Author: Alex

Oh no, Climate-gate!

I don’t really have much more to say about the ridiculous situation. The SGU did a great job in episode 228 and 227 talking about it. I can’t personally speak authoritatively and I don’t have anything really unique to say other than this: attacking scientists for being grumpy, bitchy humans doesn’t change the preponderance of the data; it just makes the grumpiness and bitchiness feel much more justified. Panting hysteria over the use of the word “trick” may help you shore up your own worldview, but to someone not scrabbling for evidence of a world-wide global warming conspiracy, it starts sounding like sad desperation.

colorado ufo

Moo? Moo.

You know who else is always baffled, along with doctors? Apparently: Ranchers, cops, and a UFO believer. Cattle mutilations in Colorado! Woohoo! And on the front page of today’s Denver Post.

I hadn’t realized it, but apparently we have our own tradition of whacky cattle mutilation tall tales in Colorado. “Phantom Surgeons of the Plains” certainly has a nice ring to it. Though what I find quite interesting here is that the “UFO Investigator” that has been looking at these seems fairly convinced himself that it’s not UFOs, but humans.

“I’m looking for obvious things,” Zukowski says. “I don’t like to say aliens did it. There are just too many unknowns. I like to lean on human intervention until I actually see a UFO come down and take a cow.”

Well, you certainly have to give him credit for that. I actually feel very charmed that he’s looking for a mundane explanation instead of immediately concluding that it was aliens because no one knows exactly what was happening. I’ve gotten the impression that it’s a fairly unusual attitude to have.

The one picture that’s on the article (which is fairly gross) isn’t really good enough to even begin to make guesses. I’d be curious to know what’s giving this impression, though:

“It’s weird and unexplainable,” says Duran, who lost a healthy 27-year-old Red Angus cow on March 8, her udder and rear end removed with what he describes as “laser cuts, like when somebody cuts metal with a torch.”

Were there apparent burns, or is he just sticking with the meme that only human intervention can cause cuts to appear straight or precise? If nothing else, the icky picture looks like the carcass has started to decompose, and depending on the weather out here, that’ll either mean that it’s going to bloat or dehydrate, or do a weird combination of the two. That alone would probably alter the appearance of wounds on an animal.

Also, much is made about the udders, the eyes, and the missing entrails; that’s all pretty standard, and the best explanation for that is often that insects like eating the wobbly bits instead of chewing through leather. Which is fair enough. I don’t like chewing on leather, myself. From the article (though it’s hard to tell) it doesn’t sound like the calf that was found right away was missing the squishy bits. In the end, it may not be possible to say exactly what killed these cows. But like most mutilation cases, leaping to the alien conclusion is a big, big leap. Dead things look weird when you’ve let them sit out for a bit, so that even natural causes start looking decidedly unnatural to anyone that’s not a forensic scientist. There are predators around of the four-legged variety, and possibly of the two-legged variety that widen the prospects of just how weird things might look.

I find it sadly ironic that the UFO investigator says that he doesn’t think it was UFOs, but one of the ranchers apparently does:

“I do believe it was UFOs. This universe is so big, a lot of people think we are the only ones here,” he says, declining to guess why aliens harbor such bloody disdain for bovines.

“I bet there is something out there.”

Something that really, really hates cows, apparently.

Tags colorado, ufo

women in science

Ego > IQ?

Well, obviously. For guys, at least.

I find this very unsurprising, to be honest. Sorry, but we still very much live in a society where women feel a definite pressure to dumb themselves down. This sort of study also lines up pretty nicely with the “girls are bad at science/math” attitude as well. Men think they’re smarter than us; we do too. And I imagine if a woman thinks that she’s not as smart as her fellow men, she’s not going to fight as hard for her share of education or her right to be there.

I’m sure of course that there are egotistical women (like me?) that think they’re far smarter than they actually are. It’s just that the general trend is for men to have the ego and women to agree that ladyparts suck the oxygen out of your brain.

While this may be funny in some ways (I’m obviously poking fun at it myself), let’s also not forget that there are real and horrible consequences to this sort of sexism. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, when a man who hated feminists and believed they didn’t belong in the field entered an engineering seminar, separated the men from the women, and began shooting the women.

Pretending we’re different when we’re not may bring the funny, but it also can fuel much, much darker things.

Tags women in science

links

Quick links for today

The periodic table of elements has never looked so tasty.

The same sex marriage debate, greatly simplified. – Thank you, PZ. I laughed a lot.

Reading Rogue – a series of blog entries by a man heroically taking the bullet and reading Going Rogue and blogging about it. Entertaining, yet I fear for his sanity.

colorado ufo

"Get a new hobby" doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Post author By Alex
Post date December 3, 2009
No Comments on "Get a new hobby" doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Denver voters will be asked to create UFO commission

Oh yes, Peckman is back. In 2003 it was a plan to instate city-wide stress relief programs. Last year it was his utterly asinine “alien” video, which the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society*** utterly demolished. And now, because not enough people think he’s crazy, or think that Denver’s full of insane people, he’s setting up a voting initiative for Denver to create a UFO commission. No, really.

This would still be a colossal waste of time and money, even if we were in the greatest world economy of all time. Considering the current economic issues we’ve got going on, this is just beyond irresponsible. Now, I don’t think it will pass. I really, really hope it won’t. (Don’t disappoint me, Denver. Please.) I can’t vote against it myself, since I live in a different city. Hopefully since it’ll be on the 2010 ballot, there will be a decent voter turnout and it’ll go down in spectacular, Hindenburg-like style.

Also, apparently Peckman has been living under a rock and doesn’t realize that there already is an organization looking for aliens. It’s called SETI. Or maybe he doesn’t think that SETI is doing a good enough job because they’re, you know, too concerned with doing actual science. Instead of making hoax videos. I suppose it’s too much to hope that Seth Shostak, incensed at the slight to his honor, will dispatch SETI’s ninja death squad to Denver. But a girl can dream.

I suppose one good thing that may come of this is that it’s getting the city of Denver to focus on how stupidly easy it is to get an initiative on the ballot. May Denver have more luck with fixing that problem than the state of Colorado did last year.

***made of 100% pure awesome

Tags colorado, ufo

awesome

Quite possibly the greatest thing you will ever watch

Post author By Alex
Post date December 3, 2009
No Comments on Quite possibly the greatest thing you will ever watch

I apologize for the terribly late post. Today was utterly atrocious; I set my alarm to the wrong time, and just in case I somehow could have teleported myself to the bus stop in the necessary ten minutes it would have taken before my normal bus showed up, it was snowing. A light snow. A snow that left the highways covered with significant amounts of no-this-isn’t-ice-it’s-just-a-bit-damp. So as you can imagine, traffic was at a standstill as everyone in Colorado realized that they hadn’t actually seen snow before, and that the best place to stare at it in rapt fascination was on the US-36 stretch between Westminster and Boulder.

Then I had a class project to work on this afternoon, because in this great state, we believe in adding insult to injury.

Whining done, I would draw your attention to this. It is quite possibly the greatest thing you will ever watch. And involves the most classic taste combination since someone got chocolate in their peanut butter: hand puppets and theoretical physics.

Tags awesome

links

And three nifty links

Before I go scooting out the door for school.

Koreans make plastics without fossil fuel chemicals – I’m waiting for the E. coli strain that will vacuum my floor for me. Oh bacteria, is there anything you can’t do once properly tinkered with?

Trailblazing: Three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing – From the Royal Society (the UK’s equivalent of the NAS) there’s an array of historic and important papers from its 350 years of publishing online for our perusal. Very, very cool stuff.

Balloon Boy’s Dad — Not Smart, Not Funny – Well, we already knew that Heene was a total crank after his balloon hoax where he tried to prostitute his young son to the media in a bid to get his own reality show. Apparently he’s a racist, too. Just when we thought we couldn’t get less classy than a six-year-old barfing on national TV…

grad school women in science

Women and geoscience degrees.

Post author By Alex
Post date December 1, 2009
No Comments on Women and geoscience degrees.

There are some new statistics from the AGI regarding women earning science degrees – and more specifically geoscience degrees. The general upward trend makes me quite happy, as far as geoscience degrees being conferred. There looks like there’s been a teeny dip in the percentage of undergraduate degrees over the past couple of years, but there could be quite a few reasons for that. We’re above 40% now, which I find heartening. Geology isn’t the old boys club that it used to be, even if you can’t necessarily tell that quite yet if you work in oil and gas.

What I thought was interesting is actually in the bar graphs. The greatest percentage change in degrees conferred for women was non-science and engineering degrees first, then geoscience. So we’re making bigger gains than the other science/engineering fields. But if you look at the two percentage graphs below it, the comparing 1993 to 2006, it’s also interesting. Some fields have taken a pretty big bump, but the only two where women are getting more than 50% of the degrees are social sciences and non-science and engineering fields. Considering that more women attend college than men (in 2006 the New York Times reported that men were down to 42% of college attendees), we’re still not getting an even distribution across the fields. But who knows if we ever will. I think for now, just seeing that more women are going in to these fields is encouraging.

Looking at the graphs a second time, there is one other thing that struck me. For the most part, women are doing pretty darn good at getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Except in geoscience and engineering, there’s still a major (at least 10 point) gap between master’s degrees and PhDs, even though we are getting more PhDs than we used to, by a lot. It’s not like we haven’t noticed this before. A brief cruise through the feminist stylings of the amazing Dr. Isis provide some lovely anecdotes regarding why being cursed with ladyparts make life rough if you want a PhD.

But, I’m hoping that if we’re seeing increases in other degrees, some day we’ll see the institutional adjustments that will let women pursue their doctorates, rather than being forced to choose between advanced education and producing the next generation of li’l scientists.

Personally, I’m just going for a Master’s right now. Not because of any sort of external difficulty, but mostly because I have no idea what research I’d even want to do for a PhD. Some day, it’d be nice to get to wear the big-girl “doctor” pants, but I definitely need some focus first.

And since I’m mentioning graduate school, here’s a random aside: Why is it that of the three colleges that I attended, the only one that’s charging me for official transcripts (to the tune of $10.25 each) is the one I attended for only one semester? Grr, I say. Grr.

Tags grad school, women in science

backyard geology igneous stuff pet rock

A girl and her pet rock (4)

Post author By Alex
Post date November 26, 2009
1 Comment on A girl and her pet rock (4)

So I just realized that I owe a post for today. I spent my entire day working on my geology term paper, so I have nothing all that clever or interesting to say. So I guess instead of falling down on the job completely, I shall share the rough draft of my paper. Yay?

Unfortunately I can’t really include the pictures, so you will miss the treat of my extremely awful, juvenile-looking hand-drawn cross section. It’s one step up from MS Paint, but a small step at that.

I’ve also now submitted my two grad school applications. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Also as a note, the pictures of what I’m referring to in the petrochemistry section can be found right here.

Genesis of the Green Mountain Kimberlite
Introduction
The Green Mountain Kimberlite is located in a mountain park/open space near the city of Boulder, Colorado, at approximately latitude and longitude 39º59.431’N, 105º18.09’W.

The Green Mountain Kimberlite intrudes in to the Boulder Creek Batholith, which is primarily composed of Precambrian granodiorite. There are no rocks other than the granodiorite and kimberlite exposed in the immediate area, and no evidence of other intrusions at the surface.

The exposed kimberlite contains no identifiable rock fragments that are younger than Precambrian in age. Larson and Amini (1981) attempted to track the age of the kimberlite using fission track ages on apatite and sphene within the rock. The apatite fission tracks yielded the highly suspect age of 77.1 ±5 million years, while the sphene fission tracks yielded a more reliable age of 367 ±15 million year. This number agreed with other kimberlite emplacements near the Colorado-Wyoming border and was considered reasonable at the time, under the assumption that all kimberlites in the region were emplaced at approximately the same time during the Devonian. However, a later study used 40Ar/39Ar of phlogopite from the kimberlite to determine a maximum emplacement age of ~865 million years, though that age was considered suspect within the study due to problems with Ar degassing and anomalously low initial 40Ar/39Ar ratios. Using 147Sm/144Nd ratios taken from megacryst samples from the kimberlite, the same study found an age of 572 ±49 million years for emplacement (Lester et al, 2001). This dating of the Green Mountain Kimberlite agrees with that of the Chicken Park Dike in the same study; the two kimberlite intrusions are compositionally similar to each other, while being significantly dissimilar to other kimberlites in the area, making the difference in age seem both reasonable and logical. At this time, the evidence points to the Green Mountain Kimberlite being emplaced in the Paleozoic, at 572 ±49 million years ago.

Lester et al (2001) have suggested that their dating of the Green Mountain Kimberlite as Neopaleozoic in age puts the emplacement in line with the break up on the Rodinia supercontinent and suggests a tentative link between the two events. If this is the case, the Kimberlite resulted from an extensional tectonic setting, in which the kimberlitic magma flowed up through deep fissures and zones of crustal weakness related to the extension. The formation of the kimberlite came from the melting of mantle peridotite mixed with volatiles, most importantly CO2, though the source of these volatiles is not immediately apparent in the scenario of the Rodinia breakup. Another possible scenario for the generation of the kimberlitic magma is hot spot activity, though the evidence for such activity in North America is so thin as to be nonexistent (McCandless 1999).

Petrochemistry
The Green Mountain Kimberlite is a porphyritic, with a fine-grained ground mass surrounding large phenocrysts. The phenocrysts in the thin section examined were serpentanized olivine sometimes with apparent remnant olivine, phlogopite, biotite, and large calcite crystals. There was also a 1-2mm in diameter opaque of unknown type in the sample, and infrequent but identifiable orthopyroxene. The ground mass is fine grained and rich in calcite, as well as opaques. Boctor and Meyer (1979) identify the major mineral components of the kimberlite as diopside, ilmenite, Cr-rich and Cr-poor almandine, olivine (serpentanized and not), orthopyroxene, biotite, phlogopite, and calcite. No large garnets were identified in the thin section, but it is very possible that some small garnets exist in the ground mass, which remains mostly dark at all angles under crossed polars. Ilmenite is an opaque mineral and as such cannot be identified with true certainty in the thin section, but considering its abundance within the kimberlite, it is likely that a significant percentage of the opaques in the ground mass are ilmenite. The ground mass is also rich in calcite.

Boctor and Meyer also note the presence of Perovskite within the Green Mountain Kimberlite, though it is a mineral not easily identified within the thin section. However, the presence of the perovskite does suggest that the mantle peridotite source of the kimberlite interacted with CO2-rich fluid, which allowed the chemical interactions to create the abundance of Nb and REE in that mineral.

Conclusions
The formation mechanism for kimberlite magmas in particular is still a topic of great discussion among geologists (Heaman et al, 2004), and unfortunately the genesis of the Green Mountain Kimberlite remains murky. In general, the kimberlitic magma that produced the Green Mountain Kimberlite must have formed due to the interaction of mantle peridotite with volatiles, particularly CO2 and water. This volatile interaction is further supported by the abundance of calcite phenocrysts and in the ground mass of the kimberlite, as well as the Nb and REE-rich Perovskite found within the kimberlite by Boctor and Meyer (1979). Probably prior to the partial melting, the peridotite had undergone at least one episode of metasomatism. The source of the volatiles for this metasomatism and melting is unclear; there is little evidence for a mantle plume in the area, and the existence of a nearby subduction zone is likewise unclear (Heaman et al, 2003). After the formation, the magma was forced upward under high pressure, most likely following deep crustal fissures or zones of weakness related to the break up of the Rodinia supercontinent. This rapid, pressurized intrusion (and ultimately extrusion) of the kimberlitic magma explains the existence of granodioritic xenoliths within the kimberlite, taken from the surrounding Boulder Creek Batholith during the kimberlite’s intrusion. With even the age of the Green Mountain kimberlite still a matter for debate, little more can be said about the rock’s formation with any degree of certainty.

References
Boctor, N. Z., Meyer H. O. A. Oxide and sulfide minerals in kimberlite from Green Mountain, Colorado. In: The mantle sample – inclusions in kimberlites and other volcanics (F. R. Boyd and H. O. A. Meyer, editors), Proceedings of the Second International Kimberlite Conference, AGU, Washington DC, v. 1 (1979), pages 217-229.

Heaman, L. M., Bruce A. Kjarsgaard, Robert A. Creaser, The temporal evolution of North American kimberlites, Lithos, Volume 76, Issues 1-4, Selected Papers from the Eighth International Kimberlite Conference. Volume 1: The C. Roger Clement Volume, September 2004, Pages 377-397, ISSN 0024-4937, DOI: 10.1016/j.lithos.2004.03.047.

Heaman, L. M., B. A. Kjarsgaard, R. A. Creaser, The timing of kimberlite magmatism in North America: implications for global kimberlite genesis and diamond exploration. Lithos, Volume 71, Issues 2-4, A Tale of Two Cratons: The Slave-Kaapvaal Workshop, December 2003, Pages 153-184, ISSN 0024-4937, DOI: 10.1016/j.lithos.2003.07.005.

Larson, E. E., M. H. Amini. Fission-track dating of the Green Mountain Kimberlite diatreme, near Boulder, Colorado. The Mountain Geologist, v. 18 (1981), pages 19-22.

Lester, A. P., E. E. Larson, G. L. Farmer, C. R. Stern, and J. A. Funk. Neoproterozoic kimberlite emplacement in the Front Range, Colorado. Rocky Mountain Geology, v. 36, no. 1 (2001), pages 1-12.

McCandless, T.E. Kimberlites: mantle expressions of deep-seated subduction. In: J.J. Gurney, J.L. Gurney, M.D. Pacsoe and S.H. Richardson, Editors, Proceedings of the Seventh International Kimberlite Conference vol. 2 (1999), pp. 545–549.