greengabbro | February 23, 2009
The Bacon Story -- How science can make even bacon disgusting.
Building a Google Earth Geology Layer -- Lots of great resources accumulating in the comments here.
Magma Cum Laude: Using Google Earth to visualize volcanic and seismic activity -- A discussion of the different data layers available
Geoblogosphere Search -- Can't remember where you saw that awesome geology blog post? Ron Schott has put together a handy custom Google search just for you.
Grow Your Own Bismuth Crystals -- Bismuth seems to go for about $15/lb. online, and you can melt it on a household stove. Bismuth photo credit…
greengabbro | February 19, 2009
Following the Royal Mail's release of some lovely new Darwin stamps, a few of us got to Twittering over lunch yesterday about the lack of geologists on this year's release of American scientist stamps.
(What's that? You have no idea what Twittering is? It's a stupid Web Eleventy-Point-Oh jibber-jabber service, pay no attention. If you are an Eleventy-Point-Oh sort of person, though, perhaps you should be following me.)
Googling around a bit for existing stamps that feature earth scientists, I found the pickings to be surprisingly slim. Alfred Wegener has been on stamps issued by both East…
greengabbro | February 17, 2009I got a request for advice from Maryam, an old undergrad committee-comrade-in-arms, which I have mangled for clarity:
To make a long story short, I'm co-teaching a communication class to engineers and I want to introduce them to science blogging. I'm planning to have them write brief essays about classic science papers (similar to the Beginnings of Immunofluoresence), and then post the essays to a class blog.
The main instructor of the class is a rhetorician, so we put emphasis on rhetorical situations and interpersonal communication. I wanted to introduce blogging because it's a new and…
greengabbro | February 11, 2009Dear Environmental Geologists, Engineers, and Technical Illustrators of 20 Years Ago:
Please remember that the real audience for your work - the mind-numbingly detailed technical reports over which you have slaved many hours - is not the board of petty bureaucrats who commissioned your investigation. The real audience is someone like me: A data-entry and verification cog in a giant lawsuit that will one day, far in the future, bring your paperwork out of cryogenic storage.
I mean, you were working on a project at a large industrial facility. Did you really expect your figures to snooze…
greengabbro | February 4, 2009I finally have a day job! For a few weeks, anyway - I'm temping as a GIS monkey. While this is not functionally much different from generic office temp jobs, data entry using ArcGIS pays much better than data entry with Excel.
Historically, day-jobbing has not had much effect on my blog output, but it might take a while to adjust to the new routine. In particular, I need to grow some muscles so that I will be less exhausted by my bike commute. And since I will no longer be able to lounge around osmosing the blogosphere all day, please do drop me a note - by email, or leave a comment on one…
greengabbro | January 30, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: November 10, 2008
While on the craton, I just missed the chance to take my own peek at the deposits left along the Iowa River by the flooding this summer. Cleanup crews have been busy removing sediment and other crap left by…
greengabbro | January 29, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: January 23, 2008
A powerful earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale ripped through northern Chile today, causing panic, power outages, damage to airport tarmacs and road closures, according to news reports.
I wince every…
greengabbro | January 28, 2009
REMINDER: Accretionary Wedge posts due this Friday -- The theme is unhinged speculation about the future Earth.
Calculus: The Musical! -- The concept may or may not be more charming than the execution.
Sand Won't Save You This Time -- Mmm, ClF3.
Plausibly Impossible: Hirotoshi Itoh's Grinning Stones -- Rocks with zippers!
Planet Harddrive -- Cool, but implausible, geological sci-fi idea. Who *doesn't* need a giant information storage medium in which the long-term conservation problems are worse than those of a cheap-o CD-RW?
Carnival of Space #87 -- Spaaaace!
greengabbro | January 27, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: April 18, 2008
There's a related discussion happening now at All of My Faults Are Stress-Related.
So far, the part of scientific paper-writing I hate the most - I mean, apart from all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over…
greengabbro | January 26, 2009In addition to helping judge this year's Open Laboratory science blogging anthology, I'm also the production editor (i.e., typesetting jockey). So as I go through, reading the entries in much greater detail than I ever would otherwise, I'm noticing a couple of things:
All of the pieces are either about biology, or professional "life in science" stuff. Geology is represented this year by Kim's piece and my own, and is actually in good shape relative to physics and chemistry. But that's not saying much - the volume as a whole is very life-centric.
Some of the pieces, um, I'm not sure what the…
greengabbro | January 22, 2009 Since today is National Pie Day, I thought I would list a few of my favorite cookbooks. In particular, the ones that have taught me to bake pie. The ones with science.
My staple meringue pie recipe comes from The New Best Recipe. The Meyer lemon meringue pie I made from this recipe for Thanksgiving several years ago is what kicked off my love affair with meringue pies, and with meringue in general. But before I can tell you about this cookbook, I need to tell you about seismology.
Seismologists set up simple computational models of the Earth in order to understand why seismograms look the…
greengabbro | January 22, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: February 29, 2008
Once you have chosen an event that represents a boundary in the geologic time scale, you are left with two questions: How long did that event take? How accurately can we resolve the date at which it happened?…
greengabbro | January 21, 2009
The science of espresso, with a dash of geology -- Darcy's law!
Four Stone Hearth (58th Edition) -- Anthropology carnival!
Association of American Geographers Anne U. White Fund -- A grant for doing field work with your partner. Would've been nice to know about this when I was scrimping to pay for plane tickets in an LDR...
The Curious Cook - Wine Enhancement Devices Are Put to a Test -- "the obnoxious, dank flavor of a “corked” wine, which usually renders it unusable even in cooking, can be removed by pouring the wine into a bowl with a sheet of plastic wrap."
And remember, if you're in…
greengabbro | January 20, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: June 30, 2008
I just checked my watch, and apparently it's time for another science blogging meta wankfest! This time, Blake Stacey is complaining that we don't teach science with our blogs:
My thesis is that it's not yet…
greengabbro | January 15, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: August 15, 2008
At about 2 in the morning on Saturday night, I was wandering back to the hotel when I found myself chatting with someone on the street. I have no idea how the conversation got onto earthquakes, but it did, and…
greengabbro | January 13, 2009I finally fixed up a semi-automatic link-posting script that fits my needs - if you're interested in the gory details, or using the script yourself, see my post on the B-Sides. Enjoy all the backlogged links!
Call for Submissions: Carnival of the Arid -- Submissions should have something to do with a desert somewhere in the world. ... scientific in nature, or history, or travelog. Images are welcome, photographic or otherwise. Discussions of culture and politics are welcome if they’re desert-related. The one restriction, other than geographical, is that — at least when I’m compiling it —…
greengabbro | January 13, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: November 19, 2008
I stopped writing this post because I convinced myself that I was probably maybe sorta wrong, and not just because we are mining the Ogallala... but now I can't remember my own argument. So I'll punt to…
greengabbro | January 12, 2009I've been working on a set of scripts that will play sped-up seismograms as sound. I was very proud of myself last night for remembering enough Perl to translate from one format to another, thereby producing clicking noises. Obviously I'm still doing something wrong in the processing necessary to translate from a 10 minute seismogram, recorded at 50 samples/sec to catch interesting stuff that happens at frequencies well below the range of human hearing, to a 5 second audio clip played back at ten thousand or so samples/sec... but hey, clicking noises are better than nothing!
Then I found that…
greengabbro | January 9, 2009Just a note: ScienceBlogs will be doing some system upgrades this weekend. The site will still be accessible, but you won't be able to post any new comments, and we won't be able to post any new entries.
The upgrade will start at 1 pm EST today (Friday), and should be done by Saturday evening... probably.
This would a perfect time to explore my freshly-updated blogroll. And I think a number of Sciblings will be guest-blogging at Comrade PhysioProf.
greengabbro | January 8, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: October 22, 2008
I don't know what it is about Dinosaur Comics that inspires me to be a contrarian, but when I saw this, I immediately wanted to prove T-rex wrong.
Wear Gloves - Last night we gave in and ran the heater for the…