Links
awild | April 27, 2009My profound apologies for the lack of blogitude here while I'm over at Photo Synthesis. Fortunately, the internet has other things in it:
Myrmician shares an action series of Australian Podomyrma taking apart a much larger Myrmecia.
Brian Valentine finds some British Myrmica with a serious mite problem.
Steve Shattuck's Ants of Australia has been given an overhaul and a new URL.
Roberto Keller explains ant mouths.
Adrian Thysse has quite a nice photo blog, voyages about my camera.
***update*** There's also this bit in the New York Times. Who is that dashing young photographer?
khannula | April 23, 2009I got back from a conference Tuesday night, and came home to the craziness of the semester's end. Part of me wants to blog about how cool undergraduate research is, after we had our big school-wide undergraduate research symposium, but I really should be grading the proposals for next year's senior thesis projects. (Which will be fantastic, too, though right now the students are a bit overwhelmed at the thought of the work they're planning to do.)
So here are some things that made me say "oh, WOW" when I skimmed through my rss reader & Twitter:
Guest photographer at Through the Sandglass…
khannula | March 26, 2009I've got one wallet-sized version of the 1983 Geological Society of America time scale in my field pouch, and another page-sized version that used to be taped to the wall in front of my desk. I relied on it a lot, especially when starting work in a new field area. In the early 90's, when I was trying to break into the world of Appalachian tectonics research, I started by trying to figure out where the problems were in the models of how the metamorphic rocks of New England came to be. I spent a lot of time reading papers from different subdisciplines - the records of old mountain belts are…
khannula | March 21, 2009Calls to arms:
Chris at goodSchist is looking for help to work on the wikipedia page on the mantle. Since he posted, some people have taken on the challenge, but someone who thinks the mantle is too cold to convect is arguing that the revisions violate wikipedia's neutral point of view.
Eric at Eruptions wants to see who can write a better volcano description than FEMA. It can't be too difficult. (In fact, this would be a good assignment to give to a class, I think.)
Maria at Green Gabbro notes that wikipedia's women in earth science category is "underpopulated." If you run across wikipedia…
khannula | March 13, 2009Erik Klemetti's blog Eruptions has just joined ScienceBlogs. Yay!
Now you know that geology is the hottest science. (Well, except maybe for solar physics, but they go to American Geophysical Union meetings too.)
greengabbro | March 9, 2009Thoughts on Tuli v. Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Inc., et al. « Feminist Law Professors -- On the rewards of a sexual harassment lawsuit: "So, the bonus payoff here is, she gets to work in an environment where she is ostracized, despised, feared, and hated - barred from any leadership position - and will never be taken seriously as a decision-maker or policy-maker - for the rest of her professional life. And that’s because she WON!"
The Open Laboratory 2008 is here! -- Woot, I'm an author! Also, OpenLab 2009 submissions are now open. Quick, nominate all the fantastic science posts you'…
khannula | March 6, 2009Earth is going to be here for the foreseeable future. Will there be geoscientists to help everyone else figure out how to deal with it?
The people who organize the Cutting Edge geoscience teaching workshops have another set of workshops, aimed at helping geoscience departments figure out how to grow and stay vibrant. This is particularly challenging for the geosciences, because we're on both sides of environmental issues. Our majors might end up looking for oil and gas or for ore deposits, or might monitor and clean up pollution. Our departments are also the place where college students learn…
khannula | March 4, 2009There has been a lot of cool stuff posted while I was getting this blog set up. From my Google Reader shared items:
Exotic rocks. There's an art exhibit in Oakland, California, that includes metamorphic rocks from Maine. Why? Because the schists sound like xylophone keys when they're struck. I knew there was a reason why I liked hitting metamorphic rocks with my hammer...
Fermi paradox meets the timescale. Why haven't we been visited by intelligent life? Well, if we had been visited by intelligent life sometime during Earth's 4.6-billion-year history, odds are that there wasn't any…
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 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 28, 2009REMINDER: 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 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 the…
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 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 | October 15, 2008I'm saving all my brilliance for a job interview today. So here, have some slices of other people's brilliance.
Great news! Seed is raffling off prizes for the Donors Choose challenge! Donate as little as $5 for a chance to win 1 of 50 free subscriptions to Seed magazine or 1 of ~15 pieces of ScienceBlogs schwag - mugs, laptop covers, and USB drives. At the end of the month, there will be a grand prize drawing for an iPod Touch. Right now, only 160 people have donated to the ScienceBlogs challenge (and we're beating the mommy bloggers! Yeah!) so your odds of winning are high. To enter, simply…
greengabbro | September 29, 2008This month's geoblog carnival is on Geologeeeee.... innnn... SPAAAAAAACE!!1! - you simply must click through to see the cover.
If you need more geoblog goodness, Lutz at geoberg.de is working on a complete list of the entire geoblogosphere! See it in English or German. There are currently 101 blogs on the list, more than twice as many as covered by Callan's geoblogosphere survey results. Guess it's time to update my blogroll... (h/t: NOVA Geoblog)
Conversely, if you need a perspective check from non-geologists, go read what freelance writers think is interesting about a volcano photograph.
greengabbro | September 13, 2008A few more announcements while I'm catching up with the blogonets:
I will be hosting the next edition of the Carnival of Feminists on September 24. Please send me your best recent women-in-science posts (or non-sciencey feminist-oriented posts, if you must) by the 22nd, using the carnival submission form or regular ol' email.
Geobloggers! Please take Callan Bentley's survey, if you haven't already. He needs your input by Monday - and I am super-curious to see results from as complete a sample as possible.
From my favorite nerdy haute cuisine blog, a recipe for liquid nitrogen rum raisin balls…
neurophilosophy | August 22, 2008Six more new ones:
Encefalus
Missives from the Frontal Lobe
Neuromics
NeoCorTEXT
Neurospeculation
Nothing's Shocking
Plastic, Elastic, the PFC
neurophilosophy | August 5, 2008A few neuroscience blogs I've come across recently, most of them new:
V1
Dr. Shock
Frontal Blogotomy
Neuronism
NeuroTechnica
NeuroWhoa!
Persistent Activity
greengabbro | July 17, 2008
Eye candy of the week: Zoltan Sylvester (of Hindered Settling fame) has some fantastic photos from the Geopalooza! exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.Mike Brown on coming up with a name for Make-make (the plutoid formerly known as 2005 FY9 aka Easterbunny):
Its orbit is not particularly strange, but it is big. Probably about 2/3 the size of Pluto. And it is bright. It is the brightest object in the Kuiper belt other than Pluto itself. Unlike, say 2003 EL61, which has so many interesting characteristics that it was hard choosing from so many different appropriate name (more on…