Even mountains vanish : searching for solace in an age of extinction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Earth is old. Nothing lasts. All life is kin. Different eyes perceive different worlds, and much remains hidden. Ours is an age of extinctions; ours are the hands of the destroyers. Grief and beauty are knotted together. Curiosity and imagination are fundamental human forces. So are fear and hatred, passion and compassion. None of this is surprising.... But scale matters. At this high level of generality, everything seems obvious. When I focus on smaller things, the picture changes. from the bookSitting on a mesa above the Rio Grande, her back pressed against the remnants of eons-old volcanic eruptions and her thoughts drawn to the unavoidable significance of the laboratories at Los Alamos a few miles away, an idea plants itself in SueEllen Campbell s mind. Brought to fruition, the idea becomes a journey to find the seam where past and present, geology and history, Yellow-bellied Marmots and White-tailed Ptarmigans meet and join to create the world in which we find ourselves.With elegant, urgent prose, Campbell attempts to make sense of a planet shaped 13.4 billion years ago by awesome natural cataclysm and now threatened with destruction by environmental cataclysms of human origins. Spurred by curiosity, despair, and an analytical mind, she wanders from Colorado to New Mexico to Canada s arctic coast investigating not only facts and data, but also the mystery that lies below the surface.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".