rooks and minerals

real posts soon

Using laser ablation on tephra for ICPMS. The laser is controlled by a joystick so it’s basically Space Invaders. 

Here’s a picture of the plasma torch! The welding glass you have to look through to see it makes it blue.

scientificillustration:

Inverse crystallised carbonate of Lime by Library & Archives @ Royal Ontario Museum on Flickr.

Author: Sowerby, James, 1757-1822.
Title: British mineralogy; or, Coloured figures intended to elucidate the mineralogy of Great Britain
Imprint: London : Printed by R. Taylor and co., and sold by the author … and by White … Symonds … and all other booksellers, 1804-1817.
Physical Description:
Page: Plate 143
Call Number: QE381 .G7 S731 1804 Rare Book

This reminds me that I can probably get in to the ROM archives if I elbow enough people.

Time to start elbowing people.

From Benno et al., Polar Biology 2003, “Pressures produced when penguins pooh–calculations on avian defecation.”

The pressures involved [in the projectile pooping] can be approximated if the following parameters are known: (1) distance the fecal material travels before it hits the ground, (2) density and viscosity of the material, and (3) shape, aperture, and height above the ground of the orificium venti.

Fig 2. An illustration of the dependence of pooping pressure on viscosity.

painfully loud sound

painfully

More here. 

The True North, strong and free.

There’s not much lifting on this blog any more, mostly because 1. I’m stupidly busy and 2. snorting up vast amounts of phlegm while running a fever. (I did snatch 50 for a double the other day and then went home immediately after because whoa dizziness holy shit). Last week I also cleaned 67 for trips and jerks have been going well. I’m anxious to get better and get back to lifting as quickly as possible (also, midterms are next week).

Weighed in at 65.8 last week, but I’m probably up again thanks to shitty eating in the field and a mostly sedentary week. My muscles are shrinking up and withering away. Given that the comp’s in two weeks, this is not a good time for that.

In other news, I think I’m about to get fired from my job (for going on a school field trip and notifying the manager two weeks in advance). Exciting stuff. Except not really.

Also, meanwhile, in geology-world: fucktillions of reports to write and a research proposal to put together for an undergrad study thing. All I’ve got so far is:

1. regardless of what it is, get the cool French-Canadian prof to like me and like my ideas enough to take me on
2. aaaaaaaaaa
3. should be reasonable to get to from Toronto (Quebec or Northern Ontario probably, since all we’ve got over here is crappy-ass limestone from the Ordovician)
4. something to do with the Grenville orogeny or Archean greenstone belts?
5. or uh maybe something related to metamorphism around the Frontenac Arch or dat shield
6. like what?
7. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

followed by

“So, if you don’t mind me asking… are you a lesbian?”

followed by

“So… can I watch you lift sometime?”

well, that escalated quickly.

missbarslammer replied to your photo: Just got home from Quebec. We’ve been looking at…

glad you enjoyed your trip around here! Oka and Brome, have you been to some place else? if ever you come back around Quebec City, tell me ;)

We stayed in Mont-St-Hilaire and visited Mont St. Gregoire, Oka, Mont Brome, and Mont Royal, along with some stops around Inverary and some general puttering about in the woods in the general area. I think we were supposed to look at Mont Shefford or some of the other hills but we had to cut down our itinerary by quite a bit this year.

It was a pretty short trip, unfortunately! I wish we could’ve stayed longer; it’s really beautiful this time of year over there. :) I’m hoping that maybe I’ll be able to do some research in Quebec or Labrador if I ever get the chance to. I should be back in Montreal some time in the spring, but I’d love to spend more time in the rest of the province. Every time I go it just seems to get lovelier. 

If I’m ever in Quebec City, I’ll definitely hit you up! 

Just got home from Quebec. We’ve been looking at some of the Monteregian Hills — silica-undersaturated plutons formed as part of the Great Meteor hotspot track (except it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than that) jutting out through the Ordovician limestone you can see here in the St. Lawrence Lowlands below. This was taken with my phone around the time we got to the top of Mt. St. Gregoire, the smallest and simplest of the hills we looked at. I did bring a DSLR with me on the trip, but I don’t have the energy to go through all the photos right now. 

After three days of living in the car and eating sub sandwiches, Timmy’s coffee, hummus and apples for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I’m pretty glad to be home. I’ve got two sample bags full of rocks (the carbonatites at Oka pretty much made the trip for me, along with a really interesting nepheline syenite/gabbro complex around Brome and a weird banded hornfels I found as we got closer to the contact of the intrusion) and a report to write, but it feels pretty good to bust out the steeltoes again. I’m getting the sense that with a bit of practice, I might actually get pretty competent in the field. Especially since it turns out I’m pretty good with drafting maps and I’ve got a good grip on the chemistry and mineralogy side of things. Before this weekend I was pretty sure I was actually just terrible at everything.

Some exciting stuff: one, I just got an email this weekend about a geology company that’s offering part-time work through the school year, and two, I may get the opportunity to do some independent research as soon as next semester (which is a whole lot better than all the geography and mineral engineering courses I was planning on taking to try and get APGO accreditation). Three - I might be helping a few guys from class make an optical mineralogy reference website to help out the first- and second-years (atlases already exist online, but we want to make it interactive and have them actually contribute to its growth).  Four — there’s a professional conference coming up this week where I might also stand a chance of getting employed. 

My best academic decisions have been made recklessly, abruptly, and usually on a cell phone in the middle of the night. It’s how I got into this whole thing, and it hasn’t proven to be a bad decision yet, so I’m rolling with it. Last night in Mont-Saint-Hilaire I dropped the crap I was taking for breadth requirements after a conversation with one of the faculty members along for the trip. According to him — and I agree with him — my best bet is to focus on everything that will make me a good, well-rounded, highly competent geologist in this field first and accreditation second, and I’m not going to be able to do that if I’m stuck in a course learning for the seven fucking millionth time what a podzol is or how ecological change is, you know, totally a thing and stuff.  And I’m especially not going to be able to do it working a crappy retail job, or wasting my time, or half-assing my way through projects and avoiding responsibility. 

So far this semester’s been great for me. Time to make the next few fantastic. 

weightliftress:

slyfig:

buy here

oh my god

Geology jokes are entering the Tumblrsphere at large.

We’ve been found out. Abandon ship!

(Source: bradtitt, via weightliftress-deactivated20130)

Dr. Terry Bottrill

(My first year prof, easily one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, and a major reason I went into geology.

Dude’s had dinner with Fidel Castro, been on every continent except Antarctica, and nearly got trampled by an elephant. Clearly, he’s done something right with his life.)

All it’s going to take is some begging and pleading for hundreds of departmental dollars in the next three weeks. Wish me luck. 

My geophysics survey got cancelled today, so this is about the most exciting news of my week. 

SWOLE LIFE

Here’s the link to the rest.

Every ~2 pages: “FUCK”, “SHIT”, “WHY”, “utter and complete crap”

Every ~3 pages: “FINISH PULL”, “FINISH IT”, “FINISH YOUR DAMN PULL”, “srsly”

Every ~8 pages: “weak”

Every ~20 pages: “okay”, “!!!”, “not bad”

Occasionally people go through it at the gym and find it hilarious. I don’t know why. Maybe I should be less pissed off when lifting doesn’t go as well as I want it to. I’m not actually this angry at the gym, either — or, indeed, ever. 

Snatches are slowly coming back after my two weeks of just squatting. Jerks are still great. My cleans have become weirdly unreliable, though, and this being a full time student while employed and never sleeping thing is killing any kind of gains I could potentially make. It’s frustrating how much work it takes to stay this weak, but I can’t complain about having a roof over my head.

Clean and jerk day today, though! And presses. Nothing cheers me up like a good set of presses.

Maybe that’s sad; I don’t really know.