@silicatefondue A badger!

Rossman was born on August 3, 1944, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He spent his childhood in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a lumber town in the state's densely wooded northwest. Rossman cultivated a passion for the natural sciences throughout his childhood, collecting minerals, interacting with the chemistry department of the nearby Wisconsin State College, and building a home chemistry laboratory in his basement. He graduated from his high school class as the salutatorian in 1962 and went on to study at the newly formed Wisconsin State University–Eau Claire, graduating with a BS in chemistry and mathematics in 1966.

#LocalAngle #Wisconsin #Caltech

George Rossman, Caltech professor of mineralogy, emeritus, passed away on February 6, 2026. He was 81.

The unifying theme of his research career was a simple, relatable question: Why do gems and other minerals possess their distinctive colors? He also studied the distribution of water in minerals of the deep earth, electronic structure, etc.

From Chris Tacker on MSA-list and:
https://www.gps.caltech.edu/news-and-events/news/caltech-mourns-the-passing-of-george-rossman-19442026

#Caltech #MineralSocAmerica #Mineralology #EarthScience

I remember being perplexingly locked into reading this trash cover to cover, which probably says much more about how unpleasant the #Caltech experience was, than about Hubbard or Battlefield Earth. Closeting myself in my dorm room with a shitty phone-book of a space opera seemed preferable to soaking up the Caltech campus culture.

Sometimes I wonder if we'd already somehow made friends with the ghost of Jack Parsons (whom I regard as a kindred spirit in terms of bashing heads with the Caltech nerdbros) and it was his impulse to read Battlefield Earth. After all...Parsons and Hubbard had a history.

One of the many things we learned at #Caltech in 1992-1994 was about #LRonHubbard. I've mentioned that there were a number of his books in the "Blacker Hovse" dorm library, and as a result I can honestly say that I've read Battlefield Earth cover to cover.

I honestly don't exactly know how I managed that, except to say that for a span of adolescent years I regarded it as a virtue to push through as many books as possible and read everything to completion no matter how unpromising it was. For Battlefield Earth is terrible writing. J. K. Rowling looks workmanlike and competent in comparison to Battlefield Earth.

I've gotten to this point, in trying to come to terms with Stanley Kubrick's 2001, which perplexed me so much back in those early #Caltech days that I watched the movie numerous times, though never while resorting to LSD-25 or anything like that.

Now the movie seems almost comfortable, comprehensible, simply because I decided that the monolith stood for Mystery™. My Hellenic dabblings gave me a different sense of mystery and thus I could finally slot 2001 somewhere in my head where it was no longer a worry.

And what do you know...once I got to that point, then Stanley Kubrick himself (who had once taken up far too much of my time and energy) no longer seemed so strange.

Perhaps it's good to regard the unknown as nothing more than that, unknown. Not everything has to make sense.

~Chara of Pnictogen

The daydream of #space exploration has withered, reduced to a mere interest in finding fresh space to colonize and fresh sources of resources for existing industries. #ElonMusk and Shaun Maguire and all their cronies, with most of #Caltech behind them, are surely thinking of space in terms of metals and hydrocarbons and other things which they imagine they can start gathering in massive quantities, exploiting them in situ most likely.

There's a very #Scientology vision of galactic empire dimly to be seen here...a vision of a Cosmos in which every other star system and planet and minor celestial body is merely an outpost of some sort, a garrison mining materials for the sole purpose of keeping up a general state of occupation.

Why, it's like the glory days of #Rome you could say...except with much worse poetry and dramatic writing.

~Chara of Pnictogen

And it's dreadful. It's sexist, it's snide and superficial, and it feels very much like a 1980s relic of a sitcom with the same stale relationship jokes, only spiced up with a lot of oppressive brand-heavy geek allusions.

#Caltech was happy with that, and NOT happy with "Strange Angel", about Jack Parsons. That show died suddenly right around the time L. Ron Hubbard pops up in the series, but I'm pretty sure the California Institute of Technology didn't want "Strange Angel" to keep going. They played foully with Parsons. But then all of Caltech's postwar doings stink. They were too much in love with The Bomb™.

(cont'd)

Consider that one of the most durable legacies of #Caltech in recent years is "The Big Bang Theory", a dreadful television show in which Caltech plays very little part in truth, except as a brand and an offscreen vibe the way that Seattle never really appears in "Frasier".

I am dead certain that the California Institute of Technology must have bankrolled the production of that show, and invested heavily in subsidiary interests. Caltech must surely deny any official ties with "The Big Bang Theory" but the California Institute of Technology is really keen on merchandising themselves...so I'm pretty sure they thought (at the very least) that "The Big Bang Theory" was good publicity.

(cont'd)

Former Mother of Rome, Lady Livia Drusilla, is of the general opinion that if a barbarian university at the furthest edge of some gods-forsaken North-American land builds itself a building with neo-Classical styling and calls it "The Athenaeum", then they'd bloody well start acting as though they give a curse for the wisdom and judgment of Pallas Athena.

I see little evidence that #Caltech believes in much past the power of the U.S. military-industrial complex. How much do they care about #physics really? I suggest that they're content to allow the discipline to stagnate and degrade into arguments over various computer models of super-symmetrical stringy whatever.

Those of us in less exalted physical sciences smell trouble with physics in any case. Too many anomalies are piling up. There's something clearly amiss with the "Western" physical understanding of the Cosmos.

(cont'd)

I went to #Caltech because I thought it would be a feast of #science, and now I must try to save Science from Caltech. That would seem to be a difficult quest but I do have many assistants, most notably Lady Livia Drusilla, former Mother of Rome, now one of my...esteemed taskmasters.

In her severe way she takes a strong and stern interest in general education and especially in the more Roman-flavored pretensions of schools, which at all levels in the United States and "The West" are saturated with a kind of Hallmark #Classics approach to ancient history.

(cont'd)

I look at Shaun Maguire's chatter with David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project (this is back in 2022), and I don't want to read it because most of it seems so insubstantial and boring. This isn't a scientist talking or a great thinker; I could get the same general level of popular-science burble from any generic #technology executive, except Maguire can drop much BIGGER names into his burble because went to #Caltech. He's chattering about business connections, not about science.

What happened to #science, huh? Where did she run off to? (Science is feminine, of course. Remember the Italian word for science, scienza! That's a feminine ending. Women have always made better scientists, just think of Rosalind Franklin or GlaDoS!

(cont'd)

Just about the last thing that #Caltech genuinely cares about, to sum this up, is #education. The attitude of the U.S. ruling class and its corporate bosses is that only a few people need specialized education, and that education ought to get more and more specialized over time—the better to make it unavailable to most persons, and to keep schooling limited to a thin stratum of favored pupils.

That's how we get "Ph.D. #physics" from people like Shaun Maguire, who has zero visible interest in physics and probably couldn't answer a single difficult question on the topic. It's not his business. His world is one of money and power and sucking up to political sponsors, and he's got computers to do his thinking for him. Everyone round him is the same.

(cont'd)

I feel like the contents are far less significant than the foreword, in which Maguire lavishes pro forma praises on his mentors and his school, which he compares to Hogwarts in the first line.

I would suspect that #Caltech has leaned heavily into the #HarryPotter fandom in order to burnish its image. Like all modern #universities, the California Institute of Technology zealously upholds their scintillating public image, the better to add value to their investment portfolio.

(cont'd)

More significant perhaps is that there was an awful lot of L. Ron Hubbard in the "Blacker Hovse" library and that was strange in a school purporting to be a powerhouse of science. "Oh it's just for fun" you may say but that would be unwise: Hubbard and Scientology are a massive cognitohazard and I had to work myself free of getting too fascinated by Hubbard until I had more historical context. Callow nerds (like myself at #Caltech) are too apt to decide that someone like Hubbard must be the acme of human evil, and thus never learn to view "evil" with any perspective.

Just how many Scientologists can be found among the faculty and staff and student body of the California Institute of Technology? I would love to learn that.

(cont'd)

But I digress, except to say that Jack Lewis proved a paradoxical lifeline out of #Caltech. Not the only lifeline, but finding That Hideous Strength in the "Blacker Hovse" library was like finding a fossil in the wrong stratum (to use Winston Smith's analogy). It was an anomaly, a curiously off note worth some investigation in much the same way that Aleister Crowley or William S. Burroughs might be.

Except neither of those men is accounted the world's greatest authority on Jesus Christ. (Well...all right, I'm sure that Crowley and Burroughs have their fans, but not like the #CSLewis fandom!)

(cont'd)