John.c.clarke

A LIVE SHOW STARTING IN TWO WEEKS TIME IN MANCHESTER

The show is a collaboration between myself and the brilliant Robert del Naja of Massive Attack.

What links us is not just cutting stuff up - but an interest in trying to change the way people see power and politics in the modern world. To say to them - have you thought of looking at it like this?

We've used film, music, stories and ideas to try and do this - to build a new kind of experience. The best way we can describe it is "a Gilm" - a new way of integrating a gig with a film that has a powerful overall narrative and emotional individual stories.

The show will be a bit of a total experience. You will be surrounded by all kinds of images and sounds. But it is also about ideas. It tells a story about how a new system of power has risen up in the modern world to manage and control us. A rigid and static system that has found in those images and sounds a way of enveloping us in a thin two-dimensional version of the past.

A fake, but enchanting world which we all live in today - but which has also become a new kind of prison that prevents us moving forward into the future.

Along with Massive Attack the show will star two great singers.

The amazing Liz Fraser.

And the wonderful Horace Andy.

And some of the music will be surprising - from early Barbra Streisand to Siberian punk from the 1980s.

Here's a two-dimensional trailer that will give you an idea of what the show is about - and the stories it tells.

A film by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cast: Icosahedron

Tags: picasso

[Image: The west coast of North America as it appeared roughly 215 million years ago; map by Ron Blakey].

The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear leaving only the subtlest of geological traces.

With a particular emphasis on North America and the U.S. Southwest—where Blakey still lives, in Flagstaff, Arizona—these visually engaging reconstructions of the Earth's distant past show how dynamic a planet we live on, and imply yet more, unrecognizable changes ahead.

The following images come from Ron Blakey's maps of the paleotectonic evolution of North America. The first map shows the land 510 million years ago, progressing from there—reading left to right, top to bottom—through the accretion and dissolution of Pangaea into the most recent Ice Age and, in the final image, North America in its present-day configuration.


As part of BLDGBLOG's collaborative side-project, Venue, Nicola Twilley and I met with Blakey in his Flagstaff home to talk about the tectonic processes that make and remake the surface of the Earth, the difficulty in representing these changes with both scientific accuracy and visual panache, and the specific satellite images and software tools he uses to create his unique brand of deep-time cartography.

Like film stills from a 600-million year-old blockbuster, Blakey's maps take us back to the Precambrian—but there are much older eras still, stretching unmapped into far earlier continents and seas, and there are many more billions of years of continental evolution to come. Blakey talked us through some of the most complex changes in recent geological history, including the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean, and he allowed himself to speculate, albeit briefly, about where Earth's continental crust might yet be headed (including a possible supercontinent in the Antarctic).

Many of Blakey's maps are collected in the book Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau, written with Wayne Ranney, where Blakey also describes some of the research and methods that went into producing them. Blakey also contributed to the recent, new edition of a textbook by Wolfgang Frisch and Martin Meschede, Plate Tectonics: Continental Drift and Mountain Building, a thorough exploration of landscapes disassembling and colliding over vast spans of time.

• • •
[Image: The west coast of North America, depicted as it would have been 130 million years ago; the coast is a labyrinth of islands, lagoons, and peninsulas slowly colliding with the mainland to form the mountains and valleys we know today. Map by Ron Blakey].

Geoff Manaugh: When I first discovered your maps showing the gradual tectonic re-location of the continents over hundreds of millions of years, I thought this was exactly what geologists should be doing: offering clear, step-by-step visual narratives of the evolution of the earth’s surface so that people can better understand the planet we live on. What inspired you to make the maps, and how did you first got started with them?

Ronald Blakey: Well, the very first maps I made were in conjunction with my doctoral thesis, back in the early 1970s. Those were made with pen and ink. I made sketches to show what the paleogeography would have looked like for the specific formation I was studying with my doctorate. Three or four of those maps went into the thesis, which was then published by the Utah Geologic Survey. I’ve also done a number of papers over the years where I’ve made sketches.

But I was late getting into the computer. Basically, during my graduate work I never used a computer for anything. I kind of resisted it, because, for the kind of work I was doing, I just didn’t see a need for it—I didn’t do quantifiable kinds of things. Then, of course, along comes email and the Internet. I actually forget when I first started with Photoshop—probably in the mid-1990s. When I found that, I just thought, wow: the power of this is incredible. I quickly learned how to use the cloning tool, so that I could clone modern topography onto ancient maps, and that made things even simpler yet.

Another thing I started doing was putting these maps into presentations. There were something like five different programs back there, in the late 90s, but the only one that survived was PowerPoint—which is too bad, because it was far from the best of the programs. I was using a program called Astound, which was far superior, particularly in the transitions between screens. I could do simple animations. I could make the tectonic plates move, create mountain belts, and so forth.

I retired in May of 2009, but all of my early maps are now online. With each generation of maps that I’ve done, there has been a noted improvement over earlier maps. I find new techniques and, when you work with Photoshop as much as I do, you learn new ideas and you find ways to make things that were a little clumsy look more smooth.

Manaugh: Where does the data come from?

Blakey: It comes from various publications. You can get a publication and have that PDF open, showing what something looked like in the past, and work from that. Usually, what I’m working from are fairly simple sketches published in the literature. They’ll show a subduction zone and a series of violent arcs, or a collision zone. What I do is take this information and make it more pictorial.

If you create a series of maps in sequence, you can create them in such a way that certain geologic events, from one time slice to the next, to the next, to the next, will blend. It depends a lot on the scale of what you’re trying to show—the whole world versus just four or five states in the West.

Now, throughout the years from, let’s say, 2004 until I retired in 2009, I kept improving the website. I envisioned most of this as educational material, and I didn’t pay much attention to who used it, how they used it, and so forth. But, then, shortly before I retired, various book companies and museums—and, most recently, oil companies—have approached me. So I started selling these and I tried very diligently not to allow this to overlap with what I was doing for my teaching and my research at the University.

In the following long sequence of images, we see the evolution of the west coast of North America, its state boundaries ghosted in for reference. Sea levels rise and fall; island chains emerge and collide; mountains form; inland seas proliferate and drain; and, eventually, modern day California, Vancouver Island, and the Baja peninsula take shape, among other recognizable features. The time frame represented by these images is approximately 500 million years. All maps by Ron Blakey.


Nicola Twilley: What do the oil companies want them for?

Blakey: They’re my biggest customers now. Usually, the geologists at oil companies are working with people who know either much less geology than they do or, in some cases, almost no geology at all, yet they’re trying to convince these people that this is where they need to explore, or this is what they need to do next.

They find these maps very useful to show what the Devonian of North Dakota looked like, for example, which is a hot spot right now with all the shales that they’re developing in the Williston Basin. What they like is that I show what the area might have really looked like. This helps, particularly with people who have only a modest understanding of geology, particularly the geologic past.

Manaugh: What have been some of the most difficult regions or geological eras to map?

Blakey: The most difficult thing to depict is back in the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic. Large areas of the continent were flooded, deep into the interior.

During certain periods, like the Ordovician, the Devonian, and parts of the Jurassic—especially the Cretaceous—as much as two-thirds of the continents were underwater. But they’re still continents; they’re still continental crusts. They’re not oceans. The sea level was just high enough, with respect to where the landscape was at the time, that the area was flooded. Of course, this is a concept that non-geologists really have problems with, because they don’t understand the processes of how continents get uplifted and subside and erode and so forth, but this is one of the concepts that my maps show quite nicely: the seas coming in and retreating.

But it’s very difficult—I mean, there is no modern analog for a seaway that stretched from the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and that was 400 miles wide. There’s nothing like that on Earth today. But the styles of mountains have not dramatically changed over the last probably two billion years—maybe even longer than that. I don’t go back that far—I tend to stick with the last 600 million years or so—but the styles of mountains haven’t changed. The nature of island arcs hasn’t changed, as far as we know.

What has changed is the amount of vegetation on the landscape. My maps that are in the early part of the Paleozoic—the Cambrian and the Ordovician early part of the Silurian—tend to be drab-colored. Then, in the late Silurian and in the Devonian, when the land plants developed, I start bringing vegetation colors in. I try to show the broad patterns of climate. Not in detail, of course—there’s a lot of controversy about certain paleoclimates. But, basically, paleoclimates follow the same kinds of regimens that the modern climates are following: where the oceans are, where the equator is, where the mountain ranges are, and so forth.

That means you can make broad predictions about what a paleoclimate would have been based on its relationship to the equator or based on the presence or absence of nearby mountains. I use these kinds of principles to show more arid areas versus more humid areas.

The next three sequences show the evolution of the Earth's surface in reverse, from the present day to, at the very bottom, 600 million years ago, when nearly all of the planet's landmasses were joined together in the Antarctic. The first sequence shows roughly 90 million years of backward evolution, the continents pulling apart from one another and beginning a slow drift south. They were mapped using the Mollweide projection, and, in all cases, are by Ron Blakey.


Twilley: And you paint the arid area based on a contemporary analog?

Blakey: Right. I know the modern world reasonably well and I’ll choose something today that might have matched the texture and aridity of that older landscape.

I use a program called GeoMapApp that gives me digital elevation maps for anywhere in the world. Most recently, they have coupled it with what they call the “Blue Marble.” NASA has stitched together a bunch of satellite photos of the world in such a way that you can’t tell where one series of photos come in or another. It’s a fairly true-color representation of what Earth would look like from space. So this Blue Marble is coupled with the GeoMapApp’s digital elevation topography; you put the Blue Marble over it, and you use a little slider to let the topography show through, and it gives you a fairly realistic looking picture of what you’re looking for.

For example, if I’m working with a mountain range in the southern Appalachians for a Devonian map—well, the southern Appalachians, during the Devonian, were probably far enough away from the equator that it was in the arid belt. There are some indications of that, as well—salt deposits in the Michigan Basin and in parts of New York and so forth. Plus, there are red-colored sediments, which don’t prove but tend to indicate arid environments. This combination tells me that this part of the world was fairly arid. So I’m going to places like modern Afghanistan, extreme western China, northern Turkey, or other places where there are somewhat arid climates with mountain belts today. Then I clone the mountains from there and put them in the map.

But you have to know the geologic background. You have to know how the mountains were formed, what the grain of the mountains was. That’s not always easy, although there are ways of doing it. To know the grain of the mountains, you need to know where the hinterland and the center of the mountains were. You need to know where the foreland area is, so that you can show the different styles of mountains. You have to move from foreland areas—which tends to be a series of parallel ridges, usually much lower than the hinterlands—to the center and beyond.

I use this kind of information to pick the right kind of modern mountain to put back in the Devonian, based on what that Devonian landscape probably had a good chance of looking like. Do we know for certain? Of course not. We weren’t around in the Devonian. But we have a good rock record and we have a lot of information; so we use that information and, then, voilà.

To give another example, let’s look at the Devonian period of the east coast. The big European continent that we call Baltica collided with Greenland and a series of micro-continents collided further south, all the way down at least as far as New Jersey, if not down as far the Carolinas. We know that there are places on Earth today where these same kinds of collisions are taking place—in the Alps and Mediterranean region, and the Caucasus region, and so forth.

We can use the concept that, if two plates are colliding today to produce the Caucasus mountains, and if we look at the style of mountains that the Caucasus are, then it’s reasonable to think that, where Greenland and Baltica collided in the Silurian and the Devonian, the mountains would have had a similar style. So we can map that.

This second sequence shows the continents drifting apart, in reverse, from 105 million years ago to 240 million years ago. They were mapped using the Mollweide projection, and, in all cases, are by Ron Blakey.


Manaugh: That collision alone—Baltica and Greenland—sounds like something that would be extremely difficult to map.

Blakey: Absolutely. And it’s not a one-to-one relationship. You have to look at the whole pattern of how the plates collided, how big the plates were, and so forth.

Then there’s the question of the different histories of particular plates. So, for example, most of Scotland started out as North America. Then, when all the continents collided to form Pangaea, the first collisions took place in the Silurian-Devonian and the final collisions took place in the Pennsylvanian-Permian. By, say, 250 million years ago, most of the continents were together. Then, when they started to split apart in the Triassic and Jurassic—especially in the Triassic and Cretaceous—the split occurred in such a way that what had been part of North America was actually captured, if you will, by Europe and taken over to become the British Isles.

Scotland and at least the northern half of Ireland were captured and began to drift with Europe. On the other hand, North America picked up Florida—which used to be part of Gondwana—and so forth.

One of the things that is interesting is the way that, when mountains come together and then finally break up, they usually don’t break up the same way that they came together. Sometimes they do, but it has to do with weaknesses, stress patterns, and things like this. Obviously, all time is extremely relative, but mountains don’t last that long. A given mountain range that’s been formed by a simple collision—not that there’s any such thing as a simple collision—once that collision is over with, 40 or 50 million years after that event, there is only low-lying landscape. It may have even have split apart already into a new ocean basin.

But here’s the important part: the structure that was created by that collision is still there, even though the mountains have been worn down. It’s like when you cut a piece of wood: the grain is still inherited from when that tree grew. The pattern of the grain still shows where the branches were, and the direction of the tree’s growth in response to wind and sun and its neighbors. You can’t reconstruct the tree exactly from its grain, but, if you’re an expert with wood, you should be able to look and say: here are the tree rings, and here’s a year where the tree grew fast, here’s a year where the tree grew slow, here’s where the tree grew branches, etc.

In a sense, as geologists, we’re doing the same things with rock structure. We can tell by the pattern of how the rocks are deformed which direction the forces came from. With mountains, you can tell the angle at which the plates collided. It’s usually very oblique. What that tends to do is complicate the geologic structure, because you not only get things moving one way, but you get things dragging the other way, as well. But we can usually tell the angle at which the plates hit.

Then, in many cases, based upon the nature of how the crust has been deformed and stacked up, we can tell the severity of the mountain range. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we can say: oh, this structure would have been a twenty-thousand-foot high mountain range. It’s not that simple at all, not least of which because rocks can deform pretty severely without making towering mountains.

This final of the three global sequences shows the continents drifting apart, in reverse, from 260 million years ago to 600 million years ago. There was still nearly 4 billion years of tectonic evolution prior to where these maps begin. They were mapped using the Mollweide projection, and, in all cases, are by Ron Blakey.


Manaugh: Are you able to project these same tectonic movements and geological processes into the future and show what the earth might look like in, say, 250 million years?

Blakey: I’ve had a number of people ask me about that, so I did make some global maps. I think I made six of them at about 50-million-year intervals. For the fifteen to 100-million-year range, I think you can say they are fairly realistic. But, once you get much past 75 to 100 million years, it starts to get really, really speculative. The plates do strange things. I’ll give you just a couple of quick examples.

The Atlantic Ocean opened in the beginning of the Jurassic. The actual opening probably started off the coasts of roughly what is now Connecticut down to the Carolinas. That’s where the first opening started. So the central part of the Atlantic was the first part to open up. It opened up reasonably simply—but, again, I’m using the word simple with caution here.

The north Atlantic, meanwhile, didn’t open up until about 60 to 50 million years ago. When it opened up, it did a bunch of strange things. The first opening took place between Britain and an offshore bank that’s mostly submerged, called Rockall. Rockall is out in the Atlantic Ocean, northwest of Ireland—near Iceland—but it’s continental crust. That splitting process went on for, let’s say, ten million years or so—I’m just going to talk in broad terms—as the ocean started opening up.

Then the whole thing jumped. A second opening began over between Greenland and North America, as Greenland and North America began to separate off. That lasted for a good 40 or 50 million years. That’s where you now get the Labrador Sea; that is actual ocean crust. So that was the Atlantic Ocean for thirty or forty million years—but then it jumped again, this time over between Greenland and what is now the west coast of Europe. It started opening up over there, before it jumped yet again. There’s an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, way the heck up there, called Jan Mayen. At one time, it was actually part of Greenland. The Atlantic opened between it and Greenland and then shifted to the other side and made its final opening.

The following two sequences show the evolution of Europe from an Antarctic archipelago to a tropical island chain to the present day Europe we know and recognize. The first sequence starts roughly 450 million years ago and continues to the Jurassic, 200 million years ago. All maps by Ron Blakey.


So it’s very complicated. And that’s just the Atlantic Ocean.

The Northern Atlantic took at least five different paths before the final path was established, and it’s all still changing. In fact, the south Atlantic is actually even worse; it’s an even bigger mess. You’ve got multiple openings between southwest Africa and Argentina, plus Antarctica was up in there before it pulled away to the south.

These complications are what makes this stuff so interesting. If we look at events that we can understand pretty well over the last, let’s say, 150 or 200 million years of time—where we have a good indication of where the oceans were because we still have ocean crusts of that age—then we can extrapolate from that back to past times when oceans were created and destroyed. We can follow the rules that are going on today to see all of the oddities and the exceptions and so forth.

These are the kinds of things I try to keep track of when I’m making these maps. I’m always asking: what do we know? Was it a simple pull-apart process? There are examples where continents started to split across from one another, then came back together, then re-split in a different spot later on. That’s not just speculation—there is geologic evidence for this in the rock record.

So, when it comes to extrapolating future geologies, things become very complicated very quickly. If you start thinking about the behavior of the north Atlantic, creating a projection based on what’s going on today seems, at first, like a fairly simple chore. North America is going on a northwesterly path at only one or two centimeters a year. Europe is moving away, at almost a right angle, at about another centimeter a year. So the Atlantic is only opening at three centimeters a year; it’s one of the slowest-opening oceans right now.

OK, fine—but what else is happening? The Caribbean is pushing up into the Atlantic and, off South America, there is the Scotia Arc. Both of those are growing. They’ve also identified what looks like a new island arc off the western Mediterranean region; that eventually would start to close the Atlantic in that area. Now you start to speculate: well, these arcs will start to grow, and they’ll start to eat into the oceans, and subduct the crusts, and so forth.

Again, for the first 50, 75, or even 100 million years, you can say that these particular movements are fairly likely. But, once you get past that, you can still use geologic principles, but you’re just speculating as to which way the continents are going to go.

For instance, the one continent that does not seem to be moving at all right now, relative to anything else, is Antarctica. It seems to be really fixed on the South Pole. That’s why some people think that everything will actually coagulate back towards the South Pole. However, there are also a bunch of subduction zones today along southern Asia, and those are pretty strong subduction zones. Those are the ones that created the big tsunami, and all the earthquakes off of Indonesia and so forth. Eventually, those could pull either parts of Antarctica or all of Antarctica up toward them.

But I’m more interested in reconstructing the past than I am the future, so I’ve only played around with those five or six maps.

This second sequence, showing the next phase in the evolution of Europe, begins approximately 150 million years ago and extends to the present day. All maps by Ron Blakey.


Manaugh: To ground things a bit, we’re having this conversation in Flagstaff, on the Colorado Plateau, which seems like a great place to teach geology. I wonder whether there might be another Colorado Plateau, so to speak, elsewhere in the world—something geologically similar to the extraordinary landscapes we see here that just hasn’t had the chance to emerge. Maybe the tectonics aren’t right, and it’s still just a crack, rather than a canyon, or maybe it’s covered in vegetation or ice so we can’t see it yet. Conversely, I’m curious if you might have found evidence of other great geological districts in the earth’s past—lost Grand Canyons, other Arches National Parks—that have been lost to time. How could we detect those, and where are they?

Blakey: This is indeed a great place to teach geology. It’s a great place to live.

As for Colorado Plateau analogs—it’s an interesting question. There’s an area in South America that I’d say is fairly similar. It’s got a couple of famous national parks that I can't remember the name of. It’s a smaller version, but it’s very similar to the Colorado Plateau. It’s between the Andes and the Amazon basin, part of the general pampas region there of South America. It even has similarly aged rocks. Parts of northern Africa would also be similar.

But you have to look at all the characteristics of the Plateau. Number one: the rocks are flat. Number two: the rocks have been uplifted. Number three: the rocks are dissected by a major river system. Number four: it’s a semi-arid climate. There are probably five or six defining characteristics in total, and I’ve heard many people say that there is no other place else on Earth that has all those characteristics in exactly the same way. But I went to an area in eastern Mauritania many years ago, where, for all the world, it looked like the Grand Canyon. It wasn’t as colorful, but it was a big, deep canyon.

In fact, the Appalachian Plateau would be somewhat similar, except it’s in a humid climate, which means the land has been shaped and formed differently. But the Appalachian plateau has flat-lying rocks; it’s dissected by some major rivers; it’s experienced uplift; and so forth.

The next two sequences of images, followed from left to right, top to bottom, illustrate the gradual evolution of the Colorado Plateau, where, in its modern day incarnation, this interview with Ron Blakey took place (specifically, in Flagstaff, Arizona. The earliest map included here depicts the Proterozoic; the first sequence ends in the Triassic. All maps by Ron Blakey.


Twilley: I’m interested in the representational challenges you face when you decide to make a map, and, specifically, when you’re in Photoshop, what your most-used tools might be. I thought it was fascinating when you said that the cloning tool really changed how you make geological maps. What other techniques are important to you, in order to represent geological histories?

Blakey: Oh, the cloning tool is the most important, by far—at least when I’m actually painting. Of course, I use the outline tool to select areas, but, when I’m actually painting, it would be impossible to paint these different maps pixel by pixel. I couldn’t do it. Occasionally, I will actually hand-draw some things in the flatlands, where I want to put a river system, for example, but, at least for mountains and rugged terrain, I clone everything.

Some times, I’ll cut and paste. I’ll select an area in the GeoMapApp, I save it as a JPEG, and then I can select it and copy it and paste it in, and I can rotate and deform it a little bit. Are you familiar with the warp tool in Photoshop? I use that a lot, because you can change the shape of mountains a little. If you do it too dramatically, it really looks flaky. But, if you do it right, it still looks pretty realistic.

This second sequence, also showing the evolution of the Colorado Plateau, begins with the Triassic and ends roughly 5 million years ago—basically the present day, in geological terms. All maps by Ron Blakey.


Twilley: And do you have certain filters you rely on for particular geological effects?

Blakey: A little bit. I like to use the craquelure filter. It actually gives you little bumps and valleys and so forth. I use that especially for continental margins. Continental margins are anything but regular slopes, going down to the abyssal depths. They’re very irregular. There are landslides and all kinds of things going on there at the margins, so I add a little texture with craquelure.

It can be difficult to use, though, and it doesn’t work at really high resolutions—so, what I actually have to do some times, is that I will actually copy a part of my map, take it out, make it smaller, do the craquelure on it, and then blow it back up and paste it in again.

[Image: A painting by Ron Blakey depicts a geological landscape near Sedona, Arizona].

Dee Blakey, Ron's Wife: I think the other reason that he can do what he does is that he paints. That’s one of his paintings over there. [gestures above fireplace]

Blakey: Well, I guess I should have said that right away, when you asked me why I got interested in this, because I am interested in the artistic aspect of geology. The artistic aspect of science, in general, but especially geology. Astronomy, for example, would be another field where artistic visualizations are useful—any time you’re trying to show things that can’t easily be visualized with something comparable here on present-day planet Earth, you have to use an artistic interpretation.

Anyway, I can’t explain it, but I understand color pretty well. I use the hue saturation tool a lot. I’ll select an area and then I’ll feather it, let’s say, because you don’t want the edges to be sharp. I’ll feather it by thirty, forty, fifty pixels. Then I'll take the slider for hue saturation, where, if you go to the left, you make things redder and, if you go to the right, you make things greener. If I’ve got a landscape that looks a little too humid, I’ll just slide it slightly to the left to make it a bit redder. You can also change the lightness and darkness when you do that. There’s also regular saturation. By killing the saturation, you can really kill the nature of a landscape quite a bit.

And I use hue saturation a lot. That took me a long time to master, because it’s really easy to screw things up with that tool. You start sliding things a little too far and, whoa—wait a minute! All of a sudden, you’ve got purple mountains.

• • •
For more Venue interviews, be sure to stop by the Venue website.

Almost a decade later, and we’re still seeing the impact of Hurricane Katrina. File this one under “Nightmare Fuel.” (By the way, the amoeba really does look like a scary clown face. Here’s where I found the image.)

Via National Geographic.

The deadly brain-eating amoeba that recently killed a four-year-old Louisiana boy may be linked to unsafe water conditions created by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, experts say.

The boy, Drake Smith Jr., died from a rare but deadly swelling of the brain caused by Naegleria fowleri, a species of single-celled organism known as an amoeba.

The child was playing on a backyard Slip ‘n Slide in St. Bernard Parish, near New Orleans, and was apparently infected by amoebae present in the water in early August. About two days later, he was dead.

For N. fowleri to gain access to the brain, it must go up a person’s nose and climb the olfactory nerve. Simply drinking water that contains the amoeba is not enough to cause an infection, said Raoult Ratard, Louisiana’s state epidemiologist.

“[The boy] spent all day on the slide,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some water went up his nose.”

N. fowleri is commonly found in lakes and other freshwater systems, but is usually not considered a danger to swimming pools or municipal water systems because they are typically treated with chlorine or other types of disinfectants that kill the amoeba.

But St. Bernard Parish was devastated when Katrina struck in August 2005. “St. Bernard was under 15 feet of floodwater. Water pipes were broken, and the [water] pressure was zero,” said Jake Causey, chief engineer for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

Keep reading.

The post Is Hurricane Katrina Responsible for Brain-Eating Amoeba in Louisana’s Water Supply? appeared first on disinformation.

Among many, many others of similar passion: pat stevens ?@stevepatg39m  david simon, I hope a black guy punches you right in the fucking face just for being white.. Michael Bailey ?@mikelbtko1h David Simon A Jewish man… “One less Jew to answer, One less Jew (cont) http://tl.gd/n_1rldj72 Willy Scanlon ?@shanlone1h @7sMRD313 Then David Simon should leave for Israel with […]

Indignation is growing among cheese-lovers in France and the US after Washington branded a type of French cheese as unfit for human consumption.



The US government slapped an import ban on mimolette cheese at the end of May, leaving 1.5 tonnes of the item impounded at a warehouse. American food inspectors object to the use of mites to refine its flavour.

According to the US food and drug administration, the cheese "appears to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food".



"This is absurd," a mimolette producers' spokesman said. "Changing the production process would change the flavour. No one has ever got ill from eating our cheese."

Last day for the new project! Thanks, geeks!

(WINNER - Sunset Film Festival, Los Angeles, 2013 / WINNER- Best Shorts Competition, La Jolla, 2013 / WINNER - IFFSRV, Jakarta, 2013)

THE DIRECTOR KINDLY REQUESTS:
1. Wear earphones
2. Turn your phone to Silent
3. Do nothing else for 9 minutes

TOKYO DREAMS - a journey behind closed eyelids

Tokyo Dreams is a short Zen-like film about sleeping commuters on the Tokyo subway.

Shooting 12 hours a day for two weeks, UK director Nicholas Barker contemplates the stillness and vulnerability of his fellow passengers and wonders whether they will wake in time for their stop…

Editor - Ray Stevens

To see more work by Nicholas Barker visit : nicholasbarker.com
His short JAPAN LIKES PINK can be viewed at : vimeo.com/68286417

Nicholas is represented by Chelsea in the US (chelsea.com/director/nicholas-barker) and Rogue Films in the UK (roguefilms.co.uk/directors/item/16/nicholas-barker/#0)

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Cast: Rogue Films

Tags: Short Film, Tokyo and Japan

by @sdolotom

Have I mentioned recently that we have a facebook group? Only badasses are allowed in. Good luck.

At 12:44am on the 31st of May 1996, Dr. Timothy Leary sat bolt upright in bed startling the small group of friends and family who had gathered to keep him company during his final days. He had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer the previous year and it had finally run its course. “Why not?” he asked those keeping vigil. Again, louder, “Why not?” He repeated the question a third time. “Why not?” Then, lying back down, Dr. Leary whispered his final word… “beautiful”… and slipped into death. He was 75 years old.

It’s hard to think of many public figures who split opinion to the degree that Leary did, and still does. Hailed by some as one of the most important philosophers of his generation, by others as a visionary scientist centuries ahead of his time, and by some as a prophet, a mystic, a guru, even a saint. While still others denounce him as a fool, an ego-maniacal charlatan and even – in the words of President Richard Nixon – “the most dangerous man in America”. As is so often the case, the truth is far more complex than the simple narratives produced by those who worshipped or abhorred him. In fact Leary’s life and work encapsulate perfectly the chaos and ambiguity; the heady highs and crashing lows; of the psychedelic counter-culture he – more than any other single individual – helped to create.

As a psychology professor at Harvard University in the early 1960s, Dr. Leary would exhort his students to “Always question authority. Even the authority of your psychology professor”. And this anti-authoritarian attitude can be seen all the way back to his childhood. Born into a wealthy, conservative Irish-American family, the young Tim Leary rebelled from an early age. Exasperated by his attitude, his parents sent him to a strict Jesuit College and later forced him to enrol in West Point (the US military academy responsible for officer training). He lasted just over a year before being dragged up in front of a court-martial. Although he was acquitted, Leary was discharged from West Point and although technically still a member of the Army Medical Corps for a couple of years, he finally rejected the demands of his family and signed up for a psychology degree.

In 1943 he received his BA in psychology, and by 1950 had earned his Master’s and completed his PhD. His academic career blossomed and he spent the next 13 years teaching at two of the most prestigious universities in the United States as well as being appointed Director of Psychiatric Research at the renowned Kaiser Family Foundation. A combination of personal charisma and obvious talent allowed Leary’s career to maintain an upward trajectory despite his often abrasive attitude towards the academic establishment. However, it was an event in 1960 that would radically alter Leary’s life and career. It would lead directly to his dismissal from Harvard in 1963 and his permanent exile from the mainstream. Because it was in 1960 that Dr. Timothy Leary, professor of psychology, would have his first psychedelic experience. And despite being the experience of a single individual, it would end up having a profound and revolutionary impact on global culture.

It was Leary’s friend and Harvard colleague, Anthony Russo, who first introduced him to psychedelics. He’d invited Leary to spend some time at a villa he’d rented in Southern Mexico. On August 9th, 1960 as they lounged by the pool with a small group of friends, smoking and drinking tequila, Russo told the others about his recent encounter with the mushroom, Psilocybe mexicana. He’d been studying the religious rituals of the local Mazatec people who consumed the mushroom to induce visions. Fascinated by what he was hearing, Leary asked Russo whether he could get his hands on any more. One brief trip to the local market later, and the group were in possession of a large bag of the powerful hallucinogen. They washed down the dried mushrooms with local beer and the whole world shifted a little on its axis.

Later, Dr. Leary would declare

it was the classic visionary voyage and I came back a changed man. You are never the same after you’ve had that one glimpse down the cellular time tunnel. You are never the same after you’ve had the veil drawn. I learned more about psychology during the 5 hours of that trip than I had in 15 years of studying the subject as an academic.

A few days later Leary would return to the local market and purchase a very large quantity of Psilocybe mexicana. He brought the mushrooms home with him to Harvard University and the focus of the psychology department shifted in a radically new direction. Leary’s initial research and experiments were lauded by the faculty and the wider academic community. He gave the mushrooms to hundreds of academics, writers, philosophers and religious leaders. The poet Allen Ginsberg asked to be part of the experiments and within a year Leary had accounts from poets, professors and priests all attesting to the positive life-changing qualities of psilocybin. Under controlled conditions he administered psilocybin to prison inmates and reported that his test group had a 20% rate of re-offending; a massive decrease on the an average rate of 60%. He administered a course of the drug to alcoholics and reported astonishingly positive results. Later as a concerted effort was made to discredit Dr. Leary’s work, the experiments were repeated and while the huge improvements in re-offender rates were not achieved, “statistically significant” reductions were nevertheless reported.

Within three years however, news of the Harvard experiments (which by then had expanded to include LSD) had spread far and wide, and interest was growing in these “new” drugs. With the official experiments massively over-subscribed, a black-market in LSD and psilocybin flourished around Harvard and although these substances were still perfectly legal, the university administration were less than happy with the psychedelic explosion within the undergraduate population. Claiming that he was neglecting his teaching duties in order to conduct his research – a charge that he vigorously denied – Harvard University fired Dr. Leary signalling the decline and eventual end of serious clinical research into these incredibly promising chemicals (though recent years have seen a tentative and hushed revival).

Leary, however, saw his dismissal as both a challenge and a vindication. In the three years since he’d first taken mushrooms in Mexico he had become convinced that the psychedelic experience would reshape western culture in a powerfully positive manner. This conviction led him to become openly evangelical about LSD and other psychedelics. Released from the confines of academia, his experimentation continued at a large estate called Millbrook in New York. It was to be his home for the next five years and is often seen as the epicentre of the psychedelic counter-culture that sprang up in the mid 60s. His evangelising took the form of interviews and articles in mainstream magazines, lectures to packed halls and eventually a series of books.

His first two books, High Priest and The Politics of Ecstasy were massive cultural events. They would influence the direction of the 1960s counter-culture as much as any musician, writer or activist. As someone born just as the 1960s had drawn to a close, I didn’t encounter the two books until I hit my teens in the 1980s, but just as with a generation of teenagers in the sixties, they had a huge impact on me and profoundly influenced my intellectual development. Make of that what you will.

However, Leary’s LSD proselytising in the mid 60s was making him as many enemies as it was friends. And not merely within the mainstream establishment he was overtly attempting to destabilise. Some of his colleagues became concerned – as it turns out justifiably so – that his personal mission to “turn on” the world would end in a backlash that would see psychedelics driven so far underground that they could no longer be openly studied. They saw Leary’s charismatic public performances as little more than self-publicity and his writing as irresponsible and dangerous. In reality, there’s plenty of truth in that assessment. But it’s far from being the full story.

Reading, for example, The Politics of Ecstasy you’ll be hard-pressed to name a single essay or interview which extols psychedelics without also urging caution. That the media chose to highlight his extolling of LSD while the cautionary words were ignored is perhaps not surprising. But nor is it Leary’s fault. He can certainly be accused of a singular naiveté in that respect but I challenge the notion that he was knowingly irresponsible. Yes, Leary urged us to “Tune in, turn on and drop out”. But he also wrote very clearly that “Of course you can not be turned on all the time. In fact, you cannot even be turned on most of the time”. He insisted that LSD – when used responsibly – was a tool that could help people fulfil their potential and change their lives for the better, but he also made it clear that when used irresponsibly it could have dreadful consequences.

Indeed, Leary went so far as to suggest that the use of psychedelics should be permitted only by “licensed individuals”. In The Politics of Ecstasy he writes

The licensing for use of powerful psychedelic drugs like LSD should be along the lines of the airplane pilot’s license: intensive study and preparation, plus very stringent testing for fitness and competence…

He insists that “anyone who wants to have a psychedelic experience… should be allowed to have a crack at it” but that first they should be “willing to prepare for it and to examine [their] own hang-ups and neurotic tendencies”. It’s easy to grab chunks of Leary’s work in which he vigorously promotes the use of psychedelics, but we are being dishonest and do him a great disservice if we fail to acknowledge the cautionary context into which he placed that “promotion”. To claim that he argued for some sort of psychedelic free-for-all is simply wrong. When Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters showed up at Millbrook, Leary refused to give them any LSD precisely because he felt their philosophy of dolling it out to all-comers was potentially dangerous.

But of course, cautionary statements or not, Leary’s anti-establishment rhetoric was starting to worry the establishment. His “tune in, turn on, drop out” message and his exhortations to “tear down the American TV studio reality” didn’t play well in the power structures he argued should be replaced by a new psychedelic consciousness. And so, by the late 60s the worst fears of those who saw him as a demagogue had come to pass. Psychedelics had been outlawed and draconian punishments were being visited upon those caught producing or possessing them. Violent criminals were given more lenient sentences than those caught with LSD and even cannabis – long prohibited – was seen as an integral part of this revolutionary subculture and a nationwide crackdown was ordered.

So it was that Leary found himself arrested and charged for the possession of a single joint. His sentence? Thirty years in prison. He appealed the sentence and spent the next few years in and out of the courts. In the meantime he continued his transformation from respected academic into counter-cultural icon. Not only does he get a name-check in John and Yoko’s Give Peace A Chance but he was part of the famous bedroom recording session in Montreal and can – legend has it – be heard providing percussion by banging on a wardrobe door. He opposed Ronald Reagan in the race to be Governor of California and Lennon wrote his campaign song, Come Together. But the noose was tightening around Leary’s neck and while he successfully appealed the thirty-year sentence, he found himself back before the courts on charges of marijuana possession once more and in January 1970 finally lost his legal battles and found himself behind bars for 25 years.

Or he would have done had his life not turned into something out of a spy novel at this point. Although originally sentenced to a maximum security institution, Leary – like most prisoners at the time – was asked to sit a psychological profile test to establish the most appropriate prison regime for him. The name of the test was “The Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test”. He’d designed it himself a decade previously and knew exactly the right answers to give to ensure he ended up on gardening duty at a minimum security facility. Meanwhile his wife enlisted the help of the revolutionary organisation, The Weather Underground, and together they broke him out of prison and smuggled him to Algeria.

Dr. Leary spent the next three years on the run from the US authorities. Nixon took a personal interest in his case and provided practically unlimited resources to those hunting him. From North Africa to Europe the chase continued. Through Europe to Beirut and finally to Afghanistan where he was intercepted and dragged back to the United States to face punishment. Leary was told that not only would he never see the outside of a prison again but vague threats were made against his family including a promise to resurrect an old marijuana possession charge against his daughter.

However, Leary didn’t waste his time in prison and was prolific in his writing. His psychedelic experiments had led him to propose a radical new model of human consciousness (the “8-circuit model”) which he detailed in his book Exo-Psychology (later revised as Info-Psychology). This was hugely influential, albeit not within the mainstream, and was the catalyst for much of Robert Anton Wilson’s work, including the seminal Prometheus Rising. In prison Leary also wrote Intelligence Agents and Neuropolitics among other books. And he used the time to develop many of the themes that would dominate his later work… a complex and occasionally confusing fusion of mysticism, technology, psychedelia and about a dozen different schools of philosophy.

Nixon’s spectacular fall from grace meant that Leary ceased being public enemy number one and the new administration offered him the chance to “buy his freedom” by informing on others in the underground. This controversial period in his life is often raised by his critics. What’s interesting, however, is that the criticism never came from those he allegedly “informed” on. In fact, as An Open Letter from the Friends of Timothy Leary makes it clear, Leary managed to clear all of the information he passed on to the FBI with those on the outside before he passed it on…

– Nobody was seriously injured by Leary’s interaction with the FBI, with the exception of a former attorney, who received three months in prison after being set up on a cocaine bust by a girlfriend of Leary working on the outside, not from Tim’s testimony. The lawyer has never come forward to express any anger toward Leary. Two other former lawyers of Leary were placed at risk, as were his estranged wife and his archivist, but nothing came of it because of the absence of corroborating testimony from people who Tim well knew had been underground for years.

– The Weather Underground, the radical left organisation responsible for his escape, was not impacted by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the escape for which they proudly took credit. Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was “we understand.”

In 1975, two years after providing this information to the FBI, Leary was released. While he continued to write, to lecture and to make public appearances, his experiences in prison left him understandably cautious and less willing to poke the establishment with a stick. His ideas were no less radical, he was just more careful about how he presented them.

An advocate of space exploration and an early internet enthusiast, Leary’s final decade was spent producing illuminated manuscripts such as Chaos and Cyberculture and The Game of Life. He collaborated with artists, scientists and philosophers as diverse as William S. Burroughs, William Gibson, David Byrne, Johnny Depp, Bruce Campbell, Gerard O’Neill of NASA, Brenda Laurel (the Virtual Reality pioneer) and countless others. He argued in favour of a kind of technological paganism, or techno-shamanism; aware that although the religious experience had been swallowed up by the tyranny of monotheism, it was nonetheless an essential part of being human and we faced disaster unless we found a way of reintegrating it with our modern, technological culture. “The Purpose of Life is Religious Discovery” he wrote. On the surface, a rather conservative statement. But, typical of Leary, it appears in an essay entitled “Start Your Own Religion”.

Ultimately, no short article can even begin to capture the life and work of Dr. Timothy Leary. For better or worse (I’d argue “better” but I guess that’s a judgement call), partly by design and partly by accident he brought psychedelic drugs to the masses. He was one of life’s genuine pioneers. A radical thinker who was larger than life. And yes, that magnified his flaws just as much as his virtues, but in the 75 years he spent on this small planet, he arguably changed western culture as much as any single individual during the same period. Re-reading his writing can be a little sad in these dark times. The joyous optimism; the belief in a brighter, better future; the conviction that the psychedelic explosion would usher in an unprecedented global creative revolution that would sweep away the power structures, hierarchies and oppression of the past… liberating us all and allowing the dawn of a new age of exploration. “The future is not a place we travel to”, Leary famously said, “it’s a place we build”. And for all Leary’s faults he wanted nothing more than to build a better future for himself and us all. And for that, Dr. Leary, I’d personally like to thank you.

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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Three Ypsilanti City Council members in Michigan abstained from voting on a resolution on Tuesday that would have prevented them from taking that very action in the future when considering issues.

Council member Pete Murdock proposed a resolution that would have required council members to only vote yes or no on each issue facing council unless they had a financial or professional conflict of interest.



Mayor Paul Schreiber, Council members Susan Moeller and Brian Robb abstained from the vote to show their disapproval of the resolution brought forth by Murdock.

Mayor Pro Tem Lois Richardson and Council Member Ricky Jefferson voted no, while Murdock and Council Member Daniel Vogt voted yes. The resolution failed.

[Image: A Galveston house on stilts, courtesy of the Galveston County Museum, Galveston, Texas, via Science Friday].

Following the catastrophic hurricane of 1900, the city of Galveston, Texas, was vertically raised up to 17 feet from its original ground level using "hand-cranked janks and mules," NPR's Science Friday explained last week.

In order to "protect itself from future storms," Dwayne Jones of the Galveston Historical Foundation told the radio program, the city set about constructing a defensive seawall. "And the city began to be raised behind it," he adds, "so everything was lifted up... Houses, out-houses, sidewalks, fences—everything was raised."

[Image: "One hundred men worked to raise the church, one-half inch at a time, for 35 days. Once the correct height was reached, a new concrete foundation was poured." Image courtesy of the Galveston County Museum, Galveston, Texas, via Science Friday].

The whole town, in effect, was "lifted up and put on blocks," including huge masonry structures, such as Galveston's St. Patrick Catholic Church. The church was held off the earth by nearly 700 separately hand-operated jacks. The church was kept level as it was raised only one half-inch a day for 35 days, lifted off the ground as if you were changing its tires.

The description brings to mind the truly extraordinary photographs of North Moore High School being moved across Los Angeles, posted here back in 2011.

[Images: Moving Fort Moore High School in Los Angeles, 1886; photos courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries].

Commenting on the seven-year time span of the overall town-lifting operation, Jones describes how the soil there in Galveston is "all sand." These soft ground conditions meant that the engineers could "put canals through, and they had barges and pumps that took the soil or the fill from Galveston Bay and pumped it underneath the properties. So they would go kind of block by block, lift the properties up in that block, pump underneath it, and keep going across the island." The city dredged itself.

In any case, the short but interesting radio segment goes on to discuss contemporary structure-moving operations in New Orleans, Chicago, and beyond, with the ultimate implication that perhaps the inhabited coastal periphery of the greater New York City area might also someday see itself on the rise.

(Thanks to Ed Porter for the tip!)

Tivoli, NY

Maddie

JARHEAD