Gabbro B-Sides

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?).

• Remember: Your Scientiae posts are due on Monday! Here, again, are the theme announcement and instructions for submission. You want to write about women in science, you know you do!
• Need a better concept of your own mortality? The second-ever edition of The Accretionary Wedge, the blog carnival for the earth sciences, covers lots of ways the Earth could kill you. (Am I totally lame for not posting about this until a week later? Maybe. But really, we’re geologists, we shouldn’t be fussed about such a nothing eyeblink.)
• Oh hey, we’re nominating a guy for Attorney General who thinks the President is above the law! Hilarious. Now, I’ve been on a vacation from DC politics, occasioned by my jogging buddy injuring his foot so that I no longer need to get out of bed early enough to listen to Morning Edition. So my brain is foggy about dredging up appropriate background information, like who was the last Attorney General to actually believe in the rule of law? Was it Janet Reno? Does John Ashcroft count because he believed in the rule of Biblical law? Or do we have to go all the way back to Marbury v. Madison? and did this Congress ever develop a spine?

This image, originally created by Nobuyuki Kayahara, is a great scientific personality test. If you see the dancer spinning clockwise, you’ve got excess spleen qi in your left frontal crockus. This means that you’re a vibrant personality whose passions are apparent to everyone around you, but sometimes you are indecisive. If you see her spinning counter-clockwise, the right ascension of your natal chart lies in your sagittal broab and there are Fire humours dribbling out your left nostril. You should see a doctor as soon as possible.

An Australian tabloid recently republished the dancer with a little spiel about how you can use her spin as an indication of whether you are right-brained or left-brained. Since then, she’s propagated all over the internets, and so has the accompanying spiel.

In contrast to my deeply insightful, completely factitious interpretations of the left frontal crockus, the tabloid’s claims about “left brain” and “right brain” personality types are vastly overblown. But the spinny dancer is captivating, and because we are watching her with our brains in addition to our eyeballs, she must surely tell us something about how our brains work… so what’s actually going on?

As it happens, my fiancé is a professional optical illusion geek. He spends his time making monkeys play video games, in order to figure out their visual processing systems. So I made him explain it to me.
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I found this one on the side of the road, near the top of Sonora Pass. The zoned structure reflects some change in the conditions under which the crystal was growing, but frankly, telling you that this is feldspar has strained my mineralogy skills to the limit. If we are going to get a lesson on the difference between normal and reverse zonation in alkali feldspars, it’ll have to come from some Gentle Reader who does real geology, and not this geophysics number-crunching bullshit with which I am so obsessed.

I went camping this weekend in a natural disaster waiting to happen. Seven hundred and sixty thousand years ago, a volcano went off in Eastern California, covering the western United States with ash and leaving behind a 15 km x 30 km caldera. That volcanic system is still active - there’s a slowly-growing bulge in the middle of the caldera, which indicates the presence of an expanding magma chamber. As the magma loses some of its dissolved gasses, a gentle CO2 breeze wafts up from the rock on nearby Mammoth Mountain, to the great misfortune of the mountain’s trees and a couple of skiers. And of course, as magma shifts around, it creates frequent earthquakes.

Most importantly, though, there are hot springs. Late Holocene anthropogenic bioturbation has created comfortable soaking pools throughout the valley. Occasionally, these springs will kill you - more than a dozen people have been fatally scalded at Hot Creek since 1968, and the area has been closed to swimmers since it resumed geysering in 2006. Other hydrothermal sites, however, are less fatal and less closed.

Bizarrely, the news that Long Valley is an active volcano has been downplayed by the local tourism bureaus. The emergency evacuation route from Mammoth Lakes has been labeled a “scenic loop”. Business suffered in the early 1980s, after the USGS issued an eruption warning. Sure, the area is at risk; although the next eruption is likely to be small, continuing the string of little cinder cones that run from Long Valley to Mono Lake, a smaller eruption would be bad enough. Ski boom or no ski boom, I’m not scrambling to invest in mountain real estate. But as a tourist, the odds are very low that an eruption will occur during the weekend you happen to be visiting. And did I mention there are hot springs?

I shouldn’t make the area sound too enticing, though, or the tubs will fill up. Long Valley is a large and explosive volcano. It will kill you. Stay away.

The world’s most generic sandstone comes from a narrow strip that runs from northern Kentucky through the town of Berea, Ohio, and then into Pennsylvania. It’s an area that, 330 million years ago, was occupied by a large bay off the epicontinental sea that covered most of what is now the central United States. Delta deposits from rivers that flowed into this bay are now known, collectively, as the Berea formation.

What makes the Berea sandstone so generic? Well, there’s a lot of it, it’s easy to quarry, and it has a good marketing team. As a result, it’s a popular choice for scientists who just want to fracture, deform, drown, thump, poison, or otherwise torture an innocent piece of sedimentary material. The properties of Berea sandstone make frequent cameo appearances in textbook tables of “approximate values for various rock types”.

If you’re a sedimentology nerd local to the Berea formation, here’s a field trip guide.

The October edition of Scientiae is up at Wayfarer Scientista. Not only does this mean there are buckets of interesting things to read, it means it’s my turn to play host! Eek!

Stay calm. If the theme sucks, people can just ignore it and submit a post about whatever they’ve been thinking about lately. It will be awesome no matter what. Scientiae is always awesome. Also, the Internet loves you, because you’re very witty and clever. Smooches!

Your theme, should you choose to accept it, is talking to yourself. What does your internal monologue sound like? Is it helpful, or harmful, or a mix of both? Has your gender influenced the stories you tell yourself about what you are doing, and why it is important? What about the gender of the person you are talking to or thinking about? Do you have a little script you recite to yourself when you’d really rather be puking on someone’s shoes? What about a script for when write a recommendation letter, select nominees for an award, or other situations where your unconscious biases might come into play?

Wow, that’s a lot of question marks. Fuck it, though, they’re all fine pieces of punctuation.

Finally… the mission of Scientiae is to provide a space to share “stories of and from women in science, engineering, technology and math.” Note the “of”. The past few editions have been composed entirely of women’s voices. While I think it’s appropriate that women’s voices should dominate the conversation about women’s experiences, the job of thinking about gender in science belongs to everyone! I’d like to invite all you progressive, equality-minded men scientists to join the fun this time around.

To submit a post to the carnival, please email the URL by October 29, 17:00 Pacific Time (or, y’know, whenever it is I wind up sitting down after dinner that evening) to scientiaecarnival [aaaaat] gmail.com.

Do you want to fuck around with the Technorati tag? No. No you don’t.

Hey, look how well I resisted the temptation to make sarcastic remarks about the amount of time these ostensibly equality-minded men spend actually thinking about gender! Go me, I am totally fostering productive dialogue. strike-out jokes are a cheap trick, but cheap tricks built Dave Barry a career.

O Great and Powerful Oracle, the current contract between the United Auto Workers and the University of California expires on Sunday. Negotations continue, with goals like affordable dependent health care and a slightly less risible excuse for day care benefits. Like all adversarial negotiations, this involves an awful lot of bullshit posturing on both sides, including threats of a strike. Will it actually happen?
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So ever since I decided to leave grad school, I’ve been thinking that it might be nice to have the diffusion equation tattooed on my feet. This is the first tattoo idea I’ve had that I’ve actually liked for more than a week at a time; if I still like it when I’m 30 I’ll start looking for an artist. Why is this such an appealing concept? Well:

1. I’m a really big dork.
2. I like to think of life as a random walk (NB: you can derive the diffusion equation from the drunkard’s walk problem).
3. Reeeeeeeeally big dork.

But of course, there are some important dorky questions to answer first, one of which is detailed in a chat log below the cut. It also brings up an important gender issue.

Okay, fine, I’m just posting chat logs because I haven’t been posting much lately and I really don’t want to redo my figures.
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You know those moments where you look at a column of data, and then over at a second column of data, and slowly the realization dawns on you that the numbers should be the same but aren’t? Yeah, I just had one of those. (If this has never happened to you, please shut up and enjoy your perfection somewhere else, thanks.) The damage in this case is minimal - if I can’t trace the discrepancy, I’ll need to regenerate a few figures and change some numbers in a table, but my qualitative results will remain unchanged. Still, it’s a powerful argument in favor of adopting a more streamlined approach to handling data, figures, and files.

My current practice involves a hodgepodge of nerdy tools (Matlab, LaTeX) and corporate whore tools (Excel) - with additional corporate whore tools imposed by my collaborators (and here I make farty noises at the very idea of Microsoft Word). I’ve mostly been interested in getting the job done as fast as possible, without spending much time learning how to use new software. However, the nerdy tools aren’t so good at interfacing with the corporate whore tools, so the process of moving from data to analysis to figures always involves some tedious export-import-copy-paste steps.

If I were really awesome, I would have Matlab or gnuplot scripts for making my figures, rather than manually loading and plotting my data. If I were even awesomer, I would write cute little scripts in python or R or even Matlab to do my analysis, rather than using the spreadsheets to which I am accustomed - then I could set up a makefile to go directly from data to figures. And if I were holy shit on top of the world of awesomeness, I’d manage it all with a subversion repository, so I didn’t end up with these directories full of crap that I have to wade through every time I get confused.

Of course, you do lose something if you do things from script right away. The process of playing with data is important for figuring out what’s actually going on, and the process of playing with figures is an important part of good graphic design. And once you’ve finally gotten it the way you like, there’s no one forcing you to go back and document it by writing a script…

So tell me: What happens when you discover a mistake that’s umpteen steps behind what you’re doing right now? Do you have an easy way of dealing with it, or is pouting and pulling your hair out and kvetching on the Internet just par for the course?