As a kid, I was fascinated by the hardware store. It had aisles and aisles full of shiny, mysterious gadgets. It also had a distinctive smell, composed primarily of grease, burnt metal, and dirty old linoleum. I hadn’t felt that particular sense of wonder at a poorly-understood sense of order and purpose and shiny in many years… and then I tried this vegetable dip. It tastes exactly like the floor of a hardware store smells.
Sometimes I just need to blog about a product to remind myself never, ever to buy it again.
Below the fold: O iTunes Oracle, will I ever forget this warning and waste another dollar on shitty generic vegetable dip?
Continue Reading »
So 2008 is the International Year of Planet Earth (why does nobody tell me these things?). In honor of the project, this week’s issue of Nature has a free special supplement section, with some very accessible overviews of currently trendy topics. I recommend that y’all use your copious spare time to read them.
In case you’re wondering, the currently trendy subfields are climate, climate, seismology, climate, mineral physics, climate, planetary science, climate, climate climate baked beans and climate, geomorphology, climate, and climate - sorry, everyone else!
The RSS reader favored by the Machead elite is now free (as in beer). So, while I was enjoying Mr. McMoots’s exceptionally craptastic home Internets connection - the kind where you would really benefit from the ability to go to a coffeeshop, download everything, and then read it offline - I thought maybe I’d stray from my old companion Bloglines, just for kicks.
NetNewsWire is pretty slick, but it lacks one killer feature: Email subscriptions. A magic button that lets you fabricate an email address, and pretend that anything sent to it is just another blog entry. Why does this matter? The American Geophysical Union is apparently still running on FORTRAN - their journals are the only ones I read that don’t offer RSS feeds for new issues*.
Dear AGU: What is wrong with you people? You are missing out on the Internet 2.0 social blog bubble pie! Or whatever it is. Also, I like getting journal updates mixed in with my blog habit.
Fortunately, there’s Mailbucket. I just made some publicly accessible RSS feeds which, Internet volente, will provide update notifications for the following journals (links will take you right to the XML files):
Update: Mailbucket is… suboptimal. It truncates long messages (goodbye, full contents to GRL!), doesn’t convert http:// addresses to hyperlinks, and there’s something funny about the line breaks. Bah, humbug.
Continue Reading »
Venice is sinking. It’s sinking due to tectonic forces, being on the wrong side of the plate flexure that’s lifting the Alps. It’s sinking because in the 16th century they diverted all the rivers around in an effort to avoid floods, thereby depriving the lagoon of the influx of fresh silt to which it had been accustomed. It’s sinking because that’s just what happens when you put a bunch of heavy city on top of soft sediment. It used to be sinking because people were pumping water from the aquifers beneath it, but that mostly stopped in the 70s. This has caused all the problems you might expect when an entire city sinks into the freaking ocean.
A group at the University of Padua is working on a scheme that could, if successful, raise the entire city by 25-30cm in about 10 years. The idea is to do the opposite of what mid-20th century industry and agriculture did to the city, and pump water into an aquifer underlying the city. They’ve just published their plans for a pilot project in Water Resources Research*.
Continue Reading »
I promised to give you all details on the upcoming Accretionary Wedge carnival, didn’t I? Well. Better late than never.
Accretionary Wedge #5 will be published on January 23, in honor of National Pie Day. This means you will need to submit your posts by 6pm Pacific Time on January 22 to guarantee inclusion in the carnival. Submit posts by commenting on this post, or email them to me at criminy.crickets [at] gmail.com.
The theme(s) is(are) as follows:
- Your (least-)favorite geological misconceptions
- Pie and the earth sciences
Or just send in your favorite earth science post from the past month!
I am looking forward to your submissions.
Iowa City is a liberal town, but I think it gained a few Republicans tonight, just because their caucus line was so much shorter. The Democrats stretched down the hall, back again, and out the door, and that was early - we showed up shortly after 6. While in line, we were entertained by a little light campaigning, and occasional calls for Republicans and people in the precinct next door to get the hell out of our line. By the 7:00 cutoff, there was hardly room to turn around.
After making it through the line, I spent the first part of the evening hanging out with the loser groups, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel (Bill Richardson was also a loser group in our precinct, but his crowd was over on the other side of the gym). It was hard to find - while most campaigns had decorated their corner of the gym with festive signage, the Kucinich section was marked by a single sign, hand-written in permanent marker on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet of plain white paper. I think it was actually on the back of one of Bill Richardson’s flyers. It was soon joined by a similarly improvised sign for Mike Gravel.
Continue Reading »
Our Christmas* dinner was interrupted by a phone call from Hillary Clinton. And another one from Bill Richardson. And a poll.
Last night, we gave up on our game of guessing which candidate was calling (usually Clinton, but Biden and Richardson and Dodd have all stepped up their telephoning in the past couple days, and a number of local political figures decided at the last minute to endorse Obama), and started hanging up on anyone we didn’t recognize from the caller ID. I didn’t count how many times the phone rang - the calls quickly blurred into a timeless haze of prerecorded messages and “I’m calling from out-of-state because…”.
This household is a fat, juicy political prize - three registered Democrats, all of whom intend to caucus, one of whom is undecided - but we still haven’t gotten any campaign workers to shovel our sidewalks. What, I ask you, is the use of having such a political circus if you can’t even get your sidewalks shoveled?
I’ll be going to the caucuses tonight, just to observe, just because I can. (”But you can register at the caucus, you know!” said an assortment of friends, acquaintances, and campaign workers. “I think that would technically be perjury,” said I. “Oh, right.”) How dorky is it that I’m excited about standing around in my elementary school gymnasium watching other people talk about politics? Answer: pretty dorky.
Continue Reading »
Here, Have a Clip Show
- Post I Really Wanted More Comments On: What would you name as “science world heritage” sites? - Good science heritage sites should force us to consider the process of science, in addition to its results and historical characters.
- Most Likely to Be Used as a Manifesto in 2008: Asking for a Pony - Yet here we are, apologizing for asserting our own desires, because there are little goblins in our heads spewing out endless variations on the theme of no, you can’t have a pony.
- The One Post You Should Read to Understand What I’ve Been On About in 2007: Leaking from the Pipeline Again - life is just too short to fart around pretending that if you exercise just a leeeetle bit more gumption your problems will all go away
- Best Science Post: The Spinning Dancer and the Brain - If humans had less wimpy olfactory processing, I’m sure we could figure out some bistable smell illusions, too - though as far as I know no one has tried to confuse dogs with this particular technique.
- Best Geoscience Post: What’s the Good News of Geology? - What is the message? Fund my research or San Francisco gets it?
- Honorable Mentions: The Comic Potential of Orthogonality, I Can Has Country Back Nau Plz?
Previous clip shows: 2004, 2005. Other year-end lists are below the fold.
Continue Reading »
After a hint, I found Ron’s volcanic complex. Which means I can declare the recent trend of oblique images to be so very last week, and return to some straight-up, top-down imagery. I would really like a geomorphologist (or at least, someone who can play a geomorphologist on the Internets) to tell me what’s going on in this picture.
I’ll invoke the Schott Rule here - previous WoGE winners must wait one hour from posting time (~22:00 Mountain Standard Time) for each round they’ve won. Good luck!
I am basically only on board with holidays to the extent that they are about pie. Thanksgiving? An awful lot of it is about pie. National Pie Day? Oh my yes. Christmas? It’s more about cookies than about pie. This is a problem.
What's the most festive Christmas pie?
And a few links, none of which are about pie:
