I'm a proud member of the United Auto Workers. The entertainment value of people's broken socioeconomic assumptions when I say this is not to be underestimated, but I don't feel that I'm personally much better off with the UAW than without. The sciences as a whole are much better funded than, say, comparative literature. Graduate students in the earth sciences typically have the option to get a "real" job without leaving the field, which makes school almost like part of a competitive labor market - even without collective bargaining I would probably still be paid okay. I don't have…

I am frequently earwormed by the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo's song New Madrid, in which the narrator begs an intraplate seismic zone to somehow restore his lost love: Come on do what you did Roll me under New Madrid Shake my baby and please bring her back So for Valentine's Day, I thought I'd poke around the iTunes store and see if I couldn't find something else to be earwormed by. Something a little less relentlessly cheesy than The Earthquake Of Your Love. As it turns out, geological love songs are hard to find - and when you do find them, they're likely to be depressing (or else they'…

Nerd Links Igneous Sounds -- What happens if you feed mineral powder diffraction curves into a synthesizer? You get something that's too harmonic for your computer music composition professor's avant garde sensibilities. More details on the process here. Help Save Paleontology at Dinosaur National Monument! -- Dinosaur National Monument without the fossil exhibits would be like Glacier National Park without the glac... er, wait, maybe that's not the best analogy. Anyway, please write to the Park Service and ask them to preserve the place of paleontology in the park. Bunnies Pee Red -- when…

You know, when you join a new organization, you don't typically scan the board of directors looking for people who have previously been publicly identified as over-the-line bigots no reasonable person should associate with ever. Or at least I don't. I certainly didn't when I signed on as a minion for ScienceBlogs. So I was surprised to learn that the over-the-line racist sexist bigot biologist Jim Watson is still on the Seed Media board. Of course, if I refused to work for anyone who associated with what I consider to be unacceptable racism or sexism, I would never have a job ever again. I…

gabweb Originally uploaded by kevinzim I have a confession to make: I have absolutely no idea what this picture means. And most of you probably don't either, which is okay, because you're not running around the Internets pretending to be a geologist. This is what's colloquially known as a thin section - a piece of rock sliced so thin that you can shine light through it, and then stare at it under a microscope until you get a headache. Minerals that look similar in a hand sample will refract light very differently in thin section, which makes it useful for obsessive mineral-…

Telling Stories: February's Scientiae Carnival Hooray, hooray, for Scientiae! This month's theme brings us lots of stories about what sexism looks like in everyday life... and some less depressing entries as well. Stratigraphic layer-cake T-shirt I would buy it immediately, but fortunately for my wallet I got stuck nitpicking the weird clastic dikes. Callan Bentley has more about why it is a wholly unrealistic piece of art. Global warming skeptics claim Patriots win Superbowl "Common sense demands that a team which makes up less than 0.05% of the population of Hudson County can't possibly be…

I'm a bit cynical about the revolutionary power of the blogosphere. I blog because it's a fun and easy way to share things that I find exciting, it makes my writing better, and it helps keep my ginormous slavering beast of an ego fed in the manner to which it has become accustomed. I don't blog because I want to have a scientific discussion with scientific colleagues about peer reviewed sciencey science. I would rather have sophomoric intellectual wank-fests about science policy, cockroach geologists, and structural inequity... um, but when I say "sophomoric intellectual wank-fests" I mean…

I vaguely knew that the U.S. Geological Survey's Menlo Park office runs a series of public lectures, but I didn't realize they were all videotaped and archived online for my blogging convenience. Ace! Now we just need to chop them up into bits and put them on YouTube. Anyway, Thursday night's lecture was about the ongoing eruption of the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia (which Chris has covered in the past). You can watch it here. It's a little long, but quite suitable to put on as background material for your weekend housecleaning. The good science bits start about 15 minutes in. Now, I've got…

Let's get one thing out of the way right now: The question of whether or not a new geologic epoch has "really started" is precisely as stupid as the question of whether or not Pluto is "really" a planet. The definitions of geologic eons, eras, and epochs are not objective truths about the history of the planet that are simply waiting for us in the rock. The geologic time scale is made up by geologists, for geologists as a matter of convenience. So Greg Laden is making a category error when he dismisses both the Anthropocene and the Holocene as scientifically invalid - the worst thing you can…

Welcome, Gentle Reader, to my new series of Internet tubes. You'll notice that I haven't completely unpacked - there's no pretty banner at the top, the blogroll is woefully incomplete (it's probably even missing your blog!), and my profile page is not nearly as verbose as it could be. It'll get there in time. You can expect to see this space filled in the future with rocks, water, progressive identity politics, primal screams of terror associated with my master's thesis (due in May) and/or my upcoming wedding (September), and maybe some lolcats. Oh, and pie - I am quite keen on pie. If you're…