I really enjoyed Freakonomics, and so it was disappointing to hear that the recently-released sequel, Superfreakonomics, had a section devoted to the suggestion that global warming was going to be imposssible to solve via cutting carbon emissions (with renewable energy sources) and so we should focus our efforts on geoengineering schemes instead. RealClimate has a well-written post up today showing just how sloppy the Superfreakonomics authors' thinking on this issue is.

Labels: books, climate change, global warming, politics, tech

Got a computer but don't use it 24/7? Perhaps you might consider lending some of its processing power to modeling climate. The more computing power, the more robust the models' predictions can be. More information here: essentially download a program that makes use of your computer's computing power when you're not already using it for other stuff, like Facebook.

Labels: climate change, tech

The first of our monthly science seminar series is coming up at the end of the month:

"Cameras we cannot picture"
Dr. Ravi Athale, Senior Principal Scientist, The MITRE Corporation
Monday, September 28, 2009, Ernst Center Forum, 12 noon - 1pm

Abstract: The world of imaging has evolved from its humble origins as a pinhole camera to its current incarnations of very large (Hubble Space Telescope) and very small (pill cameras that one swallows). Last 10 years, in particular, has seen more rapid growth in our ability to record static and moving images than anytime in human history. This has been enabled by replacing film with semiconductor devices for recording imagers. Dr. Athale argues that as dramatic as this progress has been, the future will bring even more startling and unimaginable changes due to the integration of imaging with equally spectacular progress in computing, communications and storage technologies.

Ravi Athale is Senior Principal Scientist and Department Head, Emerging Technology office at the MITRE Corporation. Over past 30 years he has worked as a scientist, educator and manager in government, academic and industrial institutions. In 2007, he received Leadership Award of the Optical Society of America and Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. In addition, he is a co-author of a high school engineering textbook published by Prentice-Hall and is a co-founder of company that develops consumer products based on computer generated holograms.

Please join us, if you can!

Labels: art, meetings, nova, science and society, tech

Very cool!

Here's my favorite... Or maybe this one? ...Or potentially this one? No, no: definitely this one.
Actually, this is pretty cool too. Sigh... too many to choose from. Too hard to pick just one fave...

Hat tip to Lee Allison!

Labels: structure, tech, websites

Good morning! I'm in New Paltz, New York, right now, on my way up to the Adirondacks for several days of fun, to be followed by a visit to a geologist pal in Drumlin Land, and then a quick excursion to visit some other friends in Canada. Later this morning I'll visit the Taconic angular unconformity outside of Catskill, New York. I'll try and post photos and whatnot as I go, in the same manner as yesterday's ptygmatic fold post -- my first ever remote post from the new iPhone. But I forgot to bring the iPhone charger, so we'll see how I do... Anyhow, stay tuned.

Labels: canada, mountains, new york, tech, travel, unconformities

Very cool.

Labels: art, new york, tech

Virginia geologic map overlay for Google Earth -- you can click on the different units and it will tell you what rock type/formation they are. Pretty cool. Kind of clunky when I loaded it up on my home computer this morning, though.

Hat tip to Kyle House's Geologic Frothings blog for the alert.

Other states available too.

Also worth noting is an interactive Potassium-Argon age date map. In Virginia, you can use it to find the age of the lamprophyre dikes at the upstream end of Mather Gorge (~369 Ma) or find Alleghenian-aged pegmatites, or look at Triassic diabase ages contemporaneous with supercontinent breakup.

Labels: art, geology, google, isotopes, maps, tech, virginia

Last week, I was geologizing down at the Chain Bridge area (far western corner of DC), and this Osprey aircraft flew over. A few minutes later, I heard it returning, and I shot this little video. What a weird looking airplane!

Labels: dc, tech

A computational search engine? Holy cow.

You have got to check this out. (Wait for it to load, then watch the introductory video.) This appears to be a vision of the future for folks who are interested in data.

Hat tip to Babak for this alert.

Labels: tech, websites

Earlier today, Silver Fox posted an interesting example of how Twitter can be used to do geology. She has a conversation with Andrew Alden, Brian Romans, and Ron Schott about the Eureka Quartzite. I'm impressed. I was kind of with the naysayers on Twitter, until I read this.

Labels: tech

Enjoy!

Labels: meetings, nova, tech

Coyote Crossing alerted me to this awesome-looking application for the iPhone: a field guide to the birds of North America. On my way back home to the apartment last night, I parked my car in Mt. Pleasant and was walking up the hill to my building, when I saw two of my neighbors pointing a flashlight into the woods (yes, we have woods in DC). "What have you got?" I asked. It was an owl, and they obligingly pointed it out to me. I identified it as a barred owl, and explained the field marks that would allow them to distinguish it from our other big eastern owl, the great horned owl. As we talked, the barred owl flushed and silently swooped through the tree branches and into the darkness. Anyhow, if my neighbors had the iBird Explorer Plus, they wouldn't have needed to rely on an ex-ornithologist walking by at that moment. Pretty cool!

Labels: birdies, dc, gear, tech

Good news!
Google's putting out a way for users to track their home electricity use from their computer. Check it out at the New York Times' "Bits" blog.
Thing is, you need a "smart grid" for it to work, so it's going to be a while before you actually get one in your house.
It's like the dashboard readout on the Prius: constantly giving you feedback about your energy use & efficiency.

Labels: energy, environmental, tech

Here's a copy of my presentation last week at the NOVA "Power Up Your Pedagogy" conference, hosted here at the Annandale campus (sponsored by our Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning). Apparently there were some technical snafus for one (both?) of the scheduled playings of the talk, so I wanted to put it online for anyone who missed it. It's 13:40 in length, available as an .avi file. You'll have to download it to your computer, because I can't figure out how to embed it here.

Other talks from the conference are listed (some with video) on the PUP page on the CETL website.

Labels: blogs, conferences, geology, nova, teaching, tech

Ecofont is a free font that has lots of little holes in the letters, using less ink and therefore extending the life of your printer cartridge. You can download it at the link above; they claim it works best at 9- or 10-point size.

Blackle is Google, but with a black screen instead of white. Because it takes energy to produce the luminescence we see as the white screen when we go to Google, Blackle's creators reckoned you could save some energy if you just changed the color of the background. A simple, elegant notion. So far, they claim 1,010,466.263 Watt-hours have been saved by computer users who use their website over the traditional Google screen.

Labels: environmental, tech

Who needs a Brunton compass when you've got your iPhone?

I had a few beers earlier in the week with geoblogger-home-for-the-holidays Jess Ball. I was telling her how I was going to be teaching structural geology next semester at George Mason, which prompted Jess to show me a very cool application on her iPod Touch that also works on the iPhone: it's a clinometer!

It is very cool. Twist and turn the thing, and there in two confident digits, is the angle of inclination for the device's straight edge. I was impressed. Future structure students, take note: you need this thing ($1). But first, you need an iPhone (>$1). Or I can just loan you one of GMU's Brunton compasses ($0). Your choice.

Image from John Naughton, showing that there is a margin of error associated with this cool toy.

Labels: structure, tech

As I mentioned a few posts back, I spent the week of Thanksgiving on the big island of Hawai'i. I had an exam scheduled in one of my classes, and I pre-recorded the lecture for my other class (via Smartboard), so I was free to kick back and relax on my travels. However, I find it's difficult to turn the inner geologist off, and so I spent a lot of my time checking out the cool geology of this unique island. I've got a lot of photos to share and stories to tell, but I'll start off simple: here are sand samples from four beaches in Hawai'i:






As you can no doubt tell, these sands are dominated by, respectively from top to bottom: calcareous hash (fragments of shells and corals), basalt fragments, olivine crystals flavored with basalt fragments, and a greater proportion of olivine crystals. They are respectively from "Sixty-Nines" Beach (west side of island; named for the milepost on the nearby road, so get your mind out of the gutter), Punaluu Harbor (south side of island), Green Sands Beach (south side of island), and a nameless cove between Green Sands and Ka Lae (a.k.a. South Point, on the south side of the island -- and in fact the southernmost point in the entire United States).

Labels: hawaii, minerals, oceans, sediment, tech, travel

Another event that may be of interest to DC area readers:
Learn why plug-in hybrid cars (PHEV) hold such great promise as a means to reduce the costs of driving, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce our national reliance on petroleum. What are current PHEV drivers experiencing (the good and the not-so-good) and what are the barriers to bringing PHEV’s to market. Plug-in hybrid passenger vehicles are not yet in production, but what we might expect to see from automotive companies in the next few years. The term "plug-in hybrid" has come to mean a hybrid vehicle that can be charged from a standard electrical wall socket.

I won't be able to make it because of Historical Geology class Tuesday nights, but I encourage the rest of you to go, and enjoy!

Labels: climate change, global warming, oil, prius, tech

No way...

"US army has laser guns in its sights" New Scientist, 2 Sept. 2008.

Labels: news, tech

Labels: gear, tech, tourism, travel

An article in today's Washington Post explores the constant feedback that Prius drivers get about their fuel consumption -- and how that may be one of the main reasons that Prii* get lower gas mileage than other vehicles. I've noted this phenomenon before, so I thought I'd pass along a link to the article.

* "Prii" = plural of "Prius," at least in my world.

Labels: action, environmental, oil, prius, tech

Mars has a new robot geologist on its surface, as of last night at just before 8pm (E.S.T.). The Mars Phoenix lander arrived in Mars' north polar region after an apparently dicey landing sequence that went off without a hitch. It unfurled its solar panels and started taking pictures, like the one at the left. That's a new view of the planet thought most likely to give us insights into the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

Why the pole? That's where the water is. Remote sensing indicates ice just a few inches below the surface in this area, and the geomorphology seems to back that up. Visible even in this earliest photo, polygonal shaped features suggest repeated freeze-thaw action. (Similar freze-thaw action in Earth's polar regions produces similar features, like these:



That's the way geology works, right? The principle of uniformity suggests that uniform physical laws operating over vast ranges of time and space will produce similar phenomena in different locations. It remains to be seen how valid this principle is in guiding our exploration of other planets, but with Mars it appears that there are some real similarities. And why do we care where the water is? Because on Earth, all life needs water. Figuring out whether life exists elsewhere in the universe has huge implications for our place in the cosmos.

Labels: mars, planetary geology, satellite imagery, tech

In an article in Newsweek, the hosts of NPR's "Car Talk" talk about the car of the future.

Turns out that the Tappet Brothers, one of whom doesn't even own a car (!), are lobbying Congress for increased automobile fuel efficiency. They're also starring in a new episode of the PBS series Nova. And they have some advice for you, the consumer: "Get a Prius."

FYI, since we're talking about it -- a quick update on my "Pious" seems in order. Its current fuel efficiency (running average since I bought the car in December) is:

Labels: action, climate change, global warming, oil, petroleum, prius, tech, tv

A cool feature from Google Maps allows users to create individualized maps with content centered on specific locations. They call them "My Maps." This maps are then viewable in any HTML browser. Check out the "Earth As Art" demonstration map, or this "Oral Histories of Route 66" map for examples of the kind of stuff that you can do with "My Maps." You can also watch the video about how to create them.

It occurs to me that My Maps might be a good way to share geologic knowledge about outcrop locations. One thing that I found frustrating and limiting in my first few years of teaching was that there was no good single source to go to find out about relevant outcrops. It took time and experience to find out where the cool rocks were. Is it a good idea to put this information online in a publicly-accessible format so beginning instructors and interested students/amateurs can visit interesting outcrops? (I sure would have appreciated it four years ago!) Or does that run the risk of letting rockhounds and less-than-ethical geovandals onto previously-secret locations? Is there a benefit to the ancient barriers in outcrop-information flow? Is it better to pass this information on from wise elder to trusted neophyte?

Labels: google, maps, teaching, tech, websites

I got an e-mail the other day from NOVA's VP for Instructional & Information Technology. He informed the faculty that later this month we'll have the option of putting our lectures & course materials up on iTunes, as part of something called iTunes U. Thomas Nelson Community College, another community college in Virginia, is already participating, as are a great many 4-year universities, including Ivy Leaguers.

I like this idea, but wonder how much time it's going to take. In general, I am super-duper excited over the advent of increased sharing online, and the decline of barriers to sharing. One of my pet peeves has been academic journals. Many are published by huge publishing companies like Elsevier, who make money off of them. For many years, scientists (and other scholars) who wanted to publish their research were forced to give up the copyright to their work and turn it over to one of these companies. Other scientists (or other scholars) who wanted to read about the research then had to pay OUTRAGEOUS subscription fees for these journals. I'm talking thousands of dollars a year -- far beyond the means of anyone who doesn't have a massive academic bureaucracy backing them up. To me, this seems massively unjust. It's the scientists who produce and consume the research; and publishing companies appear to make crazy profits off of all that stressful labor by others. ...Reminds me of slavery!

However, the Internet has the potential to change all that. With the net, anyone can publish their research online, and someone else on the other side of the world can access it 2 seconds later. With this, of course, comes the potential for lousy scholarship and fakery in research. At least that's the line touted by Elsevier and their ilk. Peer review is still essential, and it's going to be cool to see which journals get on board with the new reality. One I checked out recently is PLoS One. (They had a research article on really cool jellyfish fossils from the Cambrian, which is how I found out about them.) Somewhat more basic is the Journal of the Virtual Explorer, where my thesis advisor and some colleagues published an article (about kink banding) in 2004.

And while you're talking about the distribution of online information, it would be remiss not to mention Wikipedia. Wikipedia is HUGE among my students. I frequently use it myself as a handy reference. But handy doesn't mean accurate. Because anyone can edit the entries on Wikipedia, it's not guaranteed to be peer reviewed. A competitor, Citizendium, hopes to out-wiki Wikipedia with fully-refereed articles written by identifiable authors. WIRED explored their competing styles in their recent "Geekipedia."

More information about the iTunes U / online lecture phenomenon is available in a Washington Post article from the end of December.

Labels: teaching, tech, websites