rock out to the apparatus
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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I was recently convinced that there are three possible fates for the universe. Sci-fi narrative fates, not bona fide cosmological ones:
Lazyweb, has that last one ever been done? For values of “universe” and “exist” that require an impressive degree of ontological contortion?
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.
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!
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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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:
With either [melt catalyst belt or chemical vapor deposition], nitrogen from organic compounds in the coal would impart a yellow-green color in the diamond due to the absorption of the single N defect.I assume this also holds for the Superman method.
In fact there are some rather bewildered-looking avian dinosaurs outside my kitchen window wondering how Bubba the Fat Squirrel managed to steal the fat balls from 1.5m high up on our dispenser.
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”.
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.
There are a number of things a gabbro can become when it metamorphoses. Among them:
But I don’t know that any of these things make particularly good puns. Hmm.
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.
