Child of a Metal God

I've wanted to visit Haida Gwaii for a long time. And the last few years I kept having to burn a bunch of vacation time at the end of the year, which sucks. So earlier this month I took two ferries to Vancouver Island, drove to the northern tip, took a 16 hour ferry through the Inside Passage up to Prince Rupert, and then an 8 hour ferry the next day out to the archipelago. I spent a week biking around, then spent another 3 days getting home.

( Pictures, as always )

So, I've been working on a plate tectonics simulator for the last few months. It's been a project idea in my head for a long time now, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. As such, I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject, and accidentally getting exposed to obscure forms of Discourse from plate tectonic deniers. And that led me to start to think about all the evidence for plate tectonics, and how beautifully well it all fits together. It's really an underappreciated paradigm shift story that hasn't gotten the history/philosophy of science attention it deserves. So this is my list, generally in chronological order, of everything plate tectonics explains really, really well. If you don't want to believe it, fine, but this is what any alternative you want to propose is up against.

Shape of the continents

They kind of match, that's odd.

Geological continuation across continents

There are a lot of rock formations, and sequences of formations, that seem to match across continents if you lined them up the way they look like they would fit.

Fossil continuation across continents

Lots of specific fossils are found in areas that also span across continents, as if there used to be a continuous habitat for those creatures.

Shape of the continental shelves

If you look at the shape of the continental shelves instead of the current coastlines, the match is even better.

Earth's bimodal elevation

If you plot the elevation of the Earth's surface, it's strikingly bimodal. Most of the continental land is within a certain band of heights, and almost all the ocean floor is within a much tighter band of depths.

Mid-Atlantic ridge

Not only do the continental edges match, there is a ridge running right down the middle of the ocean which separates them. The shape of this ridge also matches the contours on either side. Something has to be up here!

Seafloor arcs coming off ridges

There are very gently curving features which connect all these ridges on the seafloor. And if you map them, you can show that they all are concentric around a certain point. This is what you would expect to happen if that section of crust was moving, as all motion on the surface of a sphere is equivalent to rotation about a certain axis.

Oceanic crust sediment thickness

The thickness of sediment on the ocean floor gets thicker and thicker the farther from the ridge it is, as if it's older and has had more time to accumulate.

Oceanic crust ages as given by radiometric dating

You can work out how old rocks are by measuring the presence of certain radioactive elements (such as uranium) and the things they eventually decay into (such as lead). By knowing the half-life of those elements, (and making some reasonable assumptions about the original content of the rock) you can work out how old it is. And by this measure, again, all ocean crust gets older the farther it is from a ridge.

Paleomagnetism (wet)

When certain minerals solidify, they lock in the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field in a way that can be measured hundreds of millions of years later. Since the magnetic field isn't always the same -- in fact is flips polarity fairly regularly -- this can let you work out age and/or original position of rocks. If you do sweeps across the mid-ocean ridges, maybe using some very sensitive submarine detection gear the Navy is happy to give you after WWII, you can see that the magnetic signatures are almost perfectly symmetrical on either side of the ridge.

Paleomagnetism (dry)

You can do the same trick on land, and see that lots of rocks are very far from where they were originally formed.

Earth's bimodal crust age

Some parts of continents are billions of years old. In contrast, there is no oceanic crust older than a few hundred million years.

The ring(s) of fire

Plot all the earthquakes and volcanoes in the world. The vast majority of them are along lines which more or less outline the continents.

Ocean trenches

There are often ocean trenches near these areas of volcanism and earthquakes. Really, really deep ones, with no obvious explanation for how they are formed.

Wadati–Benioff zone

If you plot the depth and location of earthquakes in these areas, they line up to form a tongue pointing down from the trench deep into the mantle

Seismic tomography

If you set up a lot of seismic detectors and use tomographic algorithms on the waves detected after natural earthquakes, you can see the remnants of plates that have been subducted, matching the Wadati-Benioff pattern closely.

GPS measurements

There are thousands of GPS stations set up around the world, and these networks clearly show movement of bedrock coordinated across large areas, as if they're all part of a single plate that is moving in a mostly rigid way.

Actual physical measurements

Direct measurements across faults with lasers or even just cables also show movement. And of course, lots of evidence showing dramatic movement across faults during earthquakes, so we know large chunks of the Earth can move on at least a local scale.

Measured plate motion points at trenches or areas of collision

When the motion tells us that plates should be colliding, we see evidence of that collision in the form of subduction trenches or huge crumpled mountain ranges.

Crust density

Oceanic crust is (on average) much denser than continental crust. And the continental crust (as measured watching seismic waves as before) is ~10x thicker than oceanic, with as much going above the level of oceanic crust as below. It really looks like they're both floating on something.

Seamount chains

If you plot the depth of the seafloor, you can find long lines of mountains, some entirely submerged, some still poking above the surface as islands. Not only that, but there are multiple such lines, all parallel to each other. The ages of them are also linear -- the oldest at one end, the youngest at the other. And this pattern also matches between different, parallel lines. It looks like there are points which cause volcanoes, over which the seafloor itself is slowly moving.

Supervolcano chains

You can find similar chains within continents, but here it's in the form of huge calderas caused by supervolcano explosions.

Coastal subsidence after massive offshore earthquakes

One type of particularly powerful earthquake happens not far off the coast of places with trenches. When they happen, they generate dangerous tsunamis which imply a lot of seafloor got lifted very quickly. And on the shore near where this happened, the land drops by several meters, as if the crust was getting pushed up slowly as something was grinding down between it, then this tension gets released all at once. This has been shown indirectly in the geological record, and also directly measured with those GPS stations in the recent 2011 Tohoku earthquake of Japan.

Old, dead volcanoes where we think subduction used to be happening.

Currently there is only a fairly small section of subduction going on along the west coast of North America, the Juan de Fuca plate. In another 10 million years it will be entirely subducted under North America and the volcanism of the Cascades will come to an end. But if you run back the clock, it's obvious that this section used to be much wider. And inland along those areas are the remnants of volcanoes, whose estimated ages of death all fit nicely for when the subduction would have stopped at that point.

Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir *
The Art of Language Invention - David J. Peterson
Middlegame - Seanan McGuire *
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë *
The Nature Of Demonstrative Proof According To The Principles Of Aristotle And St. Thomas Aquinas - Owen Bennett
What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - Donovan Moore
William Blake collection *
Digital Apollo - David A. Mindell
Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell *
The Metaphysical Poets collection *
The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins *
The Great Poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson *
The Royal Society - Adrian Tinniswood
Or What You Will - Jo Walton
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence *
Railways and the Raj - Christian Wolmar *
Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States - Alex Wellerstein
The Archimedes Codex - Reviel Netz
A Passage to India - EM Forester *
Days of the Deer - Liliana Bodoc
Lagoon - Nnedi Okorafor *
Essential Hindi Grammar - Christine Everaert
Seven Demons - Aidan Truhen *
Design of Weldments - Omer W. Blodgett
Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli *
Burning Chrome - William Gibson
Memory of Empire - Arkady Martine *
A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine *
High-Rise - JG Ballard *
Over Sea and Under Stone - Susan Cooper
Psalm for the Wild-Born - Becky Chambers *
Because Internet - Gretchen McCulloch *
The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper
Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark
Greenwitch *
The Grey King *
Silver on the Tree *
The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann *
Master of Djinn - P. Djèlí Clark *
City of Brass - S. A. Chakraborty *
Kingdom of Copper - S. A. Chakraborty *
Empire of Gold - S. A. Chakraborty *
Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells *
Ninefox Gambit - Yoon Ha Lee *
Raven Strategem - Yoon Ha Lee *
Revenant Gun - Yoon Ha Lee *
A Darker Shade of Magic - V.E. Schwab *
A Gathering of Shadows - V.E. Schwab *
A Conjuring of Light - V.E. Schwab *
Nothing Like It in the World - Stephen E. Ambrose *
But n Ben A Go Go - Matthew Fitt
A Voyage for Madmen - Peter Nicols *
Final Voyage: A Story of Arctic Disaster and One Fateful Whaling Season - Peter Nichols *
The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad - Lesley Hazleton *
The Path Between the Seas - David McCullough *
The Great Bridge - David McCullough *
Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century - Michael Hiltzik *
Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex - Michael Hiltzik *
The Strangest Man - Graham Farmelo *
Sailing a Serious Ocean - John Kretschmer *
Dune - Frank Herbert *
Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Döblin *
The Wright Brothers - David McCullough *
Moby Dick - Herman Melville #
Art Loss Register Casebook Volume One - Anja Shortland
Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir *
Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky *
A Long Journey to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chalmers *
Seven Surrenders - Ada Palmer
The Will to Battle - Ada Palmer
Crash - JG Ballard *
Perhaps the Stars - Ada Palmer

* == audiobook
# == group reading out loud to each other over weekly video calls
Bold == would enthusiastically recommend
Italic == reread

Still having trouble concentrating on physical books. Also did a lot of shop work and a lot of bike riding this year, so the list is even more heavily tilted towards audio.

For my parents' 50th anniversary I rented us a boat on the Erie Canal and we all took the train out to east coast. Except my mom cancelled at the last minute due to extreme Heatdome fire risks at the homestead. But it was still fun!

( Pictures and such )

I like flags. The household has quite a few, and we occasionally switches out which one is currently flying, more or less at random. What I want to build is an entire liturgical calendar of flag-relevant events, so they can be switched out every 2-3 weeks (on average).

For example, we have the EU flag to fly during Eurovision. Various pride flags in June, of course. And the UN flag for UN Day (Oct 24). I keep forgetting to buy an Esperanto flag for Zamenhof Day in December. And the French flag for Bastile Day. And NASA (or Apollo program) for July 20.

So I'm turning to you, the internet. What days that have a related flag should we be celebrating? Nothing is too minor, I promise you.

The pandemic made absolute havoc of most of my finely honed habits. Keeping up on Dreamwidth has been one of them, I'm afraid. I've successfully reinstated my daily reading goals, though, and posting here is next on the list. I refuse to let my annual retrospectives die now, just 2 years short of their third decade!

Between September 5*, 2019 and September 4, 2020 I...
...made a replica of a historical artifact good enough to get added to a museum's collection.
...visited Panama, got to sail on some of the canal.
...made a kinetic sculpture installation I was really pleased with.
...got into DIY modular synthesizers, somehow, and designed several PCBs as a result.
...started moving into a new shop that is a significant upgrade and will probably be the one I stick with for the rest of my life.
...experienced life in a global pandemic and the greatest popular uprising in several generations, got tear gassed and hit with flashbang shrapnel, lived without the sun for a week, watched an explosion of fascist degeneracy, and generally became fairly superstitious about the ability of this fucking year to keep coming up with unpleasant developments months after month, same as everyone else.

^*I borrowed an extra day in last year's post. The accounts have now been balanced.

( 103 books this year )

I'm surprised how low the number is -- I really thought inhaling all of Dune and Hornblower and Aubrey/Maturin on audio would blow away my previous records. I guess that wasn't enough to compensate for all the 3-5 weeks tomes I was lugging around physically. Oh well! Still fairly pleased with the range of material this year.

Might as well share this here too! I finally made a serious shopwork video for this year's Halloween project, with a script and planned shots and graphics and all that. The effort seems to have paid off, as only a week later it already has more views than anything else on my channel since I made the Hugo base. (Still not many views in an absolute sense, but I'll take what I can get.) I guess that means I should do stuff like this more often, at least when I'm working on nicely self-contained little projects.

Continuing with my late medieval theme, I started Le Morte d'Arthur on my big walk. It's fairly hefty at ~38 hours, even at 2.8x playback speed. I thought all that walking time would eat it up, but I was only maybe a bit over halfway 5 days later. The trouble is, for all the swashbuckling and magic and fantasy, it's really kind of... boring.

It was neat hearing some of the older forms of the Arthurian mythos, certainly. And there is some wild stuff in there. Fairly early on Arthur goes to war with the Roman Empire, and easily wins, then that just isn't ever mentioned again. He also wins a British version of the Battle of Tours against some surprisingly numerous Saracens, leaving the time frame of the stories rather ambiguous. Lots of weird little details, like a magic ring that some lady loaned to some knight, which changed all the colors he was wearing into other colors. The need of knights to fight in a tournament without being recognized comes up far more than I would have expected. There isn't just one Sword in the Stone, but many Swords in the Stone, or magic sheath, all just kind of waiting around for the right person to come along and draw them finally. The (first) Lady of the Lake does give Excalibur to Arthur, but only on the promise he would grant a boon later. (This never works out well for anyone involved, btw.) Later she shows up and demand the head of one of Arthur's knights, who instead cuts her head off, using one of those other fated blades, in self defense. Then anotherLady of the Lake shows up, and she ends up imprisoning Merlin in a rock because he won't stop trying to rape her. Chivalry!

But beyond the interesting little weird bits, it's just dull and repetitive. Another book meant to be read out loud over many, many nights, it doesn't even have the charm and characterization of the Decameron stories. No knight has a personality beyond good and evil. No maiden has a personality beyond chaste and lascivious. No dwarf has a personality at all. At that's pretty the entire stock of character types. Even the battles manage to be boring. Either you are told and not shown, or the details shown are overused. The two knights smote each other passing sore and verily did knock each other from their horse. Then they fought for another two hours, until the ground was red with blood and their shields had been chopped to splinters. Then one either kills the other with a blow to the head that cuts down to shoulder, or knock them out with a blow to the head, or knocks their helmet off and the other yields. That's it, repeated, I dunno, 600 times.

(The language is pretty fun, though, hitting that perfect sweet spot of late Middle English where other than spelling it's really entirely readable yet still sounds super Ye Olde Fashion.)

The ending was pretty surprising, knowing only modern interpretations of the mythos. Lancelot is found in Guinevere's chamber, so he straight up murders a dozen knights to get away, and then murders another 4 dozen the next day to rescue Guinevere from being burned alive. (Not the first time he had to do that, either. Arthur is surprisingly willing to accept anyone's accusations against Guinevere.) He takes her back to his castle, then Arthur and the rest of the Round Table knights besiege it for months, until a truce is made. Lancelot goes back to France and is a great king there, until Arthur invades and starts the whole thing up again. Finally everyone but the two of them are dead, and Arthur has to go die in Mordred's coup back in England. So much honor and worship!

I also resent this book because it tricked me into watching Excalibur, and that was just dreadful.

The Black Death is ravaging Florence. The inescapable awareness of mortality has demolished all restraints on polite society, with shockingly lascivious behavior becoming common. To reduce their physical and moral risk, ten young people flee to the countryside. It is so boring there that they immediately decide to pass their time by telling stories. Each of them must tell one story every day, over a total of ten days, making up the vast majority of the book.

This was a fun, easy read, though a bit too slight of content for really extended listening. The stories range in length from brief anecdotes to fairly lengthy stories. None of them get as long winded as, say, The Knight's Tale. Overall it's a hornier book than Canterbury Tales -- basically every story is about someone who really wants to fuck -- but it doesn't get quite as crude. The tone is a lot more consistent than with Chaucer, reflecting the more homogeneous status of the narrators. Fewer of the stories seemed mean-spirited, but maybe that's wishful thinking. There is certainly no shortage of really ugly behavior in the stories.

While entirely readable, this classic story telling structure remains more suited to an oral tradition. A few stories read out at a time to a small audience would be ideal, instead of sitting down alone to read the whole thing straight through. Doing radio drama adaptations as a 100 episode podcast series would probably be the most faithful way for a modern audience to experience it. That would actually be a really fun project, if anyone's interested. Also, at the end of each story day, one of the framing characters sings a song. Making an album of those 10 songs with different artists for each would also be pretty cool!