My relationship with Alfa Romeo began when I was a child born in the mid-1960s when it was customary to play with toy cars and imitate “grown-ups” driving a car. I do not consider myself a real car enthusiast in the strict sense and I have not had many Alfa’s, in fact, only one so far. But from an early age I was fond of the legendary Alfa Romeo models of my childhood. I was enchanted by the cars around town, I would ask my father what model they were and which one was the best. I still remember that back then my father thought that the Alfa Romeo Giulia was the best car in those days. And that was my imprinting. The Giulia was the car of the police force and bad guys. The “cop” movies of the time were full of chases between Alfa Romeos. Their performance, the road holding in particular, was legendary.
Liquid or solid music?
I have always been an advocate that digital, although very convenient for so many things, forces us to rush and enjoy the product or art form only superficially. I have always maintained on this blog that my insistence on using analog tools when I can is due to a need to rediscover other, more human rhythms from time to time. So putting on a vinyl record to listen to music allows for greater depth, a more complete enjoyment of the artwork (if only because it is impossible for us to jump from one track to another for example, or to extract a “playlist with a different order from how the artist conceived it). But buying new records is becoming very expensive, and when I think that in order to buy an album I would have to spend 2 or 3 months of subscription to a streaming service, even I start thinking. Is it worth it in 2023 to insist on analog? Especially if you are not sailing in gold?
My two cents on nuclear energy
To begin with, I remind you that I am a geologist, not a nuclear physicist, but I do have some basis for understanding and divulgation as well. I want to do this because as a person of science, I should not have also believed certain scientific inaccuracies that have become almost stereotypes. One only has to delve a little deeper into the subject (from scientific sources) to discover that it is not all as dark as it is painted. We are usually afraid of things we do not know. Culture is freedom.
Let’s start with clarifying: in nature we observe 4 types of energy, electromagnetic energy, gravitational energy, weak nuclear energy and strong nuclear energy. The first two we can experience in everyday life. Light itself is an expression of electromagnetic energy, but so are wifi connections and radio waves. Nuclear energies are less visible because they act within atoms.
The costs of staying analog
I was pondering (and it would not be the first time) the cost and commitment of continuing to enjoy music with an analog turntable. As a matter of fact, the analog system is not inherently superior to the digital system. Sound quality depends on the original recording, its mastering, and how the copy we enjoy was created, whether it is a vinyl record, a CD, or a file. I have vinyl records that sound worse than the MP3 files of the same tracks! I have a subscription to Tidal HiFi, and for 10 euros a month I get all the music I want in CD quality (even more since broadband streaming today runs into fewer errors than reading data from an optical disc). So is it really worth the efforts?
What the hell does a geologist do?
I often notice that even other well-trained scientists when talking about geology sometimes make trivial mistakes. Perhaps, because Geology is a relatively new science, it is little known. for example, its other “cousin” science (because it is also a “historical” science) Astronomy, is far better known. Probably looking up, toward the stars, makes us dream more than looking down, underground. Furthermore many associate the geologist with her or his freelance profession, the one related to construction, surveys, and the study of the technical characteristics of soils. But that is only one of the many applications of Geology. Others may be the search for subsurface resources, the study of geological risk (earthquakes, eruptions, landslides, floods-themes that perhaps explain the greater fascination of Astronomy than Geology). I could go on but I want to dwell here on what is really typical of the geologist, whatever activity he or she does: the geologist’s field work.
The earth shakes – whose fault is it?
And again a major earthquake fills the pages of the newspapers because of the many thousands deaths. Again no geologist, geophysicist or seismologist is surprised that there was such a strong earthquake in that area. Insiders are well aware of the most dangerous seismic areas in the world. The Anatolian Peninsula, mostly occupied by Turkey, is one of them, on a par with California and Mexico, Japan, Chile and Peru, to give a few examples of states on plate margins. By now we know well the different plates into which the Earth’s lithosphere is divided and where they interact releasing large amounts of energy. So why so many deaths?