M Bjornerud - Turning to Stone
"I had trained myself to set any such notions aside in order to develop an objective analytical understanding of nature. The terrain was animate, sentient, creative. It would just take me thirty years to say that out loud."
Mist - "The morning light pours down through the tall trees onto the open space in front of the cabin, sunbeams everywhere and... floating like freshly minted souls." (Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami)
Basalt - "This process created the smooth...ic lava plains of the moon, including the Sea of Tranquility, where Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module.... was thus the first rock humans encountered on another world." (Book - Author)
Jurassic - "But with the rise of geological prospecting elsewhere, names began to creep in from all over.... refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland. Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains." (A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition - Bill Bryson)
Outfit - "We now know that the separate bookkeeping devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, and similar...s was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice president and the stewards of his policies." (Moral Imagination - David Bromwich)
Redden - "I also collected a suspiciously light cynthia moth cocoon. My fingers were stiff and ....ed with cold, and my nose ran. I had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, "Carry Kleenex." (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard)
Norway - "In 1905, John Munro Longyear was prospecting in a remote part of northern... with an eye toward opening a new iron range. But he needed coal for smelting, the nearest coalfields were on Svalbard-vestiges of an ancient tropical forest on those polar islands" (Timefulness - Author)
Enjoyed "I am willing to grant that some groups may have.... an edge but I suspect that the second interpretation grasps a central truth about evolution. The Burgess Shale promotes a radical view of evolutionary pathways and predictability." (Wonderful Life - Stephen Jay Gould)
Rhyolite - "There are three major tectonic settings where granite (and its volcanic equivalent, ....) is forming on Earth today: continental arcs such as the Cascades or Andes; continental rift zones like the East African rift; and continental hotspots like Yellowstone." (Book - Author)
Unsteady - "The ice slopes towards the sinkhole and so too does the light, as if pulled into it. We approach it with care-this black hole set within blue-black ice-conscious of our footing, of how easy a slip would be. A few yards from its edge we stop and regard it briefly, shivering and chilled." (Underland - Robert Macfarlane)
Devastated - "It's impossible to give anything close to a full account of the various species, genera, families, and even whole orders that went extinct at the K-T boundary. Mammals' ranks were....; something like two-thirds of the mammalian families living at the end of the Cretaceous disappear at the boundary." (The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert)
Tradition - "The poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk - chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the....al protective shield between the embryo and harmful substances in the mother's body." (Silent Spring - Rachel Carson)
Uranium - "uranium has a specific weight of 19, much more than lead, twice as much as copper: the gift given to Bonino by the Nazi aeronaut-astronauts could not be..... But if it wasn't...., what was it?" (The Periodic Table - Primo Levi)
Rainwater - "The tightly folded Appalachians are something like the ribs of a washboard. In the Paleozoic era, when the tectonic washboard was made and repeatedly lifted from the east, falling... gathering in streams found its way westward across the ribs." (In Suspect Terrain - John McPhee)
Novena - "Whole devotions dropped from use, indulgences (Luther's old point of contention), ....s, even the Mass, the central and most stable shared act of the church, had become unrecognizable-a thing of guitars instead of the organ, of English instead of Latin, of youth-culture fads instead of ancient rites." (Bare Ruined Choirs - Garry Wills)
Iridium - "We then had a mystery: the origin of the clay layer... appeared to be extraterrestrial. We first guessed that it had come from a nearby supernova explosion. Some astrophysicists had proposed that the K/T extinction had been triggered by such an explosion" (Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis W. Alvarez)
Neotectonics- "But the curriculum was still anchored in the logic of nineteenth-century museums. The emerging fields of geochemistry, ...., and climate science were simply absent, or at best, wedged in as footnotes on the last day of traditional courses." (Book - Author)
Gentle - "Combining the two extreme ends of physics-cosmology, the study of the universe, and quantum mechanics, the study of atomic and subatomic systems-is ambitious by any standard. But that hasn't stopped some distinguished physicists from working on the topic. First up was John Wheeler in the 1960s, who argued that quantum uncertainty would fuzz out the singularity, replacing the infinite curvature of spacetime with something....r and more complex. "(The Goldilocks Enigma - Paul Davies)
Thousand - "We are equipped to appreciate processes that take seconds, minutes, years or, at most, decades to complete. Darwinism is a theory of cumulative processes so slow that they take between....s and millions of decades to complete. All our intuitive judgements of what is probable turn out to be wrong by many orders of magnitude. Our well-tuned apparatus of scepticism and subjective probability-theory misfires by huge margins, because it is tuned-Ironically, by evolution itself - to work within a lifetime of a few decades. It requires effort of the imagination to escape from the prison of familiar timescale" (The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins)
Ophiolites - "Most exposures of peridotite and serpentinite occur in rare places around the globe, where subduction somehow went awry and slabs of oceanic lithosphere were thrust onto continental crust. These "misshelved" rock complexes are called...., and famous examples occur in Newfoundland, Northern California, Oman, and Cyprus." (Book - Author)
Stealth - "The numbers showed a pattern: tiny changes grew quietly until they took over the whole system. Scientists had to rethink what it meant to predict anything at all." (Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick)
Tachylyte - "Pseudo..... is a dark, glassy rock formed when frictional melting occurs along a fault during an earthquake. Even many geologists find its name befuddling because they've never heard of "true".... Despite its obscure name, however, pseudo.... rewards study because they are the closest we can get to witnessing the deep origins of earthquakes."(Book - Author)
Overtaken - "Nature's own rhythms have been.... by human activities. What once took millennia now happens in decades." (The End of Nature - Bill McKibben)
North American Free Trade Agreement - "Companies found they could move their plants across the border under .... and leave U.S. environmental regulations behind at the Rio Grande." (Living Downstream - Sandra Steingraber)
Estate - "In Staffordshire, on the... of a relation, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man" (The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin)
Haidt - The Anxious Generation
"Companies that strive to maximize engagement by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking were the worst offenders. Social media companies hooked children by designing a firehose of addictive content."
Hyper - "When adolescents have continuous access to a smartphone at that developmentally sensitive age, it may interfere with their maturing ability to focus. Studies show that adolescents with attention deficit....activity disorder (ADHD) are heavier users of smartphones and video games" (Book - Author)
Ankle - "My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, no hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd, ungart'red, and down-gyved to his.... (Shakespeare - Hamlet)
Introvert "The....'s way of being in the world this deep, sustained attention to inner experience-represents not a retreat from reality but rather a different, equally vatid way of processing it. I am reminded of Temple Grandin's observation that her autism allowed her to see what others missed." (Oliver Sacks - An Anthropologist on Mars)
Dostoevsky - "The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key" (.... Notes from the Underground)
Took- "It... considerable strength of mind to refuse the endless circus of distraction, to choose instead the harder path of genuine attention." (Mary Oliver - Upstream)
Triggering - "The constant notifications were... a cascade of interruptions, each ping cutting a thought before it could fully form." (Nicholas Carr - The Shallows)
Hazy - "Memory grows... in the digital age-not from age or illness, but from our outsourcing of recall to our devices." (Sven Birkerts - The Gutenberg Elegies)
Enlist - "Social media platforms... our natural desires for connection and validation, turning them into engines of anxiety." (Jaron Lanier - Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts)
Accident - "By pure... we created tools that perfectly exploit our brain's vulnerability to distraction." (Adam Alter - Irresistible)
Nonacceptance - "The... of constant digital interruption has become our era's small act of rebellion." (Jenny Odell - How to Do Nothing)
Xenophobic - "The... impulse to reject unfamiliar perspectives finds perfect in our personalized news feeds." (Cass Sunstein - #Republic)
Ices "The mind... up when oversaturated with digital stimutt, losing its natural fluidity of thought." (Maryanne Wolf-Reader, Come Home)
Onomatopoela "The... of digital life-ping, swish, ding-colonizes our soundscape, sach artificial word-sound tugging at our attention." (Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy)
Unfaithful - "Memory becomes... to lived experience when we trust our devices to do our remembering." (Sherry Turkle - Alone Together)
Sacrificed - "What gets... first is the very thing we need most: the capacity for sustained attention." (Nicholas Carr - The Shallows)
Giggle - "Coming from who knows what house dance, there ghosted past us two of the Donnellan sisters. A... bubbled out of one of them and the other hooked her arm and hurried them past." (Niall Williams - This Is Happiness)
Emoted - "Children who primarily... through digital interfaces showed marked differences in reading real human expressions." (Catherine Steiner-Adair - The Big Disconnect)
Newsweek - "As.... shifted to digital, the weekly rhythm of reflection gave way to the constant scroll." (Clay Shirky - Cognitive Surplus)
Edifies-"What genuinely... comes not from screens but from slow, sustained engagement with ideas." (Maryanne Wolf - Reader, Come Home)
Rigged - "The game is... from the start: apps designed not to satisfy but to create endless craving." (Adam Alter - Irresistible)
Accomplish - "The need to ... something real grows more urgent as our lives become increasingly virtual." (William Powers - Hamlet's BlackBerry)
Time-... Magazine's shift to digital marked another victory of the immediate over the Important." (Clay Shirky - Cognitive Surplus)
Idiom - "The digital age steamrolls over every... of face-to-face conversation, replacing subtle expressions with standardized reactions." (Walter Ong - Orality and Literacy)
Obsess - "Students increasingly... over metrics - followers, likes, views - treating these digital signals as measures of self-worth." (Danah Boyd - It's Complicated)
Nymph - "Like a... vanishing at dawn, our capacity for wonder dissolves in the blue light of screens." (Richard Louv - Last Child in the Woods)