Author: Alex

Categories
rants

Everyone’s a Hero

Everyone’s a hero in their own way
You and you and mostly me and you.

— Captain Hammer

Stephen Marche wrote a column about the utter meaninglessness of the word ‘hero’ as currently used in America: We Are All Heroes. The stinger at the end sums the whole thing up nicely: If people living up to their basic obligations are heroes, then we’re all failing disastrously.

Ouch.

As I read the column, though, I found myself thinking “Yes, but…” a lot. I think there’s a lot more to the issue. Which is not to say Mr. Marche doesn’t, because goodness knows it’s hard if not flat impossible to boil down a complex issue into a snappy column that comes in at the appropriate word count.

However, since this is the internet, where oceans of text are spilled daily to expound on matters of no consequence that no one’s paying attention to anyway, I might as well say what I’m thinking. So, my buts. Let me show you them.

I’ve got kind of a knee-jerk defensiveness that kicks in every time mentions the self-esteem generation, participant ribbons, all that. Depending on who you ask, I’m either at the tail-end of Generation X or the very front of Generation Y (or whatever it’s fashionable to call them these days), but I always get this paranoid feeling that it’s me in the cross hairs. I don’t know when the self-esteem raising craze really hit, but I definitely churned through the public education system when it was in full swing. It just seems a little too easy to take a shot at the self-esteem bullshit we got fed in school.

I obviously only speak for myself and my limited group of friends that are close to my age, all of whom are intelligent, snarky nerds. But by about third or fourth grade, I’d copped to the fact that not only were participant ribbons meaningless, they were actually kind of insulting. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that when everyone’s getting the same award, it’s not much of an award. Particularly when you’re awarded for participation in something that’s mandatory.

Perhaps I was remarkably cynical as a child. I also had amazing parents, who took pains to drive two important facts into my skull:
1) You are smart, and don’t ever take shit off of anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
2) It’s pathetically easy for even very smart people to do embarrassingly stupid things.

Hell, it could even be because my parents let me watch things like Life of Brian at an age that would probably cause some severe pearl clutching among the squadron of adults that think children are delicate hot house flowers as opposed to tiny, developing humans. There is a certain impression that gets made on you when you’re young and seeing the “Yes, we’re all individuals,” scene for the first time.

Whatever the reason, I want to give my peers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to participant ribbons and self-esteem raising. There’s an awful little part of me that would just like to think I had it all sussed out because I wasn’t one of the little sheeple (god I hate that word) but that smells way too much like hubris for my comfort.

At worst, the scourge of participant ribbons are a symptom. We didn’t turn into a country of selfish beasts because of the orange ribbon that got pinned to our shirts in sixth grade. The most toxic parts of selfish American culture that encourage an abdication of duty – emphasis on consumerism, lack of empathy for those on a lower social rung, the idea that we shouldn’t have to pay for anything – are not sourced from people in my age group. Sure, assholish thirty-somethings are now rallying around the idea that all taxes are too high and screw the safety net anyway, but the self-esteem generation isn’t leading the charge.

I’m pretty sure no one ever gave Senator Mitch McConnell a ribbon for just showing up. (Other than the invisible ribbons lovingly bestowed by privilege, but I digress.)

Maybe a message of selfishness is happily accepted by people who have had their egos artificially inflated. But I also think it is just that the lesser nature of the human animal is to be, well, kind of lazy and selfish. So anyone whispering sweet nothings about how we can have everything we ever wanted (Oh boy! A war in the Middle East!) and never have to pay a cent is going to have a lot of receptive ears.

This is a general failure on all our parts to reject the poisonous idea that selfishness is somehow an acceptable ground state, if not a virtue. Because if you’ve accepted that idea, even the smallest of selfless actions become noteworthy.

We like calling soldiers1, firefighters, and paramedics heroes – police as well, though that’s a bit more fraught. Some of it’s because, let’s be honest, most ordinary people would not want to run into a burning building or get shot at by hostile men armed with assault rifles, even if they were being paid to do so. People doing those things willingly, whether its their job or no, does seem a little fantastic.

There’s something else all of those heroic professions have in common, however: the pay is generally shit.

I volunteered as an EMT for several years. I never seriously considered making it a career because the pay was so ridiculously low, my mortgage would have swallowed up nearly half of my gross salary. (I do not live in a mansion with a pool.)

At a time when we have soldiers on food stamps and public safety workers looking down the barrel of severe budget cuts while simultaneously one party would love to slash social programs like food stamps, maybe calling these people heroes is also hollow compensation and pathetic excuse. You can’t feed your kids, but you’re a hero. You can barely scrape by, but you are some sort of superhuman paragon of virtue that should be above such mortal concerns anyway. We threw you a fancy party, what more do you want – more funding for suicide prevention? Mama needs a new tax cut.

Of course, it’s not just soldiers and public service workers that are struggling financially these days, though their struggle is all the poignant because it comes at such immense personal risk. But I think it’s this struggle that’s contributed to another change in how we view heroes. Mr. Marche mentions Peter Parker, and he’s a perfect example in this case. When you’re constantly having to decide if you’re going to have electricity or food this week, being a superhero does seem like it should be the easier half of life. Beating the ever-living shit out of a masked bad guy that’s threatening a little old lady is an easy, black and white call. When it’s a choice between heart medication and new shoes for your kid, it’s a hell of a lot harder.

This is not to say I disagree with Mr. Marche’s thesis. The utter cynicism which which the term hero is being wielded has everything to do with manipulation and political expediency. If we shy from our obligations as a nation, it’s because as a nation we have allowed our expectations to be so pathetically lowered, and without much of a fight.

But does that mean heroes are dead?

No.

Mr. Marche retweeted this (so I have no idea if he agrees with it or just found it an interesting point), and it makes me sad:

@arcadiaego: not sure *anyone* is a hero outside myths. (Which may be your point, Steven.) But interesting article.

Maybe this is me clapping because I believe in fairies. If that’s the case, so be it. But no matter how meaningless the word becomes in public discourse, heroes still exist.

The presentation of heroes even in mythology isn’t so simple as all that, but for the sake of argument let’s grant that they’re paragons, that they’re presented as what we should aspire to be. There are still people – ordinary, flawed, beautiful, mortal people – that have that same quality. There are people who far exceed expectations, and in so doing encourage others to aspire to do the same. Mr. Marche brings up the example of Sal Giunta, who says he doesn’t feel like a hero at all.

But that’s kind of the point, I think. People who truly have that quality we should laud as heroic have expectations of themselves that far exceed those of society. When they meet their own expectations, they don’t necessarily find it out of the ordinary. But it should encourage the rest of us to examine our own expectations of ourselves, society’s expectations, and find them wanting.

When I was in Germany, one of the ladies I worked with told me that she’d recently found out her grandmother sheltered Jewish people from the Nazis during World War II. She said, “I’d like to think that if I were in that situation, I would be that strong. But you never know.”

That is what heroes do.

They make you look deep within yourself and say, if I were in that situation, facing that kind of danger, could I be that strong? If that were me, would I have that kind of fortitude? I don’t know.

But I will strive to be that person.

Notes:
1 – I think with soldiers there’s also a whole other level of American neurosis at play, starting from the beginning of the Afghanistan War. People were reminded, and rightly so, about the abhorrent treatment some Vietnam War veterans received at the hands of civilians. No one wanted to see a repeat of that, particularly when it became clear that anti-war protests would be ongoing. We overcompensated, big and grand and loud, because damnit, that’s the American way. That desire to compensate then became a very useful political club to aim at anyone objecting to the wars, particularly in their early days.

Categories
fitness for fat nerds

Fitness for Fat Nerds: Enough With the Mental Bullshit

Stop me if this is a nightmare you still have: You’re wearing those tiny, humiliating shorts. You’re faced with the climbing rope, or sometimes it’s the chin up bar. Whatever task it is, you struggle to pull yourself up with arms that seem terribly flabby and inadequate, and you get nowhere. And then your classmates, a bunch of shithead kids in equally ridiculous shorts, laugh at you.

I don’t know what it is about physical education in school. If you’re a fat nerd (or a thin nerd, no need to exclude) the classes felt like they were tailor made to drive home the point that physical activity is the most miserable experience a human being can have inflicted upon them. And then there were the jocks. You know, the people who spent all their time being utterly mean to us, and then running effortlessly up and down the field, and you know what? Fuck those guys. They’re jerks. If that’s what it takes to be good at sports, you didn’t want to be one of them anyway.

When I was in junior high – this is a true story, just ask my mom – the first time they dragged us outside and made us run on the track, I was in the middle of a twenty teenager pile up and broke my leg. And I was relieved. Happy even. Because it meant that while everyone else had to run on the track – where I knew that I’d be puffing along at the back of the pack, if I could even keep running at all – instead, I got to sit on the bleachers and soak in all the sympathy you can earn for having a cast on your leg.

What the hell is wrong with this picture, that I’d feel happy I broke a bone?

This attitude follows us out of school, I’ve noticed. Just listen to how most people talk about physical fitness: I had a piece of cake, I need to punish myself on the elliptical trainer tomorrow. We’ve all heard things like that before. Exercise is presented as something you inflict upon yourself in retribution for enjoying good food, or playing too many video games, or just having the poor taste to be chunky. Maybe it’s just something that appeals to the weird, creepy inner puritan of the American psyche. Chocolate cake is something you like, so it’s a sin. Exercise is good for you, so that means it’s got to be unpleasant because it’s bad to enjoy things okay?

Because we all know, exercise isn’t supposed to be fun.

Yeah, screw that.

This is the problem, with treating exercise like a punishment: unless you’re a hard core masochist, you’re not going to want to be literally inflicting something horrible and unpleasant on yourself, day after day. It’s just not in human nature. There’s a lot of evolutionary programming in us that says unpleasant things are bad and that we should avoid them. Eventually, the urge to not suffer is probably going to win over your willpower. I think even more importantly, there’s the fact that life is short. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Why the hell do you want to spend a significant portion of your day doing something that you absolutely hate if you don’t have to do it to survive?

I struggled for a really long time trying to come up with an exercise regimen I could stick with, because I knew I was out of shape and I didn’t want to be. (Here, I mean out of shape as in “oh god don’t make me climb a flight of stairs” as opposed to “judgmental jerks call me fat.”) The problem was, after a while I’d find myself making excuses to not do it, because day after day, running on an elliptical trainer was slowly driving me insane. It wasn’t fun. If I had my choice between doing that and playing video games, the video games were eventually going to win because I’m only human.

And that’s okay.

This is the secret: exercise is supposed to be fun. The people who we all hated in school because they were stupidly, effortlessly fit? That was mostly because it was fun for them. When doing something is fun, that makes it really, really easy.

The first inkling I ever had that exercise could be fun was thanks to a game called Dance Dance Revolution. I could play that thing for hours at a time, until my muscles were just burning and screaming out for mercy, and I’d still be ready to keep going because it was fun. Working up a sweat and dancing until I thought my heart was going to explode was fun. Fitness was fun? It was fun!

I really believe that the first step you have to take is getting rid of that mental bullshit about exercise being punishment. Exercise shouldn’t be a thing you inflict upon yourself because you’re overweight or lack definition in your muscles or want to fit back into your old jeans. It needs to be a thing you do for yourself. It needs to be joyful and something that makes you feel alive.

And it can be anything that is joyful and makes you feel alive. I run and do kung fu. But I’m not the archetypal fat nerd. That’s a thing that doesn’t exist. My experience is not going to hold true for everyone, and I don’t expect you to like the same things that I like because I’m not a jerk.

So what to do? Do you like taking walks? Dancing? Water polo? Weightlifting? Do some exploring and see what you enjoy. Figuring that out is the first step, and we can always talk about that more later. The point is: whatever gets your heart going and helps you work up a sweat is a-okay as long as you like it, and anyone that tells you otherwise can go hang.

There aren’t many of these – I think that a lot about fitness is individual. But this, I’ll lay out there as a universal fat nerd truth: You need to have fun.

Because if you’re not having fun, why the hell are you doing it?

Hi, I’m Rachael. I’m a fat nerd. I also run 3-4 miles a day and have done kung fu for eight years. I’m not writing this because I want to be some kind of fitness guru. Hell no, that would be ridiculous. I’m writing this because I’ve got a lot of friends that struggle with the [metaphorical] Fitness Demon and I’m hoping my experience might make things a little easier for them. I’m also writing this because it’s a lot of stuff I wish someone had told me, back when I was making attempt after unsuccessful attempt to get into this exercise thing. If it helps you out, great.

Categories
bbcp

921 meters later, I’m home from Bremen, DE

So yes. It’s been a busy month and a half. For a good portion of December I was in the UK for the annual Christmas trip. So that was all fun.

But January was geology business through and through. For three days I was in Houston for a conference that Exxon held for grant recipients and international scholars, and that was a surprisingly fun time. I got to hang out with one of the other grad students from CU a little – Aya, who is from Lebanon – and she introduced me to all of the other international scholars from the middle east. It was fantastic to get to talk with all of them. I also had a poster at the conference (it was pretty and contained no actual data!) and Exxon conducted a short course for us all as well.

The short course was kind of an interesting experience, since a lot of it focused on very basic petroleum reservoir concepts. It was a good reminder that many geologists really don’t encounter that kind of thing until after they’re done with grad school, if ever. And also a reminder to me that I’m still total crap at seismic interpretation.

A day after the Exxon conference, I flew to Bremen, Germany, because it was time to process all of the core (921 meters of it!) that we drilled in the Bighorn Basin last summer. It was a lot of hard work. We mostly did 10-11 hour days with only a lunch break, which was normally less than an hour – and we didn’t get weekends. We were a 7 days a week operation.

I was the little cog in the process that did some general core description of each newly split core. It was definitely a new experience for me – I’ve done core description before, but never in that kind of situation. New cores were constantly coming in, so basically I had only 10-15 minutes with a core at most (normally less). The emphasis was on breaking the cores down into units that could be given a description with the important major features highlighted. There weren’t a lot of places where I had a chance to pinpoint specific features.

So that was tough, and stressful. These cores were also a lot of mudstone, and a lot of paleosols. There were very few sharp contacts. Almost everything, from color to lithology, changed gradationally, and that made picking where to draw the line very difficult. There were also a lot of drab intervals that just made me crazy, because they were on this weird border between being sandy siltstone and silty sandstone and I just had to pick one with a very limited amount of inspection time.

But the cool part of my job was that I got to see almost every centimeter of those cores (except for the few that would get done while I was at lunch) and I saw some really, really cool stuff! There are some pictures of the most fantastic things linked below. But overall, it was a really cool experience, and it has confirmed for me that I really would enjoy that as a job. With the caveat that normal work days and weekends would be necessary.

With all the core split, now we’re into the next phase of the project, which is going to be the real meat. Half of the core (the working half – I described the archive half) was extensively sampled for the various scientists in the project. Mary and I will be getting our samples soon, so we’ll be able to start looking at grain size. Extremely high resolution image scans of the core were done as well (along with color analysis that should be way better than me frowning at the Munsell color chart and bitching that none of them look right) so I think I’ll be looking at those in more detail, and then I have a feeling it’s back to Adobe Illustrator and I’ll be spending more weeks of my life drawing lots of little boxes. I’m excited to meet with Mary on Wednesday to see what direction I should be headed in next. And soon I should finally have a thesis topic hammered down! Which is exciting, and scary.

Anyway, here’s the pictures, enjoy! We ended up working so hard and so fast that we had three days off during the course of the trip, and were able to use those days to do actual tourist-type things. So there are a lot of pictures of Bremen as well. I had a lot of fun, and I already miss all of the other people from the work group. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in the near future, maybe at AGU!

Pictures

Pictures of Bremen
Pictures from our day trip to Bremerhaven
Pictures from work time at Marum – lots of pretty rocks.
Video of a ship leaving the docks at Bremerhaven because this was the first time I’d actually seen something like this up close and thought it was insanely cool.
Video of the adorable puffer fish at the Klimathaus in Bremerhaven
Here, listen to the horrible noise the reefer door at Marum made every single time it was opened, though after a while you just stop hearing it.
Video of a core being split which takes a long time, but it was near the start of work so Will and Rike weren’t that fast at it.

Categories
geology

Spec Tech post up

Okay, a little belated, but I wrote a post for the Clarion blog about sandstone as a building material, since a commenter had asked about it a while ago: Sandstone: It’s a Living.

My next post will be due mid-December… I’m trying to decide what to write about. I’m kind of tempted to talk about undersea hydrothermal systems (black smokers, white smokers, carbonate chimneys) because they’re really cool. And it lets me share something I’ve learned in oceanic geochem this semester.

Categories
climate change

Republicans Attack the Obama Administration…. on science?

If you haven’t read this yet, prepare to have your brain melted.

This letter caused me a lot of incoherent sputtering this morning.

First, I’d like to address the specific claims made by Senators Inhofe and Vitter and Congressman Issa, then I’d like to say a few words about the main premise of the letter itself.

I’ll go through this section by section. What I have to say here is the result of me spending some quality time with Dr. Google. My findings are not necessarily definitive, or complete. So if you dredge up any points that I’ve missed or gotten wrong – or have arcane knowledge that I manifestly do not possess – please let me know and I’ll add any new facts to the pile and swiftly correct mistakes.

Inspector General Investigation of the National Academy of Engineers Report

The criticism here is in regards to the report Secretary Salazar used to justify the six month moratorium on deepwater drilling following the blowout at the Macondo well that ultimately spewed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. I do not have a link to the report, but rather the Investigative Report, Federal Moratorium on Deepwater Drilling, US Department of Interior, which responds to criticism of the original report.

The Republican letter implies that there was misconduct in the report, because scientific peer review for findings was claimed where none existed.

From the IG’s report:

All DOl officials interviewed stated that it was not their intention to imply that the moratorium had been peer reviewed by the experts, and that when the experts’ concern was brought to their attention, they promptly issued an apology to the experts via conference call, letter, and personal meeting.

And:

All DOI officials interviewed stated that it was never their intention to imply the moratorium was peer reviewed by the experts, but rather rushed editing of the Executive Summary by DOI and the White House resulted in this implication. After reviewing different drafts of the Executive Summary that were exchanged between DOI and the White House prior to its final issuance, the OIG determined that the White House edit of the original DOI draft Executive Summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed by the experts.

So basically, the Inspector General’s report says that any implication that there was peer review – and it was only an implication, not a stated fact – was a mistake that the preparers of the report freely owned up to and apologized for.

Also from the IG report, in regards to the complaint that information quality assurance was violated:

While the 30-Day Report’s Executive Summary could have been more clearly worded, the Department has not definitively violated the IQA. For example, the recommendation for a moratorium is not contained in the safety report itself. Furthermore, the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations. The Department also appears to have adequately remedied the IQA concerns by communicating directly with the experts, offering a formal apology, and publicly clarifying the nature of the peer review.

The Republican letter also alleges blatant political influence. Having read the Inspector General’s report, that’s a baseless accusation on their part.

I will note that the Inspector General’s report was requested by Senator David Vitter (and Congressman Steve Scalise). To be honest, after reading through the entire thing, I wonder if Senator Vitter is just feeling a little aggravated that the Inspector General didn’t find the steaming heaps of politicized scientific misconduct he was desperately hoping for. What’s in the Republican letter reads like a mountain being made from a mole hill.

National Research Council Review of IRIS Formaldehyde Assessment (EPA)

The NRC’s review can be found here if you’d like to read it yourself.

This seems to be the most damning part of the NRC’s review:

The report finds that EPA supports its conclusions that formaldehyde can cause irritation to the eyes, nose, and throat; lesions in the respiratory tract; and genetic mutations at high concentrations. Furthermore, the report finds that the evidence is sufficient for EPA to conclude that formaldehyde exposures are a cause of cancers of the nose, nasal cavity, and upper throat. However, the draft assessment has not adequately supported its conclusions that formaldehyde causes other cancers of the respiratory tract, leukemia, or several other noncancer health outcomes. Also, the assessment should consider additional studies to derive noncancer reference concentrations (RfCs), which are estimates of lifetime concentrations to which someone could be exposed without appreciable risk of particular adverse health effects.

This one is a little less clear cut, I think. The NRC makes valid points about the EPA overstating the research to pin leukemia on formaldehyde, for example. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies formaldehyde in group 2A, which means “probably carcinogenic to humans.” This is generally not the same as “you will get leukemia.”

Here’s a news article that has the rainbow of reactions in black and white. The Sierra Club is disappointed. Industry groups are happy. And Senator Vitter is quoted as saying:

“I’m extremely glad I fought so hard for this review by the National Academy of Sciences, which really is the gold standard in terms of scientific assessment,” Vitter said. “It confirms what I feared — serious shortcomings and bias at the EPA. Louisiana citizens should be able to count on EPA conclusions and advice. This study shows that we can’t.”

Which I think is a very nicely crafted attack, since it implies that the EPA is completely unreliable instead of overcautious, which seems to be the case here.

Personally, I’d rather agencies were too cautious about health risks than not cautious enough. Though that is no excuse for a lack of scientific rigor.

US District Judge Oliver Wanger’s Decision Criticizing Agency Scientific Work and Testimony in Federal Court

I find it rather curious that the source cited in regards to lives and local economies being ruined is an opinion piece: California’s Man-Made Drought, The green war against San Joaquin Valley Farmers

The snide tone of that particular opinion piece notwithstanding (because hey, I’m not going to begrudge someone a bit of snideness when I revel in it myself!) the job losses seem to be more about drought than pumping restrictions. (Estimated 16,000 jobs lost due to drought, 5,000 due to the restrictions.)

However, the rest of the points in the Republican letter are a bit more difficult to tackle. If you’d like to read the entirety of the judge’s opinion here it is, and I’d recommend you put on your asbestos underwear first, because it’s a doozy. Judge Wanger has some very nasty things to say about the scientists in this case, the juiciest bits of which are cited in the letter to the Administration.

This is where it gets muddy, I think. Judge Wanger has apparently faced some criticism:

But at times, Poole said, Wanger has gone too far. “We have argued in certain cases … that he has basically made scientific calls when there’s a dispute between scientists that are improper for him to make” under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. “He shouldn’t be the arbitrator for scientific disputes. Congress has given that role to the expert agencies.”

I haven’t been able to find any detailed information about the testimony given by the two scientists. So at this point, I feel like it devolves into a he-said she-said, where Judge Wanger feels that the witnesses are not credible, and the EPA says it continues to support their findings. I’ve found several articles that have questioned Judge Wanger’s accusations that the scientists are contradictory on the grounds that he has mistaken scientific uncertainty for attempted deceit. I really can’t say one way or the other.

For more information on the issue at hand, I found this post helpful.

GAO Report on Yucca Mountain and IG Investigations into the Actions of DOE Secretary Chu and NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko

In this case, the NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, NOT the National Research Council.

The GAO report on Yucca Mountain can be found here.

I have little to say about the Yucca Mountain criticism, because FSM help me, I actually kind of agree.

The attack on Chairman Gregory Jaczko has me rather floored, though. Specifically in regard to his recommendations for evacuating Americans in a fifty mile radius around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima is still really an ongoing thing, and will be for years to come. In March, radiation levels at 60km were hitting the threshold for increased cancer risk. The Japanese government has faced very strong criticism for redefining safety levels of radiation in proximity to the plant. In April, high radiation levels were being found outside the 10 km evacuation zone.

What just boggles my mind is that Chairman Jaczko is basically being attacked for taking a “better safe than sorry” approach to a nuclear disaster. One can only wonder what the reaction would have been if he’d just stuck with the evacuation zone that the Japanese government had drawn.

But really, this is all beside the point.

Public trust in federal scientific work is waning and the academic community has gone so far as to call the situation a “crisis.” Accordingly, we request that you provide us with an accounting of your activities in response to serious questions raised about the quality of science utilized by this Administration.

Looking over the list of issues in the Republican letter, one thing struck me the most – scale. They want to talk about public trust in scientific work? I’d be curious to know how many people outside of the San Jaoquin valley – and outside of those that have a serious hate on for the EPA – knew about Judge Wanger and the never-ending delta smelt war? How many people have had their trust of science scarred by the EPA overstepping and placing leukemia risk in a report about formaldehyde instead of just sticking to nasal cancer? How many people had their trust in the government shaken by Chairman Jaczka recommending Americans not remain within 50 miles of the meltdown at Fukushima instead of a more modest 20 miles?

I am not in any way saying that scientific misconduct – whether it involves overstating one’s case or acting with too much haste – is acceptable. (Though sometimes in the intersection of science and policy, haste is required and mistakes are made.) But I think I am well within my rights to talk about scale.

What hurts the public trust of science more? The DOI erroneously implying that something had been peer reviewed when it hadn’t, or Senator Inhofe calling climate change (and thus the robust science backing it), “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people“?

What hurts the public trust of science more? Judge Wanger calling Dr. Jennifer Norris a zealot, or Congressman Issa dogpiling on the Climate-gate-that-wasn’t and saying, “It’s very clear that an inconvenient truth has been replaced by a convenient lie – we’d like to get to the bottom of the lie.”?

What hurts public trust of science more? The EPA insufficiently documenting its methodology, or Senator Vitter stating, “I do not think the science clearly supports global warming theory“? Or perhaps Senator Vitter trying (and thankfully failing) to quietly earmark money for an anti-evolution group?

What hurts public trust of science more?

The hypocrisy fills me with rage.

The shear sack required for these men to continually attack biology and climate science then set themselves up as “defenders” of science to score a few cheap political points, is breathtaking.

With “friends” like these, enemies need not apply.

At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has previously had a lot to say about these newly-minted defenders of federal science:
Vitter: Fail
Deniers abuse power to attack climate scientists
A firehose of global warming news, both good and bad

Categories
NERD

Join me in squee.

Because I have nothing of interest to say. So here, the Avengers trailer:

Because Robert Downey Jr + Joss Whedon banter is my new OTP.

Grad school is keeping me very busy. I’m also jut trying to decide what I want to do with this blog, since I mostly just write about more personal stuff on my LJ and I haven’t had much interesting to say about geology because it’s all class work at the moment. (Though I will note that anyone who doubts or denies carbon-induced climate change should be forced to take a geochemistry course.) Are my non-geology diversions into random nerdery or obsessing about my writing fun? Annoying?

I’d probably be able to blog a bit better if I knew what I wanted this blog to be, really.

Categories
climate change oil and gas

Two Earth Science Items

Everyone should read this post. It’s by Dr. Bailles, one of the co-discoverers of the so-called “diamond planet” that the media was having squee spasms about recently. He pointedly notes that his discovery wouldn’t have been at all gleefully received if he was, say, a climate scientist, despite the fact that the scientific process and peer review is the same.

Which I think is a really good point. Everyone loves hearing about awesome astronomy things, and you never see the media seeking “balance.” And by “balance,” I mean, “finding a dissenting voice on the fringe of the science to provide the illusion of fairness when, in fact, the dissenting voice is the minority and has often failed to address the criticism of his or her peers.”

But, you know, “balance” is way easier to type.

And Brian Dunning of Skeptoid just put an episode out about fracking. I did a couple of posts about that myself, almost two years ago. Generally, I think Brian did a good job, and the episode is worth a listen. His ending point is excellent – it’s important to separate the science from how much you loathe Halliburton, for example.

The only complaint I’ve got is for part of the episode he refers to natural gas drilling as “mining” for some reason I can’t fathom, and even refers to wells as “mines” in a couple of instances. That started driving me a little crazy after a while. But then he uses “wells” and “drilling” in other parts of the podcast, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the vocabulary choice.

Also, I would have liked to hear Brian mention that fracking fluid is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, due to a 2005 amendment. This is something I still personally think needs to be changed due to the possibility of surface contamination. There are sites like FracFocus, which sounds like it’s built on voluntary disclosure. As far as I know there’s no other federal requirement of disclosure (please, correct me if I’m wrong) though it sounds like a lot of states have laws now. Ultimately, your mileage may vary depending upon how evil you may think the various oil companies are, but I do have my doubts that fluid additives would be disclosed without a legal requirement; if nothing else, a lot of the additives are proprietary.

Anyway, good job, Brian!

Categories
grad school writing

Read one of my stories!

Last year Anotherealm bought one of my short stories, and now it’s published online and available for reading! Go here!

I was a bad girl and worked on doing some queries and such today instead of doing my geochemistry homework. Geochemistry this semester is looking pretty interesting, though. The class is actually focused on marine geochemistry, where we use chemicals to make rocks yell HOORAH which is pertinent to my own research since the ocean is very involved in the carbon cycle, and climate. And thus, very involved in climate change.

I’m also going to be doing a one hour independent study this semester, as long as the paperwork went through. I need to learn about paleosols in thin section anyway, so that’ll be the aim… research micromorphology and then apply what I’ve learned to thin sections that Mary has from two sites in the Bighorn Basin. I’m pretty excited about that. I just need to get someone to show me how to use the automated stage on the microscope in the sed lab. Or tell me where the left occular for the other microscope’s gotten to. Because trying to use a binocular microscope only looking through one eyepiece… it started doing funny things to my vision after a while.

So expect some pretty pictures of paleosol thin sections at some point in the near future! (Near future meaning this semester… as was pointed out to me at Skepticamp, geologists need to qualify what we mean when we say things like “quick” and “soon.”)

Categories
bbcp skepticamp

Clarion Blog Post Up! And Skepticamp!

New post of mine up over at the Clarion Blog. I talk about my seven days of drilling in the Bighorn Basin, this time from the perspective of what the experience felt like.

Skepticamp Colorado Springs was today, and it was awesome and tons of fun. This one was split into two rooms, which put us all in the unfortunate position of having to choose between speakers – but also meant there was more variety. There were a lot of fun talks. As always, I loved Bryan and Baxter, Karen Stollznow, and Stuart Robbins. John Rising did a great job organizing the event, and also did an interesting talk on the history of ghost photography.

We also had a couple of guys from the Airforce Academy: Dr. Carlos Bertha and Dr. Barry Fagin. Dr. Bertha started the morning with an interesting talk about Fideism, which is basically the position of unreasoning “because I said so” faith. It was enough philosophy to be interesting but not so much it made me want to tear my hair out, and it was generally interesting. And it was a good explanation why sometimes, you just have to give up an argument and agree to disagree, because no amount of logic will really penetrate. Dr. Fagin I had more mixed feelings on. He gave two talks, actually. The first in the morning was basically a libertarian ranty rant about how we should be skeptical about politics, where he said he’d be goring his own ox as well but didn’t really. He said some things about economics that I desperately wish Mike had been there for, since I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Mike say bitchy things about just those things in the past. But Dr. Fagin’s second talk was absolutely awesome, about how skepticism brings with it a rich inner life. It was extremely well done and was a nice end cap for the day.

I did a talk as well, about the basics of the Bighorn Basin Coring Project, what we’re hoping to find out about the PETM, what the PETM and ELMO are, and why this is an important topic to discuss. I moved my talk so that I could see Stuart’s entire topic. This meant that I actually gave mine at the same time our local global climate change denier was giving his. Which I think was probably for the best, or we might well have just been heckling the crap out of each other during our respective talks and never would have gotten anywhere. I feel like my talk went pretty well. I was nervous as hell. I always am about public speaking, and this I was trying to talk about some basic isotope ratio stuff, and I still get so turned around with those at times. But apparently I didn’t sound nervous at all, and I was enthused and interesting, so go me! I think that teaching has helped my public speaking, to the point that I at least manage to not throw a lot of garbage “uh” and “you know” in, even if I’m nervous.

Correction from my talk: I got on an excited roll and said something about there being a rainforest of some sort in Antarctica. Let the record show that this was a mistake on my part, where I confused two separate and interesting things in my head. There’s evidence of a very high-latitude (80N paleolatitude) seasonal rainforest in Arctic Canada during the middle Eocene1. And there’s evidence that during the PETM, Antarctica had a subtropical humid episode – so it got a lot warmer and a lot more humid than today’s Antarctica2. So there was season rainforest that moved up into the Arctic, but I have no idea what the vegetation might have been like in Antarctica during the PETM. I tried to do a quick and dirty paper search and didn’t come up with anything, so it could be that we just don’t know. Antarctica isn’t the most hospitable place to go searching for fossilized pollen. But if you don’t believe me about the proto-Potomac, read this cool paper.

Boy, is my face red.

Anyway, my parents came to Skepticamp! It was their first one. Though I’m sure it wasn’t at all intimidating after going to TAM. But my parents are super awesome.

Afterward, we all went to Jack Quinn’s, and I drank two ciders despite the fact that I had no business drinking anything stronger than water after the Evan-induced beer binge last night. (Though I somehow managed to escape my richly-deserved hangover this morning, so who knows.) I had some excellent bangers and mash.

Where will the next Colorado Skepticamp be?

1 – Jahren, A.H., and Sternberg, L.S.L., 2003, Humidity estimate for the middle Eocene Arctic rain forest: Geology, v. 31, p. 463-466.

2- Robert, C., and Kennett, J.P., 1994, Antarctic subtropical humid episode at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary: Clay-mineral evidence: Geology, v. 22, p. 211-214.

Categories
movie

Fright Night

I have never actually seen the original Fright Night, but my best friend Kat has, and she seemed to think the remake did just fine. As someone completely new to the franchise, I felt like it was well worth my $8.50 at the local AMC.

I don’t think I need to get spoilery, since it’s not the sort of movie that I want to dissect when it comes to plot and characterization. It was just fun. The pacing was excellent, the humor and horror were mixed well. Colin Farell was delightfully creepy in both the “holy shit, vampire” and “yucky dude from next door that hits on your mom” kind of way. David Tennant was in leather pants.

Let me repeat that for my fellow Doctor Who fangirls: David Tennant was in leather pants.

There was suspense, and creepiness, and just enough ridiculous gore to remind me that even though I was squirming in my seat at times, the movie was one big nodding, winking joke about vampires. (“Jerry the vampire?”) It makes me happy when I see movies where vampires are giant, gross bastards instead of whiny drama queens who want to spend all eternity writing poetry and gazing soulfully at teenaged girls.

And the part I liked the most? The characters weren’t dumb. It’s so rare to see a horror (even if it should be “horror” here, I suppose) movie where the characters are actually competent. There wasn’t really a time in the entire movie where I felt like shouting at the screen, as if that would prevent someone from doing something hideously stupid, and that’s rare indeed.

I recommend it, definitely.