Carl Sagan’s COSMOS (edited for rednecks)

Geology Hike

~Yesterday I went on a hike at Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area, which is next to Hillsborough, North Carolina.  The hike was led by a volunteer geologist and was coordinated by the state park office. I’d never been to Occoneechee (pr: oh-ko-knee-chi) Mountain before – I’d never even heard of it – so this looked like an interesting opportunity.

^ On the left is our guide, Jean-Michel Margot, a retired Swiss geologist who also worked for IBM.  He now conducts these monthly walks on the mountain and has also helped produce a guidebook to the geology of the Eno River area.

^ Before Occonneechee Mountain became a state area, there were farms and homesteads on the mountain.  Now they lie in ruins; there’s little left of this house except the collapsed chimney.  Many of the trees on the lower parts of the mountain are comparatively younger than trees near the top, because the original trees were cut down for farmland.  The trail we hiked crossed what were originally roads between farms, but were now little more than collapsed, overgrown ditches.

^ Embedded quartz, with red iron oxide (rust).

Geologically speaking, Occoneechee Mountain is very interesting.  Travelling west from the North Carolina coast, it marks the very beginning of the Appalachian Mountains, which are some of the oldest mountains in the world.  The mountain consists almost entirely of quartz (SiO2), which is a very hard rock and so resists weathering – which is why the mountain is still here (albeit smaller than younger mountains such as the Rockies) after hundreds of millions of years of precipitation.

^ Yellow paint on tree trunks marks the boundaries of state parks in North Carolina.  Blue paint marks trails.  Triple rings mark the geographical corners of a state park.  These markings may come in handy if you get lost…however, Occoneechee Mountain is not very large and is also near a highway.  I was informed by M. Margot that there are no bears on the mountain, although I have my doubts.  I don’t think I could bear that.

^ Now, I know what you’re thinking.  “It’s just a rock.”  Just a rock?  JUST a rock?!  I’ll have you know that this is genuine Appalachian bedrock, that forms the interior of the mountain itself!  There are several ways to tell that it’s bedrock, but the most obvious is that it’s aligned to the southwest, which is the direction the Appalachian Mountains go.  Imagine the mountains being pushed up from underground hundreds of millions of years ago; the rocks that got pushed up against harder rock all ended up facing the same way.

^ Like any self-respecting geologist, M. Margot brought along a rock hammer.  To really “do” geology, you have to break open rocks and see what’s inside, because it’s often hard to tell what a rock is from the outside due to lichens, discolorations caused by weathering, oxidation, and so forth.  He let one of the hikers break open a couple of rocks.  One of the rocks was brittle shale and broke easily, but the quartz bedrock in the above picture was much harder to break.

^ There’s more to the mountain than rocks and trees; the area is also a biological sanctuary for a variety of plant and animal life.  The above picture is a laurel; in the summer, the area is also filled with blue- and blackberry plants.  The mountain is also home to large numbers of Brown Elfin butterflies (Callophrys augustinus); the trail we walked on was the Brown Elfin Trail.

^ Some more bedrock.  Another way to tell that it’s bedrock is that it has distinctive splits, which again are aligned to the southwest.  The kids in our group had a good time climbing on them.  Yes, so did I.

^ The destination for the hike was an abandoned quarry along the north side of the mountain.  The quarry has been abandoned for many decades, and there’s a scenic overlook above it.  However, a rockslide several years ago resulted in it being closed off.  Fortunately, at some point in our hike we acquired a park ranger who gave us permission to proceed; park management is gradually re-opening the overlook for the general public.

^ The day was clear, and the view from the overlook was fantastic.  I stitched together the above panoramic picture; please click on it for a better view.

^ The quarry…Fred Flintstone would be right at home!  The soft mineral pyrophyllite was once mined here, which is quite rare (albeit not extremely valuable) and has many industrial applications.  Among other things, pyrophyllite was and is used in space shuttle nose cones, ceramics, gaskets, bricks, and in chemical manufacture.  It was also used as filler for North Carolina’s first east-west railroad.  This quarry is inactive, but there’s another still-active quarry just next to Occoneechee Mountain that’s the largest pyrophyllite quarry in the world.

^ Compare the two types of rocks in the above image.  On the right is quartz bedrock: grayish, rigid, split, and aligned southwest.  On the left is soft, reddish-brown pyrophyllite.

^ View of the Eno River from the overlook.

^ The cube-shaped brick building in the back (the one with battlements on the roof) was once the headquarters and commandant’s house of the Hillsborough Military Academy, which recruited and trained soldiers for the Confederate Army during the Civil War.  After the war, the Academy was intermittently used as a school and for storage, and the barracks were dismantled as part of a WPA project in the 1930s.  The headquarters was renovated in the 1960s and is now a private residence.

I enjoyed the hike very much, and I hope you enjoyed these pictures.  I’ll definitely be returning to Occoneechee Mountain in the near future to walk down some of the other trails, perhaps in the spring when the plants are in bloom and the animals are out.

DAG GUMMIT!

~A small selection of blooper outtakes from sport fisherman Bill Dance’s television show, “Bill Dance Outdoors”:

^ While watching this video, I kept hearing this voice in the back of my head saying, “That would be wrong…”

Russian to Antarctica

This time-lapse video shows a Russian expedition to resupply and transfer personnel to research stations in Antarctica:

 

[РАЭ-54 с борта НЭС "Академик Фёдоров" from North Pole on Vimeo.]

For a rough translation of the expedition objectives, see here.  The expedition began in St. Petersburg and stopped in Cape Town before proceeding to the bottom of the world.  The An-2 airplane that was unpacked and put together (assembly with duct tape in field conditions is allegedly in the official manual under the heading "Normal operation procedures") was used to deliver supplies to the inland Vostok Station.  And doesn’t the crew look like they’re having a good time in that hot tub at the end?

Also, note the coffin that appears at the 4:30 mark; it contains the body of a construction worker who died in a fire at the Russian research station “Progress” in Antarctica.

Creating Humans: Ethical Questions, part 11 -Population Control

~Somewhat belatedly continuing my bioethics lecture analyses, today’s topic is population control.  The other reproductive technologies I’ve previously discussed are largely available only in developed nations (i.e. screening), although some are becoming increasingly available in developing nations (i.e. gender selection).  But population control is different, and has been a bioethical issue among human societies for…well, as long as there have been human societies.

Most developed nations are experiencing declines in growth, and some are in fact experiencing a decrease in population.  The reasons for this have to do with smaller family sizes, emigration, and economic changes.  Although zero or negative population growth results in an aging population and subsequent economic headaches, this is not the focus of my analysis today although I did discuss it earlier with regards to Japan.  [Although, the question of whether or not growth, in both the population and the economy, is always a good thing is in fact a very good question.]

These days, population control issues are largely confined to developing nations, as a result of improvements in hygiene and medicine that have not (yet) been matched with a decrease in birthrates.  In these nations, population control is a question of scarce resources.  Burgeoning populations, particularly China and India, are already placing tremendous stress on available resources and services, as well as catastrophic environmental degradation and pollution resulting in health issues and long-term socioeconomic problems.

The key bioethical question when discussing population control is: How can we reconcile human rights with any coercive policy of population control, especially in developing nations?  Some question the need for any controls, pointing out that the Malthusian disaster of global famine has been averted again and again as a result of technological improvements leading to increased food production.  But although food is a key limiter of population, it is not the only resource humans consume; water shortages, for example, are predicted to be a major problem in the next few decades.  Access to medicine and medical care, especially in a time where global travel can allow pandemics to quickly spread, is another limited resource.  Jobs and limited economic opportunity may also prove scarce, which can lead to mass unrest.  These challenges and others have convinced some people and nations that population control is necessary.

I don’t think most people (except perhaps the “be fruitful and multiply” fundamentalist crowd) have any problem with long-term efforts to reduce birthrates. For example, the most reliable method of decreasing the birth rate of a nation in the long term is the education and empowerment (via economic opportunities and availability of birth control) of women.  This will almost always decrease birth rates…but it takes time, and with the population of some nations rising so rapidly, it may not be fast enough to prevent the problems mentioned above.

The bioethical problems begin when such national (and possibly global) methods of population control become coercive.  As with so many of the reproductive technologies I’ve discussed, international conventions on population control are either unclear or nonexistent.  From what I can tell, this seems to be because international discussions on population control inevitably devolve into arguments over contraceptives (opposed by conservative Muslim and Catholic nations and the Catholic Church) and abortion laws.  Unfortunately, these disagreements have so far prevented a truly global dialog on population control in the context of individual nations or the planet as a whole.

The quintessential example of coercive population control is the “One Child" policy enacted by the People’s Republic of China in 1979.  With extensive propaganda and the motto “later, longer, fewer”, it aimed to stymie that nation’s rapidly rising population, particularly in urban areas, by levying fines on families that had more than one child (for a full history of the policy, see here).  The policy seems to have been successful (although not as successful as predicted) in reducing long-term population growth and is slowly being dismantled, but it has resulted in two problems:

• Human rights violations ranging from infanticide, forced sterilizations and abortions, and underreporting of births resulting in “undocumented” people.

• Potential unrest caused by an aging population, gender imbalances (since the policy favors boys), and ethnic & socioeconomic discrimination in the way the policy is enacted.

In a political sense, such unrest might be perceived by Westerners as a good thing, (since it may result in an increased democratization of China), but it does show that this sort of coercive population control is not without its flaws.  Such a policy can only be achieved by an authoritarian government such as that of China; conspiracy theories aside, such a policy is very unlikely to be enacted in a democracy without major political upheaval (i.e. no more democracy).

But such changes are not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility, especially in a poisonous political environment where a segment of society is targeted as causing problems or taking up too much resources.  To the Nazis, it was Jews, Gypsies, gays, etc.; in the American south, it was blacks; in America today, hatred is directed at undocumented immigrants and their fictitious “anchor babies”; tomorrow, when robots do most of the work, it might be the unemployed masses. 

I’m reminded of one of my favorite science-fiction stories from when I was younger: Invitation to the Game by Monica Hughes.  Most of the main characters are the children of unemployed people, and because there are no jobs for them, they too become “unemployeds”, confined to an urban ghetto.  Early in the novel, the protagonist reads a newspaper article in which a senator calls for the sterilization of the unemployed.

But I don’t think things will go that far, at least not for a while.  Although I believe that educating women and increasing access to birth control are better solutions to long-term population pressures, I recognize that my perspective is shaped (some might say warped) by the fact that I live in a wealthy developed nation.  In the meantime, we must ask ourselves how to reconcile human rights with the issue of population control.  Consider the following questions:

• Imagine you live in a developing nation with a rapidly rising population and extreme inequality.  Would you support/obey a one-child policy, if it meant that your family could only have one child?

• Assume that a chemical is developed that, when added to drinking water, decreases fertility rates by, say, 50% with no other harmful side effects.  Would it be ethical for the state to (publicly) add this chemical to drinking water, just like we do now with fluoride?  What about in developing nations?

• Imagine you are a delegate to an international meeting intended to craft a convention on what is and isn’t ethically acceptable as a means of population control.  What methods, if any, would you support?  Which would you oppose?  Imagine you’re the delegate from Russia (growth: –0.19%/yr).  Now imagine you’re from Liberia (+4.5%/yr).  How might your decisions be different?

• Is coercive population control ever ethically acceptable?  On a national level?  On a global level?  Why or why not?

Sugar Mountain

~Last week, just after Christmas, I went skiing with my parents at Sugar Mountain, a ski resort in the mountains of western North Carolina.  Due to snow and ice, we almost didn’t make it up the mountain to the cabin we stayed in (actually, we almost didn’t make it out of the house in Cary), but we did eventually make it there.

The day my dad & I went skiing was perfect, and while I was on the mountain, I managed to take some pictures:

^ I took this picture from the top of the mountains.  The altitude here is 5,300 feet, and with the cloudless sky, the visibility was fantastic.  The beautiful mountains in the distance are the Blue Ridge Mountains.If you’re wondering why the mountains appear blue (and hence where their name comes from), here is the answer (from the National Parks Service Blue Ridge Parkway FAQ):

“According to "A Naturalist's Blue Ridge Parkway” by David Catlin, "it can be legitimately claimed that trees put the "blue" in Blue Ridge, for hydrocarbons released into the atmosphere by the forest contribute to the characteristic haze on these mountains and to their distinctive color." The entire Appalachian Chain is extraordinarily diverse and rich in its vegetation, so there is perhaps more "blue" to the Blue Ridge and more "smoky" to the Great Smoky Mountains.”

^ Me striking a pose.  I’m the King of the Mountain!

 

^ Dad is ready to go downhill!  For an old man, he’s still spry on those skis…

^ I’m ready to go as well!

 

^ Just southeast of the mountaintop is Sugar Top, a large building of condominiums located on top of the nearby mountain.  Although the building is, in my opinion, truly ugly (but good for holding many Russian comrades, da?), the view from there must be magnificent. 

^ A map of the Sugar Mountain ski trails.  I tried out most of the runs; my favorite was to take the central lift all the way to the top, then go down Northridge to Switchback, then go down either Upper Flying Mile or Big Birch to the bottom.  Most of the pictures in this post were taken either at the summit or at the top of Big Red.

^ We stopped at the top of Big Red for a snack, and I took this picture of dad with the mountains behind him.

 

I really enjoyed skiing at Sugar Mountain.  Next time, however, I think I’d like to try snowboarding.  The way snowboarders maneuver seems to more closely match my skiing technique…or lack thereof!