Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest

Head over to Union of Concerned Scientists to see all the finalists for this contest. They are all pretty good...but this one is my favorite.

Shadow of a moon and Kelvin-Helmholtz waves

I saw this photo on Terra Que Gira a little earlier. Not only is it a striking photo...I just love that sharp, black circle against the more diffuse and swirly background of Jupiter's atmosphere...but it also shows some nice Kelvin-Helmholtz waves, which are trains of waves typically marking a boundary or interface between two layers or regions of different turbulent behavior (commonly due to different densities). They happen in all kinds of fluids....sometimes you may even see them in clouds on Earth.

In a temporal sense, they commonly define the conspicuously organized transition from non-turbulent (laminar) flow to the much more random behavior of fully turbulent bursts and sweeps.

Check out this movie below of a simulation (click on it to go to movie, then go here for explanation)


Although they do occur in sedimentary features (bedforms), perfectly preserved examples of them are hard to come by.

Read more about the fluid mechanics of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities here, here, and here.

Mr. Wizard ... R.I.P.

If you are (1) in your late 20s to early 30s, (2) grew up in North America, (3) had the cable TV channel Nickelodeon, and (4) are a geek, then you probably remember watching Mr. Wizard's World. Don "Mr. Wizard" Herbert passed away today at the age of 89.


I have fond memories of watching that show in the afternoons after school. I won't lie...I related to the dorky kids he had on the show going "whoa....cool" as an experiment was performed.

I may just go ahead and get the DVDs for my little niece and nephew (perhaps i'll watch some episodes before I send to them).

Check out these great experiments!

Mystery of the megaflood

Last night we watched a NOVA special about the unique geomorphic region known as the 'Channeled Scablands' of the northwest United States called Mystery of the Megaflood. During the latest Pleistocene as the continental ice sheets began to retreat, huge lakes (similar in scale to some of the Great Lakes) that were dammed by ice broke free and rushed across the state of Washington creating erosional and depositional features that perplexed geologists and geomorphologists for a long time.

If you don't know about this story, check out the NOVA website (click on image or link above). They have tons of information to help you learn more about it. The program was pretty entertaining. As a geoscientist it's always nice to see the science portrayed in these programs. Yes, they can be a little sensationalized with the scary music and overdramatized reenactments, but that's kind of fun in a way. I recommend it.

Check out this interactive on their website for a tour across the region highlighting the key features.
One of my favorite features are the giant bedforms (ripple marks, essentially) that were formed near where the flood started near Missoula, Montana. I went on GoogleEarth and started poking around the area and lo and behold you can see them fairly easy. They are on the order of 35 ft high and have wavelengths of hundreds of feet. The image below shows an area about 5 miles across (copy/paste these coordinates into GoogleEarth to go there: 47.48N, 114.59W).


And here's a closer shot (this area about a mile across). These suckers are huge!
Anyway...check out the website and rent the show. It also goes into the incredulity the early 20th century geologists had regarding this catastrophist point of view. That's another interesting topic for another time.

Another post forthcoming is -- what happened when these floods reached the ocean? People have done some work on this and it is really interesting...stay tuned.

The book of life

Check out this article about a project to build an online archive of the Earth's species.

"The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time," said Dr James Edwards, executive director of the $100m (£50m) project.

It is said to take 10 years or more to complete. Ideally, this will be a fantastic resource for both researchers and the general public.

The vast database will initially concentrate on animals, plants and fungi with microbes to follow. Fossil species may eventually be added.

That's really cool! Especially with regards to this database as an educational tool, it will be nice for the general public to see both present and past species side-by-side.

Evolution and conservatism

I don't spend too much time with topics like this on this blog but I found this particular article interesting (there are several bloggers over at Scienceblogs that do put a lot of energy into these topics, so you should check it out if you want more).

Yesterday (May 5th), the New York Times science page published an article titled 'A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin'. I am certainly no expert in how Darwinism has been or is being invoked in the past or present by political/social figures. This article cites several books that might be a good sampling of how these ideas have evolved (pun intended).

The other night, the ten Republican presidential candidates were asked if they believe in evolution and three of them said they did not.

For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor. As an alternative to Darwin, many advocate intelligent design, which holds that life is so intricately organized that only an intelligent power could have created it.

Maybe I am simple-minded, but what does the science of evolution have to do with abortion? This is a rhetorical question and I know the talking points, but this gets right to what I dislike about rigorous political ideologies: that one must agree with or adopt the entire spectrum of perspectives and beliefs to 'be on the team'. As for intelligent design, I'm not going to discuss that here as it has been, in my mind, thoroughly proven to not even be close to scientific practice. Period.

Yet it is that very embrace of intelligent design — not to mention creationism, which takes a literal view of the Bible’s Book of Genesis — that has led conservative opponents to speak out for fear their ideology will be branded as out of touch and anti-science.

Well, I think it's too late on that front. That ideology has already been branded as anti-science.

Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.

I do like to bring up the concept of the free market with those who feel they have to be both fiscal and social conservatives. The purist view of a free market believes the system self-organizes into an efficient and collectively beneficial construct without the aid of a centralized authority (intelligent designer). This is accomplished through the balance of supply and demand, prices of goods/services, and other market 'forces' and sometimes nudged this way and that (e.g., tweaking of interest rates). There is no need for an intelligent designer! In fact, if you were to tell one of these very proud, so-called 'self-made' individuals that they are the product of the decisions of a centralized authority (intelligent designer) rather than the sum of their individual actions, decisions, and development (evolution) they would be pretty upset with you.

As for how natural selection explains traditional gender roles, I'm simply not versed in such ideas and really don't understand that. What do they mean by 'traditional'? Traditional as in the American family as portrayed on 1950s television, with the man going to work in a suit and the woman staying home wearing a dress and cooking/cleaning for him? What exactly does that have to do with natural selection? Perhaps the argument is that this is the contemporary version of the male venturing out to hunt/gather while the female stays behind to care for the offspring? There's probably a whole blog out there somewhere discussing that.

The technocrats, he [Mr. West, the author of “Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest”, 2006] charged, wanted to grab control from “ordinary citizens and their elected representatives” so that they alone could make decisions over “controversial issues such as sex education, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and global warming."

Apparently, a technocrat is one who wants government run by the highly educated. Okay. I always figured that should be give-in...raise your hand if you want ignorance running the government. I suppose the opposition would charge that "technocracy" is steeped in the amoral and materialistic worldview. But, then in that case isn't the government being designed intelligently?

Is that really what the technocrats want -- to "grab control" and make decisions alone? To me, it's about actually using science to guide us to make decisions. What West is doing here is probably my biggest pet peeve --- that it all comes down to all or nothing. The all-or-nothing viewpoint is pervasive in political thought...it is completely illogical and unusable but I tend to think it's an unfortunate result (strange attractor?) in the trajectory of how society debates complex issues. Unless it's simplified to a duality of "this vs. that", and whose team are you on, the public can't understand it? But, this is a topic for another time. It's also funny (and sad) how global warming is thrown in with this list of 'controversial issues'.

The institutions that successfully evolved to deal with this natural order were conservative ones, founded in sentiment, tradition and judgment, like limited government and a system of balances to curb unchecked power, he explains. Unlike leftists, who assume “a utopian vision of human nature” liberated from the constraints of biology, Mr. Arnhart says, conservatives assume that evolved social traditions have more wisdom than rationally planned reforms.

Really? I've never heard a conservative put it that way. And what if a particular tradition becomes rigid and outdated? Isn't resisting change not accepting that things are evolving?

To many people, asking whether evolution is good for conservatism is like asking if gravity is good for liberalism; nature is morally neutral. Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard and Carson Holloway in his 2006 book, “The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion and the Future of Democracy,” for example, have written that jumping from evolutionary science to moral conclusions and policy proposals is absurd.

Well said. Finally...that's a viewpoint that resonates with me. To beat down the ugly head of the all-or-nothingers, I would add that it doesn't mean we can't learn something by discussing these things...the point is to not make the leap.

Then there's a quote by Wiliam F. Buckley about how Darwinism led to the Nazis....are we still doing this? And this is a top thinker?

And then, finally...

Mr. West agreed that “conservatives who are discomfited by the continuing debate over Darwin’s theory need to understand that it is not about to go away”; that it “fundamentally challenges the traditional Western understanding of human nature and the universe.”

All is revealed. Western understanding of human nature and the universe is the concept of evolution. I think he has it backwards on what is being challenged.

Science podcasts

I take a commuter train nearly every day from home to my office at school. I find this time perfect for catching up on the latest science news via podcasts. Below are science-related podcasts that I subscribe to. If you know of any others, please let me know...i'm always looking for something new.

I'm including the link to the website for these podcasts but, if you use an iPod, you can also easily find them through the iTunes directory. These are all free.

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Nature Podcast: This is one of the longer ones at about 25-30 minutes and is published once a week. This podcast sums up 3 or 4 of the prominent articles that are reported in the weekly journal Nature. The format is typically a phone interview with one or more of the authors of a study in that week's issue. This is the most technical of all the podcasts listed here.



Science Friday: This is one of my personal favorites. Science Friday is part of NPR's Talk of the Nation programming and hosted by Ira Flatow. If you listen to this on the radio is an hour long and typically broken into 2-4 segment covering different topics. The podcast edition is delivered so that each segment is a separate episode, which is nice so you don't have to listen to the entire hour to hear the topic you are really interested in. Sometimes a segment can be over 30 minutes and others will be only 10 minutes. It is very non-technical and Flatow does a great job of keeping the guests from using too much jargon. Lately, they've had a lot of climate science and/or policy topics that are pretty good.



Science Times is hosted by David Corcoran of the New York Times. It is published once a week and summarizes the main articles that were highlighted in the newspaper that week. This is a nice one to add to the mix because they tend to not focus on the same story that all the other media outlets picked up (usually from Nature or Science). It is typically 15-20 minutes in length.



Science Talk is the podcast associated with the magazine Scientific American. I've only started listening to this one recently, but so far so good. There is a little overlap with the others but sometimes that is nice because you get a slightly different perspective or style of reporting. It is similar in length to the others (20-25 minutes) and published about once a week.



PopSci Podcast is hosted by Jonathan Coulton and is the less serious one thrown on this list. It is associated with Popular Science magazine, which I don't read, and is essentially a nerdy comedy podcast sprinkled with some information. It is short (<10 minutes) and consists of an intro and summary by Coulton (who is stationed on the moon) and a phone interview with a researcher usually on something offbeat. For example, they once had a guy who studied how fruit flies fight and another story about how San Francisco wants to try and collect dog poo and turn it into energy. The problem is there hasn't been a new episode in a couple months, so i'm not sure what's up with it.


If you know of other podcasts that are similar to these, please leave a comment and link.

Review of 'Thin Ice' by Mark Bowen

PLEASE NOTE: As of August 2007 his blog has moved...you can find this same post at the new blog here. Thanks.

A couple months ago, Thermochronic over at Apparent Dip started a list of popular science books and will be reviewing them as he reads/re-reads them (here's the first).

He asked fellow geobloggers to suggest books for this effort.
I recently finished Thin Ice by Mark Bowen...i'm going to provide a short review here (hopefully not stealing Thermochronic's thunder!).

The subtitle of this book, Unlocking the secrets of climate in the world's highest mountains, succinctly sums up what this book is about. Bowen successfully weaves together adventure and science. For any of you out there who have done a lot of field work, you will like it. There are many anecdotes about working and surviving in the field, ranging from humorous to tragic. I tend to like stories about adventurers who are also scientists (rather than people going through hardships just to do it).

Lonnie Thompson, a climate scientist at Ohio State University, and an assortment of others from his research team are the main 'characters' in this story. For decades, Lonnie and his team have been drilling and studying cores from high alpine ice sheets, including Peru (Quelccaya), Bolivia (Sajama), Tanzania (Kiliminjaro), and Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (Dunde). An interesting aspect of this story is how in the 1970s and 80s the paleoclimate community more-or-less regarded alpine cores, especially from low latitudes, as useless to climate reconstruction. Everyone believed all the answers were in the big continental ice caps near the poles (Greenland and Antarctica). The results from Thompson's work showed that these ice caps have records going back maybe not has far as the continental ice sheets but much farther than had been postulated (100,000 years). Furthermore, the climatic fluctuations that are recorded in these lower-latitude archives have important implications for weather patterns that the polar records just cannot address. Bowen also includes great sections on the history of climate and paleoclimate science interspersed with the narrative of the ice coring work of Thompson's team.

I found this book to be at a great level for a scientist (who's not a paleoclimate expert) or a layperson who is motivated. That is, you need some background to stay engaged but you don't need to be an expert in atmospheric dynamics.

Data Sonification

Although it would likely be a waste of time, I have always been tempted to somehow turn geologic data I have collected into sound. It is commonplace to convert data into visual representations by which qualitative patterns are evaluated by simply looking at it (e.g., maps). Less common is converting data into sound and listening for patterns. The idea of turning data into sound for analysis is certainly not new (e.g., the Geiger counter was invented in the first decade of the 20th century), but the application of sonification to varied data types across scientific disciplines has seen more activity in the last couple of decades.

It is important to make the distinction between music and sound. A separate, but related, discussion would deal with the potential for creating new kinds of avant-garde music within this realm (check out here [1] and here [2]), but that's not what I'm talking about. Data sonification is simply the auditory equivalent of data visualization. Yes, some visual data is certainly striking in its beauty, but aesthetic value and scientific value are mutually exclusive. In recent years, data sonification has been applied especially in biomedical disciplines (e.g., here and here), but what about the geosciences?

What data types in geoscience would be amenable to being listened to? One answer to why we haven't seen the value of data sonification demonstrated in this regard is because it has none. This approach can most easily be applied with time series data (and potentially 'thickness series' data as I discuss below) but what about spatial information? My intuition is that turning spatial data into something that one can listen to would create something extremely difficult to interpret.

The two figures below show a waveform (top) and associated sonogram (bottom) for an eruption event at Mt. Etna (click on the image to go to the webpage for those figures, here for the home page [3], or here for a BBC report about the project in general [4]).

I listened to some of the data from the above project and I have to say I was underwhelmed. It should be noted, however, that I am currently sitting in a room where clicking, whooshing, and otherwise white-noiseing of a magical machine that knows when a zircon was born is overpowering all other sound. Additionally, this particular dataset is a gradual and subtle crecsendo...all-in-all, not a very exciting pattern. That being said, one of the objectives of what they are doing is to figure out a workflow.


Being a sedimentary geologist, I measure and describe a lot of vertical sections of stratigraphic successions that are exposed in outcrop or part of wellbore data (e.g., core, logs) for the subsurface. At right is an example of a measured section from outcrop. How might we go about sonifying this? From my perspective, I would want attributes such as lithology, grain size, bed thickness, prominent sedimentary structures, presence/absence of trace fossils, and so on captured in the data. The question is: would doing this add any value to the process of recognizing and then interpreting observed (heard) patterns?

Perhaps the value might be when multiple sections are combined? I don't know. This is one of those topics that is perfect for a blog because I'd like to hear what people think. Do you think your particular type of data could be converted to sound and be of any use?





Further reading (and some listening) on the web:
(1) Article from Feb 2007 SF Chronicle about Stanford music professor turning data into sound
(2) Heart Chamber Orchestra
(3) Mt. Etna Volcano Sonification: Listening to Seismograms
(4) BBC News report about Mt. Etna project
(5) A Spatialized Meterological Data Sonification Project (PDF)

Deep sea observatory in Monterey Bay

This is really cool -- check out the article on ScienceDaily.

In a multi-institution effort managed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and funded by the National Science Foundation, 52 kilometers (32 miles) of cable were laid along the seafloor of Monterey Bay. This undersea cable will provide electrical power to scientific instruments, video cameras, and robots 900 meters (3,000 feet) below the ocean surface. It will also carry data from these instruments back to shore, for use by scientists and engineers around the world.

MBARI is a very cool organization, I was able to go out on a short research cruise last fall, which was a great experience. Very high tech...exploring the deep sea floor is like exploring another planet. It will be exciting to see how well this new system works out.

Old and eccentric scientist entertainment

I just returned from the 2007 American Assoc of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) annual conference in Long Beach, CA. All in all, a decent meeting this year.

Although I would argue that publications coming out of AAPG have declined in quality in recent years (too many case studies about oil fields...yawn), the meeting still attracts many great researchers from the broader sedimentary geology community.

If you've never been....the AAPG meeting is a single meeting for two general types; those who use geology to find oil and those who use the oil industry to do geology. If you can't tell by this blog, I fall into the latter. The amount of data and information about sedimentary geology that this industry produces is phenomenal. If you're an Earth data junkie like me, this is a good meeting. The topics are typically split nicely for both the nerdy and business types.

A highlight for me was seeing Emiliano Mutti speak. This guy is a legend in the sedimentary geology (particularly turbidite researchers) community. He is a short, old, Italian professor and extremely fiesty....quite entertaning. Like many scientific communities, there are always some eccentric characters that stand out. This guy is one of those characters. One of my favorite moments was watching one of my colleauges who was chairing a session decide when to cut Mutti off when he went off on a ranting tangent after asking a speaker a question.

The great North Sea impact crater vs. salt withdrawal basin debate

That title doesn't quite roll off the tongue...oh well.

A debate is currently going on (or at least now making it into the news) regarding the origin of a conspicuous feature found in the subsurface of the North Sea.

Here is the original BBC article.

Geologists from the oil exploration company BP discovered a circular structure about 3 km wide and 1 km deep in the subsurface about 130 km off the coast of England. Some are claiming it to be an impact crater while others have some other thoughts.

Two studies by Dr Stewart and Mr Allen (of BP), the latest of which mapped the structure in 3D, concluded that it was the result of a space impact.

But, University of Edinburgh geology professor, John Underhill, has examined some of the data and disagrees.

"I decided to throw a more regional view at it, and ended up finding a whole load of these features with very similar cross sections," he said.

It turns out that Underhill's approach has either uncovered a field of impact craters...or perhaps there's an alternative explanation.

[Underhill] says that the swarm of structures is the result of movement of a thick layer of salt of Upper Permian (248-256 million years ago) age that lies below the whole area.

Granted, I've never worked the North Sea...I have worked on projects in the subsurface of the Gulf of Mexico, which is also influenced by the flow of salt, and it can produce a fantastic and wild subscape full of nearly circular minibasins. It seems that this explanation is a pretty good one, especially with this little tidbit:

"The key observation is that every single syncline is exactly coincident with where the salt has thinned or withdrawn," [Underhill] said.

But, the ones who discovered the original feature in question still disagree.

Dr Stewart is un-moved. He points to a 300m-high central peak, or nipple, in the centre of the inner bowl, typical of impact craters.

Alas...the debate is interesting enough to draw other researchers into it. The only real way to settle this is to drill, sample, and look for evidence of impact in the rocks (e.g., shocked quartz).

Hmmm....what are the chances BP will pay for that?

Nature to launch a geoscience journal

Not sure if this has been blogged about yet.

I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I stumbled upon news that Nature is launching a specialized journal called Nature Geoscience in January 2008.

Here's their description of it:

Launching in 2008, Nature Geoscience will be a monthly multi-disciplinary journal aimed at bringing together the most significant research across the entire spectrum of the Earth Sciences. Published monthly, in print and online, the journal's content will reflect the core subject disciplines and other related areas with direct links to Earth Sciences.

In addition to primary research, Nature Geoscience will also publish review articles, news and views, research highlights about important papers published in other journals, commentaries, book reviews and correspondences.

Nature Geoscience will take an interdisciplinary, integrated and balanced approach to all areas of geoscience and foster the exchange of ideas between scientists involved in different disciplines. Nature Geoscience will be an invaluable resource for all researchers who are active in the process of discovering and developing an understanding of the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences.

I subscribe to the general Nature journal and enjoy it quite a bit...especially their review articles for the technical papers outside of my field -- like in genetics, quantum physics, astronomy, etc. But, there's typically only about one or two Earth science-related papers per issue (if that). I'm actually quite surprised it took this long for Nature to get this going considering how important the disciplines of Earth science are to the scientific community.

Will this be a good thing for the science? Any thoughts?

2007 AAAS meeting in San Francisco

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is having its annual meeting here in San Francisco.

The "Triple-A-S" meeting is designed for a broader audience than most science meetings. This year's theme is Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being and also has two days worth of events and demonstrations designed for the general public and whole family:

AAAS Family Science Days San Francisco Hilton 11:00 AM — 5:00 PM
Saturday, 17 February
11:00 AM	"The Mythbusters: Jamie Savage and Adam Hyneman" — The Science Channel
Noon	"BioBug: Field to Fuel" — University of Idaho
12:45 PM	"Iron Science" — The Exploratorium
1:30 PM	"Fun with Science and Astronomy" — The Zula Patrol and KQED Kids!
2:15 PM	AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books: Awards ceremony
3:15 PM	"Waves in Nature: Lasers to Tsunamis and Beyond" — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
4:00 PM	"The Outreach Roadshow" — Women@SCS Outreach Roadshow, Carnegie Mellon University
Sunday, 18 February
11:00 AM	"Name that Mammal!" — Platypus Media
11:45 AM	"The Science Hour of Power" — Sikes Science
12:30 PM	"Global Warming Discovery" — ClimateChangeEducation.Org
1:15 PM	"The Science of Yo-Yos" — Yomega Corp.
2:00 PM	"BioBug: Field to Fuel" — The University of Idaho
2:45 PM	"Cloud Nine" — How The Weatherworks™
3:30 PM	"Robotics: The Next 10 Years" — The Robotics Society of America and San Francisco State University
4:15 PM	"Kinetic City" — AAAS

As usual, i'm not quite ready to leave for a long field expedition on Tuesday and have too much crap to do....maybe i'll try and go tomorrow.

Sarcasticity as a function of profile disclosure level

Okay...I have a hypothesis. I'm never gonna test this because compiling the data would be a ridiculous waste of my time.

I've noticed a general pattern out there on blogs or forums (places where commenting is allowed) such that the level of snarkiness, rudeness, derisiveness, scorn, disdain, etc. increases as the level of knowledge about the one making the comment decreases. The plot below shows sarcasticity on the y-axis vs. profile disclosure level on the x-axis.



Profile disclosure level of the commenter is discussed here in three basic levels: (1) when the real name and full contact information is either readily available through a link, or not too hard to find, (2) when an alias or nickname is used but enough clues are given that one could likely find out the identity of that person if they really tried, and (3) completely anonymous and without a link to any other site; usually using the name 'anonymous' or some other nondescript handle probably never used again.

However, this qualitative relationship has some important caveats:
a) if the commenter and poster know each other reasonably well sarcasticity is more-or-less independent of disclosure level (this is very common)

b) if the commenter is well-known for making rash comments (that's their bag baby) then they will be more likely to do it regardless


The plot above would require a huge amount of data (hundreds of points) and would likely be a pretty rough trendline. A small sample set, especially taken within one kind of blogging community, would probably not produce this result.

Designed natural cycles...

One of the favorite arguments used by one type of global warming denialist goes something like this:

The Earth has experienced natural and significant climatic swings in the past; therefore the current climatic swing we are experiencing is likely natural (not human-made); therefore we don't need to take any action.

In this view, they accept the results of paleoclimate studies (the source of knowledge of the natural cycles). This argument is typically trotted out by those who are motivated solely by a economic/political paradigm. That is, they predict that the regulation of emissions will result in global economic recession at best or a complete and total economic catastrophe (i.e., the collapse of modern civilization) at worst.

I've always been bothered by the mixing of discussions about scientific conclusions (i.e., the data and conclusions regarding attribution) with discussions regarding policy (i.e., what or what not to do about it). The policy debate is the true and timely discussion to be having at this point. There are legitimate concerns about how to go about mitigating problems that have global reach (and whether or not what we do will even have an impact anyway with all the feedbacks in the system). But, those who have those concerns should discuss them within the context of policymaking. Instead...they bring out the lame since-it-was-natural-in-the-past-it-must-be-natural-now routine. Why not talk about what you really want to talk about?

Anyway...so, then I was thinking about where the intelligent design crowd would fit in here. They can't possibly believe the flucuations that have been interpreted from paleoclimate proxies (e.g., the last 600,000 years) are an 'accident' (i.e., not by design). Do they think the current climatic changes are designed? Does climate even fall into that paradigm? Where is the "boundary" between what gets designed and what is left to evolve naturally?

I'm not sure what my point is.
I haven't really used this blog as a record of my stream-of-consciousness thoughts....this is probably one of the first ones.

napping = good

I have to admit, it's nice not trying to produce an actual science post every day. That was a little hectic. Now I can simply link to the latest and greatest until I think of something.

I really hope this info gets out. Napping is not only a great way to spend a half-hour in the middle of the day, not only a way to feel reinvigorated, but apparently napping is good for your health.

So, what's stopping the United States (just because this is where I live) from adopting a siesta culture? Some would say that it would decrease productivity. I wonder if anyone has done a study trying to model the increase in productivity we might gain by a more refreshed workforce? Not even sure how to go about this.

Anyway... this is an equation I can handle: napping = good


above painting found here

JSW #3: Experimental Sedimentary Systems

This is the third post for the Just Science week (Feb 5th-9th). See Monday's and Tuesday's posts.

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On the first post for this week, I said I would stay within a theme of deep-marine sedimentation....well, i'm gonna break from that for this post just because the topic today is just that cool.

For a few years i've been following the work at the St. Anthony Falls Labratory, University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. And a good friend of mine who works there was kind enough to give us a tour in December. This place does all sorts of cool stuff...like super-cavitation research (!)...but, here i'm gonna show you a few images from their experimental set-ups for studying sedimentation.

So, basically what we got here are some very sharp scientists who have taken 'playing in a sandbox' to the ultimate level. They have two main experimental tanks that interest me the most: a delta basin and the experimental Earthscape basin, or "Jurassic Tank".

The above image is a deposit growing in the delta basin. Remember this is just a couple meters across. These experiments run for weeks and they photograph at equal time increments so they can make a time-lapse movie at the end to see the evolution of the system. But the real beauty of this is the quantitative information. At other increments during the run time, they scan the deposit with an extremely precise laser and collect data about the topography of the feature. As the deposit is buried by further deposition, they can relate this information to patterns of river avulsion and lobe-switching identified in natural systems.



The image to the right is a plan-view image from "Jurassic Tank", which is an experimental basin a few meters wide by a few meters long. What makes it unique is its ability to create differential subsidence in almost any imaginable pattern. The "basement" of the basin is actually an interlocking framework of numerous plates that each move independently from each other. With this they can run experiments with similar subsidence patterns that are seen in Earth's sedimentary basins.

And, like the delta basin, the progress of the filling is scrutinized and measured. At the end, the entire basin fill is carefully sliced centimeter by centimeter and high-res photos are taken of the cross-section. The goal is to then relate the explicit knowledge of the sedimentation to the resultant stratigraphy. In the "real world" we typically only have the stratigraphy remaining...and it's up to geologists to interpret the processes that generated it.

These experiments are helping us think in different ways regarding what actually controls the patterns we observe and map in stratigraphy.


Check out their web resources:
- St. Anthony Falls Lab (SAFL), is part of
- National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (NCED)
- NCED Research Projects
- a link to some movies
- data repository for the stratigraphy experiments


This short article from Science in 2000 does a much better job at explaining the goals of particular research projects utilizing these facilities (note: you'll probably need a university or personal license to download).

Science 17 March 2000:
Vol. 287. no. 5460, pp. 1912 - 1915

Space junk and ring of debris

I had to interrupt the JSW (Just Science week) posts because I wanted to show this quite striking graphic of space junk around our planet from the New York Times.



The red ring of debris is from the recent satellite destruction shenanigans by the Chinese....who's brilliant idea was that?

Click on the above image to see full size and then go here to view the interactive feature at New York Times website.

"Just Science" week on this blog (Feb 5th-9th)

I've joined a bunch of science-related bloggers in a week designed to be about Just Science. That is, posts will not be diatribes about the misuse of science by government (not that that's not fun), not rants about intelligent design in public schools (not that that doesn't deserve ranting), not a reference and/or commentary on a mainstream article, etc. ... But a post about some actual science. The goal is at least a post a day.

Good idea!

I'm not sure i'll make a post a day, but i'm sure gonna try.

Here's the feed: http://www.justscience.net/?feed=rss2