greengabbro | May 28, 2008Quick 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 that one of my papers has been officially accepted, I officially have an Erdös number of no greater than 6 - which fact I discovered using this handy-dandy search engine*. Though sadly, one of the papers that links me to Erdös is an obituary, not actual research.
As far as I can tell, this is not…
greengabbro | 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 on the Mississippi River this spring have brought back memories of the summer when it just. kept. raining. During a rare break in the weather in July 1993, my mother took me, my sister, and friends up to the local Army Corps flood control structure, and the Coralville Lake behind it; of course, we…
greengabbro | May 20, 2008Hey, 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.
greengabbro | May 19, 2008My 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 order, catching up on laundry, assembling alternate resumes and writing my acknowledgments.
I imagine committees sitting on drafts as adopting the posture of a brooding hen. That's funnier for some committee members than for others.
My ability to actually write the acknowledgments is limited by the…
greengabbro | May 4, 2008Brian 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 attenuation bit casing caused changes cm data depth distance drilling dynamic earthquake east eruption et fault fig figure fluid formation gas ground hydrological java loss lusi magnitude mazzini minutes mpa mud occurred pga pore ppg pressure relationships rock seismic stress string surface trigger volcano…
greengabbro | April 29, 2008What do Emperor Hirohito, Princess Benedikte of Denmark, and Duke Ellington have in common?
greengabbro | April 28, 2008Tonight 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 writing a Master's thesis; I wasn't originally expecting that. While I am fully capable of enumerating its many flaws in a multi-paragraph bullet-pointed high-pitched single breath, I'm still proud of what I've produced. I wasn't expecting that either.
Let me give you the soap opera summary: I burned…
greengabbro | April 25, 2008First 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 series of excruciatingly dull technical documents.
Part of my job used to be telling the people of Sun County, California* how their ground water resources would be affected by proposed new developments. Your average housing development poses a couple of different potential risks to ground water…
greengabbro | April 22, 2008Happy 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 about the relationship of geology, as a science and a profession, to environmental politics... which is good, 'cause I'm distracted today by larger-scale theoretical considerations:
In the end, the root of the problem lies with culture. If we can change the culture, then we may win. If we cannot, then…
greengabbro | April 19, 2008Every 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 reverse the geoscientific brain drain from the Midwest to the West Coast (there's also the weather to think about)... but for an ostensibly stable part of the continental interior, thousands of miles from the nearest plate boundary, Illinois and Indiana have seen an awful lot of seismic action over the…
greengabbro | 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 difficult, he discovered that even a simple set of equations can produce fundamentally unpredictable results (play with this effect here!). Scientists in virtually every field of study have been banging their heads against this fact in utter frustration for the past 45 years.
Quoting from an email…
greengabbro | April 16, 2008My 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's Scientiae carnival. And the announcement for next month's Scientiae carnival - I'm excited about the theme!
And a couple of things on the social status of women in relation to geology: A Broadsheet summary of this article (pdf) about how oil and mineral-resource economies are bad for women. The…
greengabbro | 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 steganography.)
greengabbro | April 5, 2008I 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 beyond the context of early modern England or speculate about what modern scientific culture might have inherited from the founders of the Royal Society (doing so properly would be an awful lot of work), he discusses several concepts which I have very much enjoyed comparing to the interactions I…
greengabbro | 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
greengabbro | 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 convinced of the spiritual healing properties of ancient Oriental geology.
After thinking about it, though, I think mud volcano tofu might actually be pretty tasty.
Mud volcanoes occur when sediment is (a) deposited very fast, so that there's no time for its water to gracefully ooze out while it…
greengabbro | April 2, 2008One 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 and Range:
Geologists communicated in English; and they could name things in a manner that sent shivers through the bones. They had roof pendants in their discordant batholiths, mosaic conglomerates in desert pavement. There was ultrabasic, deep-ocean, mottled green-and-black - or serpentine. There…
greengabbro | 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. More precisely, you need your volcano to work like a cotton candy machine: take a bit of liquid rock, and spin it out until it looks like, well, hair. Or cotton candy (seriously, Internet, why do you not contain any magnified images of cotton candy for me to link to here?). Though these images…
greengabbro | March 25, 2008A 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 and robot. "Robot" is the state I am aiming for most of the time. It's what I feel when I'm working effectively, a sort of detached contentment mixed in with cheerful bleeps and bloops whenever I finish a computation. Oh, but sometimes it's more a sort of detached grouchiness mixed in with…
greengabbro | March 24, 2008This 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 reaction when the students in my intro classes spout it back at me on exams.
And once again, I am not in it. But still, you should go read! See especially the quote Zoltan pulled from a review of There Will Be Blood:
The fact is, Plainview is barely human to begin with, so watching him grow coarser…