"I have to take a deep breath before I start the first full revision. I used to hate myself for procrastinating, but now I see it might be wise. You need to pause in holy fear at what you’ve done, and make sure you don’t wreck it in panic."
PROJECT GASBUGGY - FARMINGTON, NEW MEXICO
Once upon a time in the west, December 1967 to be exact, some men from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and some men from the EL Paso Natural Gas company buried a 29-kiloton nuclear bomb (Hiroshima was around 13-kilotons) in the ground just west of Farmington, New Mexico, in the Carson National Forest. Then they set it off.
Project Gasbuggy was the first of three industry-government experiments conducted in the Four Corners area under the Operation Plowshare program to turn swords into plowshares. The grand idea was to find peaceful uses for nuclear weapons, in this case to stimulate energy production by fracking for natural gas on an epic scale.
The bomb used at Gasbuggy was 13 feet long and 17.5 inches in diameter. It took three days to lower the bomb 4,240 feet underground. Once there, it was cemented into place in the dense, but natural gas rich Lewis shale formation.
The resulting explosion — and 5.10 magnitude earthquake — left a crater on top and an underground glass lined chimney 335 feet high and 160 feet in diameter. As predicted, the detonation shattered the shale and dramatically increased the amount of gas that was recoverable.
It also made the gas so radioactive that it couldn’t be used.
Somehow feeling that unleashing that much natural underground radiation with a nuclear explosion might turn out differently, the experiment was tried two more times: first with the 40-kiloton Project Rulison near Parachute, Colorado, and finally with Project Rio Blanco’s three simultaneous 33-kiloton detonations near Rifle, Colorado.
While the public was initially supportive before Gasbuggy, by the time of Rulison in 1969 the tide had changed. With a new national sense of environmentalism taking root, Operation Plowshare would come to an end after Rio Blanco in 1973.
Then they just had to clean it all up.
To visit the Project Gasbuggy site, look for mile marker 115 on Highway 64. Turn onto the Jicarilla Apache reservation road J-10, and follow it for 7.25 miles. At that point you will enter the Carson National Forest, and the road will turn into Forest Service 357. Go one more mile and you are at ground zero.
Guide Notes:
- Plowshare, the Movie
- Plowshare background, including a list of planned but not executed tests in such places as Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Australia, Canadian tar sands and Buffalo, Wyoming, among others.
- Carson National Forest
* * *
At-Large Guide to the West James Orndorf was born in Minnesota, but knew at a very young age that the future lay out west. He is currently photographing and illustrating outside of Durango, Colorado. You can see what he’s up to at inlandwest.tumblr.com and roughshelter.com.
You Americans have way too much room.
(Source: inlandwest, via americanguide)
"the first word I teach my daughter will be “no”
she will sing it to me and scream it at me
and I will never tell her to quiet down
she will say it when I tell her to go to bed
when I tell her she can’t have anymore candy
or watch anymore television
“no” will be my daughter’s favorite word
not only will I teach her how to say it
but I will teach her to repeat it over and over
again until every single atom in her tiny little body
hums with it
If it makes her less soft than the other girls
I will take her to museums and show her
what marble and stone can become
I will brush her hair and let her wear whatever
she wants
whatever that makes her
she will know
that the world has been built upon “no’s”
upon rejections and refusals and swords
if this makes her a warrior in a field of
flowers, then she will walk without fear
of being trampled on
the first word I teach my daughter will be
“no”
and when she grows up
in a world that tells her
she can’t walk down the street by herself
that “no” will be heard
it will roar and echo down the block
and she will never be told to keep
silent
she will not know the meaning of the word."
she will sing it to me and scream it at me
and I will never tell her to quiet down
she will say it when I tell her to go to bed
when I tell her she can’t have anymore candy
or watch anymore television
“no” will be my daughter’s favorite word
not only will I teach her how to say it
but I will teach her to repeat it over and over
again until every single atom in her tiny little body
hums with it
If it makes her less soft than the other girls
I will take her to museums and show her
what marble and stone can become
I will brush her hair and let her wear whatever
she wants
whatever that makes her
she will know
that the world has been built upon “no’s”
upon rejections and refusals and swords
if this makes her a warrior in a field of
flowers, then she will walk without fear
of being trampled on
the first word I teach my daughter will be
“no”
and when she grows up
in a world that tells her
she can’t walk down the street by herself
that “no” will be heard
it will roar and echo down the block
and she will never be told to keep
silent
she will not know the meaning of the word."
— The First Word I Teach My Daughter (via albinwonderland)
Oh is that what I did?
(via greatwhitebear)
Many people didnât even heard about these famous abandoned places. Many of these places are really amazing and magnificent, but they’re also really sad when you take a closer look at them.
I don’t know which one I like the most.
(Source: paperisdue)
Henry James, c. 1860, age 17.
From the submitter Katie Sommer:
Hello MDB. I am the associate editor for The Complete Letters of Henry James (ongoing; U of Nebraska Press). Here’s a photo of an extremely handsome young (18 years old or so) Henry James. The photo dates from 1860 or 1861 when his family was in Newport, RI, and the original is at the Houghton Library at Harvard University (pf MS AM 1094).
I had forgotten this one. I always connect HJ with his bald, fat portrait at the National Portrait Gallery.
Nature’s Unbalance
“Imbalance.”
This is probably the worst one I’ve seen to date.
"As I am now convinced that intellectual property does not have the same standing as real property — and for good reason grounded in the nature of things — I have not abandoned my conviction that the writer and artist enjoys a moral right that is superior in ethical value to me than any real property’s economic value.
The intimate bond of the idea and the imagination to the mind that has developed and holds it is one that can never be taken away forcefully except with the destruction of mind and conscience itself. This, however, defines the paradox that faces the author and artist. Once a thought or image had been put out there and enters the mind of another, the bond can become just as firm as it was when the author thought of it, and as it enters that person’s process of thought and expression."
The intimate bond of the idea and the imagination to the mind that has developed and holds it is one that can never be taken away forcefully except with the destruction of mind and conscience itself. This, however, defines the paradox that faces the author and artist. Once a thought or image had been put out there and enters the mind of another, the bond can become just as firm as it was when the author thought of it, and as it enters that person’s process of thought and expression."
"
When we use online services to gather together and share information, whether it be about our favorite romance novels, or most useful sets of bibliographic citations, we create persistent and accessible agglomerations of data. The more popular such services become, the more valuable that data becomes, and sooner or later, a big fish is going to come around and gobble it up. We personally may have never intended to sell out, but together we managed to create something that was bound to be sold. Inevitably, that data will be used to target us.
The close proximity of the GoodReads and Mendeley incidents is a useful reminder that so many of us have now conducted so much of our lives online for so long that the Web is ripe with Big Data fruits for the plucking. We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of consolidation.
""It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read."
— Lemony Snicket (via gingermob)
(Source: runa-lovegood, via fozmeadows)
