Snoozing Eider... in process

Turkey Hunting with an atlatl

Was just reading an article about BLM archeologists at a National Turkey Hunting day demonstrating the use of atlatls to hunt turkey. Someone commented "I would go hungry if I had to hunt turkeys that way".

My immediate thought was that it would probably be easier to hunt turkeys with a throwing stick, a bola, or something involving snares. So unless you find an arrowhead (or "dart point") with turkey blood on it, then I would give up on that idea. Why not kick that up a notch and demand a fossil turkey with an arrowhead lodged in its vertebrae!

A letter I wrote to a friend

I have formed the opinion that the way forward in America is not through elections but through labor organizations (or other unions) forcing the government to do the right thing. I have watched more than 50 years of failed political solutions and I am willing to believe we should try something else. Apparently one of the difficulties in forming unions is the difficulty in finding leadership. This seems particularly unfortunate as "power corrupts" and leaders, inevitably, tend to have power. The conclusion might be that leaders always become corrupt, so maybe they should be avoided. So I wrote my friend Johannes, who works in labor organizing at SEIU

I hope you are safe and well. 

I have been thinking about unionizing software and realized that the most fundamental issue is not about finding leadership but about getting people to feel solidarity with each other. I am guessing that barriers to unionizing are often seen as a matter of conflict between employer and worker. That is what all the newspaper stories are about. But I think the conflict between individual workers and creation of solidarity might be the most significant challenge. After all, you are asking people to put their jobs on the line when they strike. They won't do it out of self interest but they will do it out of solidarity.

On a related note: I think the goal of merging unions (like merging all transportation-related unions) is a crucial need in America. And I think the dynamic for this might be similar to  the dynamic for forming a union itself, with similar solidarity issues between unions, rather than individual people. On the other hand, there is no "employer" and it is all about creating solidarity and figuring out how to define an all-purpose employment contract - something that would need to include an understanding of the government's role.

These are some tough issues to think about.  

Update: I got a better idea. If unions should not need a leader, workers should not need a union. What they need is a good employment contract. This leads to the idea of a universal contract.

Exchange heard at the supermarket

 - "Living the life"

 - "One day at time"

What were the weirdest things you saw in the desert?

Well, finding a colonial root cellar was pretty strange.  

I did not take a picture but I was noticing a badger hole and then spotted a metal tag, glued to a nearby small rock. It said "1530" on it. I have no idea why someone would go around gluing metal tags to rocks but imagined it was some kind of badger tracking system.

Here is a story: I drove with my friend Dave Larson along a dirt road, under power lines and up to a pass between the hills. I thought it might be a way to spot game trails and somewhere to look for arrowheads. We parked at a turnaround that was covered with shell casings, shotgun shells, broken skeet, and broken glass. About twenty yards out we also saw Coke Cans that were still unbroken and I came across a Corona beer bottle that still had beer in it. I popped it open and enjoyed a wind cooled free beer in the middle of the Nevada desert. You had to wonder why, after missing their shots, they did not go collect the unbroken Coke and Coronas. They could have been distracted or just been too drunk.

[When I told this story to a barmaid at the airport, she started worrying it was going to be a scary story, as soon as I mentioned "middle of nowhere" and "gun". When I got to the end she supplied the phrase - "finding a beer in the middle of the Nevada desert". In fact, I was dehydrated and it was delicious.]

Oh yeah! That WAS a glacial lakeshore.

I am smacking myself in the forehead for not realizing I was exploring exactly the kind of glacial lakeshore early-man site that I wanted to find in Nevada. Better late than never.

On the other hand, I am patting myself heartily on the back for picking a place to explore that has perhaps the highest concentration of lithic debris in the whole valley. The dark brown crescent at the southern end of the chert outcrop is darker than any other of the patches. Having been there on foot, I can tell you what these different features are:

The amazing thing (I'll write about this more on Rock Piles) is that the darker patches are a heat map. I am now looking at aerials of the whole valley (called Hidden Valley on the topo map) and not only is my hill the best place to look (the darkest) I can also see other specific places I should have gone here and there - because they also have dark brown patches. How cool is that! 

Random thought from my trip to Nevada

Gosh there are so many different little thoughts from my trip to Nevada. Like this one I just had about the dark brown rock that is the commonest tool material on my little hill. I looked up "chert" and it is the perfect definition for this material, as far as I can tell. This is gratifying for several reasons. One is that I had almost figured out a material with nodules in some places and layers on other places, would have to be like an accreting flint but also -somehow- sedimentary. Well, what do you know, they suspect that diatomaceous layers were the source of SiO2 molecules which migrated around to form chert.

And I was trying to resolve the difference between white chalcedony [??] and brown chert. It is OK, they are compatible as different varieties of mixture between trigonal and monoclinic  forms of SiO2 crystal. Don't ask me what that means. 

But here is the little thought: I had decided that the brown chert and the white Chalcedony could not be the same material because the chert remains shiny when underground but the white material become crumbly like chalk. So you pull a fragment out of the ground and expect the white stuff to have deteriorated but the brown stuff to be like new (at least visually).