Category: now-reading

Four Billion Years and Counting…

Four Billion Years and Counting: Canada’s Geological Heritage. Produced by the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences, by seven editors and dozens of authors. 2014.

November-December, 2024.

I am reading this with CJS. It is a nice overview of regional geology, and it is nice that all the examples come from Canada, and at least some of the discussion is relevant to Minnesota Geology. The book is notable for its beautifully done pictures and diagrams.

The first part of the book, Foundations, is an introduction to general geological concepts. For CJS and I this will be largely review. Here I will preterit any summary, and simply list some of the points that stood out because they filled in a gap, or provided a different perspective.

FOUNDATIONS

C1: Miscellaneous Points

  • Polygonal jointing occurs when basalt flows stop moving before they cool.
  • Granitic magma forms at 600-900°, sometimes with water contributing to lowering the melting point, where silica minerals tend to melt, but more magic minerals remain solid. The melt tends to move upward, either because it is less dense than surrounding rock or because of tectonic pressures. As it forms a mass, chunks of surrounding “country rock” fall into it in a process called “stoping,” making the melt more silicacious and also persisting in solid chunks that will eventually become xenoliths.
  • Ripples (and their large scale cousins, dunes) are straight and symmetric if they are formed by currents moving back and forth, or curved if they are created by a unidirectional flow.
  • Mud cracks form as a result of repeated drying and wetting, as occurs in mudflats with seasonal rain, or intertidal areas.
  • A seam of coal that is a meter thick was originally 5-10 meters thick and took on the order of 2500 years to accumulate.
  • Paleosols, fossil soil surfaces/horizons, are generally rock-like with a characteristic disrupted knobby appearance.
  • Metamorphic rocks develop cleavage planes perpendicular to the direction force or pressure is being applied; metaphorphic rocks split along cleavage planes, not their original bedding surfaces.
  • Schist has a lot of mica; gneiss has little. Both are coarsely crystalline and so highly-altered that it is difficult to tell what the source rock was. The light and dark banding in gneiss is the result of recrystallization, and has nothing to do with the original bedding plane.

At lower metamorphic grades, platy crystals of chlorite and mica are common. As higher metamorphic grades are reached, minerals such as garnet, staurolite, and sillimanite may form. Such high-grade metamorphic rocks form at depths of 15 to 25 kilometres within the crust. If pressure (usually the result of deep burial) is a major factor during metamorphism, minerals such as kyanite and glaucophane may grow. The blue colour of glaucophane gives rise to the name blueschist, a rock formed under conditions of low temperature and high pressure.

Igneous rocks also show interesting metamorphic changes.When basalt is metamorphosed at low pressures and temperatures, some of its constituent minerals convert to the green minerals chlorite, actinolite, and epidote, producing a type of rock called greenstone or greenschist. At higher metamorphic grades, greenstone becomes amphibolite, a dark green to black rock made up of interlocking amphibole crystals.

C2: Miscellaneous Points

  • Reverse and thrust faults are different. They are created by the same array of forces, but reverse faults are steeper (closer to vertical) than thrust faults. …The text doesn’t say where the line is between them…
  • Fault breccia. Rock formed of a jumbled mix of sharp rock fragments embedded in lithified rock flour.
  • Nice review of minerals: pages 19-21.
  • The Greenville orogen underlies Quebec, the midwest US, and stretches into mexico.

All modern oceans contain areas where the lithosphere is thicker than regular oceanic litho-sphere. These areas include island arcs, oceanic plateaus perhaps bearing atolls, and isolated fragments of continental lithosphere such as present-day Madagascar. If subduction continues and these within-ocean features are swept toward the continent, they will ultimately collide with it. Because high-standing islands or plateaus are more buoyant than regular oceanic lithosphere, they will be scraped off the sub-ducting plate and will stick, or accrete, to the overriding plate rather than be subducted. Many mountain belts contain remnants of such former within-ocean features; such remnants are called terranes (a term not to be confused with terrain, which denotes topography). Terranes thus have a variety of origins: they may be continental fragments (microcontinents); former island arcs; or former pieces of thickened oceanic lithosphere such as Hawaii may become if it is accreted to a continent. Many terranes are a mixture of these elements. The convergence and collision of terranes with continental margins commonly leads to the rise of mountains.

Remnants of former deep oceanic lithosphere can be preserved within an ancient mountain system. Such remnants are known as ophiolite suites or ophiolites…

  • Rift Shoulder Highlands are mountains produced as a side effect of continental rifting — when the floor of the rift is bulging upwards.
  • Basins. Fore arc basins are in front of island arcs; back arc basins are behind them. Fore land basins can form on continents, due to the weight of accretionary material pushing down that part of the continental plate. …Is the Owens Valley in California such a basin?
  • The next supercontinent has already been named: Amasia.

C3: Miscellaneous Points

C4: Miscellaneous Points

  • xxx

Part II: The Evolution of Canada

Cx: xxxx

  • xxx

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Through the Language Glass

by Guy Deutscher

October 2024

This is an excellent book; interesting well-documented science, and some beautiful and erudite writing as well. The basic argument — that grammar determines what must be specified, rather than what can be specified, and in that manner instills certain habits of mind that effect how people see the world — seems correct, if not quite living up to the subtitle of the book: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

Perhaps the most interesting and fun part of the book was to be introduced to languages that work very differently from English: The Mates language (in Peru) that requires speakers to specify whether the fact they report is based on personal observation, indirect evidence, or hearsay; and the Australian language that has no egocentric prepositions, but requires all positional information to be reported in terms of the cardinal directions, thus requiring their speakers to always be oriented.

This book was a pleasure to read. I plan to seek out other work by this writer. 

Contents

Front Matter

On whether languages reflect the characteristics of their speakers, he writes:

Many a dinner table conversation is embellished by such vignettes, for few subjects lend themselves more readily to disquisition than the character of different languages and their speakers. And yet should these lofty observations be carried away from the conviviality of the dining room to the chill of the study, they would quickly collapse like a soufflé of airy anecdote-at best amusing and meaningless, at worst bigoted and absurd.

— p. 2

The basic argument of the book is this:

The effects that have emerged from recent research, however, are far more down to earth. They are to do with the habits of mind that language can instill on the ground level of thought: on memory, attention, perception, and associations. And while these effects may be less wild than those flaunted in the past, we shall see that some of them are no less striking for all that.

I think it is correct, but that the subtitle of the book – Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages – is a bit of an exaggeration.

C1-5: <Reprise of history and status of color terms>

C1: Naming the Rainbow

This chapter reprises now-unknown work by William Gladstone (now remembered as an English prime minister) on Homer and his writings, and focuses in on particular on one chapter in Gladstone’s monumental 3,000 page work: a chapter on Homer’s use of color terms.

Gladstone’s scrutiny of the Iliad and the Odyssey revealed that there is something awry about Homer’s descriptions of color, and the conclusions Gladstone draws from his discovery are so radical and so bewildering that his contemporaries are entirely unable to digest them and largely dismiss them out of hand. But before long, Gladstone’s conundrum will launch a thousand ships of learning, have a profound effect on the development of at least three academic disciplines, and trigger a war over the control of language between nature and culture that after 150 years shows no sign of abating.

Gladstone notes that Homer uses color terms in odd ways — the famous “wine dark sea” (really “wine-looking” sea) being just one example.

Mostly Homer, as well as other Greek authors of the period, use color very little in their descriptions: mostly they use black or white; terms for colors are used infrequently and inconsistently. For example, the only other use of “wine-looking” is to describe the color of oxen.

Gladstone’s fourth point is the vast predominance of the “most crude and elemental forms of color”-black and white-over every other. He counts that Homer uses the adjective melas (black) about 170 times in the poems, and this does not even include instances of the corresponding verb “to grow black,” as when the sea is described as “black-ening beneath the ripple of the West Wind that is newly risen.” Words meaning “white” appear around 100 times. In contrast to this abun-dance, the word eruthros (red) appears thirteen times, xanthos (yellow) is hardly found ten times, ioeis (violet) six times, and other colors even less often.

C6: Crying Whorf

This chapter describes the origin, rise and fall of linguistic relativity. Sapir is depicted as respectable but making over-stated claims; Whorf comes across as a charlatan, for example, making claims to have deeply studied Hopi, when he only had access to a single informant in New York – and making broad claims that are entirely wrong (e.g. that the Hopi language does not have a future tense). 

Deutscher traces the origin of linguistic relativity to Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1799,  whose “linguistic road to Damascus led through the Pyrennes.” Deutscher encountered the Basque language, and found that it was radically different from the languages linguists tended to study. He then sought out other ‘more exotic’ languages, which he found by going to the Vatican library and studying the notes of Jesuit missionaries to South and Central America: “…Humboldt was barely scratching the surface. But the dim ray of light that shown from his materials felt dazzling nonetheless because of the utter darkness in which he and his contemporaries had languished.” p. 135 Although Humboldt’s ideas led to linguistic relativity, it should be noted that he had a much more nuanced and correct view: In principle, any language may express any idea; the real differences among languages are not what they are able to express but in “what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.” But this view was not carried forward, and instead: “The Humboldtian ideas now underwent a process of rapid fermentation, and as the spirit of the new theory grew more powerful, the rhetoric became less sober. ”

All that said, Deutscher argues it is a mistake to dismiss the idea that language has no influence over thought. But rather than taking the strong case the language constrains thought, he instead argues the habits of language may lead to habits of mind. In the case of the influence of language, and refers to the idea that Boas introduces and that Jakobson crystalized into a maxim: “Languages differ in what they must convey, and not in what they may convey.”

Phrases I like

“…has still the power to disturb our hearts.” [Sapir, referring to Homer, Ovid, etc.] p. 129

“[His] linguistic road to Damascus led through the Pyrennes.” p. 134

“…Humboldt was barely scratching the surface. But the dim ray of light that shown from his materials felt dazzling nonetheless because of the utter darkness in which he and his contemporaries had languished.” p. 135

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A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Reading on my own, circa Fall 2024.

This book or extended essay is based on a lecture on Women and Literature that Woolf gave, or at least that is the framing of it in the book. She approaches the topic by explaining how she came to develop her thoughts about it:

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial–and any question about sex is that–one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

She begins with an account of going to Oxbridge, and walking about the colleges. She notes that, being a woman, she is barred from walking on the grass, and is not welcome in the library. She has lovely descriptions of the landscape and colleges:

To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.

And as we accompany her, she recounts her thought process. I love her metaphor (more extensive than the excerpt I quote) of thinking as fishing…

Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Pausing in my account here, but passages that I like for various reasons follow:

“Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, ‘Tell me then how you wrote your essays?’ For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.“

“Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, old though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. “

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction — so we are told. “

“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me.”

“I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.”

xxx


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LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

February 2024…

This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.

Continue reading LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

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