ADAMANT

PYRITES OF THE CARRIBEAN

    In Which Ye  Author  Most Shamelessly Plugs

  A NATURAL HISTORY OF MUSTIQUE

The only place to read a Patrick O'Brian novel is lounging in the  mizzen top of a brig like Astrid. Nowhere else can a landsman keep track of what the man is talking about.  Running down the Windward Islands from English Harbor to Fort De France, I glanced up to spy that the nearest volcanic peak semed to be  greenly shivvering. So I put down The Nutmeg Of Consolation and swung from the mainyard garnet 'neath the futtocks to the quarterdeck ratlines to  go check the synthetic aperture radar--with a nightmare rig like Astrid's you want plenty of post-modern Nav gear, wired all Bristol-fashion.

Sure enough, the williwaw rustling the cane fields of Martinique's  Mont Pelee' was reaching across the sea-- it was time to shorten sail. From meteorology to ornithology and mineralogy, there's no avoiding natural history cruising the Caribbean. On land and under water , much of it is delightful ; but while  Captain Raul King of Bequia once declared " Nothing in this sea will harm you", you do need to know enough not to grab the fire coral , poke the sea urchins , or steer afoul of its underwater volcano.

With so much to oogle, the naturally curious visitor might well need  A Natural History Handbook to seek out, and sort out all the beautiful creatures, lovely corals, and sparking mineral veins. So I helped write one.

Political Cosmology In Primary Colors

The Creation Museum's subversion of the nation's Presidential Primaries is a scandal of astronomical proportions!

Staying open throughout the primary season, this Kentucky establishment lures parents from the polls by advertising what seems a wholesome alternative to city slicker's " millions of years ' stories...ape-men " and all that. Do not be deceived. The Museum is a political ruse designed to undermine the  intelligent Presidential designs of fine candidates like Reverend Governor Huckabee with a Planetarium show offering children a ' starship ride billions of light years away .'

....   But Parents beware !  Beneath this Planetarium Of  The Apes ,
Satan twitches his claws. The 'Billions of light years' projected by
this diabolical  political light show are not of the Lord's Creation! Lift up your eyes instead to our

.......BIBLICALLY COMPACT ..............COSMOLOGY
The only Theory Of Everything that applies the rigorous equation D=2R to the impeccable premise that it takes light a year to travel a light year!

As the radius of the Universe R, equals C times the number of  years since Genesis, which noted Revelation scholar Sir Isaac Newton reckons as ~6,011, then D=12,022  [4004BC+2007AD* x 2 ] . So surely as Numbers follows Leviticus, the World being six thousand years old, The Universe must be twelve thousand  light-years across.

Red State Astrophysicists can breathe easy.  Adamant's new Theory of Everything is 100% inflationary ! As light zaps outward from the formerly dark face of the waters, the universe grows like clockwork, one light year larger every six months.

Now for the Good News. As light takes just 12,022 years to traverse Creation, the Biblically Correct Universe is a mere 1.7375 Trillion Cubic Light-years in volume, leaving the stars just billions of miles apart. No one will be Left Behind with Interstellar Travel a Done Deal!

Every space probe launched since Star Trek The Movie must by now have left hundreds of stars astern, and Voyager should arrive at the Andromeda galaxy any year now. Providence  clearly smiles on NASA's 'Faster, Better, Cheaper' program.

Besides offering missionaries from the churches of  Scientology , Unification, and the Latter Day Saints new  recruitment opportunities, high density astronomy puts paid to those who blame the sun for global warming. The real culprit is plainly the ten trillion stars blazing  away within a light-day's drive of Earth.

Forget CO2 and solar variation. The virial theorem suggests supernovas igniting on our doorstep hourly should  guarantee global warming of Biblical proportions, and the high density of q-bits per cubic cubit in Biblically Condensed Matter may help Vanderbilt Divinity school Doctor of Homiletics Albert Gore to repave the information superhighway and  extend  Moore's Law to the End Of Days.

Help Prohibit Election Day Sale Of Astronomical Moonshine In Arkansas !

OH, THE HUMANITY ! BALI ICING CAP MELTS

..Half  Of  Globe Inundated, Hordes Left Stranded As
Sea Level Rises 20 Feet After Bali Conference Eruption

Antarctica and many Pacific Island nations disappeared Friday after the Performance Artist Formerly Known As The Former Next President exploded from his collar at a UN conference on Fast Food & Climate Change. The wardrobe malfunction occurred as he  was attempting to metabolically sequester carbon from a supersized dessert.

The icing cake responsible for  the catastrophe, traced to EcoAction des Patisseries De Versailles, depicts a rain forest village being razed to stop slash and burn palm oil cultivation, and assure sustainable production Of Fair Trade coffee for future UNESCO conferences. 

The explosion wiped out the conference's carbon neutral food stalls, but Endangered Species Pavilion officials averted the treat of cannibalism among starving climate modelers and diplomats by allowing them to eat the exhibits raw to avoid greenhouse emissions

Among those complaining they were not allowed to eat cake were these   "International Climate Science Coalition  scientists ...
Viscount Monckton ( spokesman)
Vincent Gray (IPCC Expert Reviewer)
David Evans (Carbon Cycle Modeller / Rocket Scientist)
David Archibald (Climate Scientist / Solar Effects)
William Alexander (Engineering Scientist)
Greg Balle (Executive Director / Geophysical Flows)"
Some edifying excerpts from the climate and rocket science websites of the I.C.S.C.'s icy esquires :
Greg Balle :
"New Zealand  Libertarianz Finance Spokesman,"

Bryan Leyland
" I am a New Zealand based Consulting Engineer specialising in hydropower, power systems [ gas and coal ] and markets. ".

David Evans Associates "provides expertise in site applications, survey and mapping, site civil development, and right-of-way appraisals and negotiations for siting gas- and coal-fired power generation facilities."

Viscount Monckton has written five volumes of Soduku and owns a white lab coat.

No ants or icebergs were killed or injured in producing this post-conference postscript

Rock Of Ages

   POSTMODERN GEOLOGY 102 A

Petrology for Deconstruction Majors 

Trinitite
The first rock to form during  the Postmodern epoch.

This violet to green, obsidian-like lithic, fused from the White Sands of southern New Mexico is an un-natural glass  emplaced in a shallow anticline , with a tritium age of 6.1 milli-eons, a few weeks older than the Terminal Showa formation of the Hiroshima district in southern Japan.

Younger deposits are known to exist in Kazakhstan ,the Lop basin in China, and synclines in India and Pakistan. A calcian variety has been reported from some recently vanished French atolls.  All are highly enriched in transuranic elements and look far older than their years.

Saddamite
More mafic than  Maccadamite,this high-temperature no pressure  metamorphic exists atop the holocene tar sands of Kuwait. Consisting of quartz grains in a matrix of carbon black with fossil impressions of boots, coots and camel tracks,  its petrogenesis defies explanation.

High porphyrin levels suggest a marine Cretaceous origin ,but no natural or commercial explanation exists for the infernal thermal fluxes required to pyrolize so much carbon There are no signs of natural catastrophe or nuclear winter in the vicinity.

Cryabase

Foundation stone of the infant science of neopetrology , cryabase is the only  terrestrial rock consisting entirely of condensed air. This paragon of igneous minimalism  contains native oxygen and nitrogen,  argon snowflakes  ,and  minute crystals of  Freon, neon, and radon.

Cryabase occurs as aircicles and frost-like masses surrounding liquid hydrogen tanks. Much feared by Space Shuttle pilots ,it is difficult to collect as geologists picks embrittle severely at frozen air temperatures. Attempting  to lick field samples is highly inadvisable.

Saganite
Phenomenally cold and dark variety of cryabase. A report in Science in 1983 stated that minute amounts in atmospheric suspension can lower global temperatures below freezing for 40 days and 40 nights, but the still unpublished type specimen seems to have reverted to apocryphite.

Saganite seems structurally related to Imhofite and the War of the Worlds symplectite  near Grovers Mills N.J . Immense deposits reportedly exist beneath the Enron gas dome and the Busang Borneo  megagold strike, but none has been offered for sale . Distinguishing features : highly refractory at a distance; melts under examination.

The Ground Zero Gneiss
Thus far known only from lower Manhattan and the Pentagon basement,  this so unique migmatite exhibits a portlandite matrix with corrugated layers of  galvanized iron , asbestos fibers , and exotic nickel alloy  laths whose grain structure suggests hot deformation. Zones of heavily mylonized gypsum contain mica-like books of carbonaceous schist with  angular markings. Unlike exsolved  graphic granites, which resemble garbled cuneiform, the GZG graphitites are highly legible, and appear to pertain to world trade.

The Tora Bora Metapeltites
Cave entrance exposures near the Waziristan-Pakistan syntaxis have yielded fugitive traces of these rare and much sought after products of repeated shock and awe.

Its distinuishing features are Seismic deformation and  clasts of lead, depleted uranium , kevlar and boron carbide.  Analytical  petrologists  hope to collect the $50 million reward offered for a specimen showing plastically deformed traces of the elusive  organic phase binladenite  in amounts sufficient for positive DNA identification.

Who Needs Woodrow?

Edward O. Wilson is a professor of entomology at Harvard University.
This extract is from    So Simple a Beginning:
                                     Darwin's four great books,     to be published in December by W.W. Norton.

IT IS surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rock-like conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 per cent that accept the prophecies of the Bible's Book of Revelation as truth, and in yet more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as "only a theory" rather than a "fact".

Yet biologists are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably strong evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.                                                                                   

Many who accept

There Go The Dinosaurs

...................REVEALED AT LAST !

The Evolutionary Basis Of Climate Change:

..................In the beginning, the Lord said

"Let there be Carbon Sequestration, " And it was pretty weird.

Those disposed to swallow the National Center for Policy Analysis' Global Warming Primer  chapter and verse should feel at home in the world according to tractarian cartoonist Jack Chick :
 

...................................                          ............   And thus doomed to end up
.....................................................................as the Flintstone's lunch.

Here endeth the Lesson. If you can't stomach the thought of  Dinoburgers at The Last Supper,  try this instead.

Monte Hieb's Flying Graphics

Planetologist Of The Week

Monte Hieb, sometime West Virginia Office of Miner’s Safety chief engineer, can scarcely be accused of neutrality in the Climate Wars. Deservedly celebrated for his web site on the fossils of the coal measures of Appalachia, the amateur climate scientist has created a truly remarkable graph for The National Center for Policy Analysis "Global Warming Primer".

Coal enthusiasts may have a case to make, but Hieb's peculiar history of palaeoclimate  seems an improbable tool for recruiting scientists to the fossil fuel  cause-- it  rivals the Creation Museum's take on geochronology.

Hieb's Kindergarten approach to radiative forcing by water vapor  had  atmospheric science professionals laughing long before he tried his hand at finger painting palaeoclimate . The Primer's cut and paste counterfeits of curves generated by mathematical models are all too reminiscent of the statistical shenanigans that led to the 'Hockey Stick' affair  being denounced by Center chairman Pete DuPont in his Wall Street Journal column.

The Primer asks "Is there a relationship between CO2 and global  temperature over the  Earth's history ?" but the  graphic answer provided its rhetorical question  wildly exaggerates some extremes of  palaeoclimate  while ignoring  the climate record of today. Yet Dallas's NCPA deserves the thanks of all Texans-- The Global Warming Primer may  temporarily drive Aggie jokes out of circulation.

This harsh judgment  stems from the Primer's poor timing - the  latest peer reviewed  assessment of CO2 past by palaeoclimatologists who respect the data instead of playing statistical games with it  appeared on the same day as Hieb's latest ,and most Orwellian,  attempt to rewrite geological  history :

Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations during the Palaeozoic era

Rosemarie E. Came¹, John M. Eiler¹, Ján Veizer², Karem Azmy³, Uwe Brand⁴ & Christopher R. Weidman⁵

1. Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
2. Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario KIN 6N5, Canada
3. Department of Earth Sciences, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, Newfoundland A1B
   
4. Department of Earth Sciences, Brock University, St Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada
5. Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, Waquoit, Massachusetts 02536, USA

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations seem to have been several times modern levels during much of the Palaeozoic era (543–248 million years ago), but decreased during the Carboniferous period to concentrations similar to that of today^{1, 2, 3}. Given that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, it has been proposed that surface temperatures were significantly higher during the earlier portions of the Palaeozoic era¹. A reconstruction of tropical sea surface temperatures based on the ¹⁸O of carbonate fossils indicates, however, that the magnitude of temperature variability throughout this period was small⁴, suggesting that global climate may be independent of variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Here we present estimates of sea surface temperatures that were obtained from fossil brachiopod and mollusc shells using the 'carbonate clumped isotope' method⁵—an approach that, unlike the ¹⁸O method, does not require independent estimates of the isotopic composition of the Palaeozoic ocean. Our results indicate that tropical sea surface temperatures were significantly higher than today during the Early Silurian period (443–423 Myr ago), when carbon dioxide concentrations are thought to have been relatively high, and were broadly similar to today during the Late Carboniferous period (314–300 Myr ago), when carbon dioxide concentrations are thought to have been similar to the present-day value. Our results are consistent with the proposal that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations drive or amplify increased global temperatures1,

The Ascent Of Yes Man

Media Fossils Of The Genus Yesmenia

The Yes Men's debut  on Bill Moyers raises hopes for the new PBS season- can we look forward to a NOVA special on their evolutionary biology, and a Frontline expose' of their foundation funding ?

When it comes to political icons, embryology can indeed recapitulate ontology. Here's a brief review of the fossil larvae of the genus that evolved into
Yesmenia pestis

Yesmenia Pythonis

Creosotic Era , Thames Valley

..........Yeamania
..............Oscaris         Post-modern,    Telluride Formation

 

Yesmenia

Yesmenia Pneumothorax
Pre-Priuscene era, Paris basin

..Yesmania Huttutsi

......Rwandan Syncline