You know you’re a geologist when…

… Your pillow talk revolves around explaining mantle convection cells and triple junctions. Including getting up to demonstate on a white board.

I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour I drew this

Geeks are hawt, dammit!

Where have all the pirates gone?

Where can you find pirates? Only in Somalia! (And for those who don’t get it, find some lions first…)

It has occured to me that pirates are obviously a feedback that needs to be written into Earth climate simulation models. The “temperature up causes pirates down” link is already well known, but now it appears the pirates that are left have switched from gold and grog to oil tankers. Oil down, therefore CO2 emissions down, causing global climate to cool (a link almost as certain as pirates-temperature), and so leading to more pirates! These pirates will then return to the traditional piratical past times such as growing large beards and eating ham, allowing the hydrocarbon industry to ramp up again, and the cycle repeats itself.

S’all over

Yatta! Exams are over!

Fish!

Without making it obvious what I’m currently revising, I absolutely love this Wikimedia Commons image of how glaciers work, originally apparently from NASA

Educational and fishtastic!

Exams

Sounding like a broken record, but I’m getting really stressed about exams this year. More so than any year previously. Stuff just doesn’t seem to be sticking in my head no matter how hard I try and make it do so, and there seems to be far too much to cover before they all kick off.

I’m not even sure why I’m doing them. What use are essays? It’s an exercise in how much you can remember. Apparently it’s to assess how we take in information from lecturers and papers, analyse it, and make coherent arguments out of it. But then, isn’t that the point of something like a literature review, where you can actually go and look things up and have time to put together a sensible argument? At no point in life are you ever going to have to put together a one hour essay discussing the evolution of the Himalaya or the method of producing orbitally tuned timescales without any kind of source mateiral to go on.

At least the practicals make more sense. You actually use your brain on new material, and have to thing. It actually assesses your abilities, not how much you can remember. But unfortunately they don’t count for as much as the essays.

Still almost over. Scarily soon they’ll have started, but at least then they’ll be over in a flash. Like a blood test, the waiting is the worst part.

Hurray for censorship!

[Rant removed]

 

Did the Earth shake for you too, baby?

Another thing that caught my eye today – apparently, in a major paradigm shift in Earth Sciences, gayness causes earthquakes. From the article:

Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave “legitimacy to sodomy”.

Idea for a PhD – mapping earthquake distribution against world gayness? There is some ground for this, with San Francisco the world’s gayest city and the high frequency of earthquakes on the nearby San Andreas fault. However, one question remains unanswered – is it just sodomy in particular that causes earthquakes, or all forms of gay and lesbian activity?

The great lecturer survey!

[Removed at the request of the department]

Help me write my project time!

Right, so drafts for projects were due in yesterday. So now I’ve been forced in to making one, I can throw it around to be reviewed/spell and grammar checked/slagged off. Anyone interested in helping out can download it at http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/nrp28/draft.pdf (26mb download). Thanks!

Open source zealot, moi?

I don’t normal get all Eric S. Raymond, but for some reason I’m in a “annoyed-by-trivial-things” mood. So when we got an email from the department stating that we were supposed to use M$ Word for out project, I got a little ticked off.

From:	Margaret Johnston <XXXXX@esc.cam.ac.uk>
To:	ptiii2007@localhost , mij@localhost
Date:	Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:05:30 +0000
Subject:	Project write-up!

Last year were problems with students using programmes other than ‘word’
and then not being able to printout in college. There was then a
log-jam printing out in the Dept.

We advise you to use ‘word’ for the text.

If you are already writing the project text in another programme, please
ensure you know where it can be printed out!

I couldn’t help but respond…

To:	Margaret Johnston <XXXXX@esc.cam.ac.uk>
Date:	11 Dec 2007 09:58:30 +0000
Subject:	Re: Project write-up!

Hi Margaret

Although I appreciate that the computing guys are extremely busy with
support issues at the time of project hand ins, I feel that encouraging
people to use Microsoft Word is a little off, as most students cannot
afford the Microsoft Office package and this may even encourage software
piracy.

The department made a great leap forwards by using the open source Inkscape
rather than the proprietary CorelDraw. To that end, there are plenty of
open source and free alternatives to Microsoft Office.

The main one of these is OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org), which can
read and write Word documents. In fact, it handles Word files /better/ than
Word itself, with smaller headers and better control over images. It can
also export as pdf files. Both of these file types can be printed by the
department, through Microsoft Word and Acrobat Reader respectively. AbiWord
(http://www.abisource.com/), more suited for old computers, will also
handle Word files. The department could even go so far as to install
OpenOffice (it may have already done, in which case the problem is null and
void).

LaTeX, used for more professional typesetting and by many of the part IIIs
in the Bullard, will also export pdf files using the command “pdflatex
file.tex” (or even better DVI > pdf, which will handle encapsulated
postscript graphics), which can be printed from Acrobat Reader in the
department.

I think that instead of advising people to use Word, a proprietary,
expensive and buggy piece of software, the department should be
recommending ways to print from other office and DTP packages. There are
many students who would be happy to provide answers to queries from other
Part IIIs if necessary.

Regards
Nick

Not that I expect it will make much of a difference, but at least I got a rant off my chest.