Category Archives: NaBloPoMo

Bad Geology Movies: Armageddon, 1998

Armageddon

1998

Bruce Willis, Ben Afflek, Liv Tyler

Premise: What if a Texas-sized asteroid were careening toward Earth and we only had 18 days to stop it?

The idea is an interesting one. We know that there was an asteroid impact on Earth at the same time the dinosaurs went extinct and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the impact itself was a huge factor causing the extinction. So, what if it were about to happen again, only now we were able to detect the oncoming asteroid and could (potentially) do something about it?

In the opening sequence, the narrator describes the dinosaur-killing asteroid as six-miles wide. That may be right. It seems reasonable, anyway. The narrator goes on to describe a global dust cloud which lasted for 1000 years, through which the sun could not penetrate. For the sake of the movie, that’s as good as anything. But do be aware that there are plenty of competing hypotheses about what happened after the impact. Some involve incinerating the Earth, not coving it with dust. Or triggering volcanoes. Or all of the above. But, that there was an impact is no longer debated.

Since this is about bad geology movies, I won’t go into the details of problems with the rest of the movie aside from the geology. The movie was fairly fun… until they were on the asteroid. Then I started having problems.

1) Our characters miss their landing site by 26 miles. They wind up in a region of “compressed iron ferrite.” They also describe it as a compressed iron plate. Iron ferrite is not any mineral or rock that I’ve heard of. “Ferrite” as a word on its own, is another word that means ‘iron.’ So iron ferrite is an iron-bearing iron rock (or mineral, they never clarify). So it’s redundant. You see the phrase “Iron Ferrite” on google, but I suspect people put the two together because most folks don’t realize that the ‘ferrite’ part already says ‘iron.’

2) All over the place (on the asteroid) are huge crystals jutting all around. It’s reminiscent of Superman’s home planet of Krypton, or perhaps his Fortress of Solitude up in the Arctic. Such crystals aren’t going to form in the vacuum of space, especially not in an area composed entirely of iron ferrite. They looked like gypsum crystals, which wouldn’t make much sense on an asteroid.

3) The topography of the asteroid was bizarre. One would expect craters, with steep slopes and whatnot, but not a “Grand Canyon.” A canyon like that is an erosional feature, that you wouldn’t expect on an asteroid. But maybe it was a great big crack in the asteroid. Why then did they not drill there, where the rock was already fractured and weak?

4) One more thing bothered me, but maybe it’s not so bad. This asteroid seemed to have an atmosphere. There were the random fireballs which made no sense to me. And then the wind blew, slightly, at the end when Bruce Willis’ character picks up some of the dust and let it fall from his hand.

There was just a lot wrong with the asteroid, which spoiled the movie for me, mostly. The movie was enjoyable otherwise, with some fun and charming characters.

Aah, Relax

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – What is the best way to relax after a hard day?

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Relax? What is this “Relax”?

After a hard day, once the evening chores are done, I’ve worked out, and I’ve done everything else that’s pressing – well – then it’s usually close to 10pm and I’m ready to go to bed.

But I don’t always. In fact, I seldom head straight to bed.

I usually crack an adult beverage, grab the laptop, and get comfy somewhere. This is when I write.

Sometimes, it’s blog posts, if I have the mental capacity to write something that requires a little thought. Some of my blog posts, are fairly technical, so I have to have some manner of coherency to do the writing.

If my brain’s not all there (a more typical scenario), I will open a fiction file and start writing. I daydream, and record what I’m thinking about. Let little stories and plot bunnies hop around in my head.

I do that until I can’t keep my eyes open any more. Then the light goes off and I’m gone until the alarm goes off the next morning.

For 12-7-12

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – How hard do you think you work?

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My first reaction upon reading this prompt was, Ha-ha-ha-ha! I have far too much fun at work to really call it ‘work.’

They say that if you are doing something you love then you’ll never work a day in your life. Well, I do like what I do, so it doesn’t always feel like I’m working very hard at all.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t times that I’m just cursing my to-do list, overwhelmed with the things that I have to do in order to keep myself paid. On those days, I work ridiculously hard, going down the list item-by-item, continuing to work even after I get home in the evening, often into the wee hours of the morning.

Other times, though, I am able to keep hours that would make a banker envious. Once I get a set of analyses started in the morning, unless I have some specific reason to stay in the office, I often bug out, go home, workout. Engage in other projects. Write blog posts. This only works for a few weeks during the summer and during the regular academic breaks, alas.

I do find that whether I feel like I’m working hard (at work-related things) or not, I still am always very, very busy. I seem to like it that way. There is always something to do that is very much worth doing. Sometimes it’s the job I get paid to do that gets priority, and sometimes it’s unrelated things. It’s all about balance, right?

For 12-6-12

 

What have I taught someone to do?

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – Do you enjoy teaching others? Talk about a time you taught someone how to do something.

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It should be obvious from some of my blog posts (here and here) that I truly adore teaching. I love any form of teaching, from the formal class room, to putting up a table at a career fair, to preparing talks for senior citizens at retirement communities. I love it all.

For all the teaching that I’ve done, it’s tough to narrow down this topic to just one time I taught someone how to do something. The specific phrase “how to do something” means that there was some actual step-by-step training involved. It’s not just teaching someone to distinguish between igneous and metamorphic rocks, for example, as you might in a traditional lecture-style class. The prompt is asking about something that was perhaps a bit more involved.

One of the things I get to teach (though I use the term ‘train’ in this case) regularly is how to run analyses on the mass spectrometer. Every graduate student who’s going to run more than a couple dozen samples in our lab goes through this training, so they can run their own samples (on evenings and weekends) and I can focus on contract work (to keep the lab running).

This is not without great trials and tribulations. It’s nice to have students run their own samples. It saves me a lot of time. But running a mass spectrometer is complex. A good student will be able to gain the skills they need to independently run the mass spectrometer in about four days (or four sets of analyses). The first day, they watch me and take copious notes. The second and third days, they do everything, with me observing directly. On the fourth day, I let them do everything when I’m not in the room, but I come in and check things in between steps. If they’ve gotten most of everything right (and haven’t done anything wrong that would compromise the mass spectrometer), then I give them permission to run analyses whenever they want.

This process can be insanely time consuming. I need about four hours to get a set of analyses going. When I have to train someone, there goes the whole day. And it’s terrifying too. One wrong push of a button and BAMMO! I’ve got to replace $1000 worth of parts. Usually, the training period goes through the “Day 4” step for several analysis days. “Day 1” is also often repeated.

Occasionally, I have students that really struggle with all of it. There really is a ton to remember. It’s a bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly. And hopping on one foot. Even more rarely, I have a student who just ‘gets’ it immediately. That’s always a little disconcerting, because it makes me wonder what I left out.

And it doesn’t matter whether the trainee is a undergraduate student, a graduate student, or a post-doctoral researcher. That has nothing to do with who’s going to have the most success. I do find that most undergraduates are general so afraid to break anything that they follow my instructions to a T (which is good). Postdocs also tend to follow my instructions carefully, I think that’s because they have enough experience with breaking things by then that they also take my word as law. Grad students tend to be a mixed bag. The mix of low (or no) experience and high confidence (having survived an undergraduate degree) can result in them ‘trying’ things that they shouldn’t do. Or hesitating when they don’t need to.

By now, I’ve gone through this process so many times, they’ve all blurred together. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing I’ve trained so many students. By providing them this skill, they have something to market as they’re moving forward with their lives. And though it’s highly unlikely that whatever future job they have will entail using the exact same instrument for the exact same purpose, just knowing what is involved with such analyses and that they can do it should give them some confidence and a step up above students that might not have been provided the same opportunity.

For 12-5-12

Leader, Follower, or Collaborator – What am I?

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – Do you feel most comfortable being a leader, a follower, or a collaborator?

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This is an interesting prompt. Truth is, I’m not comfortable being a leader, though I have done it, successfully, on many occasions. I know this is because I have an anxiety disorder – social anxiety – that makes me kind of flip out when all eyes are on me. Years of therapy and medications have helped me a long ways. Now I know that it’s a disorder and that it’s not just that I’m shy, for example. Turns out, I’m actually very extroverted (which everyone who knows me believes), but that I have this annoying disorder that causes me to freeze in social situations. Luckily, I know this now and can (most of the time) fight past it and get on with what needs to be done. But the end result is that I have a difficult time with leadership. I do it, but I’m happy when it’s over.

But the extroversion makes it really hard to just sit back and be a follower as well. I’ll follow happily enough when something is new to me; my anxiety keeps me quiet. But once I feel competent at something, I lose interest in merely following. The extrovert comes out and sometimes I wind up taking charge. And then the anxiety comes back because I worry that I’ve offended someone or something. It’s a nuisance, really.

I really enjoy collaborating with others. The joy there is that I am treated as equal, but that someone else has to make to phone calls, and get all the permissions that may be needed (say for a grant proposal) and I can just sit back and wait until they ask me to do something. I lend my expertise where it’s needed and am present when needed, and keep out of it otherwise. It’s a nice balance.

The only problem is that when there’s something I really want done, I have a hard time rallying the troops (as it were) to collaborate with me. I’ve submitted a few grant proposals as Principal Investigator and it’s been really, really hard to do it, generally because I can’t get the rest of the team on board adequately and my (stupid) anxiety causes me to not be quite pushy enough to keep everyone motivated.

Thankfully, I’m in a place where people are seeking me out now for potential collaborations (see yesterday’s post). I have a skill that few others have, that is in demand. Not high demand mind you, but in demand enough that I can keep busy and paid.

So does it matter which of these terms (leader, follower, collaborator) are most comfortable to me. I know myself. I’m making it work. I’m happy. That’s all that’s needed.

For 12-4-12

What am I a “pro” at? – Isotopic Analysis of Bioapatites

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – What do you consider yourself a “pro” at?

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It seems strange to ever consider myself a “pro” at anything. I’m ‘good’ at a lot of things, and feel like I’m pretty well-rounded as a person and a scientist, to say “pro” makes me hesitate.

However, there is one topic (work-related, of course) that about which it appears that I am considered a world expert. I get sufficient requests from entities globally each year to corroborate that conclusion. On that one thing, I will – still reluctantly – call myself a “pro.” That topic is the analysis of light stable isotopes from bioapatites.

In English, this is basically the geochemical analysis of tooth enamel. I work mostly with the teeth of fossil mammals. The data collected from such analyses can be used to interpret ancient environments and habits and dietary preferences of extinct animals. From that, we can study things like climate changes that occurred millions of years ago. That’s my schtick.

There are lots of scientists actually that work with such data. By lots, I mean maybe a few hundred, so still a small number but greater than zero. What makes me unique is that I’m one of the very, very few who actually knows how to operate the instrumentation to do the analyses. It’s one thing to understand how to interpret the data. It’s quite another to know how to get the data. Not only can I run the analyses, I can replicate my results, which is actually much harder than it sounds.

I always giggle a bit when I get an e-mail that says something to the effect of “I’ve heard you’re the best at this, so here’s some samples, can you run them?” My first thought is, Clearly these people haven’t met me. But I get these requests from all over the world, with projects pending and running from Australia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Siberia, not to mention the stuff happening in the United States, so there must be something to it.

So that’s what I’m a “pro” at, I guess. Isotopic analysis of bioapatites. I’ll put that on my resume.

For 12-3-12

What is this “Paleopix”?

Cameras

There is, I suppose, the slightest chance that you’ve wondered why my blog is called ‘Paleopix.’ Perhaps you’ve ventured so far as to visit Paleopix.com and have been a little surprised by what you saw.

When my husband and I first married (in fact it might have been before we married), we started collecting antique cameras. We collected over 600 older film cameras, the oldest being from the late 1800’s and the newest being one that we bought about the time we got married. The collection we have is neither his nor mine, it is ours.

It all started with one camera we found at a yard sale, the Univex Corsair II. I think we bought it for $7. It fascinated us both, and it teases us on many levels. It’s mechanical (and there’s nothing battery-powered about this camera), which caught the interest of my husband. It’s very Art Deco, with is an aesthetic that my husband and I share, with all the glossy black and silver. It’s a camera and we both enjoyed taking pictures. We do have our favorites, however. I’m a big fan of the older bakelite cameras. The husband likes the 1960’s-1980’s SLR cameras.

Univex Corsair II – our first camera

We put together a Microsoft Access database (which is how I learned to use Access), and cataloged and tagged each camera (well at least the first 500 or so), and would spend hours cleaning them and trying to make them work. For each camera that still worked and for which there was film available, we’d shoot a roll and get them developed. We have thousands of photos. We were glad when we were later able to just get the photos on CD.

But then we had our son, and the camera collection and web page development had slowed. OK, it’s pretty-much stopped. But the boy is older now, and I’m starting to think about getting back into the collection and working more on the website. In the meantime, here’s a few photos of some of our cameras!

Minolta SRT-MC-II
Minolta SRT-MC-II – My first camera. Actually, it was my dad’s camera, but I borrowed it for so long he finally replaced it…
Our oldest camera
A Minolta SLR camera for 110 cartridge film. It was a little like taking photos with a sandwich.
This is one of our littlest cameras, called a ‘HIT’ camera. That’s a penny for scale. Yes, it worked (though we’ve never tried it).
The Nikon F – one of the original Nikon SLRs. Still works. It’s lenses work on our new Nikon digital SLRs.
The Univex Mercury – a half-frame camera (took 48 photos on a 24-exposure roll). This was just post WWII. It had a rotary shutter, hence the funny dome on top.
Another Univex Mercury. Same vintage, but had flash and rapid-winder. I’ve shot a roll through this one.
Bolsey camera – one of the first to take the ‘standard’ (yet now extinct) 35mm film cartridge. We put a roll through this too.
Winpro cameras were made near here in Webster NY. Pretty cheap plastic.
A Voightlander twin-lens-reflex camera. These take 120 film which is still available (or was when we bought the camera). We never tested this one.
Falcon – one of my favorite cheap plastic/bakelite cameras.
The Royal Reflex – another cheap plastic/bakelite camera. This one is a twin lens style.
A Kodak 3A folding pocket camera – we have lots of bellows cameras. This one’s nice because the bellows are red and intact. It took postcard-sized plates.

There’s a few more, but you can visit the website to see them. Obviously, we have far less than 600 cameras photographed and posted. Some of them, maybe several hundred, are not really worth photographing, but we have some treasures as well. Maybe we’ll get around to posting them all… soon.

A few cameras
A few more cameras.

Field Methods -or- Rock-breaking 101

I’ve only just become aware “The Accretionary Wedge,” a geological blog carnival! It’s basically a monthly amalgamation of the thoughts of geoscientists world wide in reference to an earth-science related prompt.

What a fun concept.

This month, the prompt was for ‘dream geology classes.’ You know, the ones you really wish were offered back in your undergrad days. There are a few that I’ve always wished were taught, some of which I see are already touched upon in the responses to the call for posts. I’ll just talk about one.

FIELD METHODS -or- Rock-breaking 101

One class that I’ve noticed is sorely missing from almost all geology programs is a “Field Methods” class. It could be that the geosciences are heading more and more into the laboratory or onto computers, but it seems that field geology is suffering. A person can actually get a degree in the earth sciences without doing more than a day or two of field work ever!

*gasp*

I was fortunate that where I did my undergraduate (Fort Lewis College), they actually offered a one-semester field methods class. This wasn’t field camp, that was different. This was a full semester course on how to read maps and use compasses. It taught you haw to take notes and how to deal with the geologist’s ‘laboratory,’ where it could rain on you while you’re working. It was ‘field-camp-mini,’ but it put those of us who later took a formal field camp (also offered by my school) at a huge advantage over our less-skilled classmates. (I’m glad to see that Fort Lewis still offers the field methods class, though it looks like field camp might have gone by the wayside.)

I loved that class. I learned in that class that I had what I needed to become a real geoscientist.

The only thing that the class lacked that I wished were in there was specific training on how to collect a hand sample. Seriously, I wanted to learn how to break a rock with a hammer. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. There’s a finesse – a certain amount of skill – needed to break off the perfect chunk of rock, completely dependent upon the equipment you have and the type of rock. A two-hour lab exercise would have been effective to teach that.

That’s the class I think needs to be offered in every department at every school. I know I benefited greatly from having it, and I’m certain that students of the geosciences would benefit as well.

Musings on NaNoWriMo and Writing in General

Well, I did it. I did it again. I signed up for NaNoWriMo and I won.

So… what did it win, Alex?

A hearty handshake and the knowledge that I can crank out a 50,000 word novel in one month.

Right.

So, what is NaNoWriMo, you ask?

NaNoWriMo is the acronym for the National Novel Writing Month. It’s a challenge put up by the Office of Letters and Light that sponsors several month-long writing challenges fro adults and youth.

I first heard of NaNoWriMo last November. For giggles, I signed up to write a little story that I had jumbling around in my head. That story has now expanded in what will likely be come the Herongarde trilogy, for which I have a rough draft of the first book (Prince of Herongarde), and a nearly complete draft of the second book (Mark of Herongarde). The third book (Queen of Herongarde) is still rattling around in my head. I’ll probably have to work on it during one or two of the Camp NaNoWriMo events during the summer of next year. You can find little snippets and bits and pieces of this trilogy on my blog under the Herongarde tag.

It’s through NaNoWriMo that I discovered that I actually have a great passion for writing fiction (and an inverse-passion for writing technical literature). I’m so glad that I can (and do) actually call myself a writer. I have two complete novels under my belt. Not so many people can say that!

I’ve enjoyed exploring life as an author so much this year, that I decided to join NaNoWriMo as a Municipal Liaison this year. This basically puts me in charge of getting everyone to play nice with each other (which is never really a problem), to be a cheerleader, and to organize events as much as possible. There’s lots of e-mails and forums to read and respond to. I’ve quite enjoyed the experience and am really grateful for having the opportunity to meet and interact with other budding authors.

This year’s novelling experience was a little different than last year’s. After writing 50k words last year, I wasn’t even halfway through the book. Even after a round of Camp NaNoWriMo, I still wasn’t done. This year, I started with something fresh. The book is currently called “The Masters,” but I suspect I might need to change the title. There are a couple of snippets of it as well on my blog. I managed to wrap the whole thing up almost exactly at 50k words (50049 is what it verified at). I actually finished the whole story.

Then this weird thing happened. I had grown so fond of my characters – all of them – that as I wrote the last sentences, I started to bawl. It was a happy ending. They were all parting ways to go on with their lives. And I was bawling. That has never happened before. It was an amazing experience.

I wonder if that will happen when I finally finish the Herongarde trilogy? I guess I’d better finish it, so that I can find out.

I once was an artist…

So with yesterday’s blog post, I started thinking a lot about my old ‘artist’ days. Back when I was in high school I was convinced that I was going to be an Olympic athlete and an artist. That’s a bit different from the vertebrate paleontologist and isotope geochemist that I’ve become.

Anywho, writing that post (and seeing my son’s report card with glowing comments about his artistic ability) made me think again about my art. For giggles (and I may be risking a lot here), I’ve decided to post photos of my artwork and call it a blog post.

Here goes:

The first painting I ever had framed. That’s a Caniberon floating in the middle there. This won an Honorable Mention at the Utah State High School art show when I was a sophomore. Ink on illustration board. All rights reserved.
The Quick and the Dead. This was an assignment in my art class. It’s a mixture of watercolor and Prismacolor on illustration board. Images are drawn from photographs. All rights reserved.
Caniberons sword fighting. Acrylic on canvas board. Done back in high school. See? My interest in swordplay goes way back! All rights reserved.
This one inspired my high school art teacher to tell me that each painting I did was somewhat more morbid than the last. Watercolor. All rights reserved.
Skeptical Pronon. This I painted in about one week for an art show in high school. Arcylic on masonite. All rights reserved.

I enjoyed drawing and painting Pronons (and a whole fleet of six-legged critters from their home planet). The Winter Olympics happened while I was in painting-mode, and Pronons figured into a couple of Olympics-inspired paintings.

Ski jumping Pronon. Watercolor. High school. All rights reserved.
Speed skating Pronon. Watercolor. High school. All rights reserved.

I was also big into cheetahs. They turned up as cheetahs in a couple of pieces, and as the Ulfrese (my response to the “Transformers”) in a few others.

Cheetah running. Acrylic on canvas board. High school. All rights reserved.
A mountain-biking Ulf. Pencil on illustration board. High school. All rights reserved.
A hipster Ulf. He was hipster before it was hip. Pencil on illustration board. High school. All rights reserved.

Caniberons are also common art subjects of mine. They’ve also appeared in a yet-to-be-finished script that one day I’ll get back to. I came up with several species.

Caniberon sapiens. Pen and ink on illustration board. High school. All rights reserved.

 

Caniberon celerissime. The swift caniberon. Pen and ink on illustration board. Dunno if this is high school or college. All rights reserved.
Caniberon curvus. It’s the big tusks that are unique to the genus Caniberon. This one’s are very curved. Pencil on illustration board. High school or college. All rights reserved.
Caniberon in snow. Watercolor. College (I think). All rights reserved.
A brightly colored species of Caniberon. I never finished this painting. Acrylic on canvas board. College or grad school. All rights reserved.
This is meant to be like a star-map or something. Down there in the lower left is a beast called Praedonta, which is the sister-group of Caniberon. Watercolor. High school. All rights reserved.

An then there are a litany of other random animals:

Awkward school photo. Here I was trying to stick four eyes on a sentient mammal’s head. Watercolor. High school (I think). All rights reserved.
Chranku. Here I was wondering what would happen if you took a saber-toothed tiger and put the saber on the lower jaw. Water color. High school. All rights reserved.
Five-legged critter. For this, I asked myself ‘what if the lobed dorsal fin in early tetrapods became a full-blown limb?’ This was my answer. Pen and ink on illustration board. High school. All rights reserved.
A random snarly thing. Check out those incisors! Pen and ink on illustration board. College (methinks). All rights reserved.
Russah. This was a critter that I had developed some stories around. I’ve forgotten the stories, but remember the name, Russah. Pen and ink on illustration board. College (I think). All rights reserved.
Very colorful random stylized thing. I think this is the same beaked critter from before. Watercolor. High school. All rights reserved.
Not sure what was going on here, but I seem to have combined Caniberons and Pronons. Watercolor. High School. All rights reserved.
More standard fare: A pegasus taking flight. Scratchboard. High school. All rights reserved.

I also fiddled some with pointillism, where one draws a picture with nothing but dots:

Stylized phoenix or firebird. Pen and ink on illustration board. College. All rights reserved.
Phoenix bending space. Pen and ink on illustration board. College. All rights reserved.

I’ve done a lot of technical work using computer software. This is the one piece of ‘scientific’ art work I’ve done using watercolor. It’s based upon the real notes that I took as I was describing a new species of multituberculate mammal:

Notes on _Fractinus palmorem_ a new genus and species of mammal from the Hanna Basin of Wyoming. Watercolor and pen and ink. Graduate school. All rights reserved.

So that’s everything I have photos of (certainly not everything I’ve ever drawn). I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at them. Perhaps someone out there can give me the inspiration to  continue drawing, and maybe get back into the more ‘fine arts’ end of things with paint and brush. It’s been a while.