The city where Sciblings never sleep

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Chris Rowan

So, after three fun-filled days, and four even more fun-filled nights, my little detour is over, and I’m now back in the UK for a few weeks to enjoy the ‘summer’. Hanging out with the Sciblings was quite a surreal experience in many ways. These people are so much more talented and important than I am, and yet somehow there I was as one of the gang. I even got to meet Steve Steve! But the really strange, yet wonderful, thing has been the way that the whole weekend felt like a reunion of old friends, despite many of us never having met before. The fact that so many of us were willing to come so far for no real purpose beyond sharing a few drinks with each other should have been a clue that our shared passion for science, and blogging, had already (with a little help from Seed) formed us into a real community. I suppose Bora would call it a vindication of Web 2.0…
Anyway, some of the high-achievers of the weekend need to be suitably recognised for their efforts in making the weekend what it was, so without further ado I bring you the first (and hopefully not the last) Scibling Meet-up Medals of Honour, awarded to those who, intentionally or otherwise, provided the entertainment for the rest of us.

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Categories: bloggery

Blogging, New York style

Posted on August 16, 2007 by Chris Rowan

I could get used to this. I’m currently sitting at a bar in New York City, and as a blogging venue it has much to recommend it over my normal lair in Jo’burg. The availability of beer, for a start. And then there’s the fact that I’m currently sharing a beer or five with fellow ScienceBloggers Grrl and Mo. And New York needs to watch out, because many more Sciblings are coming to join us here in the Big Apple for a weekend of drinking and debauchery serious and stimulating discussion. These lazy latecomers are going to have some serious catching up to do when they finally get here….

Categories: bloggery

Earthquake in Peru

Posted on August 16, 2007 by Chris Rowan

And it’s a big one – magnitude 8.0 according to the USGS. The preliminary moment tensor solution indicates a shallowly dipping thrust fault, with a rupture depth of 33 km.
Earthquake Location
So this looks like a subduction thrust earthquake (the convergent plate boundary between the Nazca and South American plates is the purple line in the image above), but it was deep enough that the rupture did not propogate all the way to the surface and generate a tsunami. Unfortunately, because it was deeper along the subduction thrust, the epicentre was actually beneath the Chilean coast itself, meaning that the towns and villages there have got a severe shaking. Such a powerful quake, in a country which lacks rigourously applied building codes, has caused the expected havoc.

Categories: earthquakes

Resubmission

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Chris Rowan

Long-term readers of this blog may recall that just before I moved out to Johannesburg (and onto Scienceblogs), I got back some rather robust reviews for two papers based on my PhD research which I’d submitted some months previously. Although I squeezed some humour out of the situation, the fact that these two manuscripts represented almost five years of toil and frustration made it hard not to take the criticism personally. And the prospect of retooling everything again – after struggling to produce sensible interpretations of my results in the first place for my thesis, and then having to recraft everything to fit the style of the journal we were submitting to – was, quite frankly, something I had trouble getting enthused about.

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Categories: academic life, publication

The lab equipment is willing, but the post-doc is… skiving

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Chris Rowan

When trying to diagnose why the lab computer was refusing to communicate with my magnetometer, I forgot to factor in one very important fact: the computer is running Windows, which can be a little quirky when it comes to dealing with peripherals. In my experience, it’s not so much ‘Plug and Play’, as ‘Plug, and Watch Everything Connected into Your Computer Conflict with Everything Else.’ As it turned out, the serial connection was using the same COM port as an internal modem, which was not actually plugged into anything and, and as far as I’m aware, never has been. I manually changed the port assignments, and now all is well in the shielded room.
Sadly, however, I’m not in a position to take advantage of this sudden functionality, because I’m leaving South Africa for a few weeks to visit the motherland – although my route back to the UK is hopefully going to incorporate a slight detour. A couple of things are scheduled to appear whilst I’m airborne, and I’m planning to blog both from my mystery destination and when I’m back home proper, but posting is likely to be a little slow until I return to Jo’burg in September.

Categories: academic life, bloggery