Today's Daily Double is... Earth Day!

I have a geology degree from Chapel Hill, so once a year I let myself give the sermon. Today I kicked off a sprint at work, aggressive deadline, ship by Friday, and I did it while sitting on a houseboat floating in a drowned river valley. Twenty thousand years ago there was no San Francisco Bay. The shoreline was out past the Farallones and the Sacramento ran through the gap where the Golden Gate Bridge now stands. Then the ice let go, the ocean came up through the gap, and everything living here now is living in the flooded living room of a river.

Mt Tam, the mountain I watch from the deck, is technically a wreck. Franciscan complex, seafloor scrapings and deep sea mudstone and chert peeled off a subducting plate, serpentine in her seams, no tidy layers anywhere. A pile of accidents that adds up to the most beautiful thing I look at daily. And the hills I grew up on in North Carolina are the stumps of mountains that were once as tall as the Himalayas, worn down one raindrop at a time.

I spend my days in systems measured in milliseconds. The planet's uptime is four and a half billion years. Once a year it is good to put a hand on the deck rail, feel the tide move the whole house a quarter inch, and remember which one of us is the recent development.