Scientist (Paleontology, Geochemistry, Geology); Writer (Speculative and Science Fiction, plus technical and non-technical Science); Mom to great boy on the Autism spectrum; possessor of too many hobbies.
I sat in the study, working away upon that which I hoped would be the final draft of this insane report. Honestly, I really couldn’t care less if the value was 1.01 or 1.03, but the boss cared and the boss signed the paycheck. I was lost in another computer spreadsheet; all the numbers looked the same to me. Maybe I needed to take a break.
What I really wanted was an escape. I had gotten tired of dealing with minutia. Is this what life was about? No. I didn’t think so.
What, then?
Part of me was tempted to just hit delete, and then e-mail the boss and tell him to jump off a cliff.
I knew that wasn’t really an option, so I took a breath and kept plugging away.
As I typed, I noticed a bug buzzing around the room. I was curious, because in January, when there’s two feet of snow on the ground, I don’t expect to see bugs. It wasn’t a constant buzz, but when it flew, I knew about it. It was like a little tank flying around my head. In the quiet moments between its flights, I continued to work.
Technical reports are dull to write, and this one was no exception. Luckily, I was able to cut and paste stock text from older reports, so I didn’t have to rewrite everything. I hit paste and watched the text appear in my report. It was the wrong text. “Dammit,” I cursed, and went to press the escape key. Something brushed my finger as I did so.
There it was. An enormous stink bug on my keyboard, sitting right there on top of the escape key.
This stink bug was blocking my escape!
The stink bug was blocking my escape. I laughed. Maybe this is a metaphor for my life.
I blew at it. It remained fixed. I lifted the keyboard and tapped it, hoping the bug would fall off, but it held fast. I poked at the bug with a pencil. Nothing changed. No matter what I did, the bug was unmoved.
The stink bug was blocking my escape.
The damn stink bug.
Stink bug.
If this was a metaphor for my life, this bug was my boss. Or at least this lame-o report.
I shook the keyboard violently. “Get off, you bastard!”
It waved its antennae and stuck its proboscis toward me, as if it were sticking out its tongue.
I grabbed a reference book – an enormous collection of data tables. It was huge and satisfyingly heavy. I held it up and giggled. Then I smashed it down upon the bug on the keyboard.
The stench was amazing. I was slammed back into my chair by it. My eyes began to water and the scene about me blurred. The images on the computer screen began to distort. I coughed and waved my hand in front of my face.
It occurred to me that everything was eerily quiet. I looked around. The lights flickered, then went out. The open files on my computer screen suddenly poured out of the monitor and onto my desk. Then the monitor melted, and vanished.
I was hit by a gust of wind, as the reference book suddenly exploded off the keyboard. The keyboard and book evaporated into the air. Suddenly, I realized I was alone, floating in the air, hovering somehow. Yet there was no ground. No up, no down. I was surrounded by a glowing gray fog.
I looked up. The bug was there looking at me waving its antennae. And it laughed.
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Make suggestions in the comments about where this story should go…
It’s a new year. 2013 is all of five days old. And I’m exhausted already. But it’s a new year. A completely arbitrary starting point, of course, but an opportunity to ‘start afresh.’ What do I want to do with this year?
Frankly, I haven’t had any chance to think about what I want to do with this new year because the old year just won’t let go! The end of the fall semester always means playing catch-up with all the things that I put off doing because I was busy teaching. I look at my to-do list and it makes me want to cry. But what can I do?
Well, it’s time to put up or shut up. There are things I want to accomplish this year and there are things I have to accomplish this year. Right now, the have-to-dos out-weigh the want-to-dos, but I’m making a point of continuing to slog forward on the want-to-do list. Luckily, with want-to-dos, I’m willing to work on them at funny hours, because I want to do them.
Have-to-dos get done at work. I have to get the elemental analyzer running properly (that’ll be Monday’s task). I have to catalog some fossils (to do on Wednesday). I need to grind up some teeth and fish scales (not sure when I’ll do that, but I will). Oh, there’s data to normalize. I can do that remotely from home. That might wait until someone prompts me. Class preparation: Sadly, that will likely wait until classes start. I just don’t have time to think about it right now. And there’s a couple of papers to review here. That won’t be too bad. Oh, and those every-Tuesday for the next nine weeks talks. Yeah, I need to get on that! I have five of them mostly ready now. I’m in good shape.
Now for the want-to-dos: Finish the rewrite on my novel “Prince of Herongarde.” I can do that, if I can just shake this migraine. Blog every day. Yeah. That’s what you’re reading. Progress as a swordsman (or should it be swordswoman?). Getting there. I’ve had health problems of late, but I’m not going backwards. That’s good. Do some more sewing. I have been offered a couple of challenges. I like challenges. I’ll get ‘er done, but maybe not this month.
Naw, I’ll get to it. I’ll get to it all. I just have to accept that January will be the month of the have-to-dos and postpone many of the want-to-dos for later in the year. I have to remind myself not to get frustrated and surround myself with people who will encourage me when I get down on myself. I think I’m ready. Are you?
Quadrantid. Photo by Brian Emfinger in Ozark Arkansas, January 2, 2012
The Quadrantids are a meteor shower that happens in January. They seem to come from an area in the sky between the handle of the Big Dipper and the head of the constellation Draco.
(source: EarthSky Communications, Inc.)
Alas, by the time this is published, the peak will be just past, having been Wednesday night into Thursday morning. Plus, the waning moon (and all the snow where I live) make it difficult to actually observe this meteor shower.
In the Pilbara region of Australia are some of the planet’s oldest rocks, dating back to about 3.4 billion years ago. In these rocks are various evidences for ancient life, including textures (like minute strands connecting to each other in a network similar to that of modern bacteria) and geochemical tracers. Yes, folks, there be isotopes there!
Metabolic processes in bacteria result in an isotopic signature wherein there is more ‘light’ carbon (carbon-12) than ‘heavy’ carbon (carbon-13) than would be expected for a limestone that formed without bacteria present.
Strelley Pool in the Pilbara, where 3.4 billion-year-old fossils have been found. Photo: David Wacey
What’s important is that finding these bacteria in such ancient rocks might suggest that the Earth’s atmosphere had oxygen in it a billion years before we previously thought. Oxygen in the atmosphere has had a profound effect on both the evolution of life on Earth and as well as it’s geologic history.
This is just cool. Who knew snowflakes were so complex? In light of all the snow we’ve received of late, this gives me something to look for in the next snowfall.
National Blog Posting Month – January 2013 – Energy
Prompt – At what time of day do you feel the most energetic and productive?
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At different times of day I’m productive in different ways. It’s hard to pinpoint any single time of day when I’m most energetic and productive. I do, however, know when I am least productive.
The doldrums hit me around 2pm every day and I’m a slug until around 5 or 6. I know myself well enough to know that unless there is a seriously urgent deadline, there is little point in fighting the afternoon drags. Instead, I strap on my exercise shoes and mindlessly workout for thirty minutes to an hour. And once I’m done and showered, I start on the evening chores. By the time everything’s done and all members of the household are fed, I’m back to being constructive and energized and I get on with whatever brain-intensive tasks need doing.
It makes for me keeping strange work hours, but everyone seems to be OK with it. I come into the office in the morning and do whatever lab things need to be done until my energy starts to wane, then I leave, usually around 2. I make up the lost hours in the evening at home when my brain returns to normal function.
I get away with this because I’m on salary and I need only present results to justify my employment. I feel fortunate because of this. I only have to work during my optimal times. I’ve had jobs where I had to grunt my way through the less-optimum hours of the day. I know what it’s like and I can do it. I’m glad I don’t have to.
National Blog Posting Month – January 2013 – Energy
Prompt – What is your favourite way to recharge when you feel drained of energy?
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I’m drained. I just want to go to bed. My head is heavy. Everything is overwhelming. What do I do?
I could eat a bag of potato chips (which sounds fabulous right now, by the way!). Or, I could drink a soda or a cup of coffee (which I’ve been known to do). But if I really want to get myself back on my feet to get some work done, I have to get on my feet!
I take a deep breath. I change my clothes. I pop in a workout DVD. And I exercise. Some days it’s just a 20 minute workout. Other days I challenge myself to a 50 minute workout. Sometimes, I’ll opt to go for a run or hop on the elliptical for a while. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Exercise is what I need, most of the time. And usually, it’s enough of a kick to get me back into high-productivity mode.
The only time this doesn’t work is if I’m in energy-saving mode due to illness. Then exercise knocks me out. This is how I usually find out that I’m sick, not just exhausted. Recently, that’s been the case. I’ll have a good workout, then I’m in bed for an hour. Nevertheless, I do feel better for working out than I would have had I just had some ice cream and watched more TV.
Exercise is the key to my energy. I exercise nearly every day. It’s part of my daily routine. It’s what I do.
I’m a member of Litopia, a self-proclaimed “Writer’s Colony” on-line. It’s actually a great place to go and hang out with other writers and learn the trade.
Recently, a discussion thread came up about what it takes to become an expert. It was linked to this post.
Importantly, it made the point that the transition from novice to expert was marked by preferentially focusing on negative feedback over positive feedback.
Here was my reaction:
Expertise is a funny thing. For me, in my field (which is isotopic analysis of tooth enamel from fossil mammals), becoming an ‘expert’ isn’t something that I sought to do. I just wanted to do the best I could because my own research depends upon this kind of analysis. I don’t feel like an expert – I know that there’s tons of room for improvement. (But maybe this goes to the point about how experts focus on the negative more than the positive.)
But one day, about a year ago, it happened. I got the first e-mail I’d ever gotten that said something to the effect of “We have these enamel samples that need analysis, and we’ve heard you’re the best.” After I scraped my jaw off the floor, I told them that I could analyze their samples and there you go… Since then I’ve gotten similar e-mails from people all over the world and from students who want to study with me.
I guess I’m an expert.
What makes me an expert? Getting out there and getting noticed is important. So, not all experts are introverts. I mean, I guess I could be an expert and introverted, but who would know? What would it get me? Naw, I get out there, go to meetings, use Twitter and blogs, and talk about what I do. Other people notice and they decide I’m an expert.
Maybe being an expert isn’t something that you decide. Maybe it depends upon the perceptions of other people. And if enough other people – especially those that you yourself would call experts – are calling you an expert, maybe it’s true.
National Blog Posting Month – January 2013 – Energy
Prompt – Which daily tasks take up the most of your energy?
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Where does most of my energy go on a given day? Can I narrow it down to just one thing?
The daily chores just sap my energy, especially in the winter time. They’re endless: Water and Feed the chickens morning and night. Take care of the cats. Make lunch. The dishes. Move snow. Stoke fire. Bring in firewood. Feed the boy. Feed myself. It takes maybe an hour to two hours every day just to stay on top of these things, and at the end of a long work day, it’s not what I want to do.
In the summer it’s not as bad. The chickens are able to forage and their water doesn’t freeze, so I can deal with them once a day. We don’t have a fire, so I needn’t worry about that. And with all the extra daylight, I don’t have to do any of these things immediately upon entering the house every day after work.
So maybe it’s partly the chores and maybe it’s partly the lack of daylight. I sleep when it’s dark. When I was in the high Arctic with 24 hours of sunlight, I was full of energy. Winter time down south – I got nothing.
All right. Another month or so and daylight will be getting reasonable, even if it still is cold. That’s ok. I can handle it. Right?
National Blog Posting Month – January 2013 – Energy
Prompt – From where do you draw your energy?
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Or perhaps “Whence do you draw such energy?”
So where does it come from, all this jumpy-aroundedness? Exercise helps. Eating well. And doing what I like.
It seems though, that I mostly only have energy when the Sun is up. Apparently, I’m solar powered. In the winter, I can’t get anything finished, because my day is seemingly only eight hours long. But in the summer, I whiz-bang through so much stuff I astound myself.
There have been times in my life when I’ve put up full-spectrum lights so that I can work well into the evenings. This is how I survived my graduate school days. I’m beginning to think I need to do that again. My to-do list for these next two weeks is horrifying and I don’t know how I’ll get anything done without being able to work after my son’s bed time.
Energy is such a fleeting substance. Though I know I’m operating at a low-energy status right now because it is winter and cold, were it not for exercise and being employed at something I enjoy, I know I would be complete toast. So I’ll slog through the next couple of months, waiting for the days to extend in length and for my energy to return.
John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, and Woody Harrelson
Premise: What if the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 really did mark the end of the world? Could we save ourselves?
Obviously, the world did not end on December 21. The Mayans (modern ones) probably had a good chuckle at the premise of this movie and all the hubbub about the apocalypse. Whatever. In this movie there were some wierd things going on, things that didn’t make sense even within the context of the distorted science of the movie itself. Yeah, it was a disaster movie. A scientific nightmare.
The end of the world has been brought on by excess activity in the sun. Actually, it’s kind of funny because the world will end when the sun finally consumes the planet. But we got a few billion years before we need to worry about that. Anyway, apparently the sun’s activity has brought about a new kind of nuclear particle – a different kind of neutrino that is rapidly heating the Earth’s core, rather like how a microwave heats food from the inside out. This is going to cause the cataclysmic destruction of the Earth as we know it.
Of course, all this is happening because of the alignment of the planets that only happens every 640 thousand years. But wait. 640 thousand years is pretty frequent. Why is there no geologic evidence for this happening? There’s the ‘Nemesis Star,’ but that’s, what, every 26 million years or something? Yeah, I don’t know…
These enormous cracks begin to form along the west coast of North America. But they aren’t due to the action of any tectonic plates (according to one of the characters, the Deputy Geologist of the Office of Science and Technology Policy – which apparently actually exists). Ok, well if it’s not plate tectonic, why aren’t there random cracks elsewhere?
There’s a scene where they’re drilling (or so it seems) into a suddenly-dry lake bed in Yellowstone National Park. Our deputy geologist finds out that the temperature is 2700 degrees C at 40,000 feet deep. First, any real geologist would use meters, not feet. It’s about 12,000 meters or about 12 kilometers. I wonder how long they’d been drilling there. That’s just a gripe. But let’s put this in context. How hot is 2700 degrees C?
The Earth’s geothermal gradient (temperature with depth) compared with the solidus for rocks. If the geotherm is to the left of the solidus, the rocks are not melted.
So we’re looking at mantle temperatures. Not molten rock, mind you. The mantle is solid, but very, very hot. So, under Yellowstone it’s really warm. Well, Yellowstone is also sitting on top of a hotspot, where heat from the mantle (and associated volcanics) make it right to the surface. That’s why Yellowstone is there in the first place. So maybe 2700C isn’t so unexpected?
The other part of the story is that apparently the temperature is increasing by 0.5% every hour in this well at Yellowstone. Well, that’s pretty quick. A few hundred degrees a day or so. That’s substantial. I’d be more worried about that than the absolute temperature.
I guess this phenomenon is occurring at other sites around the Earth as well (in the movie, that is). I wish I knew where. The temperature anomaly at Yellowstone is compelling, but again, it’s a hot spot. It’ll go off again eventually, and we don’t need über-nutrinos to do that. What if the other places on the globe where they’ve been taking measurements are also hot spots. What then?
Regardless, the claim is suddenly made that “The Earth’s crust is destabilizing!” whatever that means, because the “Temperature’s rising with incredible velocity!” Is that even English? Would acceleration be a better word? Can you even use velocity to describe temperature change?
The good news is that crazy Charlie (played by Woody Harrelson) is drinking PBR, which is widely acceptable to geologists globally, for no real clear reason.
Oh yeah, and so you know, there was no major planetary alignment on December 21, 2012. This was just kind of made up…
The Theory of ‘Earth Crust Displacement’ is a big deal in this movie. The idea is that the crust destabilizes (whatever that means) and suddenly the crust rapidly moves around on the earth’s surface. It’s tough to be sure what they mean by this in the movie, as they could be referring to a movement of the crust, or a shift of the Earth’s rotation axis, so that the crust has appeared to have moved relative to the rotation axis. This depends upon a destabilization of the ‘subterranean’ crust and an ‘extreme polar instability.’ I have no idea what these things might mean.
The subterranean crust could be anywhere from just below the surface to 70 kilometers down, so what part are they talking about? Also consider that in the Theory of Plate Tectonics, it’s not just the crust that moves. A real geoscientist would be referring to the lithosphere, which is the crust plus a bit of the underlying mantle. So what’s destabilizing? Maybe it’s the connection between the crust and the mantle that’s destabilized? Wow.
The Theory of Plate Tectonics, does a nice job of explaining how the crust and the rest of the lithosphere, moves about on the surface of the Earth. But the crust isn’t going to rotate 23 degrees to the southwest over the course of a few hours. Sorry folks. Earth Crust Displacement is not a real theory in the Earth Sciences.
So far as ‘extreme polar instability,’ I think this is in reference to the Earth’s magnetic field (the north and south poles), though I can’t be certain. They do discuss the sudden reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, and that the south magnetic pole is suddenly in Wisconsin. That the Earth’s magnetic field might reverse itself is no big deal. Geoscience has known about this for a while. The magnetic field has gone back and forth many times over the aeons, in an irregular pattern. This pattern has been used to help assign ages to ancient rocks, in fact, in a field of study called magneostratigraphy. That it would happen over night is a little sketchy. The current state of understanding is that it would take at least a thousand years for this to occur, though we’re still working on the details of how the magnetic field is generated. The magnetic pole in Wisconsin is also no big thing, if you’ve rotated all the Earth’s crust by 23 degrees to the southwest. So this is Ok. Sort of.
Earthquakes: This movie suffers from some of the problems of other earthquake movies in that it implies that earthquakes of magnitudes like 10.9 are even possible. Of course, if we can have Earth Crust Displacement, we can have such huge earthquakes, too.
The tsunamis throughout the movie are a real (scientific) disaster. For one thing, just because there’s an earthquake, doesn’t mean that there’s automatically a tsunami. The tectonic situation has to be correct. There needs to be dip-slip displacement along a fault that is underwater. They have these waves arising *poof* out of nowhere!
The other problem is that a 1500 meter tall wave (which is huge, sure) isn’t going to affect a Tibetan monk living at 4000 meters elevation. Unless, of course, Earth Crust Displacement has made the Tibetan Plateau sink. At this point, you see that things only make sense when you suspend all understanding of the current state of science.
Finally, I just gotta say that once again this movie omits the fact that volcanic ash is, by itself,deadly. Movies always portray ash as soft and fluffy and falling like snow. It’s glass folks. They’re inhaling glass shards. And no one is coughing. Sigh.
National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work
Prompt – How do you celebrate your accomplishments?
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Celebrating accomplishments is a challenge. Perhaps it’s the constant, nagging suspicion that what I’ve done isn’t really all that good. That I’ve really done nothing more than fool the masses. Maybe it’s because, given that I’m a scientist, that every completed task is little more than a gateway to the next thing. I mean, finishing something really means that I’ve just suddenly got a whole bunch more work to do! It never ends!
At best, I celebrate accomplishing something by going home and chilling. I’ll drink an adult beverage and *gasp* watch a movie. Or better yet, I’ll go to bed after having shut off all the alarms for the following morning, thereby giving myself permission to sleep a little later.
Yeah, it’s possible I’m doing this wrong. Maybe that’s why I always feel a little stressed out. There’s always something that needs to be done. I can always come up with something I ought to be doing. So accomplishing something just means that now I have time to do the other things that I’ve been putting off. Maybe I ought to give myself a break.
Well, today marks the last day of 2012. Maybe next year I’ll go ahead and give myself that break. I deserve it, right. Perhaps I should sit down and list the things that I accomplished this year. I’ll bet it’s a long list. I wrote a book. Oh heck! I wrote two books! Went to the Arctic. Got in shape. Started learning swordsmanship. Managed to collect a bit of a following on my blog here (hi everyone!). Ooh! And two papers published (-ish)! That’s an improvement over zero papers from last year!
Yeah, I’m getting somewhere. I deserve a vacation. I think I’ll do that. Heh. Well, eventually anyway!
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 