Another Music Meme

This one’s making the rounds again: Put your music library on shuffle. Post the first lines of the first 25 songs that come up. The game: Guess which songs the first lines are from! Google = cheating.

(NB: I’ve skipped over songs where the first line contains the title, songs in languages I can’t order beer in, and exceptionally mumbledy singer-songwriters.)
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What to Do with the Universe?

I was recently convinced that there are three possible fates for the universe. Sci-fi narrative fates, not bona fide cosmological ones:

  1. Nothingness
  2. Trick question! The universe never ends
  3. God
    Mr. McMoots added a fourth:

  4. Trick question! The universe never existed at all

Lazyweb, has that last one ever been done? For values of “universe” and “exist” that require an impressive degree of ontological contortion?

Friday Fun Poll: What’s On My Bed?

This morning, I woke up on the cynical side of the bed. What's on the *other* side of the bed?

  • Add an Answer
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New LJ Feed

Just in case there’s someone reading this on LiveJournal who isn’t on my flist… you can add the new blog to your friendslist as green_gabbro_sb. Thanks, Dalryaug!

Non-LJ users, please ignore this message.

Moving to New Internets

As several of you have already guessed, I’ve been assimilated into the ScienceBorg.

Please update your bookmarks, links and feed subscriptions! My new URL is http://scienceblogs.com/greengabbro, and the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/GreenGabbro.

Greengabbro.net isn’t going anywhere - I like having it as a repository for personal projects, and besides, I just renewed the domain for 2 more years. I’ll keep blogging here, too, whenever inspiration strikes for a post that wouldn’t be of interest to the audience at ScienceBlogs - it won’t be often, but it’ll be more often than “never”. So if you’re interested in my intense hatred of particular food products or updates to my WordPress plugins, by all means keep checking in here now and then.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on geology, the culture of science, or pie, though, you’ll need to follow me on over to ScienceBlogs. See y’all there!

Meme Time

I held a small pie potluck today, in honor of National Pie Day. Everyone who brought a pie, brought a blueberry pie, so it was three blueberries against my lone durian. The durian, of course, lost by a landslide.

Below the fold: I’ve been tagged! This meme is about writing. Also, it only requires you to list three things, which I think is probably the maximum number of things that should be in a meme. Otherwise it’s almost as much work as writing something original.
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Accretionary Wedge #5: Geological Misconceptions and Pie

Happy National Pie Day, and welcome to the fifth edition of the Accretionary Wedge, the Internet’s premier blog carnival for the earth sciences! First, I have some news for you. Make sure you’re sitting down before you read this:

In other news, Mel discusses a test designed to expose students’ geological misconceptions - and why it might not always work. Saxifraga talks about what glaciers actually do - “The moraine five kilometers in front of the modern glacier margin is not a sad sign of the ice retreat, but a sign of a not climate related natural phenomenon called glacier surge and the retreat from the Little Ice Age moraine is partly an adaptation to warming over the past 100 years.”

In honor of National Pie Day, Callan Bentley shares his favorite baked-goods teaching analogies - but he hasn’t thought of any pielike concepts in geology, maybe you can help? Brian objects to the “layer cake” analogy, suggesting that perhaps we should use lentils instead. Lentils? I guess I’ve seen recipes for lentil shepherd’s pie…

Finally, Lab Lemming has a delicious rocky planet pie chart, and by “delicious” I mean “my dentist told me only to eat gas giant pie charts”.

REMINDER: Accretionary Wedge entries due tomorrow!

The title says it all, really: remember to submit your posts for the next edition of the Accretionary Wedge carnival! The theme is geologic misconceptions; also, pie.

Submit posts by leaving a comment here, or email me at criminy.crickets [at] gmail.

Metagabbros

There are a number of things a gabbro can become when it metamorphoses. Among them:

  • Adding water makes serpentinite plus some other junk
  • Many major metamorphic facies are conveniently named after rocks formed by sending a chunk of mafic material down to particular temperatures and pressures:
    • amphibolite
    • greenschist
    • blueschist
    • granulite
    • eclogite

But I don’t know that any of these things make particularly good puns. Hmm.

How to Make Good Cloud-Watching Weather

Clouds surrounding the Hetao Irrigation District, China Irrigated land stays cooler than native desert terrain. In the late afternoon, when this temperature difference is largest, the hot air above the desert wants to rise, and cool air from the irrigation district flows outwards along the ground to replace it. When the cool, moist air from the irrigation district hits the hot desert, it rises, and eventually cools enough that its load of farm fresh water vapor condenses into the clouds seen outlining the fields in this satellite image. Furthermore, since the air near the ground in the irrigation district is leaving, a downdraft is created to replace it. This downdraft suppresses the formation of clouds immediately above the farms.

Presto climatto, sunny weather on the farm, with just enough nice puffy cumulus clouds in the sky to find animals in.

Image source: MODIS/AQUA, published as Figure 2 of Kawase, H., T. Yoshikane, M. Hara, F. Kimura, T. Sato, and S. Ohsawa (2008), Impact of extensive irrigation on the formation of cumulus clouds, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L01806, doi:10.1029/2007GL032435. Kawase et al. worked out a numerical model which reproduces this effect. Go them.