I didn’t formally sign up for International Dissertation Writing Month, but I did set myself a couple of goals for November. I’m not sure I’ve done enough to consider myself an InaDWriMo winner yet (though there’s still time!) but I’ve made more than zero progress, so that’s good. However, I still find myself deeply embedded in thesis-related gloom, so it’s nice to find inspiration in my RSS feeds. This time, it’s from Niniane, who is doing the real NaNoWriMo:
The Nanowrimo organization sends out pep talks once or twice per week. Most of them are corny and useless. But last week they had one from Neil Gaiman, which I and all of my friends agree was truly uplifting:
The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”
I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Not really.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”
I’m at that point of the science. With this project, I’ve actually been at that point of the science for a very long time. The people around me seem to disagree with my ceaseless proclamations of epistemological doom, though, so I soldier on. I am constantly finding new and creative ways to enlarge my error bars.
What do you do when you’re stuck at that point of the science?
The American palette has no room for durian. The fruit comes pre-packed with sugar and fat, making it a natural dessert, but it also has these onion-y flavors that we expect to belong to savory dishes. So I aimed for a compromise in the tradition of sweet potato pie, a dessert which still (in some hands) manages to honor the vegetable flavor of its contents.
I thought it worked. No one else liked it. The problem wasn’t with the pie, though, it was just that no one else likes durian.
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Once upon a time in the Neoproterozoic, there was (maybe) an 8,000 km by 1,000 km mountain range that stretched across the half-supercontinent of Gondwana - that’s slightly longer than, and twice as thick as, the modern Andes. Those mountains lived for a quarter of a billion years, all the while dumping sand and dust into the oceans. When you wanted to go somewhere in Gondwana, you had to walk uphill both ways (that’s the topographic signature of life, you see - before the evolution of land plants everything was uphill both ways).
The rest of the story is a doozy - it involves all our funny-bodied friends from the Cambrian Explosion. But I’m going to refer you all to Joe Meert, who had a much timelier writeup of the actual research. Because the other intersection between geology and life is that sometimes, various spores and pollens will attempt to fertilize a geologist’s nose, so that she needs to take some antihistamines and go to sleep instead of telling stories to the Internet.
So how well are the earth sciences represented in the nominations for the 2007 Open Laboratory? Well. There’s some great geodesy, climate science, oceanography, and paleontology, and Chris Clarke wrote a lovely meditation on Miocene volcanism in the Sierras. And of course a there’s truly excellent post about neuroscience which totally counts because it was written by a geoblogger (*casually buffs fingernails*). But the straight-up geology and geophysics is oddly absent.
The deadline for nominating posts is December 20, but you can submit anything written after Dec. 20 2006. Why not take a moment to dig back in your archives for some good “hard rock” writing? I’d do it for you, but, uh, I have dinner plans. Here’s the submission form.
Also! Remember, remember, the next edition of The Accretionary Wedge will be held this Thursday at The Other 95%-ember. The theme is “geology and life”, and I see no reason why Accretionary Wedge treason should ever be forgot.
This little reading level analysis tool is all the rage; I’m fairly happy with my result. But of course, the little badge is just a snapshot - what I really want to know is whether blogging has really helped my writing or not.
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I’ve made a couple of changes to my Weighted Words plugin for WordPress. It’s nothing major - I added an alternate method for scaling the font size so that the cloud isn’t dominated by the top few words, and tweaked the default options so it behaves more like the built-in tag cloud in WordPress 2.3.
You can download the latest version here, or learn more on the plugin page.
I haven’t read as much of Paul Feyerabend’s work as I’d like to, but this quote from his correspondence with Imre Lakatos is one of my favorites:
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Life in Our Heads
Welcome to the 13th edition of Scientiae! Today I am happy to share with you what is inside of everybody’s heads: BRAAAAAAINS!! Er, wait - even though I am technically writing this on Halloween, it won’t appear until November 1. So I don’t want to invoke zombies, I want to invoke psychologists. The theme is thoughts, inner lives, self-talk, that sort of thing.
Well, maybe zombie psychologists.
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Alas, A Blog linked to this BBC report of a wacky space experiment:
Transformed into the size of bowler hat, [a rock] was then attached to the side of the European Space Agency’s Foton M3 mission, which launched from Kazakhstan last month.
Professor John Parnell, chair in geology and petroleum geology at Aberdeen, studied what effect the heat of re-entry from space had on the rock, along with Dr Stephen Bowden.
Heat from re-entry as a barrier to panspermia? I thought we’d already settled that one, when ultra-high-resolution magnetic measurements on Martian meteorite ALH84001 showed that the inside had never been heated above ambient surface temperatures. Not that I’m complaining about improvements on the natural experiment (this time there will be more organic matter in the rock), it just doesn’t strike me as revolutionary.
Oh well, it’s still a good topic for some mumbo-jumbo. Oracle, O Oracle, am I really a Martian?
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Open Text Book is a useful blog devoted to free (as in speech, and also as in beer) academic texts. There’s only one post filed under “Geology”, which lists two books published by the USGS - one on ground-water hydrology, the other a basic introduction to plate tectonics. The math sections are a little beefier.
I should also mention that lectures from the Earth Will Kill Us All 101 course I’m teaching-assisting this semester are freely available as podcasts. Some of the students are using these for review, which is why they’re there, but we’re clearly getting a significant number of outside listeners as well. It gives me the warm fuzzies, though I do wonder who has time for this sort of thing (people with long commutes?).
