First shots of Las Vegas Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. history

The Last One

Eagle Mountain, California — Our Home in the Desert. I grew up in Eagle Mountain, California, a town carved into the desert by Kaiser Steel. It wasn’t just a place on a map — it was a purpose-built world. Kaiser owned the mine, Kaiser owned the houses and the market and the parks. When you lived in Eagle Mountain, your life was tied to the mine, just like everyone else's. Our high school opened its doors in 1962, and the first class graduated in 1963. My mom was just a year behind them, graduating in 1964. I graduated in 1982, walking across the quad under the open desert sky, surrounded by the familiar faces that had been part of my world since childhood. EMHS Band We were isolated out there, tucked against the barren hills of Southern California. There were no nearby cities to escape to, no outside world to drift into after school. We had each other — and only each other. Our dads all worked for the same company. Our moms ran the same errands and attended the same community eve...

A Letter to My Daughter

Hi Sweetie, I love looking at Google Earth with all the labels and borders turned off. You get a quick view of the geology of North America. It is cool. You can see all the older mountain ranges on the east coast that have been weathered, all the pot holes left behind by glaciers in the upper Midwest and up into Canada, and the spectacular mountain ranges of the west. I love the American West. I don’t associate a state as being where I am from so much as I do the Western U.S. The Rockies are amazing. You can follow them from where they begin, just south of Mexico City, northwest into Canada. Nevada is a geologist’s dream. I remember, when I was still in school and working one summer with the geologists at Echo Bay in Battle Mountain, a few of them were roommates and they invited me over for dinner and we got a little drunk. There was a geologic map of Nevada on the fridge and I looked at it through my drunk eyes and said “look, Nevada is covered with stretch marks!”...

Dinosaurs (ok, it's really Climate Change)

If you are a Creationist and believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, give or take, this is not meant for you. Your beliefs are founded in faith and I won’t argue with you. If you fall into this category and continue to read, keep your comments to yourself. To everyone else, read on, if you wish. The Earth was formed 4.6 Billion years ago, plus or minus a few million years. 4.6 Billion years is pretty freaking old. Until around 2,050,000,000 years (2.05 Billion Years, I just wrote it out like that to impress you with the number of zeros) ago, the Earth had an Oxygen deficient atmosphere. That means for much of the planet’s history, Oxygen dependent organisms couldn’t have existed. Over time, as life evolved and turned Carbon Dioxide into Oxygen, the atmosphere became oxygenic. Are you still with me? I think this stuff is interesting, it’s probably why I became a geologist. Another 1.5 Billion years goes by (give or take a few million) and voi...

Landlocked Pirate

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