Who's the king of your satellite castle?

[austin_dern]

So the hobby shop where I got a starship Enterprise kit had a poster, please try our main store, Tiong Bahru Plaza, #05-05. I could only remember four above ground (and two below) levels to the plaza, but perhaps I missed something. I went, rode up the escalators and found ... the fourth floor was a cinema and arcade, nothing more, barely any floor space and no way up. I couldn't have gotten #05-05 wrong, but ...

I went looking for an elevator. Many malls here end with office building towers, with limited access to the grown-up sections, and yes, this was the key. The hobby shop was accessibly only by elevator, and tucked away past Learning Enrichment Children's Centers and the like. Ah, but was the store worth it? --

Certainly. It's good-sized, for a Singaporean store. They didn't have more of the original Trek Enterprises, but did have the movie Enterprises (pricey, but fiber-optic), quite a few space shuttles -- with boosters or with 747s -- and even an Apollo Command/Service Module-Lunar Module, and the Chinese spacecraft. I should have a fine time building a hopeless backlog of kits here, too. The clerks were interested and attentive, and tried to help me find stuff I didn't know I wanted, but since I didn't know what they were pointing to I had to pretend that I hadn't noticed that before, but thank you, I'll think it over. Overall a fine experience even if the place was a secret.

Trivia: ``Tiong Bahru'' is an amalgam of the Chinese tiong, ``cemetery'' or ``tomb'', and the Malay bahru, ``new'' (as opposed to the old Chinatown graveyards nearby). Source: Street Names of Singapore, Dunlop Street.

Currently Reading: Asimov on Chemistry, Isaac Asimov. It's always a kick reading science essays from back when Jupiter was made of cold ammonia slush, though Asimov brings up an interesting question. He points out the element rarest relative to life's demand for atoms of it, is phosphorous; and so far as was known (40 year ago) phosphates inevitably end up sinking to the deep ocean. Has anyone found whether, and if so how, they're returned to the surface? When the Alien Invaders come might they be after us for our phosphorous?

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

so far as was known (40 year ago) phosphates inevitably end up sinking to the deep ocean. Has anyone found whether, and if so how, they're returned to the surface?

Phosphorus always ends up in the ocean, but not necessarily the deep ocean. Sedimentation occurs on the continental shelves as well. There it's still part of the shallow biocycle, and can move back to land. It's only in the deep ocean where the sediments are lost to the land and shallow dwellers.

Phosphorus that's been lost to the shallow biocycle comes back to us in two ways. First, geological uplift can expose old ocean floor as sedimentary rock, and then you end up with phosphate deposits that weather out. Secondly, it can come back from volcanoes, either as a component of the rock that's melted in the subduction zones at the edges of the continental plates, or else as the ocean floor is entrained in the rising magma over a 'hot spot' in the mantle, such as the Hawaiian islands.

I don't think people really knew much about continental plates 40 years ago, so as far as was known then the deep ocean floor never got recycled. Asimov, being a chemist, should probably have been aware that there's phosphorus erupted from volcanoes, although noone at the time knew how much of the magma was old ocean floor.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I misrepresented The Good Doctor a bit. He does point out that in geologic scale any phosphorous lost at least to the shallower ocean will be returned to the land, as seabeds dry up and such, and it may well be there's a mechanism returning deep ocean phosphates to the land, but also that it's fairly certain human use of fertilizers wash more phosphorous into the ocean than purely natural processes do, and it's not necessarily helpful if it's all coming back even quite quickly, geologically, which may be 100,000 years from now.

The essay (I checked) was written in 1959, which I think puts it completely in the clear as far as not writing about continental plates, and certainly puts him in the clear about writing so little about what goes on in the deep ocean; back then life came to a stop about 200 meters down.

Continental Drift

[argon-centaur.livejournal.com]

I'm personally amazed that the theory of continental drift is fairly recent. I believe it's only been taken seriously since the late 50's. I may be wrong, but I can recall as a kid looking at maps of the American and European continents and Africa and thinking the coast lines sort of matched up.

Re: Continental Drift

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, the ``fit'' between continents nearly everyone notices -- Francis Bacon wrote about it in 1620, and August Comte de Buffon wondered if it might explain zoologic mysteries. The scientific community overreacted in dismissing Alfred Lother Wigener's theory (Asimov took a moment to dismiss it, in one sentence, in his 1960 Intelligent Man's Guide to Science), although the available evidence before the late 1950s was ambiguous, and there didn't seem to be any way to make the dynamics of continental islands ``floating'' on a rocky sea work out.