Job redux: Loss and the glory of the world meet in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Sean Penn as Jack in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Penn works his world-weary visage to great effect in the film Don’t worry, there are no spoilers here. In fact, I’m having a hard time even imagining a spoiler for this film. I could tell you the whole thing and it wouldn’t change its [...]
Big Head Todd and the mass extinction problem
Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis. I missed BHTM back in the 1990′s when they had their major-scale success; I blame graduate school for this. But a good friend introduced them to me several years ago and to this day I am grateful to him [...]
The wages of sin is plate tectonics
Here’s a nice elevation map of our poor fractured home planet. Click on the image for a detailed look. Notice in particular (1) the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the S-shaped mountain range running from the extreme South Atlantic all the way up to Iceland and beyond, and opening up at an average rate of 2.5 cm per [...]
Dinosaurs in church? We’re for that
Photos by Andrea Tintori. The small inset box is not in the correct location; it should be under the rail on the far right side. The measuring rod and the fossil itself are visible in the larger photo. The image was taken from discovery.com; this is obviously not Mr. Tintori’s mistake A small-town cathedral in [...]
Beware the cosmic charlatan
Joseph Graham, William Newman, and John Stacy, The Geologic Time Spiral, 2008. We at psnt.net are guessing that the little galaxy-looking thing in the lower left is the protosun and its protoplanetary disk. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. The image was produced by the United States Geological Survey and thus is a shining example of your [...]
Science envy is alive and well in old Kentucky
A trilobite, Ceraurus milleranus, found in Maysville, Kentucky. Whence this delight? There are two options here: (1) Ceraurus milleranus lived during the Ordovician, a period that lasted from about 488 to 444 million years ago and all its trilobyie cousins went extinct by the end of the Permian (250 million years ago); or (2) Ceraurus [...]
Two by two came the epidexipteryxes and vulcanodons
Noah and his family loading up the menagerie as their neighbors stare in disbelief. I don’t know who created the original image or who doctored it up so nicely with velociraptors, tyrannosaurs, pterodactyls, and whatever that weird black-and-white thing is on the left. If you do know, please advise. I try pretty hard to get [...]
