Elements

Julia's Nov. 30 11:54am post reminds me of a passage I love from Annie Dillard's An American Childhood--a book that I have read twice -- and finished for the second time just today for a human development class...

"The awesome story of the earth's crust's buckling and shifting unfortunately failed to move me in the slightest. But here was an interesting find. Only a quirk of chemistry prevented the ground's being a heap of broken rubble. I hadn't thought of that. Why isn't it all a heap of broken rubble? For the bedrock fractures and cleaves, notoriously; it uplifts, crumbles, splits, shears, and folds. All this action naturally shatters the crust. But it happens that the abundant element of silicon is water soluble at high temperatures. This element heals the scars. Dissolved silicon seeps everywhere underground and slips into fissures and veins; it fills in, mends, and cements the rubble, over and over, from age to age. It heals all the thick wounds on the continents' skin and under the oceans; it solidifies as it cools, uplifting, and forms pale veins of scarry quartz running through everything; it dominates the granite bedrock on which we build our cities, the granite interior of mountains, and the beds that under lie the plains."

#BSG

I am really into Battlestar Galactica now. Just started watching during the Hurricane. Sweetie and I just moved in together and we haven't installed the tv so I'm still only partway through season two. Yesterday I checked to see if there was wifi (weefee as they call it in Italia) and one of the networks is called Caprica six!!!!!!!

One of an art of my coworker is one of some gestating machine mothers and reminds me of how the Cylons want to gestate babies in women. That sounds normal but it's not. Coworker is adept with the internets so I cannot link to that specific drawing but here is her website the drawing is called three winsome maids gestate our machine babies / img 50 of 118

Periodic Tables

Here we have a couple periodic tables. This post was inspired by Radiolab's "very 1970's periodic table."

Here's Mendeleev's original

And here's a guy wearing it as a shirt

Bye for now.