Colorado
chaoticutopia | March 20, 2007Looking at the rhythmic repetition of forms in nature, it is easy to imagine the influence of some creator, a poet who fixes each line with exact meter and measure. Yet, upon closer examination, we can see how these forms are self-creating, born from simplicity. Nature writes its own poetry.
Take, for instance, the tendency of water to form branching veins.
We begin with an aspen leaf, which landed on a bed of new fallen snow. Weeks of gentle sun warmed the dark leaf and melted the surrounding snow. In that tiny pool of water, the softer parts of the leaf began to decay, revealing an…
chaoticutopia | February 28, 2007
Watch out... we may be in hot water soon. At least, we can hope. It seems one of our most pressing issues is sustainability. We need a source for energy which is clean, renewable, and has very little impact on the surrounding environment. Without it, we will continue to use up limited amounts of fossil fuels, polluting and affecting our ecosystem along the way. So, what if the ideal source rests right under our feet?
Down there? What's down there, you might ask. Dirt, rock, and more rock. Ah, but at some level, we find water permeating the rock. That's it. Oh, yes, and heat too. You can go…
terrasig | January 12, 2007...for supporting ScienceBlogs.
I normally don't pay much attention to the adverts Seed posts around this joint (and I joined Sb just after the "volcano episode"). However, checking the "Last 24 Hours" channel, I was pleased to see that the Colorado Tourism office has bought some ad space.
Karmen (Chaotic Utopia) and the recently-departed Kevin Vranes (NoSeNada) are both holding down the fort out West while I'm an expat. (Oops, Karmen reminded me below that new Sber, Chris Chatham, at Developing Intelligence is also a CU-Boulder grad student - sorry Chris.)
Not to hump the ad too much,…
chaoticutopia | January 9, 2007I spent long enough thinking about my last entry, that I forgot to announce my news. I've been admitted to the University of Colorado at Boulder, in the Environmental Studies program. I still need to make a few contacts to establish a double major, and study philosophy as well. (Perhaps I can eventually focus on the flow of being!) It's a great oppourtunity, and I'm pretty excited. Of course, this means that I'll be spending the next week scrambling to be registered and set up for the start of spring semester which is about a week away. That's chaos for ya... I'll still be riding the waves…
chaoticutopia | December 20, 2006The mother of all logarithmic spirals is focused right over my head. Check it out:
Basically, moisture is being drawn from the Gulf of Mexico and blown to the northwest. There, it climbs the slopes of the Rockies, where it is colliding with a large mass of cold air from the arctic. For Denver, which has been cool and clear all week, this means one thing... Blizzard:
Current forecasts expect an average of an inch a snow an hour, through tomorrow. The snow is already drifting up to a foot high around our house, and gusts of wind (estimated by the NOAA to be as high as 40 mph) have been…
chaoticutopia | December 6, 2006After the skies cleared this week, I headed out to nearby Standley Lake to get a few winter photographs:
Standley Lake, with shores covered in snow and a snow-capped Longs Peak in the distance.
A few trees by the shore.
This is "south for the winter" for these Canadian Geese. There are a ton of geese around, as usual for this time of year, but they seem to be avoiding my camera.
I believe these were goose prints in the snow by the shore, but they could belong to another shore bird.
The beauty of a Colorado winter can even be seen at night, as rainbow-like halos appear around the full…
chaoticutopia | October 13, 2006Is a place timeless? Is a hill the same hill after a hundred years, or a thousand? For instance, this black and white photograph on the right shows a canal along the Front Range. But how old is it? Does it matter? In many of the photographs I've compared lately, there have been striking or subtle differences appearing over time. This scene, however, has hardly changed in the past 150 years. Before then, there wasn't a canal here, nor a lake in the distance, but there weren't cameras around to capture the scene, either.
A few centuries back, we might have seen a herd of buffalo grazing along…
chaoticutopia | October 9, 2006In the early 1900s, Louis Charles McClure, who studied under the famous pioneer photographer, William Henry Jackson, followed the construction of the Denver Interurban Railroad. In or about 1908, he took a number of landscape photographs highlighting the railroad's journey between Denver and Boulder. I've been following the same tracks, trying to see the landscape through McClure's lens, and comparing the changes over the last 100 years. (My quest was, in part, inspired by John Fielder's work, which is well known for matching Jackson's photography. While Jackson and Fielder were mostly drawn…
chaoticutopia | October 5, 2006Continued from: "Taming the Great American Desert"
John Frank Church was born in the Wild West--a young cowboy on the Front Range. He used to help his Pa, George, with the harvest and driving cattle across the continental divide each spring to graze. The famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Buffalo Bill used to stop by the ranch to visit the family. President Grant and his daughter once spent the night, as well. Passengers on the Overland Stage Coach frequently dropped in on their way to Denver or Boulder. Frank's mother, Sarah, was always ready to greet the road-wearied…
chaoticutopia | October 2, 2006Do I have an aversion to technology? It seems absurd; I adore my computer and my microwave, my vacuum cleaner and my Ipod. So, why, then, do I hesitate to write about the impacts of technology on local history?
I've been working on a series looking at the development of the Front Range, fervently delving into local history. This isn't the first time I've indulged myself with the subject. Outside of classes, I've read books summarizing world history from various standpoints. Every time, when I approached the industrial revolution, I've backed away. Strangely, I met the same block while…
chaoticutopia | September 22, 2006Deep within the pockets of a Mandelbrot set, delicate branches display endless variations. When highlighted with the colors of autumn, (since today is, after all, the Autumnal Equinox,) patterns of exquisite beauty emerge:
These patterns can remind us of many forms in nature, including a grove of quaking aspen:
Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)
Aspen are members of the poplar family, along with their cousins, the cottonwoods (featured in last week's fractal.) While they are known for their brilliant foliage in the fall, the species has another claim to fame: the world's largest organism…
chaoticutopia | September 21, 2006Continued from: "Wedding Bells and Wagon Wheels"
The arid, sweeping prairie at the foot of the Rocky Mountains was a challenge to early settlers in Colorado. While most people were drawn to the rugged mountains, captivated by the promise of gold, they brought limited resources. The mountains, while rich in mineral, offered a poor variety of dietary selections. Being raised on home-baked breads, it was easy to grow tired of meals of buffalo steaks and berries. The Front Range needed agriculture.
William N. Byers, who founded the Rocky Mountain News, recognized the need for agriculture. He…
chaoticutopia | September 18, 2006
In May of 1861, George Henry and Sarah Church set out on their honeymoon, into an unfamiliar frontier. They loaded their cart with a variety of comforts, from a stack of homemade potato pancakes to Milton's Paradise Lost and a tome of "Grecian mythology." Then, hitching up their team of oxen ("Buck and Bright, Tom and Jerry") they headed west. Along the way, others told them to head back. Colorado was a bust, they heard. "There was no gold and no farming as it never rained." They wouldn't give up.
Sarah looked at the bleak weather outside, where rain had been pouring for weeks. "It would be…
chaoticutopia | September 15, 2006The other day, I put up a small question about history. What better place could there be to put my answer, but in the form of a fractal? Patterns seem to almost repeat themselves. Sweeping changes result from a single, initial circumstance. Each point is connected to another, within the same set. Are these descriptions of events in history, or the rules defining a rippled Julia set?
Or perhaps the rings of a tree?
The trunk of a cottonwood tree, showing rings formed over many years. Cottonwood trees (below) line the bank of Walnut Creek, which appealed to Sarah H. Church when she arrived…
chaoticutopia | September 8, 2006Fractals are like landscapes. From a simple process, be it a formula or continental drift, one area can be strikingly different from another. This is true for my favorite type of fractal, a Julia set, "colored" with a bit of fractal Brownian motion:
Or the ripples on the Great Sand Dunes:
Stone, Steam and Sand: A Geologic Photo Tour of Southwest Colorado, Part III
In the first part of this series, I described the formation of the San Juan Mountains, and then a bit of the more recent history of the lands to the west of the range. The valley east of the San Juans had similar initial…
chaoticutopia | September 6, 2006Hot and Steamy
Ok, I'll admit, the title is a bit gratuitous. But whether you're here seeking hotness, history or geology, you've come to the right place.
The volcanism which formed the San Juan Mountains has settled over the centuries, but, as with the glaciers, signs of a fiery past remain. The layers of hardened tuff have weathered into fertile soils, lending to the thick vegetation covering the area today. Throughout the mountains and in the valley below, some parts of the continental plate are still worn thin. Magma still flows near the surface, heating the groundwater, which bubbles up…
chaoticutopia | September 5, 2006The San Juan Mountains
As we traversed Southern Colorado a few weeks ago, my son declared we were in a rainforest. Seeing as how the region is known for arid canyons, pinon trees and cliff houses, I felt the need to correct him. Still, as we crossed the continental divide at Wolf Creek Pass, it was actually raining, giving the dense forest a damp, lush feel. Nearly every rock and towering cliff was covered in moss. We might not have been in an authentic rain forest, but it was a far cry from the desert.
It was easy to see why developers have been eyeing these lands. In a few weeks, the aspen…
terrasig | September 4, 2006"Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country," said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. "All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day...is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."
Put simply, the struggles of the American labor movement have given me the luxury of being a scientist, having such a thing as "…
chaoticutopia | August 21, 2006If there were ever a post to elude a specific category here on ScienceBlogs, this would be it. If it were simply a "hey, I'm back from the mountains" post, I could stick it under "Chatter". But sometimes, visiting remote regions, like mist shrouded mountains or vast, dry swaths of blowing sand can cause one to reflect on many things.... including the big picture, the synthesis of it all. I did quite a bit of that this past week, including when I saw the comments on my Schrodinger's Apple post. When I set it to repost, I didn't expect such thoughtful response. I'd like to address those…
chaoticutopia | August 14, 2006
"At last we got through, and I beheld, with some sadness, the goal of my journey, 'The Great Divide,' the Snowy Range, and between me and it South Park, a rolling prairie seventy-five miles long and over 10,000 feet high, treeless, bounded by mountains, and so rich in sun-cured hay that one might fancy that all of the herds of Colorado could find pasture there."
Isabella Bird, describing her 1873 trip through Colorado, in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, pg 171. (We'll be driving through this area, soon.)
I'm afraid I won't have too much time to attend to my blog this week. We're…