Petrified Forest National Park

June 6, 2018

In some of our recent travels we had the opportunity to pay a visit to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

Driving up from Texas we couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and look at what once might have been a lush, green, and growing forest, that now is made of rock upon after being buried in some sort of natural or otherwise celestial calamity that befell the area many years ago.

Meteor Crater (also known as Barringer Crater) on Earth is only 50,000 years old (tap or click image to enlarge)

Not being a geologist by any stretch, I pretty much surmised or came away with the notion that this particular area of the forest had been decimated as a result of a meteor that hit just west of it’s location.

I think rather that instead of the petrified forest being buried slowly over thousands of years, it was buried at once, under extreme pressure and heat. Accompanying burn marks on the petrified wood may testify to that fact.

All in all, the area is desolate and barren, lending to the total destructive nature of the meteor impact. I’m also pretty sure that the climate in the region was somewhat forever changed as a result of all of the upheaval.

Petrified log extends from among soft Limestone (tap or click image to enlarge)

I’m pretty sure that if there were no erosion, our earth would look just like the moon. We are, after all, floating about in space, just like the moon, but our atmosphere and our instances of erosion makes any meteor strikes somewhat less obvious. The fact that the meteor crater is still so well defined even today, might lend a bit of credence to the fact that it’s occurrence is fairly new in geological time.

When we look at just how quickly the Mt St. Helens area recovered after the eruption of 1980, I’m somewhat of the opinion that the meteor crater happened closer to thousands of years ago instead of millions of years ago. The meteor that struck and decimated the now petrified forest in Arizona could have easily polluted a large area of the region, thus preventing the regrowth of any of the native or natural vegetation that might have once existed there before. As far as the existing climate is concerned, just imagine how the climate in the region might be now if the meteor event had never happened.

Just my opinion of course.

Though there were many different bits and pieces of petrified wood laying about out in the open, we still visited a gift shop in town and purchased a few pieces of petrified wood for Dustin’s little collection.

It was an excellent trip to say the least. If you’ve never been to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, I would highly recommend that you go …

To learn more about what asteroids might do when they strike, check out this Asteroid Damage Visualization Map

Native Petroglyph Rock (tap or click to enlarge image)

The National Park Service had stationary binoculars set up to view petroglyphs up close, but these were worn and blurry, so I found the petroglyphs to be best viewed through the telephoto lens on my camera. These rocks sort of represent the information age of their time as native peoples used them to communicate back and forth to each other.

The context of each image is extremely important and integral to its meaning. Today’s native people have stated that the placement of each petroglyph image was not a casual or random decision. Some petroglyphs have meanings that are only known to the individuals who made them. Others represent tribal, clan, kiva, or societal markers. Some are religious entities and others show who came to the area and where they went. Petroglyphs still have contemporary meaning, while the meaning of others is no longer known, but are respected for belonging to “those who came before.”

How do you petrify wood fast?

It involves soaking a section of wood in hydrochloric acid for two days and then in either a silica or titanium solution for another two days. After air-drying, the wood is placed in an argon gas filled furnace and slowly heated to 1400° Celsius over a period of two hours.
If our modern science can create petrified wood in under a week, then it wouldn’t be that much more of a stretch to think that mother nature could likely create it in under a month.

Petrified Forest National Park Gallery:

Is your favorite news site trolling you for clicks? Searching for the Real News

Alan

January 18, 2018

In this day and age of our presumed highly charged political environment, we often can be found asking ourselves, “Is this true, or even real?”, upon after looking at our favorite news sites. Finding out what might be true or not can be somewhat of a daunting task if you really want to know and understand what might be going on in the world today.

In the world of business, everyone seems to have the new and improved next best thing.
This is how it all works. News sites aren’t really any different than this. Theirs is to draw in more readers. The more readers a site has, the more the site can charge for advertising, and so it goes. Money is the end game in the news media, just like it is in the overall world of business.

Understanding that doesn’t really answer the question of what’s real. But it’s a first step in the process of who you might potentially trust when it comes down to selecting your favorite news sources.

Learning who to trust, or not, in the news media game can take many steps or a few steps depending on how much of a skeptic you might be. You may only investigate a news source in relation to what you might have been taught to believe as a child and be fine with that, or not, it’s all up to you.

These are going to be some of your first questions in your quest to find some of your first answers.

Is this news site legitimate? (legitimacy can be a rather subjective term to those who might be inclined to being ideologically hobbled) — Does it really try to present opposing views in an equal and timely fashion? Keep in mind that there are those in this world that aren’t in the least bit interested in having any sort of conversation, much less respecting anyone with an opposing view.

Whenever I find myself wondering about the legitimacy of a news site, especially a site that I’ve never heard of before, I head straight to www.whois.sc and look up the domain name. If I was just some plain old John Q Public and had recently came upon the opportunity to look up www.TheDrum.com — I would find that it’s being hosted on the part time servers of AmazonAWS out of Seattle Washington. I might discover that the domain is being hidden using a site hiding organization called PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC. —

Though this site purports to be a news site, is it really? Is this site really a trusted source for news? It’s articles look legit, right? http://www.thedrum.com/us — or, just for the sake of argument, is this one of those Russian hacker news sites trying to sway American public opinion I keep hearing so much about? We can ask these questions because we don’t know who actually owns it, right? If, for instance, I did contact the owners of the site through the contact form, how would I know they were telling the truth? I could be told anything, because, after all, this is the internet, and a place where you can put on aires and pretend you need to be anybody or anything you want at any particular moment.

I’m pretty sure that if the U.S. Dept of Justice inquired about the site, Amazon or the ICAAN would be compelled to respond with the truth. But average Americans wouldn’t be able to accurately determine the site legitimacy on their own, and based on that premise, I would venture to guess that John Q Public would have to write this site off as pure entertainment, and declare it as being a fake news site (regardless of whether he agreed with the site message or not).

As an aside, you can see by the paragraph above, that sensationalized commentary has eroded the legitimacy of the entire news industry. If big news were totally above the board, like they say they are, we wouldn’t have to be asking many of these kinds of questions in our search for the real, albeit, ever so boring, news.

www.whois.sc is your friend — Doing business with, or giving a certain legitimacy to any site that hides behind Privacy Protect is usually not the best idea. (Privacy Protect is an extremely valuable tool that might be used by private individuals, not businesses or so-called legitimate news organizations)

Clickbaiting

Do headlines actually match the written content on the page? There are those in our industry that promote sensational sounding headlines in order to garner clicks into a rather dull and boring article write that has nothing to do with the headline. (Is your favorite news site trolling you for clicks?)

CNN does this — Here we have a headline, and once you click on the headline link, a video is presented that has absolutely nothing to do with the headline. These sorts of bait-and-switch tactics are a major part of what’s wrong with today’s news industry.

How does the particular news site get you to click?

Well, there could be a number of ways. Nefarious news sites will more often than not shoot from the hip with headlines intended to play on your possible fears, doubts, or prejudices. Drawing the anger out of a reader pays huge dividends at the end of the day via equally huge advertising fees.

The news industry of today isn’t anywhere near how it was 40 years ago. It used to be that the news mattered most. But news is dull and boring. News is just that, “News”.

News doesn’t pay nearly as well as as opinion does.

Over the years news has given way to opinion. There’s a pretty big difference between being a news reporter, and being a commentator. Commentators only comment on just the key points of a possible news story, and then turn around and tell you what to believe, or think, or whatever. Commentators are actor/entertainers, not news reporters or journalists. Since real news is mundane and boring, someone came along and tried to make it interesting by coloring the news with their own personal opinion. All of the big names in the industry does this. MSNBC, Fox News, CBS News … all of them.

Anybody that’s been around the industry long enough would certainly remember Walter Cronkite — Trust me – Walter was no actor, and though we all loved him, watching the news in those days was tantamount to listening to paint dry. Walter Cronkite was trusted by the nation, but all of that trust couldn’t pay the bills or the mortgage, so big news had to come up with something else that could.

So how can you tell which news site is giving you the real news?

Since most just provide commentary, the best we can do in this case is to select the one that has the least amounts of commentary. This is the point where getting off of the front page might help. Looking through the back pages of a news site, especially on the big news sites might garner a glimmer of hope for those that aren’t interested in what a commentator thinks. No site is totally useless because even the big guys can get it right once in a while.

Most real news can be found in local outlets. Local news sources don’t have the time or the money to push a political agenda or tell you what to think, so they can be counted on for more real news than the big guys can – Local outlets are usually where all of the real journalists are found anyway, so it just stands to reason that your real news will be found there too.

There’s an old saying, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see, and you’ll be all right”.

At the end of the day, you are going to settle in with who you might feel most comfortable with as it relates to your preferences on commentary – Keep your commentary, but search for the real news whenever you can – Real news usually doesn’t have a political bent to it so you should be fine knowing that you won’t have to run off to a padded room somewhere when you hear it or read it.

You’ve watched your commentary, now jump out there and search for the real news – See what’s really going on in the world for a change.

Happy Trails

Until next time, and thanks for the read.

Recent out of Africa theory proven wrong by Australian discoveries

Alan

November 17, 2017

The evolutionary origins of modern humans and the mapping of ancient hominin migrations across the planet are matters almost always in flux. With only limited and fragmentary physical evidence available, it has proven incredibly difficult to pin down the definitive narrative of the human story. Perhaps the most prominent claim to whether the last three decades largely unchanged is that around 70,000 years ago modern humans began to migrate out from their homelands in sub-Saharan Africa to colonize the world beyond.

The “Recent Out of Africa Theory” remains at the core of most consensus models tackling human origins and migrations, but in the background, a series of discoveries are threatening to consign this theory to the garbage bin of history. Most of the contrary evidence is emerging from studies focused on the largely sidelined (from a palaeoanthropology perspective) continent of Australasia.

Three axes from different layers of the site and a rectangular sharpening stone from the 65,000-year level

Until around eight months ago, the scientific community was in broad agreement that the first humans to reach Australasia had walked from Africa, probably close to 60,000 years ago, and finally sailed through Indonesia to the continent’s shores 50,000 years ago. This scenario certainly seemed to fit well with the overall expectations of the recent out of Africa model and seemed to embrace most of the available evidence. Then came the announcement of a 65,000-year-old Aboriginal site at the Madjedbebe rock shelter in the far north. Some of the associated stone artefacts mentioned in the paper that was published in Nature in July 2017, “Human Occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 years ago,” produced dates closer to 80,000 years.

“People got here much earlier than we thought, which means, of course, they must also have left Africa much earlier to have travelled on their long journey through Asia and south-east Asia to Australia,” said the lead author, Associate Professor Chris Clarkson, from the University of Queensland.

There is no conceivable way in which the presence of humans in Australia 65,000 years ago can be explained by a migration moving slowly from Africa through Eurasia 60,000 years ago; even at the 70,000-year upper limit for dating this expansion, it simply does not make sense. Multiple genome studies have indicated that the ancestors of modern Eurasians diverged from their source population between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Before going any further, it is essential to understand why the populating of Eurasia is understood to be the outcome of expansion from Africa; it’s all to do with modern Africans’ genes. The ancestors of all living Europeans and Asians carried the mitochondrial haplogroups (genetic markers) M and N; they also carried Y-chromosomal haplogroup CF. A sampling of modern African DNA revealed that the Eurasian haplogroups stemmed back to mutations which had appeared in the African genome around 70,000 years ago, respectively, these earlier haplogroups were mitochondrial DNA HgL3 and Y-chromosomal HgCT.

You are probably wondering what, then, is the problem with the above modelling; surely this DNA data offers definitive evidence of a shared African origin for all modern humans. The reason for extreme doubt is that the oldest sample of African DNA yet recovered is 8,100 years old. The lack of sufficiently old African genetic samples means we can’t use DNA to geographically place the ancestors of modern Africans living 70,000 years ago; they may have been living well beyond the African continent.

Researchers at the University of La Laguna have suggested that haplogroup L3 entered Africa during a migration, explained in a paper published in December, “Carriers of Mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup L3 Basic Lineages Migrated Back to Africa from Asia Around 70,000 Years Ago.” Though the authors of the paper still posit a possible earlier African origin for these migrants, they highlight another glaring anomaly within their data:

“The southern route hypothesis proposes that the Eurasian branches (M and N) of the macrohaplogroup L3 differentiated in or near the African continent and rapidly spread across the Asian peninsulas to reach Australia and Melanesia. Under this assumption, it is expected that, in general, coalescence ages of haplogroups should decrease from Africa to Australia. However, we have demonstrated that this is not the case. Just on the contrary, the oldest M and N haplogroups are detected in southern China and Australasia instead of India, and associations between longitudinal geographic distances and relative ages of M and N haplogroups run, against to expectation, westwards with younger haplogroup ages going to Africa.”

With confirmation that humans were already living in Australasia 65,000 years ago, and that these people carried the oldest variants of the haplogroups considered ancestral for all modern Eurasians, we can redraw the migration map. Somewhere between 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, people carrying the identified ancestral lineages began to move through Asia, heading westwards towards Europe and Africa, reaching these lands 45,000 years ago. These migrants are almost certainly Australasians; no other interpretation better fits the evidence.

Once we abandon the reliance upon modern DNA samples and instead focus on archaeology, paleontology, paleoclimate modelling and archaeogenetic data, the “recent out of Africa theory” is immediately displaced. We may well find that by the end of 2018 a far more harmonious consensus model involving a recent migration out of Australasia.

sourced: Bruce Fenton – author of The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution

photo credit: Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation/Dominic O’Brien

Frito’s Morning Hunt

Alan

June 15, 2017

A friend from town asked my wife if we wanted a cat.

Evidently her daughter could keep it and wanted to give it away. My wife, not being a cat person reluctantly said yes and the rest was history.

Meet the cat we named Frito.

When we got her she was starved and about half feral. Malnourished as she was, we had no idea that she was pregnant too.

Frito was so starved in fact that she would catch moths out of mid air and eat them. She even pulled Dustin’s Baconater hamburger of off the dining room table and ate it.

When we got Frito we immediately took her to the vet for shots and a check-up (that’s when we learned she was pregnant). Once she had her babies (which we promptly gave away to good homes), we had her fixed because she went in heat right away. Drove Luna (our dog) up the wall with all of the yowling.

Once our friend in town found out that we got Frito all fixed up with shots and all, she wanted her back for her daughter — Nope — Cats are an investment and they become part of the family.

The pictures below are just one of Frito’s morning hunts (that cat could catch anything).

Guarding Against Deadly Blows to the Chest in Kids’ Sports

Alan

November 12, 2016

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jack Crowley was 15 when a baseball hit him in the chest and stopped his heart. The Long Island teen survived thanks to a police officer who grabbed a defibrillator and shocked his heart back into rhythm.

A blow to the chest — one that hits at just the wrong spot, at just the wrong time — can trigger deadly cardiac arrest. Fortunately it’s rare. But most victims are otherwise healthy kid athletes. And survival hinges on fast use of those heart-zapping defibrillators that not every athletic league or school keeps near the playing fields.

There soon may be another attempt at protection: A U.S. organization that oversees athletic equipment has proposed the first performance standard for chest protectors to reduce the risk from those blows, a step that could lead to updated gear.

Nancy Crowley finds it hard to watch her three sports-loving sons’ games since Jack’s scary near-miss in a batting cage a year ago. She calls the latest move by the athletic industry overdue.

“You cannot live in a bubble,” acknowledged Crowley, who helped lobby local athletic officials to improve access to defibrillators but wants more protection. “If a standard has come along that they feel is going to protect them in some way, I’m thrilled.”

Cardiac arrest, when the heart abruptly stops beating, is uncommon in young people, especially athletes who presumably are in their prime. There are no good counts in kids’ athletics. Whatever the number — or whatever the cause — cardiac arrest is getting more attention from parents, coaches and heart specialists who say deaths should be preventable.

Indeed, NCAA guidelines recently reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology say defibrillators should be kept in the immediate vicinity of “high risk locations” such as weight rooms, basketball courts and ball fields.

For younger students, many states have laws encouraging or requiring defibrillators in schools but few specify athletic facilities, according to the advocacy group Parent Heart Watch.

The most frequent cause of cardiac arrest in a young athlete is an underlying structural problem of the heart, such as a thickened heart muscle, the problem often behind headline-making collapses of basketball players.

The chest protector standards take aim at a different problem: Every year, an estimated 10 to 20 people suffer what’s called commotio cordis — cardiac arrest caused by a blow to the chest. A voluntary registry that has collected information on more than 250 cases over two decades does show survival increasing in recent years thanks to more defibrillator access.

The highest risk is to boys under 15, when the chest wall is still flexible, not as sturdy as it will become by their 20s when such deaths hardly ever are reported.

About a third of the time, victims were wearing some form of chest protector when they collapsed, showing at least some of today’s equipment isn’t enough, said Dr. Mark Link, a heart specialist at Tufts University Medical Center who spent more than a decade unraveling just how commotio cordis occurs.

Link’s tests, using young pigs as a model, revealed that killer hits are those landing directly over the heart, at about 40 miles an hour — and in the milliseconds between heartbeats.

Armed with that science, the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, or NOCSAE, funded creation of a sort of crash-test dummy to prove what gear really reduces the risk, and proposed the first standard for chest protectors used in baseball and lacrosse that aim to do so.

The idea: find materials that disperse the heart-damaging force of a blow without impeding players’ movements — whether they’re catchers or youngsters playing other positions who may wear shirt-like chest coverings under their uniforms. Guarding against commotio cordis may require a different design than standard foam that blocks a broken rib. Among the questions is how to integrate protection against both.

The standard is expected to be completed in January; only then could manufacturers label gear certified as meeting it. NOCSAE’s recommendations often are adopted by sports governing bodies. It’s not clear what such gear would cost.

Already, one company that uses military-grade materials in sports equipment has developed some lightweight protection it expects to fit the bill. In March, Link’s team published lab tests in the Journal of Clinical Sports Medicine suggesting a combination of foams and polymers used by Pennsylvania-based Unequal Technologies is likely to be effective. The company, which funded the research, is producing chest protectors and heart-covering shirts that it plans to test against the final NOCSAE standard.

“If we can stop a bullet, we can stop a ball,” said Unequal chief executive Rob Vito.

Other manufacturers are traveling to NOCSAE’s lab to learn to test products. Stan Jurga Jr. of All-Star Sporting Goods, a Massachusetts-based manufacturer, wonders if he’ll need to alter equipment aimed at professionals, too, because teens sometimes wear the adult sizes.

“Those are the real-world challenges,” said Jurga, who also is pursuing a protective shirt. But he applauded the science, saying, “the last thing anyone wants is a false sense of security.”

sourced – Lauran Neergaard – Associated Press