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Saturday, January 21, 2006
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 Saturday, January 21, 2006
started 1/21/2006; 3:48:38 PM - last post 1/22/2006; 1:23:12 AM
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Doc Searls - Saturday, January 21, 2006 
1/21/2006; 7:48:38 PM (reads: 5564, responses: 3)
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Ask Y 
| | Niall of the Nine Hostages, who became high king of Ireland, got his name from using the taking of hostages as a strategy for subjugating his opponent chieftains. He is known in folklore as a raider of the British and French coasts. Supposedly slain in the English Channel or in Scotland, his descendants were the most powerful rulers of Ireland until the 11th century. |
| | Modern surnames tracing their ancestry to Niall include (O')Neill, (O')Gallagher, (O')Boyle, (O')Doherty, O'Donnell, Connor, Cannon, Bradley, O'Reilly, Flynn, (Mc)Kee, Campbell, Devlin, Donnelly, Egan, Gormley, Hynes, McCaul, McGovern, McLoughlin, McManus, McMenamin, Molloy, O'Kane, O'Rourke and Quinn. |
| | My father's mother's mother's mother was a McLoughlin. |
| | But since Niall's genetic marker is passed along by Y chromosomes, I am not likely connected. At least not that way. On the all-Y side, my earliest known Searls ancestor was a Samuell Searls (probably this guy), who was born in upstate New York in the mid-1700s. He fathered a large mess of Searls who spread around Upstate and Eaton County, Michigan, which the family pioneered and settled. Spellings included Searls, Searles, Sarls and Sarles. |
| | Before that, unclear. My own records on the matter are in a box somewhere. Maybe a relative can fill me in. |
Discovery
Only 567,290,382 more to go
| | Aerial photos offer better resolution than Google Maps'. Amateur aerial photos may prove to be the next step in increasing the quality and update frequency of maps with real visuals. Photographs from window seats on scheduled flights could be geotagged and stitched together to form a canvas of the Earth's surface. |
| | Besides being useful for navigation, education and planning, there is something inherently fascinating about images of Earth from above. |
| | Speaking of which, on my last flight from Oakland to Los Angeles, I took several shots of a hill alongside Highway 101 south of Gilroy, roughly stradling the San Andreas Fault. |
| | There's a name for the kind of hill that gets squeezed upwards like a mudpie between the uneven walls of a moving fault. Maybe a real geologist out there can fill us in on that one. You see them along Highway 280 on the Peninsula and again up in the Santa Cruz Mountains here and there. Not sure if that's what we have here, but in any case, the hill appears to be sliding down in large pieces, as fast as it's coming up. |
| | You can see in those last three links how the sliding and sluping has happened repeatedly, and in several directions. |
| | So I decided to shoot the same scene through the window from the ground the day before yesterday, when I was driving back to Santa Barbara form San Jose. While the sliding nature of the land is less obvious, it's still clearly a happening thing. |
| | [Later...] Just got some great input on all this from (Genuine Geologist) Ron Schott. I'll put some fresh data up later when I have time. |
Elsewares
A ('nuther) list
Clue training
| | If the MSM was left to their own accord there would never be feeds. There would be forced registration, robots.txt which blocks everything, horrible invalid HTML, and content without any links. |
| | It's their version of DRM... |
| | Even today most MSM lacks any sort of "quality" feeds. For the MSM sites that do have feeds they're generally of horrible quality. They're not full-content. You'd be lucky to get a summary let alone any rich HTML. |
| | We're seeing now with MSM what's being mirrored in the Entertainment industry. They're being dragged onto the Internet kicking and screaming and they don't like it. Things are going to have to get worse before they get better. |
| | In the post, however, Kevin is sort-of disagreeing with Dave about where RSS came from. Dave says RSS came from the publishing industry. Kevin says, If wouldn't have eventually come unless it was pushed. |
| | And I'm saying. Of course. Dave pushed it. Along with the technology. |
| | But there's also a subtle, easily-forgotten point here. Dave had a long history, before that, of equipping publishers with tools for writing on the Web. Dave was pushing the notion of the read/write Web long before the term "weblog" showed up. And he was addressing much of his work to publishers. |
| | At that last link, he was doing something he's also good at: giving credit where due. |
| | I also think it's perfectly okay to give that credit, even if the publishing industry as a whole (like so many others) resists the movement of its primary environment from offline to online. I've often said I think the Times and other papers are crazy to charge for fishwrap while giving away the fresh editorial for which they charge $1 or more per issue on newsstands. But I still think Len Apcar, Martin Niesenholtz and others at the times deserve kudos for respecting blogs getting the RSS ball rolling. |
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Geoff - Re: Saturday, January 21, 2006
1/21/2006; 11:45:18 PM (reads: 721, responses: 0)
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Amy - Re: Saturday, January 21, 2006
1/22/2006; 3:25:08 AM (reads: 844, responses: 0)
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Hey Doc, I can't call myself a "real geologist" anymore, but I did study geology for 5 years at Edinburgh Uni. I've loved your photos and geo-musings ever since first finding your blog 2 years ago.
About the name for those uplifted blocks...structures can get pretty complicated around transverse fault zones, and the exact terminology will depend on the fault geometry of the locality in question. One term for uplifted blocks on the "restraining bend" of a strike-slip fault (where the ground is getting pushed together) is simply "pop-ups". Often you get additional faulting arising from the compression, and "flower structures" develop. You may also have been thinking of "horsts" which are the (relatively) uplifted blocks resulting from normal faulting (like in rift valleys).
I'm sure someone familiar with the area in question can give you better info than me.
I love the idea of stitching images of the world together. There is so much potential for geoscience education using tools like Google Earth, geotagged flickr photos etc. I'm currently building a site about using Google Earth for geology, pulling together different people's work. Your photos could make some great overlays.
And the book idea you mentioned the other day is a great one - I'll buy it!
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Frank Horowitz - Not _my_ fault!
1/22/2006; 5:23:12 AM (reads: 885, responses: 0)
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Hi Doc,
As Amy suggested above, a reasonable technical name for such a landform is a "flower structure" or more colloquially a "pop up".
That being said, there's no truly widely used name for strucutures such as that hill which are obviously due to vertical motion in a strike-slip regime (like the San Andreas, where the particle motions are 99.9% horizontal). This is because such structures are relatively rare compared with vertical strucutures due to dip-slip faulting (where particle motions are vertical).
My wife (a Ph.D. Strucutral Geologist) and I (a Ph.D. Geophysicist) both racked our brains trying to come up with the name, but both agreed that "flower structure" was pretty close when we read Amy's post.
(Geology, being rooted in Natural History, is rife with agglomerated jargon. I'm sure a linguistic grad student or three could write a thesis on the etymology of the words in current usage.)
Cheers,
Frank Horowitz
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