greengabbro
Posts by this author
June 27, 2008
I've finally read Dr. Tom Chalko's wackaloon manuscript. It was fantastic.
Chalko artfully combines common misconceptions about his subject matter with accessible yet impressively mathy-lookin' slipshod data analysis, and produces an argument that appeals to the innate human desire to make sense of…
June 24, 2008
I've been reading The Design of Everyday Things, which I recommend as a useful and interesting way of thinking about all sorts of minor frustrations in daily life. It's also applicable to teaching - I've definitely noticed many student problems that have more to do with misunderstanding the nature…
June 19, 2008
This is the most irresponsible "science" "reporting" I have seen in yonks:
New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr. Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago.
The research proves that destructive ability of…
June 19, 2008
Greetings, and welcome to this week's Carnival of Space! Before getting to the astro-goodness, Will has a question: How many of you get your astronomy news directly from the press release?
Planets and Plutoids
Everyone likes Mars, which means everyone's attention is on Phoenix and its oven. At the…
June 18, 2008
A reader named Amanda recently wrote me, asking for some advice:
I graduated from NYU in 2007 and have been working in LA as an assistant, but I'm thinking about going back to college and getting a second degree. My first one is a BFA in screenwriting, so naturally I want to compliment that with a…
June 17, 2008
From the perspective of this paper's publication, my cross-country move was badly timed. Since my email access has been so sporadic over the past couple weeks, I missed chances to help edit the press release and do a couple of interviews.
The press seems to have done just fine without me (except…
June 12, 2008
I don't actually know what underlies the Middle Devonian brachiopods of my childhood, but I might get to find out soon. Iowa City is experiencing its second "500 year" flood in 15 years, and Coralville Lake has overtopped its dam... again. And the river hasn't crested yet. Fortunately, my family…
June 12, 2008
Earthquake engineer Kit Miyamoto has posted a journal of his trip to Sichuan. If you don't mind a little bit of construction jargon it's a good discussion of the details of what kinds of buildings collapse, and what kinds are safe, as well as the logistical difficulties of the immediate post-…
June 11, 2008
How Crater Lake was formed, in four parts
Originally uploaded by erika_amir
Via LJ geology.
May 31, 2008
It's been two years* since the ground opened near Sidoarjo, Indonesia, spewing mud over the homes, farms, and businesses of tens of thousands of people. The disaster quickly acquired the rather endearing name of "Lusi", which is short for "lumpur" (Indonesian for mud) and "Sidoarjo". The two-year…
May 28, 2008
Quick background: Paul Erdös was a prolific mathematician. If you co-authored a paper with him, you have an Erdös number of 1. If you co-author a paper with someone with an Erdös number of 1, you have an Erdös number of 2. It's like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon if you're a gigantic dork.
Now…
May 21, 2008
Julian is hosting this month's Accretionary Wedge, and wants us all to discuss a geologic event that's significant to us personally. (Well, technically, he asked for the event that is most significant, but I love all my pet geologic events equally, so there, nyah.)
The nearly record-setting floods…
May 20, 2008
Hey, if it's good enough for Dr. Science, it's good enough for me.
Regular posting will resume shortly. First, I must complete some very important experiments on the rheology of dense particle suspensions in a water-alcohol-strawberry solution.
It's for Science.
May 19, 2008
My committee has my thesis draft.
We're getting over a heat wave here in Berkeley. My office is neither air-conditioned nor particularly well shaded and ventilated, so I've been hanging out in my nice cool living room (not air-conditioned, but protected from the yellow face), putting my files in…
May 4, 2008
Brian posted tag clouds for two of his recent papers. Having no shame, Lab Lemming followed suit. Since I have even less shame, I'm just going to jump on while the bandwagon is rolling.
So here's the tag cloud for Davies et al., 2008, currently in review with EPSL:
/*-->*/
27th 28th al…
April 29, 2008
What do Emperor Hirohito, Princess Benedikte of Denmark, and Duke Ellington have in common?
April 28, 2008
Tonight I'm assembling an appendix to my thesis. Plot some data; bring it into Illustrator to clean up the formatting; write a caption and add it to the LaTeX document. Rinse; lather; repeat. I'm using an egg timer - I can handle 45 minutes of this boring stuff if I get to blog when it dings.
I'm…
April 25, 2008
First off: The Earth Day Accretionary Wedge is up, full of environmental musings from the geoblogosphere - check it out! Since it is still Earth Week here at Berkeley, I'll follow up my carnival contribution with an observation from the trenches, where geology and environmentalism intersect in a…
April 22, 2008
Happy Earth Day, everyone. Or, if you're on campus here, Happy Earth Week, complete with live bands at noon every day and a really weird papier-mâché tree ball thing oh, apparently that was a pomegranate to commemorate the Armenian genocide. Earth Week means I've got three more days to write…
April 19, 2008
Every time there's an earthquake in the Midwest, my mother emails me, just in case I want to move back home to study it. So that's how I heard about yesterday morning's earthquake in Illinois - a bit less exciting than waking up to it, but that's fine with me.
This is not earthquake enough to…
April 16, 2008
The man who discovered the "butterfly effect" died this morning at the age of 90.
Ed Lorenz was a meteorologist; I will spare you most of the details of his career, as they can be found in the MIT obituary. But back in the early 60s, when he was trying to figure out why weather prediction was so…
April 16, 2008
My beautifully kludgy little script that does much of the work of putting together linky-posts for me - pulling everything with a special "to SB" tag off my del.icio.us account and formatting it - has stopped working. I cry tears of sadness. I also have a backlog of links.
Like, f'rinstance, April'…
April 11, 2008
Coal doesn't burn completely. Here's what's left over.
(Do I apologize for the weak blogging? No! No apologies! I am still trying to work "elusive", "obsequious", and "vapid" into a discussion of bedrock hydrogeology. "Propinquitous", though, that's taken care of. Also, I am contemplating cheesy…
April 5, 2008
I have been slowly wading through A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin's study of how early modern English gentleman's etiquette was appropriated for scientific purposes - primarily to help decide who to trust, and to handle disagreements about the nature of the world. While Shapin doesn't move…
April 4, 2008
I was going to write up a proper post on marine evaporite sequences, and how they relate to the deliciousness of expensive salt vs. cheap salt, but, um, I didn't. Hey! Look! Pretty picture!
Enough salt for nine lives... Originally uploaded by aleske
April 3, 2008
There is a village in Taiwan trying to build a reputation for tofu flavored with the local mud volcano. On the face of it, this is a horrible idea - blecch, mud! - although there is probably some money to be made by importing the stuff to the U.S. and selling it to gullible New Agers who can be…
April 2, 2008
One of the things I love about geology is the jargon. After all, what could possibly be more fun than laying down "clayey" or "vug" on a triple word score and being able to say that yes, it is too a word?
Wait, don't answer that one. Instead, let me give you one of my favorite passages from Basin…
March 27, 2008
This one's in honor of the new activity at the peak of Kilauea. For pictures and updates, see the Hawaii Volcano Observatory homepage. For more geoblogospheric coverage, check out the posts at Magma Cum Laude and the roundup at Geology News.
To get Pele's hair, you need to throw around some lava…
March 25, 2008
A while back, one of my labmates claimed that there are only five permissible emotions at a scientific conference: Nervous, excited, preening, jaded, and overwhelmed.
I think there are also five emotions that one can experience while writing up a thesis: Despair, frustration, irritability, relief…
March 24, 2008
This month's edition of the Accretionary Wedge is up at Magma Cum Laude, covering:
How Hollywood manages to screw up, in movie and/or TV form, the science that it took me multiple years, pints of blood and continuing therapy sessions to learn, and why I can't be held legally responsible for my…