{"id":4460,"date":"2023-02-26T09:11:11","date_gmt":"2023-02-26T14:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=4460"},"modified":"2023-02-26T15:14:52","modified_gmt":"2023-02-26T20:14:52","slug":"on-going-with-the-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=4460","title":{"rendered":"on Going with the Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes stone-cold-obvious insights appear out of nowhere and you think: ah. So <i>that&#8217;s<\/i> how it is. Today&#8217;s case in point came as I watched a YouTube video:<center>Geologist Myron Cook lays it out for us:<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/y2Qqslr5ytY\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\n(I began with this one:)<br \/><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/umjI9Of8UL0\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/center><\/p>\n<p>\nI&#8217;ve never studied geology in any formal way, but I have been accumulating bits of rock lore over the years, and I can look back to influences like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/09\/28\/magazine\/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html\">John McPhee<\/a>&#8216;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/kindle-dbs\/thankYouPage?_encoding=UTF8&#038;asin=B005H0O8KQ\"><b>Annals of the Former World<\/b><\/a> (four books: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California) and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Geology-Newfoundland-Field-Guide-Touring\/dp\/1927099072\/\"><b>Geology of Newfoundland Field Guide: Touring Through Time at 48 Scenic Sites<\/b><\/a> and a heap of other titles, gathered up in my usual hoovering fashion&#8230; actually quite a few books, as I begin to enumerate them and recall when and where and why I found\/acquired them.<\/p>\n<p>\nAnyhow, the stone-cold-obvious <b>insight<\/b> of the morning is that one can (should? must?) think of the 4 billion plus Terrestrial years of geological time as <b>flows<\/b> of material: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> upwelling of sub-crustal magma (volcanic activity, seafloor spreading)\n<li>tectonic movements of crustal plates, broken by rifting and thrusting, leading to collision and subduction and shearing\n<li>glacial advance and retreat\n<li>sediment redeposited by flowing water\n<li>annual cycles of climate and atmosphere, and diurnal back-and-forth of tides\n<li>&#8230;and probably others that I&#8217;ll think of&#8230;<\/ul>\n<p>In fact, <b>flow<\/b> is at the heart of what we think of as <b>time<\/b>, across the range of scale from galactic (well, Universal&#038;mdash <i>lotsa<\/i> galaxies out there&#8230;) to the microminiscule dance of electrons (whatever <i>they<\/i> are&#8230;). And of course the life-time scale of human activities (where anthropology lives and works) is a landscape animated by flow&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>\nWould that I could transport this \/insight\/ back to when I began teaching, or better yet to when I began <i>learning<\/i>, and apply it to all of my various interests&#8230; The old hippy injunction to &#8220;Go with the Flow&#8221; is much more subtle than we knew&#8230; which is a pretty good launch pad for today&#8217;s inquiries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes stone-cold-obvious insights appear out of nowhere and you think: ah. So that&#8217;s how it is. Today&#8217;s case in point came as I watched a YouTube video:Geologist Myron Cook lays it out for us: (I began with this one:) I&#8217;ve never studied geology in any formal way, but I have been accumulating bits of rock [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metastuff","category-tempora"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4460"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4466,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4460\/revisions\/4466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}