When a geologist tells you to get out of the way, do it. This stunning landslide footage shows a roadcrew working to clear debris from a previous slide. They got out of the way when state geologist Vanessa Bateman warned them that they were in danger.

As Geographile points out, learning geology can save your life. So can feminism. What if the roadcrew had refused to listen to a female expert?

The Royal Society, entering its 350th anniversary year, is celebrating with a new website of 60 groundbreaking science articles. (Naturally, they published them all in the first place.) The first few articles may seem ridiculously obvious to the modern reader; the fact that dogs need air to breathe comes as no shock to us. But then, we’ve had the benefit of 350 years of science, instead of more than a thousand years of appealing to theology or ancient philosophers for explanations of the natural world.

The Royal Society was formed in 1660, just after the accession of Charles II. He became the society’s official patron, and his backing offered them powerful protection. In those days the scientific method of experimentation was not widely accepted. Instead, physicians and scientists appealed to authority. If Aristotle said something, it must be true, even if it was demonstrably false. His claim that males have more teeth than females could have been readily disproven merely by looking into a few mouths.

But opening a mouth requires an open mind, and the few people possessing those found them dangerous. Only a few years earlier Galileo had been tried by the Inquisition for spreading the heretical idea that the earth was not the center of the solar system. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He was lucky not to suffer the fate of Giordano Bruno, a scientist who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresy.

Over the decades and centuries, the Royal Society published papers on every branch of science, from physics to medicine to astronomy. Some of the papers on the web site include Isaac Newton on the physics of white light, discussions of inoculation against smallpox, and an inquiry into whether the youthful Mozart was a true prodigy or a short adult. (Prodigy.) Every article is represented by a red dot placed on a timeline that also shows other important events in western history. Mouse over the red dots to get a brief commentary and images. The silver dots show contemporary events.

The final article linked on the site has an ironic ring. It’s James Lovelock’s paper on fighting global warming–a scourge resulting from heedless use of advances in science. There is no question that scientists have been incredibly wrong at times; a glance into the history of medicine makes that instantly clear. Yet if there is hope for humanity, it lies in science and the willingness to keep thinking, testing, experimenting, finding new ways to do things.

It might conceivably be possible to care about science without revering the Royal Society, just as a baseball fan may not care about Cooperstown, but it’s unlikely. I take my hat off to the men and women of the Royal Society and to the merry monarch, Charles II, who could so easily have driven it underground. May the Royal Society continue to flourish for centuries more.

6-1 Phillies! Robin Roberts, thou art avenged!

The Phillies made more runs in this game than they did against the Yankees in the whole four-game series in 1950. No game in that series was this kind of blowout — all but one were decided by a single run. And although the Yankees swept that Series, it was, in the words of one Yankee, “closer than it looked.” The games were tough, tense pitching duels.

A few of the Whiz Kids are still alive. Hall-of-Famer Robin Roberts is taking part in the festivities. Curt Simmons, who wasn’t permitted to play in the 1950 Series, having been taken by the military, is also still around.

I’m glad some of the Whiz Kids survived to see this. It is very, very sweet.

Russia has accused Poland of provoking the outbreak of the Second World War by refusing to accede to the “very modest” demands of Nazi Germany…. The lengthy diatribe, which is unlikely to be welcomed in Warsaw, also lashed out at Britain and France for giving the Poles “delusions of grandeur” by promising to intercede if the Nazis invaded.

Let’s talk a little bit about Poland in World War II.

Poland is in a bad spot, geographically — a place ripe for invasion. The land was devastated by World War I. When the state was reconstituted afterwards, it had a mere 21 years to rebuild before the next world war.

France and England swore to intercede if Hitler should invade. They didn’t. When the Panzers rumbled in on September 1, 1939, Poland resisted as well as it could. Sixteen days later, the Soviets invaded from the east.

The country had no chance. They had less than a million soldiers, 600 tanks, 400 aircraft.

On one side, the Nazis roared in with 1.85 million soldiers, 2800 tanks, 2000 aircraft. On the other, the Soviets invaded with 1.5 million soldiers, 6000 tanks, 1800 aircraft.

Germany annexed some areas and started shipping out the Polish citizens (both Jewish and gentile) to make room for the Master Race. In the German-held territories, Jews began to be rounded up and resettled in ghettos.Of course you know already what the Nazis did to the Jews of Poland, as to the ones of France, Germany, Holland, Czechoslovakia.

What you may not know is that the Nazis wanted to destroy the Poles as well. It began before the war: in August 1939, 2000 Polish expatriate intellectuals were arrested and murdered in Nazi-held regions. During September and October 1939, Operation Tannenberg targeted Polish intellectuals: priests, former officers, activists. In a mere two months, Einsatzkommandos rounded up 20,000 people and slaughtered them in as many as 760 mass executions. The Germans conscripted many other Polish citizens to work as slave laborers. The Germans carefully calculated the expenses of food and clothing and how long the prisoners could be expected to survive on such rations. Not long.

On the Eastern front, the Soviets were busy, too. Many Polish citizens were deported to work in the Soviet Union. And the Soviets agreed with the Nazis that the Polish intelligentsia were dangerous. About 22 thousand Polish intellectuals, policemen, and officers were murdered by the Soviets. This genocide has taken the name of the forest where many were buried. Have you heard of the Katyn Massacre?

By the end of the war, 6 million Polish citizens were dead. Half were Jews. Half were Gentiles. (Yes, a much larger percentage of the country’s Jews died — virtually all of them. It was much worse to be a Polish Jew than to be merely Polish. However, it was no picnic to be a Catholic Pole, either. Poland suffered by far the greatest percentage of fatalities of any country in the conflict.) In 1939 there were less than 30 million Poles. More than one out of 5 died by 1945. The equivalent death rate in the US would take out 60 million people. In addition to the loss of citizens, the Polish economic base was utterly destroyed.

My mother-in-law graduated from high school in 1939. By 1945 she was the only survivor of her class.

Why weren’t we taught these things in school? My guess is that nobody wanted to bother with teaching about Eastern Europe while it was still behind the Iron Curtain. Moreover, Poland never was liberated; it went from Nazi rule to Soviet rule. Some of the people who survived the Nazi regime were sent to the gulags afterwards. My husband’s great-aunt and great-uncle were among them. He spent two years in Siberia; she spent five and came home limping from having broken a leg. Speaking out about what had happened, what was happening, would be punished, and everyone knew it.

I have seen Nazi propaganda films about their intentions with regard to Poland. I have read the translated memos and speeches of Hans Frank. I spent two years researching Poland from 1920 to 1945. I know damned well what happened there.

And Poland didn’t cause it. Not because Poland lost the war. But because they were minding their own business when two vast states invaded. The current Russian argument is the exact equivalent of a bully telling his victim, “You made me hit you.” Or a rapist: “I wouldn’t have raped you if you’d cooperated to give me sex.”

Under planned legislation, backed by Mr Medvedev, any Russian or foreigner who claims that the Soviet Union occupied Poland or the Baltic States could face up to five years in prison.

This is a familiar chorus.

Nobody but the Nazis made the Nazis invade. Nobody but the Soviets was responsible for the Soviet invasion. Hitler and Stalin, Himmler and Beria. Blame them. Don’t blame the Poles.

The Unlikely Events of a Water Landing: New Photos From Flight 1549. Fascinating chronicle of the salvage effort by a photographer on the inside. It shows the whole process of pulling the plane out of the Hudson. Very, very cool.

Bay Area Coolness, Episode 43,279. They’re building a rocket ship in Oakland. Yes, you will be able to visit it. And when I say “they,” I do not mean NASA or even Pixar. I mean some independent artists. Link courtesy rmjwell.

The air that I breathe, AKA Hazmat Crisis at AT&T. This article is being clipped or printed and posted in office kitchens all over the US.

O Little Root of a Dream

This poem by a Holocaust survivor is posted as my response to Hitler’s birthday. Celan’s Death Fugue may be the single best poem to come out of World War II. Do go read it.

Theodor Adorno raised the question of whether it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

To me, poetry is, has always been, one of the few possible answers to the death camps, since long before I read Adorno or Celan. When I was a small child, I saw those pictures. (You know the ones.) They were in books on my father’s shelves. Books — poetry, stories, nonfiction, any kind of book — were the only defense I had against those images, against the searing things he did to me and animals, against the things he made me do, and which even then I sensed were a private expression of the same impulse that built the smokestacks.

Books are defiance even in defeat. They are victory even in death. Long after their authors are dead, they go on tapping out the message of freedom to prisoners caged in tyrannies of iron or clapboard. They can speak the truth when all utterance is forbidden and only lies are acknowledged.

Adorno’s oft-quoted dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz is a quotation from a larger, far more complex and shifting attitude. (Good article on it by the late poet Reginald Shepherd.)

Adorno also wrote:

Literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism…. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.

For April 18, anniversary of the great San Francisco Quake, we have one of the great poems of geology:

Lay of the Trilobite

A mountain’s giddy height I sought, Because I could not find Sufficient vague and mighty thought To fill my mighty mind; And as I wandered ill at ease, There chanced upon my sight A native of Silurian seas, An ancient Trilobite.

So calm, so peacefully he lay, I watched him even with tears: I thought of Monads far away In the forgotten years. How wonderful it seemed and right, The providential plan, That he should be a Trilobite, And I should be a Man!

And then, quite natural and free Out of his rocky bed, That Trilobite he spoke to me And this is what he said: ‘I don’t know how the thing was done, Although I cannot doubt it; But Huxley – he if anyone Can tell you all about it;

‘How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams, How in the silent sea Your ancestors were Monotremes - Whatever these may be; How you evolved your shining lights Of wisdom and perfection From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites By Natural Selection.

‘You’ve Kant to make your brains go round, Hegel you have to clear them, You’ve Mr Browning to confound, And Mr Punch to cheer them! The native of an alien land You call a man and brother, And greet with hymn-book in one hand And pistol in the other!

‘You’ve Politics to make you fight As if you were possessed: You’ve cannon and you’ve dynamite To give the nations rest: The side that makes the loudest din Is surest to be right, And oh, a pretty fix you’re in!’ Remarked the Trilobite.

‘But gentle, stupid, free from woe I lived among my nation, I didn’t care – I didn’t know That I was a Crustacean.* I didn’t grumble, didn’t steal, I never took to rhyme: Salt water was my frugal meal, And carbonate of lime.’

Reluctantly I turned away, No other word he said; An ancient Trilobite, he lay Within his rocky bed. I did not answer him, for that Would have annoyed my pride: I merely bowed, and raised my hat, But in my heart I cried: -

‘I wish our brains were not so good, I wish our skulls were thicker, I wish that Evolution could Have stopped a little quicker; For oh, it was a happy plight, Of liberty and ease, To be a simple Trilobite In the Silurian seas!’

–May Kendall

* He was not a crustacean. He has since discovered that he was an Arachnid, or something similar. But he says it does not matter. He says they told him wrong once, and they may again.

I have no idea if May Kendall is a relative; she was an English poet and reformer, and my ancestors of that ilk came to this side of the Atlantic four hundred years ago.

Also, go buy a copy of Earthquake Weather, a stunning collection of poems by Janice Gould.

For April 19, one of the great poems of American history

Concord Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, April 19th, 1836

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set today a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Goodbye, Harry Kalas. I am so glad you lived to see your team win the World Series again.

From the time I was 12, Harry Kalas was the voice of the Phillies. Whenever we made the playoffs, I resented the national broadcast team who took over from the local guys. Why should someone like Kalas, who called wins and losses steadily, for decades, have his place usurped when the team was finally getting some glory?

If Harry wasn’t calling the plays with Richie Ashburn, it wasn’t really a Phillies game. Richie’s been gone a few years, but now his old partner has rejoined him. They’re both in the Hall of Fame — Kalas as broadcaster, Ashburn as player.

Harry Kalas collapsed in the broadcast booth shortly before the Phillies game with the Nationals. He was 73. Philadelphia won’t be the same without him.