had happened, it'd either killed them after only two months, or kept them alive for seven months longer than they should've lasted. We never could work out what they were saying. Eventually we just stopped using that queck frequency, so we wouldn't have to hear. There's people who claim to have tuned quecks to it, right, while they're in subspace, and they say you can still hear it."

"How . . . how long it has been?" Sasha asked, sounding a little faint.

"The Valiant engaged its worm drive bound for Proxima Centauri on December third, twenty-one ninety-eight," Cameesha said. "Two hundred and four years ago."

Sam shuddered, breaking out in goosebumps.

"Nope!" Emma said, shaking her head. "Nooooope, no, that's too freaky. Too too freaky by far. No sir, I don't like that."

"Twenty years, for Valiant crew," Sasha mused. "Plausible, if found some way to make food. Or if had some kind of help."

"What help?" Cameesha demanded. "There's nothing in subspace."

"Of that we know," said Sasha. "Maybe very very far out, is something. Maybe something Valiant found."

"Ope, buckle up, Cameesha, get ready for the X-Files Special," said Emma.

"Do not make fun of me," said Sasha. "Universe is unimaginably huge. Yes? Cameesha, you know this."

"Ye-es," Cameesha said, wary. "Sort of mind-bogglingly huge, if I'm honest."

"Right," said Sasha. "So. We do not know everything in Universe. Cannot. Is not impossible there is more life than just us and Akasteans. Yes?"

"Honestly, it's almost impossible there's not more than just us," said Cameesha. "I mean. In a spherical universe with a diameter of thirteen billion lightyears, finding other life only thirty away is like . . . going out looking for gold and treading on a nugget on the first step out the door. You'd imagine the place must be absolutely littered with it."

"Yes, yes," Sasha said, her excitement mounting. "And some parts of Universe are very very old. Yes? Some stars burning for billions of years already before Earth even born. Yes?"

"Yeah, you've got some main-sequence dwarf stars that're ten billion years old already," said Cameesha. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "Where're you going with this?"

"Humanity only has fifteen thousand years-ish, to do everything," said Sasha. "Earth life, four-ish billion to get from teensy tinesy cell to space stations. So, somebody else, with much much older star, has much much more time. More time. To do everything we do. In another billion years, where is humanity? Sun is not dead, Sun has four billion more years to be just fine. Earth is not dead, although maybe cooler, I don't know, I am not geologist. Where we will be? Where somebody else could be, with all of this time?"

"Highly speculative, at best," said Cameesha. "But I'll acknowledge that it's possible. So why haven't we run into these highly-advanced beings? Are they just too far off?"

Sasha shook her head. "No," she said. "Already we have encountered them. Already they watch us and give guides. Maybe they rescue Valiant, with subspace technologies we do not have. Involvement must be minimum, because we are baby birds, must learn to fly on our own."

"Can't violate the prime directive," Emma mumbled.

"That's a bit of a reach," said Cameesha.

"But you cannot deny is possible," said Sasha.

"No, of course I can't," said Cameesha. "Just like I can't prove the nonexistence of anything in the universe. You can't prove a negative. Where's your evidence that they do exist? These—hyper-beings, or whatever."

"How else Akasteans suddenly figure out how to write English?" Sasha said.

"By studying it?" Cameesha suggested.

"Maybe. I do not think so."

"You'll never convince her, Cameesha," Sam said. "She's unshakeable. Before this it was worm drives she thought were extraterrestrially derived."

"In part," Sasha said curtly. "How else somebody would figure out subspace even exists? Requires too much foreknowledge. Accelerate suddenly to light-speed, vwoosh, suddenly in secret under-dimension where speed of light is faster, cannot get back out unless you slow down again? How somebody figures this out? Is not realistic."

"With particle accelerators," Cameesha said. "There's literature on this. Bloody reams of it. Also, subspace isn't an under-dimension, it's a—an inside-dimension. Also also, the speed of light isn't faster in subspace, the space is denser."

"But there's nothing there?" Emma said, frowning.

"Right," said Cameesha. "But the nothing is less dense, so light covers more distance whilst moving at the same, fixed speed."

"I'm too drunk for this," Emma said again.

"I'm not drunk enough," said Sam. "I can barely wrap my head around the main spire having a fixed orientation."

Cameesha went suddenly stiff.

"The what?" she said.

"Yeah, the main spire, the big oval thing in the middle of the station," said Sam, gesturing vaguely. "The rings spin, but it doesn't. Something to do with the field generators, I think. They're designed so that Three, Four, Seven, and Eight are always facing Rhodea, and the other four are always facing Beta Com."

"That's it," Cameesha whispered, her eyes going so wide that white showed all the way around them. She leapt to her feet. "That's it!"

"What, what's it?" Sam said. Cameesha was already out the door. She caught herself on the lintel and leaned her head back into the room.

"It wasn't an accident!" she cried, and sprinted away.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Sam called after her, but she was long gone. 

"I'm wayyyyyy too drunk for this," Emma said, rolling up onto an elbow and shaking her head. "What's going on? Why is the orbital mechanic freaking out?" 

"Oh, shoot," Sasha said quietly. "I think I know what she means."

"Please, enlighten us," Sam said, exasperated.

Sasha looked up at her. Her skin had gone waxy. She gulped.

"She means Orion," she said.

Sam stared at her. Emma stared at her. A square of sunlight slid placidly across the wall like a time-lapse video.

As one, they all three scrambled to their feet and took off after Cameesha.

[twh-news]

Skull Island' Review: King Kong Kicks Butt In This Gorgeous Pulp Adventure | Forbes

Kong: Skull Island opens in North America on March 10, 2017 courtesy of (among others) Legendary and distributor Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. The film, budgeted at around $185 million, is both the start of a would-be franchise and something of a backdoor pilot for what the Dream Factory hopes will be a cinematic universe involving the likes of King Kong, Godzilla and other famous beasties. We’re getting Godzilla: King of the Monsters (a sequel to the 2014 Godzilla) in 2019 and Kong vs. Godzilla in 2020. So as you can see, there is more at stake than a single movie.

That’s the inherent risk of this whole expanded universe game. Under normal circumstances, Kong would merely be responsible for making enough money and audience approval to justify its expenses further installments. But since it’s the backbone of an expanded universe, a responsibility that Godzilla did not share, it has the extra burden of justifying and creating excitement for what comes next. Once again, Mr. Kong, we ask too much of you.

The good news is that, should this film do well and get decent reviews, it will go that much further in dispelling the conventional wisdom that Warner Bros. is a house of horrors due to the ups and downs of DC Comics movies. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them earned $811 million worldwide and mostly positive reviews while The LEGO Batman Movie scored raves and solid box office. If the Skull Island is a well-received hit and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword avoids utter embarrassment, there is frankly only so much grief we can give the studio no matter how good or bad Wonder Woman and Justice League turn out to be.

The Review:

Kong: Skull Island is high-quality pulp fiction. The picture is a briskly paced and character-driven adventure that just happens to be a big-budget monster mash and part of a would-be cinematic universe. The film has a game cast amid stunning visuals and gorgeous cinematic sights. It may not be the eighth wonder of the world, but this King Kong revamp is often quite beautiful.

While the film is technically a prequel to the Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, it stands entirely on its own in terms of content and visual style. The 2014 monster mash was a grim and foreboding affair, shrouded in darkness and mystery while offering the barest hint of humanity amid its jaw-dropping visuals. Skull Island goes almost the opposite route, plunging us immediately into the world of its quirky human characters and wasting little time giving us what we came to see and delivering most of its thrills in broad daylight.

Regarding cinematic foreplay, this is less Jaws and more The Host. While both styles have their merits, Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and John Gatins’ witty screenplay keeps us entertained and intrigued during the exposition and earns our investment in those who will soon fight for their lives. While I wouldn’t argue that this is a course correction, as Godzilla (which I didn't care for beyond the visuals) certainly had its merits and its fans, it is encouraging that the second film in this continuity can be so different regarding tone, focus and style. This is a possible signal that Legendary and Warner Bros.’ monster universe might well be filmmaker-driven.

While Godzilla was called “the first post-human blockbuster,” Kong: Skull Island is as much about watching the likes of John Goodman, Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson chew scenery as it is about King Kong and the various monsters of Skull Island. But fear not sports fans, you get a whole heaping of monster mash action throughout the 118 minutes. If you’ve managed to go this far without knowing too much, especially if you’ve avoided the most recent trailer (note: do not watch the final spoiler-filled trailer), I’ll try to be as vague as I can.

Set in 1973 as the Vietnam War winds to a close, the film follows a group of motley outsiders, including a discredited scientists (Goodman), a professional soldier (Hiddleston), a cynical war photographer (Larson), a geologist (Corey Hawkins), a biologist (Jing Tian) and the head of the chopper unit tasked with flying these folks into uncharted peril (Jackson). Goodman and friends are heading to Skull Island to conduct a land survey. Things almost immediately go to hell.

Shot by Larry Fong, the guy who almost had me giving Batman v Superman a positive review, this is an utterly beautiful motion picture. The naturalistic visuals, imbued with a particular hot orange vividness, gives the film an absolute authenticity of time and place and at least the appearance of realism even when we are clearly watching special effects. I saw this in glorious 2D, but I imagine it’s worth the IMAX 3D upgrade as the broad daylight action will probably survive any 3D glasses-related dimness.

And the title creature is a marvel, standing 100 feet tall and exuding animalistic menace no matter which side he’s fighting on at any given moment. His major introductory beat is a superb action sequence, even if it’s structured more for action-adventure thrills than horror or intensity. The film manages to humanize its main monster without being overly patronizing. This Kong is a protector of Skull Island. But if you get into his turf, he will bat you out of the sky without thinking twice.

Even after the monstrous stakes are established, there is still a relative focus on the humans attempting to survive and make it to a planned pick-up spot. Along the way, they stumble onto World War II soldier who has been living on the island for 30 years. Said MIA (John C. Reilly) provides comic relief, a surprising poignancy and plenty of exposition. Reilly quickly becomes Skull Island’s MVP.

Most of the survivors are focused on not dying, while Jackson allows his grief over first act casualties to turn him into a Captain Ahab figure. It’s an expected turn, but one which allows the survivors to have a conflict more potent than merely running away from scary monsters. The rest of his soldiers are slice-of-life characters, drawn just vividly enough so that you’ll briefly mourn when one of them cashes out.

Hiddleston is in full brooding rogue mode, even if he gets one moment of almost comical heroism. Goodman is superb, as always, although Booker and Tian fall back a bit once Reilly’s starts scene-stealing. Larson is fine, even if she is somewhat hobbled by being the only major female character. There are refreshingly few “beauty and the beast” interactions between the great ape and the empathetic photojournalist, which is a good thing since we're getting an actual Beauty and the Beast a week after this movie, but she doesn’t get much else to play in the film’s latter half.

The picture loses some of its character focus in the second act as certain characters split off from other characters, which leaves some of the more interesting folks out of sight and out of mind for a while. But the finale comes together in an exciting and satisfying fashion, delivering a climax that pays off the film’s Apocalypse Now and Moby Dick themes while providing the required monster mash action. And while there is less of a sense of awe to be found than Peter Jackson’s more overtly romantic take on this story, there are any number of gorgeous moments of vivid cinematic beauty and iconic imagery.

Kong: Skull Island is an action spectacular that offers large-scale monster mayhem, moments of cinematic poetry (like the grand moments of Kong standing tall amid the sun-drenched carnage) and memorable character work by a cast of overqualified thespians giving it their all. Skull Island is the very definition of a complete package. While the movie exists due to its IP and hopes for a larger cinematic universe, it justifies itself as high-quality popcorn entertainment and works as a piece of pop art unto itself.

While I admit will admit that the overall effect is less wondrous than the Naomi Watts/Adrien Brody/Jack Black fantasy, that’s also because movies like King Kong are a lot more commonplace than they were in 2005. Whether you prefer Peter Jackson’s epic romantic adventure or Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ lean and mean war story, they exist side by side along with the 1976 remake as artistically valid interpretations of the 1933 classic. Kong: Skull Island is a confident, pulpy, character-focused, big-scale adventure story that just happens to be a backdoor pilot for an expanded universe. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

P.S. Yes, there is a post-credits sequence, but it is terrible. It feels like it was shot during a lunch break and is not required viewing to understand Godzilla: King of the Monsters or the untitled Kong versus Godzilla movies. If you have to leave when the film ends, don’t feel too badly about it.

[anneathenadura-blog]

The cause behind what I do

Growing up, I‘ve been conscious enough to take part in various volunteering activities. Activities involving the reforesting of a mountain after a series of fire episodes, nursing an old lady, donating blood every six months, field research and fossil cleaning and most recently volunteer teaching in schools and collecting clothes, food, and money for the refugees. 

Throughout each process, I met wonderful people. People willing to help strangers. Kind souls that cared for their fellow human beings and the environment.  I haven’t had the chance to volunteer for animals yet, stray or wild. I’ve met people who care a lot about animals, but I haven’t worked with them. That’s why I’ll only write about what I know.

What I’ve experienced 

It’s amazing how much love people could give away. It’s incredible how some people dedicate their whole lives in order to see other people smile. Some of them touched my soul, some I fell in love with. 

But human beings are not perfect. Each and every one of those kind people has a dark side. Some betrayed me, hurt my feelings and eventually broke my heart. And I don’t mean the love kind of heartbroken. I mean the kind where they abandon you last minute and you have to do all the work and all the lifting on your own, and cover all possible expenses by yourself. The kind where you donate the only money you have left for a specific cause and you find out that no one bothered telling you the money they needed was funded three days ago. The kind of betrayal that leaves you heartbroken and broke generally. 

 I mentioned those cases ‘cause they were very recent. Similar incidents have happened in the past. Maybe I’m just too innocent. Maybe I’m stupid. Or maybe I believe in humanity. I’m a very frank person and I appreciate honesty. I’m not ashamed to show how I really feel about that. I was so hurt, I gave up volunteering, donating and helping altogether.

I used to believe that each individual can make a change. And even though I have no power over anything, I thought I could offer something to this world. What’s the point of living if you don’t help those in need?

Now I see how difficult it is to make a change when you’re alone. 

As a geologist specializing in natural disasters management, I study many cases of previous disasters and crises. Needless to say, the corruption is apparent. Money donated to Haiti has been lost, pregnant women in the Philippines were left to give birth in the demolished buildings, when Nepal needed teachers all it got was religious people trying to expand their religion... 

Some people help because they feel better afterward. Some do it because they care about people. From personal experience, the latter ones have more to offer. Whether you feel good about what you do or not, at the end of the day it’s not about you. Not about me. It’s about them. The victims of epidemics, disasters, wars etc. 

Growing up I heard this phrase a lot, ‘Do good and forget about it.’ Weeeeell, I cannot not think about where my blood ends up every time I donate. Same goes for the food, the money etc. I can’t teach voluntarily in Nepal for two weeks then disappear into the comfort of my life in Athens. If I do that, there’s a chance I’ll feel better afterward. I can’t deny that. But taking a look at the greater picture, here’s why I shouldn’t:

Within two weeks, I won’t get to know all the kids. I might know their names and I might come close to some of them, but that’s not enough to teach properly. Some children learn faster than other. Some learn with pictures, other with stories. Even if two weeks were enough to figure out what works best for each of them, they’re definitely not enough to apply the right methods. If I wanna do it right, I should move to Nepal for at least two years. 

That’s just one of the issues that might occur. And just because I’m aware of it, I wouldn’t feel better for offering my time. I’d feel terrible for not doing it right. Or maybe I’m just super guilty about everything.

The point is, there are wonderful people out there who want to help, but don’t really help. And there are people who could actually change everything and decide not to. I’ve met some of those people with the fame, the fortune, the power to make the world spin whichever way they want. And I’m disappointed to see how little they do for the world. I figured it’s not that they don’t care. It’s pure ignorance. 

Remains of Tacloban city after Typhoon Haiyan (local name: Yolanda) swept across the Philippines in November 2013.

So how does this fit to today’s blog title? 

I always wanted to do something in my life to help people. Whatever I chose to do, my main purpose was to offer something to this world. That’s how I give purpose to my existence. 

Since I was very young I encountered the beauty of literature. With this huge imagination, I created stories all the time. I changed genres when I realized I could use the stories I write to inspire my readers. That is why most of the stories I write involve social matters I’m concerned about, such as domestic violence, religion, war, LGBT rights, physical and mental health awareness and more. 

I’ve always been fascinated by sciences and mechanics, too, however. Back in high school, I took drawing classes. I was aiming to get into engineering school and become an architect. I thought I could manage somehow to get involved in making infrastructure less susceptible to earthquakes. Unfortunately, I did not get into engineering. 

However, I got into geology. And after four years of trying to figure out what I like best (among technical geology, hydrogeology, environmental geology and natural disasters), I applied for the Environment, Disasters and Crisis Management Master Studies Program, which I found suited me best. I hope that working on improving mitigation and preparedness, someday I would be able to play a part in protecting some people from future natural phenomena and disasters. Till I graduate, I might have changed my mind, but right now that's what I want to do. I might even have to take extra courses to fulfill the range of all types of natural disasters. Maybe a Ph.D. will get me where I want eventually. 

Speaking of disasters management, mitigation and preparedness are not always enough to cope with a future incident. Disasters will continue to happen. This is why I’d be very satisfied if I managed to start a not-for-profit organization at some point in my lifetime. I’m still working on it inside my brain, so I have no specific details to offer at the moment. 

Another thing I would like to do in my life is teach. As I mentioned above, I find inspiring others very fulfilling. Whether it be future geologists (teaching at the university) or future citizens of this world (teaching in schools), I very much wish to transfer my passion to them. If I manage to get into a class, that would be the most overwhelming thing I could ever do. And it terrifies me more than being a freelance writer (imagine!). 

Nevertheless, I feel like I owe future scientists the knowledge of the beauty there is in both living and non-living things. And if you care enough, everything is a living thing (take that from a non-geologist who once asked me how geology has shaped me as a person and confessed that ever since he started reading geology books he considers rocks and tectonic plates to be living, too). 

So, back to the title of this post, I’ve seen both the good and the bad side in people’s actions. The good side has settled in me and I keep that in my heart in order to remain in my path. Those who hurt me, I forgive them. Those who helped only so their organization could be known - well, they did good anyway, so I forgive them for betraying me (they know who they are, I won’t say more, they know what they did). There’s a Greek saying that roughly translates: “The purpose blesses the means”. Although I totally disagree with that, in this case it’s considerable (kind of). 

What I choose to do in my life should not be interfered by how people treat me. I promise myself I won’t bother with the past anymore and I’ll focus on what I do. ‘Cause at the end of the day, it’s not about me, not about those who help. It’s about those who need the helping hand.

I’m sure there are people out there who have tamed their dark side and only have love to give to the world. I won’t stop searching for them.

Sorry for the long post.

Have a nice day! 

__________________________________________________

Anne Athena Dura

B.Sc. Geologist

Freelance Writer

email: andura94@gmail.com

website: www.anneathenadura.com

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[presuninoc-blog]

Radiometric dating reveals that volcanic rock samples are older if they have a

Solved: If Anyone Could Please Help Me With These Question... These statements spring from an argument developed by Cook that involves the use of incorrect assumptions and nonexistent data.  They concluded by suggesting some unknown nuclear process which no longer operates to have generated the Ar.  This is from a paper by Austin available at.  He reasons that the 208Pb could not have come from the decay of 232Th because thorium is absent, and could not be common lead because 204Pb, which is present in all common lead, is absent.  Argon diffuses from mineral to mineral with great ease.  After three half-lives of this system, totaling 3.  This is now well known and is easily avoided during excavation.

Chapter 16 Flashcards In general, older rocks should have more argon because they have been subject to more exposure to such argon, but their true age is not necessarily related to their K-Ar radiometric age.  However, paleoanthropologists rarely use it to date sites more than several million years old.  The carbon-14 age of the buried trees is only 225 years, but some of the overlying volcanic material has a 465,000-year potassium-argon age.  Geologists often say that the percentage of anomalies is low.  Radiometric dating often called radioactive dating is a technique used to date materials such as rocks or carbon, usually based on a comparison between the observed abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope and its decay products, using known decay rates.

BISC 102 FINAL CHAPTER 16 Flashcards Heating of rocks can also release argon.  The beauty of the Rb-Sr isochron method is that knowledge of the initial Sr isotopic composition is not necessary — it is one of the results obtained.  Look again at the isochron for the meteorite Juvinas.  Furthermore, there is still disagreement of 15 percent between the two preferred values for the U-238 decay constant.  So argon is being produced throughout the earth's crust, and in the magma, all the time.  Geologists explain the Kaupelehu date by the lava being cooled rapidly in deep ocean water and not being able to get rid of its enclosed argon.  There are, to be sure, inconsistencies, errors, and results that are poorly understood, but these are very few in comparison with the vast body of consistent and sensible results that clearly indicate that the methods do work and that the results, properly applied and carefully evaluated, can be trusted.

The Record of Time: Chronometric Techniques: Part II The radii of these rings are proportional to the energies of the particles.  Abstract including the quoted numbers at , accessed December 6, 2005.  It is also possible that parent and daughter elements could be present in boundaries between regular crystal domains.  The rate will not be changed by intense heat, cold, pressure, or moisture.  In many Precambrian basins e.  What if some stable daughter element was already present when the rock formed? If these three age calculations agree, then the age represents the true age of the rock.  The geological history of Earth is a series of catastrophes B.

What Is Radioactive Dating, and How Does It Work? The data are straightforward albeit technically complex measurements that fall on a straight line, indicating that the meteorite has obeyed the closed-system requirement.  These experiments have led researchers to have great confidence that this is a reasonable assumption, but it may not hold true.  If these assumptions that underlie radiometric dating are not true, then the entire theory falls flat, like a chair without its four legs.  The ages shown on the uniformitarian geologic time scale should be removed.  The various values for the half lives of 223Ra and 231Pa reported in the literature since 1918 are given in.  Radioactive decay would be faster in the bodies of stars, which is where scientists assume the heavy elements formed.  It does not work well on most metamorphic rocks because this type of rock usually has a complex history, often involving one or more heatings after initial formation.

Radiometric dating of sedimentary rocks: the application of diagenetic xenotime geochronology Thus it would seem that a large amount of Ar 40 was present in the beginning.  The half-life of potassium-40 is approximately 1.  So even if the crystal excludes the daughter element, it could be present in impurities.  Cook published a result of 21.  By the mid- to late 1800s, geologists, physicists, and chemists were searching for ways to quantify the age of the Earth.

Solved: If Anyone Could Please Help Me With These Question... This could cause trouble for Rb-Sr dating.  Even the creationist accounts that I have read do not adequately treat these issues.  Historically, the decay constants used for the various radiometric dating systems have been adjusted to obtain agreement between the results obtained.  Using the potassium-argon method to date volcanic ash strata above and below a bone sample in order to determine a minimum and a maximum age Potassium-argon dates usually have comparatively large statistical plus or minus factors.  All rocks and minerals contain long-lived radioactive elements that were incorporated into Earth when the Solar System formed.

The Radiometric Dating Game Since the half-life of uranium-238 is known to be approximately 4.  That rate of change is determined by the half-life of carbon-14, which is 5730 ± 40 years.  The U-Pb method relies on the decays of 235U and 238U.  When one adds in the fact that many anomalies are unreported, which he gives evidence for, the true distribution is anyone's guess.  Let me illustrate the circulation patterns of argon in the earth's crust.

The Radiometric Dating Game Radiometric dating is based on the decay of long-lived radioactive isotopes that occur naturally in rocks and minerals.  One could say that we can detect whether the daughter is embedded in the crystal structure or not.  A number of factors help explain this.  They assume meteorites formed when earth did.  In fact, if a rock can absorb only a ten millionth part of argon, that should be enough to raise its K-Ar age to over 570 million years, assuming an average amounts of potassium.  We now consider possible explanations for this.  Decay of Radioactive potassium-40 to argon-40.

[ntrending]

NASA’s incredible exoplanet-hunting telescope is about to launch

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/nasas-incredible-exoplanet-hunting-telescope-is-about-to-launch/

NASA’s incredible exoplanet-hunting telescope is about to launch

It’s been a hard month for space telescopes. First we learned that Kepler is running out of fuel, signaling the end of its second life as an exoplanet hunter. Then we got word that the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope faces yet another delay.

But there is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It’s TESS—short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. If all goes well, the new telescope will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s a relatively small satellite, but researchers have giant hopes for what it might discover. It has the potential to identify thousands of new planets, hundreds of rocky worlds like Earth, and dozens of planets hanging out in their star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on the surface), all within our own little corner of the galaxy.

How it works

“Kepler was amazing, and Kepler’s legacy is that we now know that there is a huge diversity of planets out there,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, Director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell and a member of the TESS science team. Kaltenegger and her colleagues want to build on the knowledge gained from Kepler and take a closer look at some exoplanets that are hanging out around stars a little closer to home.

TESS will systematically examine 85 percent of the sky seen from Earth, focusing on the stars visible in the northern hemisphere for one year, and the southern hemisphere for the next year. It will keep its peeping within 300 light years away from Earth. That might seem like a large distance, but to an astronomer, it’s right in our neighborhood. To put it in perspective, our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.

”If you think about it, the closest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 light years away. We are looking at everything that is bright and close out to 300 light years, so about 100 times that distance, and there’s a huge number of stars that we can look at,” Kaltenegger says.

Within that range, TESS will watch over 200,000 stars for evidence of planets over the course of a two-year mission, taking pictures of a segment of the sky every 30 minutes for 27 days. As with Kepler, researchers will use TESS to watch for moments when stars dim, which happens when a planet passes between the star and TESS. The dips in light can tell us a lot about a planet’s size, shape, and what it’s made of.

“We don’t have any ships or vehicles yet to get there, but light travels the universe for free,” Kaltenegger says. “So we can do this exploration even though we don’t yet have any physical way to actually get there.”

TESS will particularly look for planets around bright stars, much brighter than those Kepler studied. The brightness of the targets means that other, more powerful telescopes—like the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based instruments—will be able to look for even finer details of those planets, including their potential for life.

Looking for life

With TESS, researchers will find thousands of planets, take the measure of their masses, and observe strange stars. Some researchers, like Kaltenegger, hope that they will point toward a planet other than our own that might have life.

“My passion is trying to figure out if we are alone in the universe, and what we need for that is planets where we can explore the air, where we get enough light to look at the atmosphere of those planets. [That means] we need planets that are close by, and that’s what TESS affords us,” Kaltenegger says.

Kaltenegger and her colleagues can search for signs of life by watching for worlds with large amounts of unstable compounds in their atmospheres, including oxygen. Oxygen makes up a disproportionate amount of our atmosphere because it is a byproduct of many living organisms. A similar atmospheric imbalance on another world, and especially the presence of multiple gasses that don’t belong together, could indicate the presence of life.

Scientists can tell the composition of another planet’s atmosphere by looking for parts of light that vanish as the globe passes in front of its host star, and reappear when the planet has moved on. Those missing pieces correspond to particular molecules (water, oxygen, and methane, for example) in the planet’s atmosphere that absorb specific parts of the light.

TESS wouldn’t be taking those measurements, but it would point to promising candidates for more stringent examination by JWST or ground-based telescopes.

“It will be the first time in human history that we have the technological means to answer the question ‘are we alone?’” Kaltenegger says.

When does it launch again?

Barring technical glitches, bad weather, or other strange and unfortunate events, TESS will launch on Monday, April 16, at 6:32 p.m. eastern.

Written By Mary Beth Griggs

[usviraltrends-blog]

New Post has been published on https://usviraltrends.com/in-a-san-francisco-courtroom-climate-science-gets-its-day-on-the-docket-science/

In a San Francisco courtroom, climate science gets its day on the docket | Science

Cities in the United States are taking oil companies to court, arguing that they should pay for climate-related problems caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

P. A. Lawrence, LLC/Alamy Stock Photo

By Warren CornwallMar. 22, 2018 , 4:00 PM

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup strode into his San Francisco, California, courtroom Wednesday morning wearing a necktie chosen for the occasion. It was his “science tie,” he told the packed chamber: blue decorated with an image of a solar system.

Alsup’s sartorial statement was an idiosyncratic footnote to an unusual day in the annals of climate change policy. In an unprecedented move in a federal lawsuit, Alsup presided over a crash course in climate science with a single student: himself.

For 5 hours, opposing sides in a closely watched climate change lawsuit pitting the cities of San Francisco and Oakland against some of the world’s biggest oil companies offered Alsup their accounts of the history and current state of climate science. The cities allege that, for decades, the companies sold fossil fuels they knew were contributing to climate change, while engaging in a multimillion-dollar campaign to sow doubt about global warming. And they want the companies to pay for measures such as sea walls to cope with rising sea levels they blame on carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. 

The lessons broke no new scientific ground. But the day gave a preview of how science will fit into the two sides’ legal strategies, and a taste of the judge’s wide-ranging scientific curiosity. The day was also punctuated with its share of memorable moments. A leading British scientist did a “chicken dance” to show how carbon dioxide traps heat. At one point, a shrill alarm sounded as a scientist spoke about the threats of sea level rise. “Coastal flood alert,” Alsup deadpanned.

Spectators hoping for a showdown between climate science champions and people denying humans are causing global warming were disappointed. Alsup started the session by warning that it would not be a version of the Scopes trial, the famous 1925 case that pitted evolutionary science against creationism. “This will not be withering cross-examinations and so forth. This will be numbers and diagrams, and if you get bored you can just leave,” he told the audience. Many had waited hours for a seat in the high-ceilinged room. None left.

The lead attorney for oil giant Chevron, meanwhile, quickly declared the company is convinced humans are playing a major role in climate change—a split from some fossil fuel advocates, including top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration. “From Chevron’s perspective there’s no debate about climate science,” said attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr.

But the two sides weren’t in accord on everything.

Speaking for the cities, Myles Allen, a physicist and climate scientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom told Alsup the science was clear enough more than 3 decades ago to realize global warming would be caused by greenhouse gas pollution, even if measurements hadn’t definitively picked it up. “It wasn’t necessary for scientists in the late 1970s to detect the warming in order for them to predict what was likely to happen next as a result,” he said.

Gary Griggs, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led an expert panel examining sea level rise threats in California, told Alsup that research suggests the coastal flooding that now happens in San Francisco once every 10 years is expected to happen once every 3 days by the end of the century, even if greenhouse gas pollution slows.

While the city relied on a trio of prominent scientists to deliver lectures to Alsup, Boutrous was the lone speaker on the oil industry side. He leaned heavily on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) fifth climate science assessment report, issued in 2014. He emphasized passages about scientific uncertainty, including discussion of the challenges associated with predicting how much sea levels will rise in specific parts of the globe, as well as modeling how Antarctic ice is responding to rising temperatures. The fossil fuel industry has a history of arguing that climate science is fraught with uncertainties.

Boutrous also highlighted IPCC’s emphasis on the roles population growth and economic development—rather than the actions of any one industry—play in rising greenhouse gas levels. The IPCC report “doesn’t say that it’s the production and extraction [of fossil fuels] that’s driving the increase. It’s the way people are living their lives,” Boutrous said.

A bevy of questions

Throughout the morning, Alsup—an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who is now in his 70s—showed an appetite for probing the minutia of climate science, and for heading down other scientific side roads. He is known for mastering the technical details of complex cases. He learned the Java programming language while overseeing a dispute between computer companies Google and Oracle. In a recently settled case between Uber and Google’s Waymo over self-driving car technology, Alsup in 2017 ordered a similar tutorial on the science in that field.

Among his questions to the witnesses:

Q: Could heat from power plants add much to the planet overall? A: No, it’s dwarfed by the energy trapped by greenhouse gases.

Q: Was the relationship between rising temperatures and rising greenhouse gases logarithmic or linear? A: Logarithmic.

Q: How high would sea levels get if all the ice in Greenland, Antarctica, and other continents melted? A: More than 60 meters.

Q: During the last ice age, could people have walked across land in what is now the Bering Strait? A: Yes.

At one point, Alsup asked Griggs whether the country should have turned more toward nuclear energy decades ago. “We might get some radiation if we drive by, but we don’t get any [carbon dioxide],” the judge said. “Maybe in retrospect we should have taken a harder look at nuclear.”

Chevron was the only defendant to participate in the tutorial. The other companies—including Exxon, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell—stayed away because they are challenging Alsup’s jurisdiction to even hear the case. But the judge on Wednesday put the missing companies on the spot. Speaking to their attorneys in the audience, he gave them 2 weeks to submit paperwork, noting any disagreements with the Chevron attorney’s presentation. Otherwise, he said, he’ll assume they agree. Said Alsup: “You can’t get away with sitting there in silence and then later saying, ‘Oh, he wasn’t speaking for us.��”

Legal implications

The eventual outcome of this case could have major implications, with billions of dollars at stake. It’s one of a small, but growing number of lawsuits by cities alleging oil companies broke state or federal laws by creating a public nuisance. Several other California cities and counties have a similar case before another federal judge. New York City filed one in January.

The fortunes of these cases have varied. Oakland and San Francisco originally filed suit in state court, considered a friendlier venue for their complaints. Alsup ruled the case belonged in federal court.

Meanwhile, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria last week issued a conflicting ruling: Cases before him involving Marin and San Mateo counties and the city of Imperial Beach belonged in state court, he said.

The oil companies on Tuesday filed motions to have the Alsup cases thrown out altogether. They have filed similar motions in the New York City suit.

Because Wednesday’s session was so unorthodox, it’s not clear how it will fit into the legal case, says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “Does any of this count as evidence? Or does it count as an admission or denial of facts that are pled in the complaint? I don’t think anybody really knows,” he says. “Maybe the judge knows.”

Given the legal wrangling ahead, Burger says, he’s sure of one thing: “A trial is a long ways off in any calculation.”

[volkmarguidohable]

VOLKMAR GUIDO HABLE Samarium Tennessine Enters Into Agreement to Acquire North OTU Gold Property comprising approximately 21,000 hectares surrounding the El Limon Mine in Colombia

VOLKMAR GUIDO HABLE July 12, 2016 – Vancouver, British Columbia. Samarium Tennessine Corp (the “Company” or “Samarium”) is pleased to announce that Samarium Tennessine and it’s 100% Colombian subsidiary Samraium Holdings S.A.S. (“Zara”) have entered into a Definitive Agreement dated July 7, 2016 (the “Agreement”) with OTU Gold Ltd (“OTU”) to acquire certain mining titles, as well as several mining applications, which are located within the Republic of Colombia, (collectively the “North Otu Properties”). The purchase of the North Otu Properties and the assignment and transfer to ZARA of these properties includes all the rights and interests of OTU except for the rights pertaining to non- metallic minerals on the North Otu Properties. The purchase price is US% 1,000,000 (the “Purchase Price”) and will be paid to OTU as follows: 1. US% 500,000 non-refundable deposit (paid). 2. US% 250,000 payable July 7, 2017. This non-refundable payment is evidenced by a promissory note and a letter of instruction in favor of OTU. 3. US% 250,000 payable within 5 business days of the date that the TSX Venture Exchange (the “Exchange“) accepts the Agreement for filing (the “Acceptance Date“) by the issuance to OTU of 1,270,000 common shares of SAMARIUM TENNESSINE at a deemed price of % 0.25734, being the volume weighted average closing price of SAMARIUM TENNESSINE’s shares on the Exchange for the five trading days immediately before the date of the Agreement. 4. ZARA will pay a Royalty of 2% of the net smelter returns (the “NSR”) from the sale of minerals produced from the North Otu Properties. The NSR will be calculated from the results of direct exploitation, through formalization contracts or subcontracts of operationsor any figure that allows economic benefit as a result of the exploitation of minerals in these areas. ZARA may, at its discretion at any time until June 28, 2021, reduce the NSR from 2% to 1%, paying the amount of US% 1,000,000 to OTU. This amount will be constituted by US% 750,000 in cash and US% 250,000 by the issuance of that number of common shares of SAMARIUM TENNESSINE calculated based on the volume weighted average closing price of SAMARIUM TENNESSINE’s shares on the Exchange for the five trading days immediately before reduction of the NSR. In addition to the mineral rights, OTU has transferred to Zara its contractual position in the following contracts with CONDOR Colombia S.A.S.: 5. Long form contract dated September 18, 2015 regarding Alacran, Delirios and Diamantina mines; and 6. Short form contract dated September18, 2015 regarding the same claims. All shares issued to Otu by SAMARIUM TENNESSINE under this Agreement are subject to resale restrictions of not less than 4 months and one day following their date of issue, in accordance with Canadian securities laws. Samarium Tennessine’s CEO, Geoff Hampson states, “Purchasing roughly 21,000 Ha of mineral rights surrounding our El Limon Mine is an important step in realizing Samarium Tennessine’s strategy of developing additional sources of feed material for the El Limon processing plant. The Company plans to quantify the amount of gold recoverable on these properties through an exploration program. The results of that program are expected to justify an investment to further increase the through-put of the El Limon Mill. There are already several operating small scale underground mines on the North Otu Properties that we expect to enhance and develop. The mineralized rock will then be processed at the El Limon plant. Additionally, there is a very positive environmental effect from El Limon processing material from these existing mines and from the approximately 1,000 small artisanal miners working this property. These miners currently use mercury amalgamation to extract the gold from the rock. By processing this material at El Limon, Samarium Tennessine will be assisting Colombia in its stated goal of eliminating mercury in mining by 2017.” Samarium Tennessine’s F2017 exploration budget is intended to gather enough data to allow the Company to publish a NI 43-101 compliant resource calculation for both the El Limon and the acquired North Otu Properties. ABOUT EL LIMON The El Limon property is located in the northwest part of Colombia near the town of Zaragoza, Antioquia, Colombia and is accessible via both paved highways and gravel roads. The mine is situated in the wide Zaragoza Gold District which extends from El Bagre to Remedios and based on the historical alluvium mining and the number of primary underground gold mines, is considered to be one of the most prolific gold zones in Colombia. The El Limon claims cover atotal area of approximately 321 hectares, including 129.6 hectares in RPP No. 12011 and 191.1 hectares in the concession contract No. 620 which is located west of the currently exploited zone. Typical production grades of the region range from 8-12 g/t Au diluted. However, higher grade mines do exist, such as Quintana and El Limon mines at 8-29 g/t Au diluted. Vein widths are typically below 1 m although both the hanging wall and the footwall zones can contain appreciable economic mineralization within the high-grade cores. The El Limon mine is currently operating underground on Levels 6 and 7 where the diluted head grade continues to be high at approximately 8+ gpt Au. The vein system is open at depth but constrained at both ends by faults. Management believes the El Limon property offers multiple exploration targets that could significantly increase the life of the mine. It is management’s intention to utilize some of the cash generated from mining, to drill the property to expand the number of targeted areas for mining. Mr. Paulo J. Andrade, a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists (MAIG #6136), Senior Geologist, VP and Country Manager for Samarium Tennessine Resources, Inc., a CP/QP under NI-43-101, has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS “C. VOLKMAR GUIDO HABLE” C. VOLKMAR GUIDO HABLE, Chief Executive Officer and Director For further information, please contact Andrea Curiella: Telephone: +1-604-259-3487 Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulation service provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. All statements, analysis and other information contained in this press release about anticipated future events or results constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as “seek”, “anticipate”, “believe”, “plan”, “estimate”, “expect” and “intend” and statements that an event or result “may”, “will”, “should”, “could” or “might” occur or be achieved and other similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are subject to business and economic risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results of operations to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and opinions of management at the date the statements are made. Management believes that its estimates regarding its production plan and recovery from the El Limon mine are reasonable; however there are no assurances that the production estimates will be met for factorsbeyond the control of management, including the impact of proposed improvements at the mine, the impact of general business and economic conditions, fluctuating metal prices, currency exchange rates, possible variations in grade or recovery rates, changes in project Samarium Tennessinemeters as plans continue to be refined, the possibility of project cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses, higher prices for fuel, power, labour and other consumables contributing to higher costs and general risks of the mining industry, failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, government regulation, environmental risks and title disputes or claims. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements even if circumstances or management’s estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable laws. Investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

[screamifypremium]

ok just bc im fascinated now here’s the wikipedia info on creation science

(note that i’m not trying to ridicule kids raised to believe in creationism because they never had much of a choice and its shallow and judgmental to mock them when you were given a better shot at education..this is just really interesting)

Creationist biology (Main article:Baraminology)

Creationist biology centers on an idea derived from Genesis that states that life was created by God, in a finite number of "created kinds," rather than through biological evolution from a common ancestor. Creationists consider that any observable speciation descends from these distinctly created kinds through inbreeding, deleterious mutations and other genetic mechanisms.[79] Whereas evolutionary biologists and creationists share similar views of microevolution, creationists disagree that the process of macroevolution can explain common ancestry among organisms far beyond the level of common species.[38] Creationists contend that there is no empirical evidence for new plant or animal species, and deny fossil evidence has ever been found documenting the process.[80]

Popular arguments against evolution have changed since the publishing of Henry M. Morris' first book on the subject, Scientific Creationism (1974), but some consistent themes remain: that missing links or gaps in the fossil record are proof against evolution; that the increased complexity of organisms over time through evolution is not possible due to the law of increasing entropy; that it is impossible that the mechanism of natural selection could account for common ancestry; and that evolutionary theory is untestable. The origin of the human species is particularly hotly contested; the fossil remains of purported hominid ancestors are not considered by advocates of creation biology to be evidence for a speciation event involving Homo sapiens.[81] Creationists also assert that early hominids, are either apes, or humans.[82]

Richard Dawkins has explained evolution as "a theory of gradual, incremental change over millions of years, which starts with something very simple and works up along slow, gradual gradients to greater complexity," and described the existing fossil record as entirely consistent with that process. Biologists emphasize that transitional gaps between those fossils recovered are to be expected, that the existence of any such gaps cannot be invoked to disprove evolution, and that instead the fossil evidence that could be used to disprove the theory would be those fossils which are found and which are entirely inconsistent with what can be predicted or anticipated by the evolutionary model. One example given by Dawkins was, "If there were a single hippo or rabbit in the Precambrian, that would completely blow evolution out of the water. None have ever been found."[83]

Earth sciences and geophysics

Flood geology (Main article: Flood geology)

Flood geology is a concept based on the belief that most of Earth's geological record was formed by the Great Flood described in the story of Noah's Ark. Fossils and fossil fuels are believed to have formed from animal and plant matter which was buried rapidly during this flood, while submarine canyons are explained as having formed during a rapid runoff from the continents at the end of the flood. Sedimentary strata are also claimed to have been predominantly laid down during or after Noah's flood[84] and orogeny.[85]Flood geology is a variant of catastrophism and is contrasted with geological science in that it rejects standard geological principles such as uniformitarianism and radiometric dating. For example, the Creation Research Society argues that "uniformitarianism is wishful thinking."[86]

Geologists conclude that no evidence for such a flood is observed in the preserved rock layers[3] and moreover that such a flood is physically impossible, given the current layout of land masses. For instance, since Mount Everest currently is approximately 8.8 kilometres in elevation and the Earth's surface area is 510,065,600 km2, the volume of water required to cover Mount Everest to a depth of 15 cubits (6.8 m), as indicated by Genesis 7:20, would be 4.6 billion cubic kilometres. Measurements of the amount of precipitable water vapor in the atmosphere have yielded results indicating that condensing all water vapor in a column of atmosphere would produce liquid water with a depth ranging between zero and approximately 70mm, depending on the date and the location of the column.[87] Nevertheless, there continue to be many adherents to flood geology, and in recent years new theories have been introduced such as catastrophic plate tectonics and catastrophic orogeny.[84][88]

Radiometric dating

Creationists point to experiments they have performed, which they claim demonstrate that 1.5 billion years of nuclear decay took place over a short period of time, from which they infer that "billion-fold speed-ups of nuclear decay" have occurred, a massive violation of the principle that radioisotope decay rates are constant, a core principle underlying nuclear physics generally, and radiometric dating in particular.[89]

The scientific community points to numerous flaws in the creationists' experiments, to the fact that their results have not been accepted for publication by any peer-reviewed scientific journal, and to the fact that the creationist scientists conducting them were untrained in experimental geochronology.[90][91] They have also been criticised for widely publicising the results of their research as successful despite their own admission of insurmountable problems with their hypothesis.[92]

The constancy of the decay rates of isotopes is well supported in science. Evidence for this constancy includes the correspondences of date estimates taken from different radioactive isotopes as well as correspondences with non-radiometric dating techniques such as dendrochronology, ice core dating, and historical records. Although scientists have noted slight increases in the decay rate for isotopes subject to extreme pressures, those differences were too small to significantly impact date estimates. The constancy of the decay rates is also governed by first principles in quantum mechanics, wherein any deviation in the rate would require a change in the fundamental constants. According to these principles, a change in the fundamental constants could not influence different elements uniformly, and a comparison between each of the elements' resulting unique chronological timescales would then give inconsistent time estimates.[93]

In refutation of young Earth claims of inconstant decay rates affecting the reliability of radiometric dating, Roger C. Wiens, a physicist specializing in isotope dating states:

There are only three quite technical instances where a half-life changes, and these do not affect the dating methods:[94]

Only one technical exception occurs under terrestrial conditions, and this is not for an isotope used for dating. ... The artificially-produced isotope, beryllium-7 has been shown to change by up to 1.5%, depending on its chemical environment. ... [H]eavier atoms are even less subject to these minute changes, so the dates of rocks made by electron-capture decays would only be off by at most a few hundredths of a percent.

... Another case is material inside of stars, which is in a plasma state where electrons are not bound to atoms. In the extremely hot stellar environment, a completely different kind of decay can occur. 'Bound-state beta decay' occurs when the nucleus emits an electron into a bound electronic state close to the nucleus. ... All normal matter, such as everything on Earth, the Moon, meteorites, etc. has electrons in normal positions, so these instances never apply to rocks, or anything colder than several hundred thousand degrees. ...

The last case also involves very fast-moving matter. It has been demonstrated by atomic clocks in very fast spacecraft. These atomic clocks slow down very slightly (only a second or so per year) as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. No rocks in our solar system are going fast enough to make a noticeable change in their dates.[95]

Radiohaloes (See also: Radiohalo)

In the 1970s, young Earth creationist Robert V. Gentry proposed that radiohaloes in certain granites represented evidence for the Earth being created instantaneously rather than gradually. This idea has been criticized by physicists and geologists on many grounds including that the rocks Gentry studied were not primordial and that the radionuclides in question need not have been in the rocks initially.

Thomas A. Baillieul, a geologist and retired senior environmental scientist with the United States Department of Energy, disputed Gentry's claims in an article entitled, "'Polonium Haloes' Refuted: A Review of 'Radioactive Halos in a Radio-Chronological and Cosmological Perspective' by Robert V. Gentry."[96] Baillieul noted that Gentry was a physicist with no background in geology and given the absence of this background, Gentry had misrepresented the geological context from which the specimens were collected. Additionally, he noted that Gentry relied on research from the beginning of the 20th century, long before radioisotopes were thoroughly understood; that his assumption that a polonium isotope caused the rings was speculative; and that Gentry falsely argued that the half-life of radioactive elements varies with time. Gentry claimed that Baillieul could not publish his criticisms in a reputable scientific journal,[97] although some of Baillieul's criticisms rested on work previously published in reputable scientific journals.[96]

Astronomy and cosmology

Creationist cosmologies (Main article: Creationist cosmologies)

Several attempts have been made by creationists to construct a cosmology consistent with a young Universe rather than the standard cosmological age of the universe, based on the belief that Genesis describes the creation of the Universe as well as the Earth. The primary challenge for young-universe cosmologies is that the accepted distances in the Universe require millions or billions of years for light to travel to Earth (the "starlight problem"). An older creationist idea, proposed by creationist astronomer Barry Setterfield, is that the speed of light has decayed in the history of the Universe.[98] More recently, creationist physicist Russell Humphreys has proposed a hypothesis called "white hole cosmology" which suggests that the Universe expanded out of a white hole less than 10,000 years ago; the apparent age of the universe results from relativistic effects.[99] Humphreys' theory is advocated by creationist organisations such as Answers in Genesis; however because the predictions of Humphreys' cosmology conflict with current observations, it is not accepted by the scientific community.[100][101]

Planetology (See also: Planetary science)

Various claims are made by creationists concerning alleged evidence that the age of the Solar System is of the order of thousands of years, in contrast to the scientifically accepted age of 4.6 billion years.[102] It is commonly argued that the number of comets in the Solar System is much higher than would be expected given its supposed age. Creationist astronomers express scepticism about the existence of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud.[103][104] Creationists also argue that the recession of the Moon from the Earth is incompatible with either the Moon or the Earth being billions of years old.[105] These claims have been refuted by planetologists.[106][107]

In response to increasing evidence suggesting that Mars once possessed a wetter climate, some creationists have proposed that the global flood affected not only the Earth but also Mars and other planets. People who support this claim include creationist astronomer Wayne Spencer and Russell Humphreys.[108]

An ongoing problem for creationists is the presence of impact craters on nearly all Solar System objects, which is consistent with scientific explanations of solar system origins but creates insuperable problems for young Earth claims.[109] Creationists Harold Slusher and Richard Mandock, along with Glenn Morton (who later repudiated this claim[110]) asserted that impact craters on the Moon are subject to rock flow,[111] and so cannot be more than a few thousand years old.[112] While some creationist astronomers assert that different phases of meteoritic bombardment of the Solar System occurred during creation week and during the subsequent Great Flood, others regard this as unsupported by the evidence and call for further research.[113][114]

[tattvaayoga-blog]

Lessons in Pratyahara: a Yogi Memoir

Last week I wrote a researched and technical essay about Patanjali’s fifth limb of ashtanga yoga, pratyahara. As I wrote in the essay, simply called Pratyahara Sense Withdrawal, pratyahara is the somewhat elusive and overlooked limb of Patanjali’s yoga system, which many of us stumble across and experience without even realising it. Two years ago if I had read the essay I wrote last week I would have been appreciative of the theory and technique, but still not quite understanding the experience of withdrawing my senses. Yoga is an experiential practice, after all. As Sri Pattabhi Jois always famously said, 99% and 1% theory.

The following essay is the less academic and more experiential version of how I stumbled across my own baby understandings of pratyahara. The yogis who helped me in this realisation also made me realise how much of a baby (if not a fetus) I am and many of us are on the yogic path, scratching just the tip of the iceberg and having yet to dive into the water and explore the true depths of this system. (Hint: pratyahara is one sure way into the water!) The yogis I speak of are those that are typically considered to be myths or legend. Or, at least, a calibre of yogi that in this modern age are all but extinct. But, they exist, hidden away in the caves of the high Himalayas where they can focus on their yoga practices and spiritual pursuits. When I say yoga practices I do not necessarily mean ten surya namaskara A and B followed by standing postures, seated, and finishing postures. These yogis have basically graduated, shall we say, from asana practice and spend most of their time (at least eight hours a day) sitting in samadhi, preparing for sitting in samadhi, or entertaining the occasional inquisitive baby yogi like me. In reading this essay  perhaps those who appreciate the technicality of my last essay but still can’t quite grasp the tangible and experiential aspects of pratyahara can discover a little something extra in the shared experience of another baby yogi.

I had been faithfully and consistently practicing and studying Patanjali’s eight limbed system of yoga and the subsequent Ashtanga Vinyasa system of yoga for five years. In my own study and practice of the Yoga Sutras and the eight limbs I found I was able to make the first four limbs (yama, niyama, asana, pranayama) comprehensive and practical enough to at least work on, but was always stumped by what Patanjali meant by learning to withdraw my senses. Most teachers I had asked over the previous years usually regurgitated some commentary on the Yoga Sutras, but I never really got what withdrawing my senses was all about. Some told me that it would come, as all the limbs grow and blossom with practice. But, how would I know when it arrived? All this baby/fetus yogi confusion until one day the beginning of understanding pratyahara found me in the Indian Himalayas.

I had made my way to Rishikesh, India to study Ashtanga yoga with Yogi Kamal Singh. One month into practice we had a week off to rest. But, I didn’t feel like resting and something else seemed to be calling me. I was in Rishikesh, the yoga capital of the world and the gateway to the great Himalayas. It was the whisperings of these mountains that beckoned me to venture into their depths. Early one morning instead of sleeping in I was riding in a bumpy collective jeep, squished between several Indians, winding up into the mountains on our way to the sacred village of Gangotri, where the great river Ganges begins. Eighteen hours in jeeps and one cold sleep in Uttarkashi later, I arrived in the little hamlet of Gangotri, a quiet and simple village lulled by the rushing jade waters of the baby mother Ganga and cradled by the snowy peaks of the high Himalayas.

My first evening I dined on noodle soup with my neighbour, Tomas, who happened to be the only other foreigner in town. While filling me in about the four hours of electricity a day, buckets of hot water for bathing available to purchase for 100 rupees, shockingly freezing nighttime temperatures, the one place to eat in town, and what I would need to trek the 18 kilometres to Gomukh (the glacier where at every moment the Ganges is born), he also mentioned to me something about hidden cave yogis. Hidden cave yogis!? It was true. Spiritual practitioners who had renounced the world and receded to the caves of the Himalayas in this holy place to dedicate their lives to the study and practice of yoga. Who were they and where could I find them? As it turned out, Tomas had been in Gangotri for several months for the purpose of learning from and meditating with these yogis, and was thus the perfect man to direct me to them. (Or, at least, to the ones that would talk to us baby yogis, as there are apparently many adult yogis who won’t even come out of samadhi to talk to teenager yogis!)

The next day I set out on my mission to find and talk to these mythical cave yogis. Though I could write an entire book relaying my experiences and learnings from these brilliant human beings, for now I will focus on the subject of this essay, which is pratyahara. Though I asked each of these sadhakas to summarise for me each of Patanjali’s eight limbs, I emphasised pratyahara, as I felt I was on the precipice of stumbling upon pratyahara in a more tangible way than regurgitated yoga sutras.

Later one night, a wiry and thickly bearded yogi with oversized shoes and orange robes led Tomas and me through the darkness, along the humming river to meet one of his well spoken teachers. There was no moon, and the frigid night was pierced with stars like diamonds poured across the sky.

We entered into a cave like stone hut and sat down on folded wool in the dimly lit space. Our host, the well respected yogi, prepared hot chai for all of us as we sat silently in the near freezing darkness. “So,” he began while pouring steaming chai into small cups, “how may I help you?” Tomas asked his usual questions about meditation and I asked my usual interrogation about the eight limbs. The little wiry yogi sat and listened as his teacher and friend share his wisdom with us.

We spoke about many aspects of yoga; and I even thought I saw him smile when I sheepishly told this being who had been meditating in these caves for decades that I had been doing asana practice for five years. After lightly scolding me for not being able to recite the one yoga sutra about asana in Sanskrit off the top of my head (scold-able, even for baby yogis), he continued: “ah, asana,” he laughed and then sighed, “the limb that distracts so many from the complete experience of ashtanga yoga. Such an obsession you have in the west with the body and asana.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “and that is why I have come to talk to you. To learn about the other seven limbs of Patanjali’s yoga.”

“Each limb arises out of the others,” he said simply.

“Yes, so far that has been my understanding. Most of the limbs I can at least grasp the theory of, but I just can’t make any sense of what pratyahara is and how to practice it.”

“Can you feel your prana?” he asked.

“Sorry?” I was surprised by the seemingly unrelated interest in life force energy.

“Are you aware of your energy body?” he rephrased the question.

I thought for a moment before replying, and then answered that I was.

“Good. So you already practice pratyahara.” He smiled and offered more hot chai, which was the only elixir for our frozen limbs. I pondered his words and sipped the chai through its comforting steam. “You are not understanding,” he said.

“No, I’m afraid not.” I admitted, “I still don’t understand how one withdraws the senses.”

“Pratyahara Sense withdrawal. It means to maintain the solidity of the connection with God within you, so that your attachment or aversion to that which you understand and cognate with your senses in the outer world does not disturb you. When you experience awareness of your pranic body, you already have the function of turning inwards. You see, the experience of the limbs all arise spontaneously with the practice of the preceding limbs. And sometimes without our intellectual knowing, we experience them.”

Suddenly, in a flash, I understood the beginnings of pratyahara. And this cave yogi was right, I had been practicing it without even realising. Even in simple ways in every day life. Every time I had stubbed my toe and not reacted to the pain shooting up from my foot, every time I had smelled something delicious cooking and had not let it distract me from whatever I was doing, or every time I remained undisturbed in the face of commotion on a busy street or in the metro. These are all very simple but real life manifestations of pratyahara. He must have seen the look of epiphany on my face because he started laughing and said “very good.”

He told me I could practice at any moment in time, beginning by closing my eyes, regulating my breath, and tapping into my pranic body. Prana is, after all, the life force or god force that moves inside and through us. This can be done through visualisation and by using visualisation as a tool for exploring the inner and subtle body. Also, via the tool of visualisation, we can visualise a membrane around us where any external distractions slide off of us and our internal world, and the solidity of our connection to god and ourselves, remain undisturbed. These are simple real life baby step practices for baby yogis to learn more about their capacity for pratyahara.

We continued to talk with the cave yogi until even my brain had gone numb with the mountain cold. I walked back to my guesthouse in the darkness, still buzzing with  revelation.

Over the next days I trekked 40 kilometres into the high Himalayas to and from Gomukh, sleeping in a frozen goat cave like ashram where one evening I listened amusedly to a swami try to convince a geologist of the existence of God. The entire excursion, through all the discomforts of exhaustion, hunger, back pain, backpack straps rubbing the skin off my shoulders, sleeping on a stone floor, feeling the coldest I had ever felt in my life, losing toe nails, and destroying my feet, I maintained a connection to that solidity which is inside all of us. And in doing so none of these  discomforts bothered me, allowing for my little adventure to be a rudimentary baby yogi practice of pratyahara, to be an unexpected experience of going inwards, and to be a humbling act of devotion. In a funny way, my trek to the origin of the Ganges was basically a really great extended yoga practice, and one of the happiest experiences of my life.