Minutes from Robb Murray:

Wow! What a great meeting!
We met from 6-11 PM at Ronnie Drantz's home.
An enthusiastic group, and great videos to see!

We first had a ceremonial libation of Gac fruit juice:
http://en.wikipedia.o...
This is an example of a "superfruits" drink:
http://en.wikipedia.o....

I was in the alley, preoccupied with the UFO.
The toy so far is only seen as just a "UO," as the Flying part
suffered from the setting of the sun -- the balloon went up to 15 feet
but would not stay.

Meanwhile, guests watched a video about cosmic expansion
and dark matter and energy.
We ordered some delicious pizza from D'Gigio's and
settled in to our viewing choices -- summarized below as best I could catch them:

--"If We Had No Moon" -- the moon will be too far from us in 1,000,000 years to keep the current sequence of seasons going. Consider yourself warned.
The moon is believed to have split off from the original earth ("Earth Mark I") when an early planet that existed between Earth and Mars at the time, called Orpheus, went singing into Earth like some sea chantey gone terribly wrong and bashed a lot of the mass off of our future home.
The mass flew out, then crashed back into a VERY surprised Mother Earth To-Be, and again flew back out, becoming a moon that was over 15 times the size of the current one. This cataclysmic process took only about two earth days to complete. ("You might say it would have been a bad weekend to be on Earth.") This original moon began to simmer down and grow smaller and also to move away from Earth.
We hope to find polar water on the moon later for use as a refueling resource in basing space missions off the moon.

PIZZA ARRIVED

--"Illinois: Our Geologic History" -- Illinois is part of a spoon-shaped geologic region that contained a shallow sea (10-300 feet deep) that spanned several states. There are rock shelves or formations in Illinois that stretch all the way from Canada, down through it, and into Kentucky.
Illinois was once at the Equator and migrated northward.

--"Mystery of the Megaflood" -- The Channeled Scablands in east Washington state were a geologic mystery
http://en.wikipedia.o...
The land showed wavy patterns and was littered with large boulders.
Today's explanation of the mystery, based on the vindicated views of a much-attacked American geologist and on analogous processes observed in Iceland, is that the Scablands were the emptyway for a huge glacially-dammed lake that was larger than Lake Michigan -- the size of Lakes Erie and Huron put together.
Ice under extreme pressure at the bottom of the "dam wall" turned into a liquid even though it was still below water's freezing point. The liquid channeled up through cracks in the glacial dam, weakening the seal. The dam finally burst with a deafening blast (there are believed to have been Native Americans around at the time) and the massive water wall leveled everything before it, carrying along huge boulders that had been trapped in the glacier and dropping them randomly. Super-strong whirlpool jets carved sink holes into the flood plain floor. The water washed out as far as 1,000 miles away from the lake, into the Pacific.
And this whole process then went on to repeat itself approximately 15 more times over a 20,000 year period, ending 15,000 years ago. Mt. St. Helens, which erupts regularly, left a telltale seam of white ash between two of the strata, tipping geologists off that the many observed layers had to have been sequentially deposited over many events in time (i.e., huge floods), and did not all trace back to just ONE mageflood.
(The program had particularly great graphics!)

--"The Unknown World" -- the insects, viruses and other microscopic organisms that coexist with us and that infuse our world. Examples:
-white blood cells scavenging other dead white blood cells.
-mites in skin and hair
-aphids getting no respect from several other species -- getting the sap sucked out of them that they had gathered for personal use, thank you very much
-snail-borne parasites entering humans through the foot, establishing themselves and then exiting through the urine to give rise to more propagation.
-AIDS viruses attacking white blood cells and turning them into AIDS virus factories.
The audience take-away message "eat or be eaten", "prey or be preyed upon" was rather ham-handedly repeated at the end. A straw vote amongst us however gave a thumbs-down verdict to the whole cannibalism thing and so, restored but not confused by a feast of science viewing, we adjourned, following a bit more good conversation, and are now looking forward to our next meeting.

Come out and join us then!

--Robb Murray