This time the quotations are from work

The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking at it with sticks. --Wallace S. Broecker, quoted as the last sentence of a paper I read the other day (alas I cannot remember which).

In June 1982, south of Jakarta, Indonesia, a British Airways Boeing 747 flew into a volcanic cloud from an eruption of Galunggung volcano. Airborne volcanic ash abraded the outside of the aircraft, melted as it passed through the jet turbines, and coated internal parts, causing complete loss of thrust. This prompted Captain Eric Moody to announce, while maintaining true British unflappability, "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress." After descending to within a few hundred meters of the mountaintops on Java, the crew were able to restart all engines and make a safe landing, an incredible feat given the damage to the aircraft and the lack of knowledge regarding how to react in such a situation. -- opening paragraph of Durant et al. (2010), Atmospheric and environmental impacts of volcanic particulates, Elements, 6:235-240

Group Dicebox order?

Hello lovely people!

Dicebox is an amazing ongoing comic that features actual queer people, actual diversity, and fantastic ongoing plot in a speculative fiction environment.

Here's my normal pitch for attempting to get it to sell: the lead couple are a lanky white FAAB genderqueer person, and a fat black woman. They're married. They don't sleep with each other; they are cheerfully and enthusiastically poly. They're itinerant factory workers, one of them with a shady past, IN SPACE.

The art is beautiful. The characters are beautiful. The story, thus far, is beautiful. The world is painstakingly detailed; gender-neutral pronouns are used by default, of everyone, unless gender is relevant.

I really, really like it. A lot.

Jenn Manley Lee, the artist & author, is currently having a rough patch financially - so is offering reduced shipping on pretty much everything from her store, outside the US, up until April 15th.

I am particularly keen on acquiring the poppy pin (or possibly the necklace and poppy t-shirt (poppies are my favourites, and have been for years); the rest of the shop is great too.

If any of you are interested in combining orders, give us a yell and we'll sort something out :-)

[rec] The Two Cultures -- C. P. Snow

This is a forty-page lecture, delivered in 1959 by an apparently cis straight white man, and blow me down if Snow isn't better at social justice than a significant proportion of the Internet (and I include the feminist blogsophere) in 2013.

Seriously. Tears. Tears everywhere, at several points. On effecting change:

I can't see the political techniques through which the good human capabilities of the West can get into action. The best one can do, and it is a poor best, is to nag away.

And this is indeed what I do, in my small ways. He does use the masculine throughout - but he states explicitly that this is because, in 1959, the UK as a whole was terrible at supporting girls and women in choosing to study sciences.

These men, whom we don't yet possess, need to be trained not only in scientific but in human terms. They could not do their job if they did not shrug off trace of paternalism. Plenty of Europeans, from St Francis Xavier to Schweitzer, have devoted their lives to Asians and Africans, nobly but paternally. These are not the Europeans whom Asians and Africans are going to welcome now. They want men who will muck in as colleagues, who will pas on what they know, do an honest technical job, and get out.

If only more of the UK establishment had listened to - and acted on - this in the last fifty years.

He isn't perfect; and the academic landscape has changed so much since he wrote this that it's laughable, in places. For example: the claim that scientists are by-and-large more liberal, more left-leaning, than their counterparts in the arts.

Nonetheless. Thank you, dead white guy; and now I'm going to go and read something by someone who is none of the above.