ADAMANT

Another Great Sucking Sound

"Recently an airport security guy confiscated my mostly empty 4 ounce container." reports Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams of the fate of  a  shampoo tube that " contained obviously less than 1 ounce of liquid. Apparently the empty portion of the container posed a threat... the airport confiscated my 3 ounces of nothing so that I couldn’t use that nothing to blow up the plane... I considered reasoning with the TSA guy... But one look in his eyes told me that thinking wasn’t his sport." Until Adams' epiphany , the threat of  terrorist vacuum smuggling went unrealized by the TSA.

Who knows how many  Islamofascists bent on assembling small vacuums into voids capable of imploding  jumbo jets have already boarded undetected ?  Until airport vacuum detectors  materialize ,TSA will display these signs to stop travellers from even thinking about vacuum tube laptops, empty thermos bottles and  unspecified quantities of nothing :

In a related development . TSA's allies in New Braunfels have banned  plastic containers smaller than five  fluid ounces from  Texas watercraft to deter boaters from consuming Jello shots. TSA is believed to be studying  the application of the 3-4-5-0 ounce Dilbert Rule to pager batteries and Congressional pages carried aboard the Boston-Washington Air Shuttle.

Playing With Firecrackers ?

    What Was That ?

By RUSSELL SEITZ
Wall Street Journal October 13, 2006; Page A12

Asked the best place to be if an H-bomb goes off, the gadget's legendary father, Edward Teller, responded, "Standing next to somebody who says: 'What was that?'"

Few realize that whatever it was that North Korea detonated on Sunday, it packed barely the explosive force of a 10-yard cube of explosive fertilizer. A hundred thousand bucks' worth of ammonium nitrate could produce much the same bang. Far larger quantities of explosives have gone off accidentally in the last century. Sometimes, these big booms claimed thousands of victims, as at Texas City in 1948. Sometimes, they took only one -- the night watchman of the fertilizer plant in Toulouse that disappeared from the face of the Earth in 2001.

Since the Dear Leader is as unpredictable as North Korean society is opaque, it's hard to reckon exactly what he did. Yet if Sunday night's rumble was intended as an entry-level nuclear test, it must have been a disappointment. One twenty-fifth of a Hiroshima may scare the hatpins out of the Better Red Than Deadheads making the pre-election TV rounds, but it won't get a grouch like Kim Jong Il a decent table at the nuclear club. The Dear Leader's half-kiloton debut was 100,000 times less powerful than the world's largest-ever nuclear test, the 59.2 megaton "Tsar Bomba" set off by Kim Il Sung's shoe-pounding pal, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1961.

Little wonder some optimists are muttering that maybe it was not a proper nuke at all. Perhaps it was only a parody physics package, consisting of a huge conventional explosives charge designed to squeeze the pips out of a tiny plutonium kernel. That's what folks in the H-bomb business in Doctor Strangelove's salad days would deride as "using a blast furnace to light a match."

Eric The Green ?

The Scythe is mightier than the Hockey Stick when it comes to getting the attention  of those disposed to deny that climate is warming. Greenland's reapers , The Economist (7 September 2006) reports , have little to be grim about . They have brought in the first barley harvest in 600 years. The icy isle was colonized in the comparatively balmy centuries around the turn of the Millennium, when vacationing Vikings introduced if not Martha's Vineyard, at least Newfoundland ,to that noble Scandinavian custom, the keg party , which transformed American politics by  paving the way for Senator Kennedy's amphibious assault on Chappaquiddick.

Viking interest in exploring New England may have been cut short when Long Ship's crews simultaneously ran out of beer and discovered poison ivy.  One hopes palynologists can illuminate this historical question by assaying bogs between Newfoundland and Newport to see if shifting medieval levels  of  urushirol ( the evil active ingredient in Poison Ivy) may shed light on that fearsome vegetables northern migration.

In any event, Greenland's salad days rolled downhill into the Little Ice Age,and by 1400, its European  immigrants had all perished of starvation, unable to eke a living as the growing season contracted and the ice fields grew.  Now there's crispy Chinese cabbage , barley, and to teach warming enthusiasts a lesson in scientific humility, a truly alarming surplus of iceberg lettuce.

                   That Ain't Hay

If Greenpeace gets wind of what's growing in Greenland ,  we will never hear the end of it.

Where barley already grows, frost-proof  GM rye  will follow.Ersatz Icelandic vodka now made from Bulgarian grain may give way to the native spirit of Greenland, flowing south from Qaqortoq to become a Green fashion statement in the hemp-clad end of the Hamptons.                                                                      

So brace yourselves , Martha's Vinlanders , for  politically loaded Low-carb Greenland beer ads featuring the wooden visages of  Alegore the Grim and Hiljari the Horrible.  The runes cast by the Finnish focus group wizards foretell fossil ice hawkers planting glacier-proof GM tomatoes, and the wind blows fair for an invasion of extra-virgin Danish olive oil , and Labrador chardonnay watery enough to stand up to Ice Age ice.  But go easy on the Siberian Champagne-  too many CO2 bubbles can ruin a carbon neutral cocktail party.

Feeling Really Jaded

                                           The Hunt for Olmec Blue

To undo the mischief wrought by Stephen Spielberg and Angela Jolie, Archaeology students must be carefully  taught the work is about as romantic as Certified Public Accounting , focused on digging up data in dusty archives , not loot in tropical jungles. Yet this anti-cliche has its problems - neat stuff  does end up underground , and lost mines ,and languages somehow manage to  get lost . 

And found -- Karl Taube   with whom  I've written on the Olmec  mines discovery in Antiquity, and in the most recent monograph from Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks-    http://www.doaks.org/OlmecArt.pdf
has just published another major Olmec find in Science, 5 September, P 1610 :

Oldest Writing in the New World

One hump or two ?

“This is a big discovery, a revolution in science,” said  Swiss palaeoarchaeologist Jean-Marie Le Tensorer of  the University of Basel of  a previously unknown  creature “as big as a giraffe or an elephant.”  that stalked the desert around the Syrian oasis of Kowm over 10,000 years  ago. The  first large bones were found some years ago with flint and stone weapons, in the 14-mile gap between two mountain ranges. but only recently  have enough to yield a partial skeleton of the same creature been discovered.

A group of humans apparently killed one while it was drinking from a spring, said Professor Tensorer, adding that human remains from the same period were discovered nearby at the once water-rich site, One of the  human bones from the area, taken to Switzerland for anthropological analysis, was of  modern form , the professor said, but a tooth was similar to that of a Neanderthal. “We don’t know yet what it is exactly,” he said. “Do we have a very old homo sapiens or a Neanderthal?” Signs of human habitation go back 1.5 million years in the area  which featured  in the migration of early humans out of Africa and on into  Asia and Europe, said Tesorer.

The creatures' skeletal form and size seem calculated to strike terror into  our recently retired surgeon general and Mayor Bloomberg, , since Joe Camel's earliest known ancestor stood  considerably taller than Goliath, about nine feet at the withers, ten at the hump and twelve at the sunglasses, despite smoking having stunted its growth.

Since the creature seems related to the giant camel of California,Camelops hesternus  well known from remains found in Los Angeles foremost cultural attraction, the La Brea Tar Pits , the possibility of its DNA being recovered there raises the delightful prospect of 12-foot walking cigarette advertisements enjoying the protection of the Endangered Species Act . and restoring equity to tobacco advertising in America.

Women and Children First

Nobody surfs a tsunami

  A few of the extremists who ride Hawaii’s greatest waves were on the  scene when the December 26 2004 Indian Ocean monster  killed 300,000 dwelling on its shores , but if any tried to ride it, none has lived to tell  .Yet many surfers the tsunami caught sleeping on the beach, escaped drowning, reminding  us that in many places the tragedy’s magnitude was amplified by  cultural as well as  natural causes . Tsunamis strike as waves, but transform into floods as they roll miles inland. That is where a large and  unnecessary fraction of the victims perished. Not from trauma, or being washed out to sea , but simply because they never learned to swim a stroke.  

The reason they should have still abides. Thousands of fathoms beneath the Andamn Sea's halcyon surface, where along an arc of darkness called the Sunda Trench, seismic strain energy  is accumulating once again. The Indian Ocean can expect a repeat of the black  Boxing Day 2004 when  a release of  energy rivaling a string of atom bombs tore the seabed asunder, throwing up submarine cliffs in seconds, and launching landslides fit to fill  the Grand Canyon along a rift a thousand kilometers long. The trillions of tons of water set in motion by 200 megatons of rolling tectonic thunder inflicted a death toll that dwarfed Hiroshima .

Within hours, the wave cast  millions unskilled in swimming into a nightmare wipeout of waters opaque with lethal debris. Board and body surfers ride the oceans wind-driven surface, but a tsunami’s mass and momentum lurk like an iceberg’s far below. Even before the wall of  liquid death tore inland, it began  wreaking havoc on the living coral in the sea. Thousands of miles of  fringe reefs were utterly smashed. Reef biologists view this is an unmitigated catastrophe, but  warm-water surfers look on the underwater devastation with different eyes. Coral is their natural enemy,