who only by moving can balance

The most recent part of Otherlands that I stalled on:

It is not a clean process, and the continents crumple, throwing land skywards under its own momentum and down into the mantle, the crust becoming nearly twice as thick as under the average continental plate. The principle is exactly that of a buckling car bonnet in a crash test, where mountains and valleys emerge from the previously flat metal sheet.

Because, per title: NO IT ISN'T.

You are getting the rant copy-pasted from elsenet rather than something freshly made, but I am laughing a bit because I indignantly made Adam read it & his reaction was almost entirely "... seems fair enough?" and to be fair I had asked because I suspected this was a quartz situation (see also the associated explainxkcd) but even so.

( Read more... )

Okay, so, the other day I got linked to a tumblr post about volcanoes, to which my response was:

kaberett: oh goodness okay so I need to clarify
kaberett: that that post is wrong about the physics
kaberett: and rising plumes are not (for the most part) liquid, and nor is the mantle
kaberett: but that aside
kaberett: (whereas ~half the core IS actually liquid, which is slightly different to the core being "semifluid")
kaberett: (and also that's not the whole story of our current theory of How Plumes Initiate, which involves "slab graveyards", but I will stop there for now ;) )

... whereupon people went "NO WAIT WHAT SLAB GRAVEYARDS???" and I did a special-interest infodump, transcribed and slightly cleaned up below the cut for your potential amusement.

( Read more... )

Looking for a reference/primer/explanation on discriminant diagrams, as one does, I stumbled upon this excellent resource, which opens:

You, too, can be a geochemist! You will never have to look at another rock or mineral again! Your only tenuous links to reality will be tables of numbers and vials of powder by post!

I am thirteen slides into this talk and I'm still on the first (of 4.5) bulletpoints and I need to restart LibreOffice so my bulletpoints ACTUALLY RENDER

I have spent some time flailing around in JSTOR (which I still don't really understand because it's mostly not where the science lives)

I have 14 hours

and I'm going to bed now

... WISH ME LUCK

Item the first: NEW WHEELS. By which I mean: the last remaining part I needed showed up in today's post, as a parcel delivery scheduled for a time window conveniently after I got back from the endocrinologist, and so I swapped all the bits around and set up the app and pumped up the tyres and set the wheels charging and adjusted the brakes and then I took them for a spin and... good grief, they took some getting used to. As far as I can tell, they've changed the response curve a lot in a way that makes a lot of sense once you've worked out what's happening, but is like neither manuals nor M15 e-motions, and therefore Confusing, at least if you are a small and easily confused Alex. (Broadly: lower sensitivity and power-assist beneath some threshold of impulse on the wheels; higher sensitivity and power assist above some threshold. This seems to make navigating enclosed environments AND outdoor environments much more seamless, with much less requirement to faff around changing settings, but takes some getting used to.)

Item the second: PAPER READY TO SUBMIT, quoth the primary supervisor. I'm waiting on a last dribble of feedback from another co-author and squashing the urge to further complicate matters in terms of the modelling, but A Day Next Week gets dedicated to Submitting The Thing. I am getting my head back in gear for Project The Third; I am excited about science; it is really nice.

Item the third: I have POSTED my RESPONSE to some WRETCHED PAPERWORK and get to not think about it again at least until I have a court date.

Ytem the fourth: Adam didn't actually prompt me much, but: with Adam's prompting, I finally, this evening, got around to bringing the lemon tree inside (from the sheltered patio) (I really should see about installing a stealth greenhouse on the secret patio) and putting hats & scarves on the fig & the bay. They now loom ghostly in the murk, and I should really stick their Warm Apparel down so it doesn't blow away next time there's a breeze.

Ytem the Fifth: goodness but I am luxuriating in the relief of getting to gently put down some of the spinning plates for a little while.

This morning, at around a quarter past nine, having been in work for an hour and a bit, I decreed myself Done For Now and left the basement and pootled down to the station in the sunshine and got myself an almond croissant.

And then ate it, still outside and in the sunshine, while sorting out MY DATA.

( Read more... )

Reading. Mostly Predator's Gold, the sequel to Mortal Engines, because I found it for two quid in a charity shop and I wanted to know what happened next. Spoilers beneath the cut. ( Read more... )

TV. Slow progress with Leverage S4, encouraged by a visitcousin who's very into the show. Still pausing several times an episode to go YOU WHAT. THAT ISN'T HOW ANYTHING EVEN. (It's possible I've been spoiled by Matt Damon's Important Space Potatoes, but like, show. SHOW. That is NOT HOW POTATOES.)

Food. I had... two surprisingly faily attempts at sourdough, after a long run of Good Bread. One was in no small part because I started cooking it using the grill rather than the oven because I was Not Terribly With It (...), but both were more of a bread-puddle than they ought to have been. I eventually worked out that I'd made the starter slightly wetter than it had been previously, which meant I needed to decrease the liquid some. Nevertheless our guests this weekend (my parents; a cousin) have consumed three loaves in their entirety, and cousin will make further inroads into the fourth once I've baked it tomorrow morning, so that's all gratifying. For bonus points the cousin is in the process of setting up her own starter so I am getting to do lots of Sourdough Nerdery with her.

Tiny adventures. Yesterday we took a trip to the Giant's Causeway, because it's right there and it would have been silly not to (and also I only waited this long because my mother had put in a special request that we delay it until she could join in). It turns out that despite perfectly well knowing the relevant physics for columnar jointing and therefore what the scales involved are, I'd somehow interpreted "Giant's Causeway" to mean that the jointing itself was on a giant scale i.e. I was expecting diameters of, oooh, at least 75cm or so? Rather than... the thirty-odd we were actually getting. Which, to be fair, is still a good deal larger than my previous in-the-wild encounter: we'd plonked ourselves down in a pile of bracken in a streambed to have lunch, one day during my mapping project, and went "oooh, that's a funny-looking rock..." It turned out, on slightly closer inspection, to be a very small exposure of some really small columns (diameter ~5cm), and I was charmed and delighted. (They were SMOL.) So, yes, this was much more impressive than that, in both scale and definition, and I'm very glad to have seen it, even as I wist after being able to do the proper hike. I hadn't realised about the concave-and-convex ball-joint horizontal fractures as a result of vertical contraction because they're less spectacular so my lecturers just... didn't bother mentioning them? But they were charming, I was charmed, hurrah.

Today we visited HMS Caroline, because my mother is interested in naval history (and my father can be persuaded to be) and it spent nontrivial amounts of time stationed near HMS Essex, which my great-grandfather served on; in the most recent trip to the mouldering ancestral pile some of the things we dug out were A Lot of records pertaining to his time aboard both the Essex and, before that, on the cable-laying ships working the Atlantic. The Caroline is remarkably accessible -- they've installed three lifts, and the ramp to get on board is only unnavigably steep at high tide. I... had a bunch of feelings. me_and's favourite fact was probably that regarding the ships mascots during WWI: two cats and... a rabbit. (I'm not sure I can generate one, because feelings.)

This week coming. Hopefully actually managing to send off a draft of my paper; hopefully actually getting the final data for the final segment of it; hopefully getting to spend a good deal of time at the allotment.

Quoth sporkyrat:

For some reason, when I imagine Kaberett at a rock concert, I imagine a lot of confusion as to where the actual geological rocks are.

I can't make it, alas, but on the 23rd of October the GSL are holding a screening of the speech given by the first geologist on the Moon (Apollo 17 mission) upon his return: Through the wonders of 1970s video technology, Schmitt will be beamed live from 1973 to once again present his lecture ["Apollo and the geology of the Moon"] at a special screening in the Upper Library of the Geological Society, Burlington House. 7pm, approx 75 minutes, tickets £12.