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?

IMG_5945 Originally uploaded by EBRPD Public Affairs

This picture was taken in a park a few miles east of my house and about 600 feet higher. Naturally, the park is closed for the day; there might be 3 to 6 inches of snow. This sounds silly to my winter-toughened Northeastern self, but most Bay Area Californians can’t even drive in the rain, much less snow. Also, we have no snowplows.

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.

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from schoolteachers. St. Bernard

How do you convey the essence of a redwood tree? No words, no pictures, can capture the experience of walking through a grove of them.

Redwoods lack the graceful stance of elms, the glorious color of sugar maples in autumn, the picturesquely twisted branches of oak trees. They don’t even have the shapeliness of a blue spruce or a Douglas fir. In fact, they resemble extremely tall bottle-brushes.

Moreover, a hiker can see the whole only from a distance. Up close, you don’t see much of the branches; they start above eye level. What you see is the reddish bark, the vast trunk, perhaps a few needles dipping low enough for your notice. They stand, calm and strong, alone or in great goosepens or in ranks on steep ridges. They carpet the woods with their shredding bark and their rusty, fragrant needles. But the simplicity of the great trunks has grace, and the fibrous bark — the color of tea in sunlight — has a subtle auburn glow.

And they are huge. The vast specimens in Muir Woods are among the greatest of the Coast Redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, which aren’t even the most massive of the redwood family. The Giant Sequoia, Sequoiadendron gigantea, are thicker-trunked. But even a comparatively adolescent Coast Redwood tree can be magnificent long before it reaches its full growth of 350+ feet in height and as much as 26 feet in diameter. (Not circumference. Diameter.) They’re big enough to camp out in when hollowed by fire or age. They grow taller than the Statue of Liberty on her pedestal. And they have a natural lifespan of as much as 2,000 years. Trees of 600 or 700 years old are common — well, common in places where they haven’t been clear-cut.

Walking among them is like walking in a great cathedral, or Stonehenge. They carry a sense of holiness, of calm contemplation. It’s more than the effect of great size; I’ve been in buildings where humans were puny without feeling the upwelling of joy these forests give me.

Words can’t do it. Pictures fail. But maybe this video will help. It shows the making of this large-scale photograph.

How to get a parking spot in Berkeley: Win a Nobel Prize. If you’ve ever tried to park in that crowded and fascinating college town, you’ll know what a valuable perk this is.

Of course, you have to teach there. Just being a Nobel laureate isn’t enough.

You can’t accuse California scientists of making their work mysterious and inaccessible. They’re much more likely to throw open the doors for a science party. Last week we had Impact Night, an all-night bash at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View to watch the LCROSS satellite smash into the moon. This cross between a slumber party and the iPhone’s midnight product release allowed as many as a thousand curious people to watch the impact on a vast outdoor screen. They also watched movies and listened to guest speakers.

Today at 10:15AM, science will strike again when millions of Californians participate in the Great California ShakeOut, the largest earthquake drill in history. (I’ll be at the DMV. I wonder if I’ll need to drop, cover, and hold on.) Many schools and museums will have special activities as well as participating in the drill.

On Saturday, October 17, we’re celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Loma Prieta, the earthquake that struck during the World Series.San Francisco will hold “Where Were You in 89?” neighborhood block parties as well as resource fairs for disaster preparedness. You can also play Beat the Quake online.

All this frivolity over a serious subject—is it appropriate? People have died in quakes—at least 3000 in the great 1906 earthquake, 62 in Loma Prieta. We’re all at risk. Yet in my opinion, staying aware without staying terrified is the best way to handle living in a seismically active zone. (Or anywhere else, really.) And the games, fairs, parties, and drills allow people to learn and stay aware while having some fun.

California. We dance on the edge of destruction.

Yes, that’s actually what they call the small screening room (in a simulated bomb shelter) at the Atomic Testing Museum in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. (Just blocks from the Strip on one side and the Clark County Library on the other. The library has a vast ongoing book sale that makes it one of the best used bookstores in Las Vegas.)

The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, is dedicated to the history of testing nuclear devices, from the days of the Manhattan Project up to the present. I thought the science was explained pretty well (Alan, the physicist, says it was adequate for lay people). I certainly will never forget the excerpt of Disney’s Our Friend the Atom film. The excerpt skipped old Walt himself, but included a German scientist, hundreds of mousetraps armed with ping-pong balls, Atomic Energy as a Tom of Finland-style genie whom we can finally control, and a non-turning globe firmly focused on the Western hemisphere. Radioactivity was portrayed as a jitterbugging atom-headed creature in tie and tails, animated in every sense, leaping from one element to another. And there are rows of Geiger counters, inactive bomb cases, and vast drillheads to delight the techies.

The museum provides plenty of social context — the Einstein letter, some newsreels, and a lot of snippets from television. The earlier ones I found utterly fascinating, because by God that was the world I was born into. There is a 1940s/1950s era office complete with–”Look, Alan, a *real* telephone!” And a non-electric typewriter, and various other objects that have faded into prehistory. The display of pop-culture atomic allusions was mostly amusing, but the cover of the old Life or Look magazine on the children of the atomic scientists was utterly chilling. Headline trumpeting that these kids have been through a score of nuclear tests. Mushroom cloud rising in the background; in the foreground, a dozen kids prone in their unnaturally clean play clothes. It didn’t look like a test. It looked like a tidy massacre.

Nuclear testing is more than blowing up Bikini Atoll or the kind of underground nuclear testing that seems so routine today. They tested the relative effectiveness of aerial versus surface detonation. They tested the effects of radioactivity on various house materials. The museum even features a facsimile bomb shelter that was used in testing shelters, complete with its blond, blue-eyed mannequins: brave Dad on his feet looking about him in curiosity, seated Mom in a dark-blue wrap dress with her face turned toward Junior in his overalls. They didn’t show that in fifteen years or so Junior would be a long-haired antiwar protester, Dad would be an alcoholic, and Mom would be coming out as a lesbian textile artist (after her time in the psychiatric hospital).

In addition to the testing itself, the museum gave a nod to the test sites: geology, history, and meaning to the indigenous peoples who found the arid land a sacred place of plenty. Looking at the tools they shaped, I had to ponder that they used the land with more love and more productivity than we did, and left it living for the next generation. Well, until we started exploding thermonuclear devices over, under, and on it. On the other hand, the Nevada Test Site is still used as a training ground for first responders from all over the US to learn to deal with radiation emergencies and hazardous waste.

We checked out the museum shop, looking for Ellen Klages’ superb books on the kids at Los Alamos: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace. No dice. So I stopped at the cash register to mention them. Although the cashier seemed indifferent, the bookstore manager overheard and came out to get details. She’d been looking for books that would help kids understand it all. With the help of the iPhone, Alan was even able to provide the ISBN numbers.

Then out again into the 109-degree heat and heavy traffic of Flamingo Road. On the next block we saw two women — one in a bikini — trying to cross against the light. Nobody stopped for them. Nobody even paused to look.

Once again, I have gone deep into the desert for my annual writing retreat. I’ll spend the next 16 days in a couple of rooms, writing, reading, listening to music, meditating. I’ll cook myself simple meals in the galley kitchen. With a few necessary exceptions (obtaining food supplies and the like), I’ll go out only in the cool predawn hours. Away from the distractions of my home, I’ll be able to clarify my thinking and choose a productive direction for the year ahead.

Why yes, I’m in Las Vegas. And no, I am not alone. I’m sharing the hotel room with Alan, who is here to play poker, and I am sure that we will not limit our activities to poker (him) and writing (me).

But the rest is true, too. My forays into Sin City are generally a lot closer in spirit to the Desert Fathers than, say, late-stage Elvis. Assuming any Desert Father had a comfortable bed, something to read, and an iPod.

We started after midnight, in the early hours of Monday morning. The roads were nearly empty. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark on the CD player, followed by the first couple discs of Citizen Steely Dan. Then Chris Squire in an album I hadn’t heard before, and we talked about progressive rock.

We stopped for a meal at 3AM — scrambled eggs and tea served in a ceramic pot that miraculously did not drip. I loathe those cheapjack aluminum teapots with the ill-fitting flat lids. The ones that spill half the tea on the table.

At a Denny’s off I-5 near Coalinga: A small black-and-white truckstop cat is patrolling the strips of grass and shrubs, hunting the mice that feed on dropped munchies.

Despite the caffeine in the tea, I fell back to sleep as soon as I got in the car.

Heading east from Bakersfield toward Tehachapi. (Pronounced Teh-HATCH-a-pee.) Torn-paper hills and a sky paling toward sunrise. Quarter moon at zenith.

Me: I know Bakersfield is universally regarded as ugly, but these hills [oak-dotted, east of the town] are gorgeous.

The hawks were hunting in the pre-dawn stillness. I put on Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and mentioned to Alan that the title song had once been seriously nominated as the official anthem of New Jersey youth.

Alan You mean by the state?

Me: Yeah. I guess they couldn’t figure out what the lyrics meant.

Ridge after ridge of wind turbines. Alan says: Don Quixote, eat your heart out.

As we reached the high desert, the dawn bloomed brilliantly pink and clear. Mojave and Marvin Gaye’s Number One Hits. Oh yes.

California towns that sound like Discworld troll gods: Monolith, Boron. Boron would be god of duty and etiquette. Or paperwork.

We passed the turnoff for Twenty-Mule Team Road in Boron, CA. Then we stopped for gas, and I took over the driving. The roads were relatively level here, mostly straight, still almost deserted. The only risk (other than falling asleep at the wheel from sheer boredom) was that there was so little close-in scenery — so few landmarks to measure one’s progress — that even 80 mph felt slow. I eased back on the throttle whenever I noticed we were at 90.

Even at that speed, I kept an eye on geology. The Mojave, the high desert, is not much like the iconic deserts: the sand dunes and palms of the Sahara, or the wind-scoured rocky Garden of the Gods, familiar from a thousand Road Runner cartoons.

The granite hills were weathered into fantastic shapes: knifelike serrated ridges, curves, pillars, volutes, needles, as fanciful as chocolate meringue. (The occasional volcanic cinder cone blended right in.) The ridges rise randomly from drifts of weathered dry ravel, like icebergs in the sea. Fat round cushions of sagebrush are scattered over the level valley floor, and the spiky Joshua trees, which look like clustered bottle brushes.

Then I asked Alan to put on an Oliver Messiaen CD he’d brought. I like Messiaen a lot, but I hadn’t heard his Quartet for the End of Time, written and first performed in a Nazi POW camp. The quartet instruments–piano, cello, violin, clarinet–were what the imprisoned musicians happened to play and the camp had available. Spare, complex, demanding, with moments of unexpected beauty. Rather like the high desert, in fact.

Last year we drove through Yosemite on the way down, and I made a spontaneous sunrise excursion that landed me in Calico Canyon. This time we’ll be here for the new moon, and I want very much to go out into the desert to look at the stars in true darkness.

I brought a stack of books and the entire Internet with me, and I’ve been stuffing my laptop with CDs. I also want and need to get a good bit of work done. I am also planning to stop by the Clark County Library book sale, where I bought a box and a half of books last year for an indecently low price. It’s the best used bookstore in town.

I am planning to continue my record of never having wagered a cent in Las Vegas. I don’t play poker anyway, Casinos have too much cigarette smoke and too many random perfumes for my allergic, asthmatic self, although I like the decorations — Chihuly flower ceilings, giant aquaria, white tiger cats sporting in waterfalls, fountains pretending to be volcanoes, and duplicates of classical statues that I’ll never get to Europe to see.

So. The adventure begins.

Joe Decker is having a 72-hour sale on nature photography.

Now, Joe is something of a cross between Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell. In other words, a hellaciously fine photographer of nature. And this sale includes many of his best pictures of glaciers, icebergs, moonrise, and the motion of light on water. Some are traditional landscapes. Others show the world almost as an abstraction, a texture, a pattern.

My brain seems to be crawling at quarter-speed today. Time-lapse photography might well show that it’s attempting to give me the finger.

However, these time-lapse photographs show amazing natural events. A lunar eclipse, a thunderstorm, a wildfire, growing mushrooms, a rotting apple, and more.

Some things take time. Others are fast, like Tweets, but can do a lot of damage as they go by.

The five worst Twitters ever. By worst they mean something like “causing most collateral damage.” Link courtesy zem42.

If you slow down high-speed phenomena, you can see extraordinary things.