tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-362224502011-11-27T16:49:36.817-08:00I am fascinated with rocks and geology. Not enough to become a scientist, but enough for friends and family to give me a rock occasionally. An ex-wife said I have rocks in my head, hence the title. Stars, galaxies, black holes and all the other stuff of the universe still evoke wonder. That will appear here also. After all, we and the rocks here are a product of what happened out there a long time ago.The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.comBlogger121100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-1378181463281993012008-12-21T15:51:00.001-08:002008-12-21T15:51:40.158-08:00

  Pope Benedict XVI has paid tribute to 17th-Century astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose scientific theories once drew the wrath of the Catholic Church.  BBC NEWS It has been nearly 400 years since the papal trial in which he was found vehemently suspect of heresy for his teaching of the heliocentric theory.  Galileo was then placed under house arrest and his movements restricted by Pope

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-24322056657140658612008-11-09T17:01:00.001-08:002008-11-09T17:01:38.205-08:00

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena. In my mind this is a form of insanity in the modern world and a total denial of all the knowledge that homo sapiens have acquired in the past 30,000 or so years. I can accept that poets and writers use the concept for the entertainment of their reader, but

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-80841569231967460212008-10-23T11:32:00.001-07:002008-10-23T11:32:58.034-07:00

  Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.    Yahoo! News   I love

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-16171033744978738862008-06-29T21:10:00.001-07:002008-12-11T13:29:47.500-08:00

CHICAGO, June 28 (UPI) -- The Field Museum in Chicago said a massive study of bird genetics has completely redrawn the avian evolutionary tree. "The results of the study are so broad that the scientific names of dozens of birds will have to be changed, and biology textbooks and bird watchers' field guides will have to be revised," The Field Museum said Thursday in a release.An international

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-35071772645740962332008-04-25T13:43:00.000-07:002008-04-25T13:43:35.509-07:00

Humans need to realize that for the foreseeable future we are stuck on our planet and we can not soon leave it.  A better way to recognize this is to look at the numbers. The stars that are nearest to our sun are about 4.4 light years away from us.  That is over 25 trillion miles away. Traveling at a million miles an hour that would take almost 26 million years for a group of human colonists to

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-15252605860126439292008-03-29T00:08:00.001-07:002008-03-29T18:02:22.526-07:00

Technorati tags: dark energy, dark matter, expanding universe, universe, black holes, stars, super novas, pulsars, solar wind, gamma ray bursts, grb's, CosmologyDark Energy and Dark MatterThe universe is a violent place and energy abounds in it. Huge amounts of matter are continuously expelled from stars and other objects. Massive solar flares add to the great volumes of matter hurling out into

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-86791647804526581492007-06-15T13:40:00.001-07:002008-03-27T22:05:54.356-07:00

Technorati tags: Geology, rocks, U. S. StatesWhen I travel, I often grab a rock, any rock, from that place. Here is a map of the U. S. showing, in red, all of the states I have visited. I probably collected a rock from each and tossed it into the rock pile at home. Some geologist would go nuts looking through that pile.create your own visited states map

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-62383195971972101652007-04-11T14:38:00.001-07:002007-05-04T12:05:05.463-07:00

Scientific thinking, education, common sense, and any other rational thinking process will never be able to overcome the lack of thought I see in people of faith. People of faith do not actually need to think, they "believe" and that is enough for them.  Because they believe, then all of the facts and data that humans have available to us are meaningless to them.  This information is as useless

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-21477458702501884652007-03-13T03:47:00.001-07:002007-03-13T03:47:42.897-07:00

Because of my affection for rocks, I have closely followed the discoveries associated with Tectonic Plate Theory.  But when I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I quickly became much more aware of the jumble of plates and tectonic processes that exist here.  I am not a scientist, but try to understand what is going on under our feet.  Like geology, I enjoy history too and geology is another form of

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-42100729487434347122006-12-29T20:24:00.001-08:002007-05-04T11:56:00.136-07:00

About 5 to 25 million years ago one of the largest flood basalts ever to occur on earth happened in the Pacific Northwest.   These flood basalts spread across what is now Oregon, Washington and Idaho.   There have been arguments that  they even extended into far northern California and Nevada.   In either case, they were huge and cover about 63,000 square miles.   Scientific analysis of Argon and

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-37401965107587284872006-12-11T15:03:00.001-08:002006-12-13T20:02:46.729-08:00

In the 70's my wife, Anita, and I took a long 4th of July weekend and drove down to Keokuk Iowa. We were going to find geodes. Actually, we never looked for them in Iowa. We stayed at a motel there and used it as our base for this adventure. We had been advised that when it came time to go looking and collecting, we should go across the river to Hamilton Illinois.A fellow rock hound had advised

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36222450.post-17132340501437538662006-12-11T08:09:00.001-08:002009-01-24T14:26:53.981-08:00

Geology became mainstream when John McPhee began writing about rocks. His Pulitzer prize winning book Annals of the Former World is an easy read for anyone even remotely interested in America, rocks, geology, or interesting people. It is all in there and it is beautifully written. He is one of my favorite writers. If you want to learn more about rocks, without studying, read this book. A

The Crater Lake Hermithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08524149753815365592noreply@blogger.com2