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nitpicking the media: of swamp coolers and heat waves
The West has been hot. Hot, hot, hot. Well, except for here; our July weather pattern arrived on Wednesday, and we're having these amazing afternoon thunderstorms. (Well, amazing for now; I'm doing lab work this week.)
In any case, when I saw CNN's headline about the weather (Stifling heat spreads throughout West), I had to check it out and see ( Read more... ) -
woman geology student murdered while mapping
From the Denver Post:
Alyssa Heberton-Morimoto, a Masters student mapping for the Colorado Geological Survey, was murdered while waiting for her field partner to meet her for lunch.I'm horrified. Yikes, that poor woman and her family. And her poor field partner, who heard the screams over her radio, and who hitched a ride with the murder suspect ( Read more... ) -
book rec: Storm World by Chris Mooney
As students walked into my Earth Systems Science class on the first day of fall semester, 2005, they saw a satellite image I had just grabbed from NOAA’s website: Hurricane Katrina, aimed straight at New Orleans. It seemed like the perfect image to illustrate the relevance of studying Earth. But I’m a solid-earth geoscientist; I’ve never taken a ( Read more... ) -
rediscovering the joy of field work
I became a geologist because I love to be outside. It's that simple, really. The chemistry lab smelled bad and I couldn't wear my contacts; geology labs involved things like hiking out to a flooding river and watching how it behaved.
But something funny happened on the way to a career. Field work became a drag.
( How I came to dread field work, and how I came to love it again. ) -
field notes of the day
I've spent the last several days camping and doing field work. The weather's been wild - first it was hot, and the streams ran high with the snowmelt; then a cold front blasted through, blowing over trees with gusts as high as 60 mph; then it was lovely again; then it rained again. This might be normal in, say, New England, but June is typically ( Read more... ) -
new blog, and gender schemas in science
First: blogs. after reading and observing a bunch of science blogs, I've decided to make a blog outside LJ for primarily science stuff: shearsensibility.blogspot.com. I noticed that theclimateblog is doing something similar. She plans to post her blogspot posts here, as well. I guess I could do that.
Second: more women in science stuff. If you aren't a member ( Read more... ) -
science book rec: The Canon, by Natalie Angier
I took a bit of a detour from reading about structural modeling to read The Canon: a whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science by Natalie Angier. The book is about the fundamental ideas that underlie each of the sciences (physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy)... but it isn't written for kids. ( Read more... ) -
NOAA on Second Life, and more on quantitative structure texts
I've never messed with Second Life, but I understand it's the newest Place to Be on the 'net these days. And this is sounds pretty cool:
NOAA has a virtual science museum on Second Life. Well, it sounds like a virtual science museum - you get to ride a hurricane, and... well, I'm not sure exactly what the glaciers and the tsunami do, but I bet ( Read more... ) -
a possibly habitable planet in another solar system...
From ScienceDaily: Astronomers Find First Habitable Earth-like Planet. So what if its year is only 13 days and it's got a mass of five times Earth's. (One of the other news sites mentioned that it has one side that always faces its sun. I wonder if that's observation or speculation? I mean, 20.5 light-years is pretty far away to know much about the ( Read more... ) -
my Mac went to Anchorage and all I got was a Fed Ex slip
Has anyone out there used the academic discount to buy Adobe products from Apple? I had an odd experience faxing my prof-proof (needed to get the discount) to them: the fax machine reached something that sounded like phonemail, then transmitted the fax. I've never heard a fax machine do something like that. I'm wondering if Apple's web page has a ( Read more... )