Author: Alex

Categories
education

Who’s the Scientist?

This is just awesome. It’s a bunch of written descriptions and drawings that seventh graders made before and after a visit to Fermilab.

I think that it really does show how pop culture has, in a way, poisoned the profession for a lot of the population. If you look at the before pictures and descriptions, it’s all very classic stuff. Scientists are uber smart. Scientists are a little crazy. Scientists don’t have hobbies. And on, and on. It all very much sticks to the “mad scientist” archetype that still gets a lot of play, and I think that powerful archetype ultimately discourages interest in science as a career. A lot of kids probably look at that and think that they’re not smart enough to be a scientist, or that they wouldn’t want that kind of career because they like doing other things and don’t want to live in a lab.

I’ve seen this sort of perceptual shift occasionally myself, when I’ve worked with some younger kids who are a bit shocked that I’m a geologist and I look (sort of) normal. One thing that always surprises me is the sort of questions the kids ask. Sometimes they’re about geology. But some times, the questions are surprisingly personal – the kids want to know if I’m married, or if I have pets, or how old I am. However, there’s an up side to that – once someone learns that we’re real people, it changes the perception of the career path. So instead of “I’m not smart enough,” maybe a kid could think, “well, I think bugs are cool, maybe I could be an entomologist.”

I also hope that it’s a good dose of reality that can help kids learn to think critically about what they see on television or other media. If one stereotype is proven false, it might be a jumping off point for re-examining a lot of the stereotypes that are prevalent in both media and culture.

Anyway, I think that this really shows the importance of outreach. It’s not something that everyone has the time for, but if you do it’s a rewarding experience. One thing that I noticed is several of the kids have very similar “before” and “after” drawings and descriptions – I’d be willing to bet that these are the kids who either personally know scientists (such as having one in the family) or are already deeply interested in science themselves. It would just be great if all kids had the opportunity to get to know a working scientist, if only briefly. And it’s a small but satisfying victory to see the gears shift a bit in someone’s mind, or to hear things like, “girls can be scientists” or “scientists wear t-shirts!”

Categories
rivers the flood

Of Catastrophic Floods and Canyons

Looks like in Texas, we just got to see a catastrophic flood in action and have some fresh land forms to look at. This is really, really cool. Catastrophic floods aren’t events that can be produced on demand1, so being able to watch one happen and be on site as soon as the waters recede to check out the alteration to the surface features is a very neat opportunity.

I’m less thrilled about some of the writing in the article, however. For example, this:

Our traditional view of deep river canyons, such as the Grand Canyon, is that they are carved slowly, as the regular flow and occasionally moderate rushing of rivers erodes rock over periods of millions of years.

Such is not always the case, however. “We know that some big canyons have been cut by large catastrophic flood events during Earth’s history,” Lamb says.

While I do understand what the author is trying to say, they’re frankly doing a poor job of it that plays right into the sticky little hands of the Young Earth Creationists; the author makes it sound as if this example of catastrophic flooding somehow sheds doubt on to what we know about the Grand Canyon. It doesn’t.

Catastrophic flooding and canyons is a fairly recent area of research that was pioneered by J Harlen Bretz – who was very much a geologist, not a young-Earth nut. He mostly looked at portions of the western US that were shaped by the glacial outburst floods from Lake Missoula during the last period of glaciation. One example of the resulting land forms is the Channeled Scablands. And the big canyons that Lamb is talking about? The coulees in that same area, such as Grand Coulee.

Morphologically, the coulees look VERY different from river canyons such as the Grand Canyon. As one example, viewed in an aerial photo, the Grand Canyon has very obvious (and incredibly entrenched) meanders – a river feature. Take a look at the Scablands and the features become much more linear – here you’re looking for the features that seem to slant NE to SW; Banks Lake, for example, was made by filling in the Upper Grand Coulee with water. And there are many other features that could be compared and found different between these canyons. If you’re curious, here’s an aerial view of the new “canyon.”

Which is why this really bothers me:

Unfortunately, these catastrophic megafloods — which also may have chiseled out spectacular canyons on Mars—generally leave few telltale signs to distinguish them from slower events.

…so do those boulders pictured in the article itself just not count? Because the idea that catastrophic flooding (such as glacial outburst floods) were the cause of certain types of features is relatively new, we’re still researching what features should be associated with what phenomena and trying to understand how they form. That is really not the same thing as there being “few” features, or that somehow slower erosional events are difficult to distinguish from flood events. Part of the elegance of Bretz’s argument for the Scablands was that the Lake Missoula outburst floods explained features that really couldn’t be explained by the normal action of rivers.

I have no doubt the YECs are already picking their way through the paper, taking the bits of data that support their position. That’s to be expected. But the way this article has been written makes me cringe. Instead of simply focusing on the super coolness of catching a flood like this in action, or giving background of other catastrophic flood morphology in the US, we’re getting these bizarre little pokings at the idea that this somehow affects our understanding of the Grand Canyon’s formation. Again, it really doesn’t. To me it just sounds like whoever wrote the article was searching for some sort of controversy or dramatic angle, one that was ultimately unnecessary when the solid facts are nifty enough to stand on their own. Writing FAIL.

1 – Okay, technically you could. But probably only if it involved an elaborate plot to blow up the dam upriver of Metropolis because you’re just so tired of your world domination plots being foiled. And you’d likely have to be cackling all the while too, and that’s just tiring.

Categories
cats NERD

With apologies to Mr. Shakespeare

Is this a kitten I see before me
His belly toward my hand? Come, let me pet thee.
I touch thee not, yet long to still
Art thou not, adorable vision, purring
To invite my hand? Or art thou but
A kitten of the mind, a belly trap
Proceeding from the cute-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As the cat which once I touched.
Mine eyes are made the fools of the other senses,
Or else I await a shredding; I see thee still
And on thy claws and my arm gouts of blood,
Which was not so before.
I touch and it is done; the purr invites me
Hear it not, be wary; for it is a spell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Categories
music

Trebuchet!

George Hrab’s new album is out now – Trebuchet! He put the entire album as a podcast, so if you haven’t heard his music before, go give it a listen there. (Dogma Free America also put the whole CD at the end of their most recent podcast.) I’m liking this publicity angle that George is taking – I really think this is more the way in to the future, rather than the more controlling methods of the RIAA, for example.

The album is a lot of fun. I downloaded it on iTunes the day I heard the podcast, and I’ve listened to it several times. I don’t think there’s a song on the album that I don’t like. Though I will admit that my favorite is still FAR. I am totally unashamed to admit that I had that song on repeat when I was out on a bike ride, and was singing along at the top of my lungs. Who cares if the other pedestrians thought I was off my head.

There’s also a song on the album called “Hai, Yookito ‘Ya.” While I should have realized that it was Ukranian – and I did recognize George’s mom’s voice at the beginning – my immediate thought was that it sounded Japanese, so I spent about 20 minutes making myself crazy over it. At this point, Japanese has become my default language on anything that sounds even vaguely like it; I guess that’s what I get for taking four years worth of classes. All is explained in his interview on Skepticality. However, I still think we should start calling George 勇気人 (brave man) or　雪人　(snow man) or possibly just 有機人 (organic man) since I’m pretty sure he’s a carbon-based life form. They all actually sound the same (other than the middle name actually has a shorter “u”) so he won’t even know which he’s being called at any given time.

And this was of course the day after I found out Devo had come out with a new album, called Something for Everybody. So I got a double dose of awesome, funky, geeky music.

Categories
marriage

What’s in a name?

I’ve been married for a little less than a month now, and one thing to note is that I haven’t changed my last name. I very much doubt that I will in the future, unless given a very compelling reason.

The name change issue came up fairly early in our engagement. One day, Mike said to me that I was going to be “Mrs. His-last-name.” It sounded very strange to my ears, and I reacted a bit strongly to it – though I immediately apologized for that. But the bug was in my ear, so to speak. Part of why I reacted the way I did was the simple assumption that I would be changing my name. I don’t think this reflects negatively on Mike, necessarily; almost everyone had assumed that I would. It’s a societal expectation that tends to go along with marriage. But it’s one I think needs to change.

I understand that marriage is about becoming a family unit, so to speak, and that having the same last name is part of that. But I dislike the very patriarchal assumption that it’s the man’s last name that ought to reign supreme; it really seems to hearken back to a time when a woman would pass directly from the control of one man (her father) to another (her husband) and that a certain “ownership” was indicated by her last name. While that isn’t necessarily the case any more1, I think that historical baggage still exists.

Even in modern day, when it’s not so much an issue of ownership, I still consider the name change to be rather unfair. Changing your legal name isn’t a simple process, and comes with a variety of annoyances. The fact that it’s normally expected that a woman will jump through the many hoops – and only the woman will do it – without complaint rubs me the wrong way.

There is also the fact that I really like my last name. It’s a very uncommon one – I have yet to meet someone who has my last name that isn’t related to me. It’s also at the very beginning of the alphabet, and I admit that I really enjoy being able to tell anyone with an alphabetical list, “I’ll probably be first or second.” And simply, it’s been my name for my entire life – almost thirty years at this point. It’s part of who I am, and for the most part I like who that happens to be. At the time, I didn’t think that marriage would fundamentally change either my identity or my relationship with Mike.

I explained all of this to Mike, and he understood where I was coming from. We considered several options, such as hyphenating (which created something that sounded very silly to both of us); I also suggested that we could both change our last names to something entirely new to keep it fair. Mike didn’t particularly like that idea either, which I think helped drive home to him why I was balking at the whole process. I tried to keep the discussion open, however, since I didn’t know how important it was to him2. A couple of months before the wedding we were walking home from the bus station and as a random change of conversational topic he said, “I think you should keep your name. You can always change it later if you need to.” And that was that.

A month in to it, I’m going to say I was right; I’m still the same person3 and our relationship is the same loving partnership it’s been for the last five years of living in sin. I’ve had a few people assume that I’ve changed my name already; I don’t let it bother me, since I understand that it’s still the societal norm. If I get the opportunity to correct them gracefully, I do.

This is not some sort of judgment on the majority of married women out there (including my mother and my best friend) who have changed their last name. I think it’s a personal choice, and it’s up to what you want, what you feel comfortable with, and what meaning it has to you. To me, it’s something of a feminist statement, but one of the things people tend to forget about feminism is that it’s about choice – in a broader sense than just abortion rights. It’s about making sure women have choices, and that they can execute those choices in whatever way is best for them, regardless of whether you would make the same decision. I made my choice for my reasons, like everyone else. I feel lucky that I live in a time where it was my choice to make.

1 – The chillingly creepy “purity” movement aside.
2 – Another lesson I’ve learned is that it’s all about compromise when something is really important to your partner. This is why, for example, I wore a poofy white dress at the wedding and not a scarlet pirate frock coat.
3 – Probably to Mike’s relief, since I imagine it would be a little disturbing if the woman he loved spontaneously changed in to someone else just because she had a ring on her finger.

Categories
oil and gas

Hope and Disappointment

I made it my business to listen to the President’s Oval Office speech from last night. I found it to be an intensely disappointing experience.

From where I stand, he had the opportunity to really strongly push the country in a new direction, particularly in calling for new energy policy. While he did say that new policy was needed – and at least he also gave a shout out to the need for stricter regulation – he didn’t present any kind of specific plan. And honestly I think that’s what we needed. Give us something, Mr. President – you mentioned the plan you came up with for energy independence as a candidate. Even retreading that would have been preferable to the nothing that we’ve got. I’m also mystified that he brought up the House passing the cap and trade legislation and didn’t take the opportunity to put pressure on the Senate for sitting on their hands. (The Senate: where good legislation goes to die.)

Of course, some of the responses to the speech have been pretty ridiculous. Like Sarah Palin telling Bill O’Reilly:

“Otherwise, Bill, we are going to be dropped to our knees and bowing to the Saudis and Venezuela and places like Russia, that will keep producing oil and petroleum products,” she said. Then “we will have to ask them to produce for us because we will still be dependent upon these sources of energy.”

We’re going to have to ask people to produce energy for us anyway; even if we drilled every available reserve tomorrow, the oil wouldn’t last long enough to transfer us over to a new energy economy. I’m extremely tired of the lie that domestic drilling will magically fix our “dependence” on “foreign oil.” Short of the god of your choice floating down to earth on a cloud made of cotton candy and pissing out an endless river of crude oil for us to dip in to, nothing is going to end our oil dependence until we build ourselves in to a society that no longer feels the need to waste it by setting it on fire.

Also, all the people going on about how the number one priority should be plugging the hole? No shit, really? Are we simply allowed to talk about nothing else until it’s plugged? Because standing anxiously around and staring at it, not daring to say another word is not going to make it get capped off any faster. Though I suppose if you’re suckling on the teat of the oil companies, that’s preferable to using that time to discuss alternative fuel sources.

I was even more disappointed that rather than address the specific policy issues and strike while the iron was hot, so to speak, the President devoted the entire end of his speech to praying. Maybe it’s a measure of how helpless he and the people caught directly in the path of this man-made disaster feel, that all they can think of is prayer. But praying isn’t going to come up with concrete policy goals that voters can get behind. Praying isn’t going to clean up the beaches or stop BP’s rather creepy attempts to shut out public observation of the cleanup. God apparently wasn’t with the men who died on the drilling rig.

We did this, and we need to fix it. Period. What Rachel said.

But I do disagree with Rachel about one thing. Last night, she said:

In the current setup we have in this country, the oil industry has everything going in their favor. They get all of the gains, all the profits from their incredibly lucrative industry. And the risk is always ours. It’s our American beaches that get doused in oil, it’s our American marshes that get ruined when something goes wrong, it’s our American industries that get destroyed when places where people make their livelihoods get polluted and made toxic.

It’s not just our beaches and marshes and livelihoods. As long as our demand for oil remains monstrous, as long as we lionize a business culture where the only responsibility that exists is to make money for the shareholders and damn the social consequences, we own a share in all of these disasters.

Categories
gaming

Pandemic

One thing you may or may not know about me is that I love playing board games. And more so, I love cooperative board games, which aren’t the easiest things to come by. Cooperative games are an experience all their own, one that many people haven’t tried and really should; they require a shift in player attitude from “I” to “we.” I would say in the field of such games, narrow as it might be, Arkham Horror is the undisputed king. The games are complex, tense, often long, and there’s normally a genuine feeling of accomplishment when your team of random characters manages to stop the world from being destroyed by a hungry great old one.

That said, I think Pandemic has become a close second in my heart. It has the same suspense, required teamwork, and scope as Arkham Horror – and the same feeling of relieved accomplishment when you save the “world” from being destroyed. However, Pandemic lacks the insane (and sometimes overwhelming to new players) complexity of Arkham Horror, and has one even bigger advantage – most games run 45 minutes at the absolute most. I’ve played many game of Pandemic that clocked out at 20 minutes, making it a very, very fast play. Definitely good for when you want a cooperative game and don’t have three to four hours available to play it.

The concept behind Pandemic is pretty simple; there are four diseases spread over the world map. All of the players are intrepid workers at the CDC, each with a different specialty. As a team, you have to find cures for all four diseases before they overrun the world and kill off a significant percentage of humanity. The turn structure is very simple, the mechanics are extremely easy to learn, and I think this is a game you could probably get kids in on very easily.

What makes the game interesting is the execution of the concept. The diseases spread in two ways; first, there are cards that you draw, which tell you where to place counters for each disease. Secondly, once you hit the maximum counters in a city (three) if you try to add another for any reason, the city “explodes” and adds one counter to all cities geographically connected to it. This can lead to heavily infected cities chaining together and setting each other off – and each time this happens, you move one step closer to losing the game.

As a model for the spread of disease, this is probably one of the more accurate ways for a board game to go. And this means that on one turn, you may feel like you’ve got things under a reasonable amount of control, and two or three turns later you’ve lost the game because you simply could not keep up with the rate of infection.

Another factor in the atmosphere of the game – the race against an implacable enemy – is how powerless as an individual player you often feel. The actions you can take in a turn are severely limited, and your only hope truly is to work with your teammates, emphasizing your specialized skills as much as possible. Since the game allows a maximum of four players and there are five roles that are randomly distributed, that guarantees several things:

  • 1) You will always feel like if you just had role X you would be doing much better.
  • 2) You will often have a very different “team” to work with in each round of the game.
  • 3) In order to win, the group needs to figure out how to best combine the specific talents of each role. If you can’t optimize that, you’re almost guaranteed to lose.
    • In our games, each player’s individual turn becomes a team discussion, where everyone at the table works to plan out the next several turns for best effect. That plan often doesn’t survive the next turn, when there are new outbreaks of infection to deal with.

    The game also comes ready-made for different levels of difficulty. There are six “epidemic” cards that are put in one of the decks. The number of epidemic cards used (minimum four) determines the difficulty of the game. My crowd of usual suspects can normally beat easy (four cards) and can beat medium (five cards) at least half the time. We’ve dared difficult (all cards) once, and I think that was purely on accident. And somehow, we won that round.

    This is definitely a game I would recommend. It takes a well-thought-out set up to make you eager to play again after you’ve just lost humiliatingly to an inanimate object. Arkham Horror has that quality, and Pandemic definitely does as well.

    Categories
    Uncategorized

    The heights and depths of Planet Earth

    Here is a very cool infographic of the heights and depths you find on this planet, all to scale. Just start at the top and scroll down; there are a lot of really cool facts included.

    The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the well that’s been spewing oil in to the Gulf of Mexico for the last fifty or so days is also included. It actually gives you a good sense of the scale of the thing, and why dealing with it is not as simple as “just put a cap on it.” I also hadn’t realized just how far they’d drilled down. It’s pretty impressive.

    And for extra added awesome, Denver’s on the graphic too!

    Categories
    grad school

    Getting Ready for Grad School

    It’s only June, but I don’t think that it’s too early to get my first semester schedule put together. I like having things tied up, neat, and ready to go before I get there. So this morning I got up early and took the bus to Boulder to meet with my advisor.

    The news is pretty exciting. The project that I was hoping to get on has now been promised funding! The only slightly less good news is that since it is a big, costly project, it’s going to take about a year before the funding appears. What this means practically for me is that I’ll end up needing to hang in for an extra semester or two, since bailing on a half-finished project would make it tough to produce a decent thesis. (Plus I wouldn’t want to leave something undone anyway.) As long as I’ve got the funding, however – and it sounds like I will – I think it actually works out fairly nicely. It means the first couple of semesters I can hit the course work really hard to get the bulk of that out of the way, so that when I do have data to dive in to and cores to examine (drool) over, I ought to be able to really concentrate on it. It also gives me a lot of time to trawl through the relevant literature and become really familiar with what’s already been done with the time period (the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum) and the general area.

    After bouncing some e-mails around this afternoon, I’ve also managed to basically put my schedule together, and I doubt I’ll have to change it at all. I’ll be taking Sedimentary Petrology with a teacher I really like (woohoo!), and of course anything that involves thin sections makes me very, very happy. I enjoyed the heck out of igneous/metamorphic petrology last year, and I’m a soft rock gal through and through. I’ve also signed up for Applied Sequence Stratigraphy and Basin Analysis, which sounds generally relevant to the project, and just darn interesting. Stratigraphy, like thin sections, makes me very, very happy.

    Also on the list is a required seminar that all new grad students have to take. It’s only an hour a week, and it sounds like it could be fun – sort of a “meet the faculty” mixed with a general literature review. Another fun thing is that I’ve gotten permission to sit in on the undergraduate paleobiology course. I didn’t have the chance to take it when I was an undergrad (I ended up doing geochemistry instead since it fit in my schedule better) and I think an introduction to paleontology is in order since I will likely be seeing fossils – the PETM is when a lot of the ancestors of modern mammals first appear. In a semester or two I’ll hopefully have a chance to take a vertebrate paleontology graduate class, so an introduction to the subject will be helpful, I think.

    I’ve also found out what I’ll be teaching this fall – the mineralogy lab! It’s a little intimidating, since mineralogy was not my best subject and I really struggled with certain aspects of it. My advisor isn’t teaching this semester, though, and I really like the mineralogy professor, so I think it’ll work out nicely. I’ll just have to do some review to make sure I’m familiar with the material again. Apparently many of the labs for the geology department are in the process of being restructured to make them a bit more student-friendly, and mineralogy has already gotten the treatment. So the labs will be new to me as well. I’ll have two lab sections to call my own – there’s another TA to teach the other two, and he’s apparently done it before so hopefully he won’t mind giving me the occasional push in the right direction.

    The classes look fun, I’m more excited than scared about trying my hand at teaching, and I’ve got a cool project to look forward to. It’s still two and a half months away, and I can’t wait!

    Categories
    oil and gas

    You are also a moron.

    And by “you,” I mean Sarah Palin, which I suppose shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that hasn’t been living in a cave since John McCain made his shark-jumping choice for vice president in 2008.

    Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country’s energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It’s catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.

    Sarah? Sarah, let’s sit down for a minute. Pull up a seat. I’ve got some fresh banana bread I just made. Do you prefer milk or coffee?

    So let’s chat. Look, I know that you’ve got an agenda, and that you don’t like environmentalists. But you’re really going off the deep end here. Maybe no one bothered to tell you this, so I’ll let you in on a little secret: oil companies want to drill in deep water because it’s a way to gain access to a shitload of oil. Full stop. I mean, I’m sure we’d be happily drilling in ANWR too, since there’s a nice untapped oil field up there. But that’s kind of the point; what any oil company that does exploration wants is to gain access to a field that ideally hasn’t been drilled before. Which means there’s a lot of oil there for the taking, and the reservoir is still nice and pressurized, and you’re not having to wrack your brain to figure out how to squeeze a little more oil out of rocks.

    If ANWR had been opened for drilling, this disaster still could have happened, and easily. Why? Because there’s a lot of oil on the continental shelf, and the farther you go out and the deeper you drill, the more likely you are to hit something your competitors haven’t really tapped in to yet. And I think my point is handily proven by the underwater oil volcano – we’re talking a flow of over 20 million barrels in about 40 days, from a single well. That’s fairly significant. No oil company in its right mind would leave that kind of potential alone, ANWR or no ANWR.

    Let’s just consider estimated reserves, shall we?

    The USGS did an assessment of ANWR in 2002. If you look at the whole enchilada of land – national land, native lands, and the nearby shallow offshore area – the mean estimate for reserves they came up with was 10.6 billion barrels of oil and 61.4 trillion cubic feet of gas. Let’s be generous and say the mean they came up with is right, and eventually that amount of reserves could be proved.

    The latest reserves estimate of the Gulf of Mexico I could find on the MMS site was from 2006; the reserve numbers may well be the same today, or possibly larger due to continued exploration. But just with the 2006 numbers, the estimated reserves were:
    Proved: 5.22 billion barrels of oil, 16.9 trillion cubic feet of gas (this left after those fields had already produced 15.1 billion barrels of oil and 166.8 trillion cubic feet of gas)
    Unproved: 4.44 billion barrels of oil, 8.3 trillion cubic feet of gas
    Not available for lease yet: 1.32 billion barrels of oil, 7.7 trillion cubic feet of gas

    Looking at those numbers, ANWR is certainly impressive if you count all available land; it may have close to as much oil as the Gulf of Mexico, and a lot more natural gas. (Though considering how ridiculously cheap natural gas is these days, one has to wonder about the benefits to the companies of producing even more of it.) But more importantly, if you think the oil companies would drop their ~10 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico so they could have ~10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska instead, I’d like to know what color the sky is on your planet. This is not an either/or situation. I guarantee you that if “safer” (which is very, very debatable) places for drilling like ANWR were opened up tomorrow, there would still be rigs in the Gulf of Mexico unless deepwater drilling was subsequently banned. These are oil companies. They go where the oil is. It’s what they do.

    Please see also: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (a cautionary tale)

    There are a lot of people to blame for this disaster: BP for its gross negligence, the government for its lack of regulation, the general American public for its unceasing demand for cheap petroleum products. But hippies on bicycles? Get a grip, Sarah. Have some more banana bread.