A day in the (scientific) life

Posted on March 6, 2007 by Chris Rowan

Whilst we’re on the subject of worthwhile memes, I’m reminded of Lab Lemming’s quest to get scientist bloggers to explain to their readers what, exactly, they get up to in their day jobs. An idea well worth reinvigorating, methinks, although it could be argued that some stereotypes are best left unexposed – I wouldn’t want people thinking that my maniacal laugh is just for show, so we’re still secretly planning to conquer the world, OK?

My attempt at ye olde blog is now a little bit defunct, of course, but I’ve yet to settle into a routine here in Jo’burg yet, as my account of a more recent day should illustrate.
The following people have risen to the challenge thus far:

So, friends, Sciblings, countrymen – how about it? Write an account of a typical day (or today), let me know via comment or e-mail, and I’ll add you to the list.

Categories: academic life, links

10 weird things about me

Posted on March 5, 2007 by Chris Rowan

My new Sciblings Janet and Chad have brought that rare thing, an interesting meme, to my attention. I’m also thinking that it’s an opportunity to give you a feel for my personality beyond my belief that giving my blog a name nobody can pronounce or spell is really cool. So, without further ado, ten (more) weird things about me:

1. I always run up stairs two at a time.
2. I am incapable of sleeping in: my internal chronometer always wakes me up at the same time every day (about 7-7:15 am), regardless of when I actually went to bed. Great in the week, not so great at weekends.
3. I am quasi-ambidextrous, in that I can do some things with only with my left hand (e.g. writing), some things only with my right hand (e.g. playing tennis) and some things with both (e.g. playing badminton, peeling potatoes). If I have a favoured hand, it seems to be the one which I first started doing a particular task with, which means I must have just been feeling rebellious (and didn’t realise the hassle it would cause me) when I was first starting to learn to write.
4. My memory is excellent except when I try to help it out: if I write down an appointment in my diary I will almost always miss it (this once led to me famously forgetting to turn up to a time management course); if I think to myself, “must remember x”, I will invariably forget x.
5. I hate Marmite, but will obsessively nibble Twiglets when they’re put in front of me.
6. I can identify virtually any song I’ve ever heard from the first few chords, but I can never remember the lyrics.
7. When I’m engrossed in a book or thinking hard about something, I can completely zone out external noise to the extent that people who come and tap me on the shoulder because I’m ignoring them almost give me a heart attack. The fact that this sometimes occurs when I’m walking places is a little troubling.
8. I always ask for the aisle seat on an aeroplane; I am willing to sacrifice a nice view for being able to decompress my legs into the aisle, and for not having to barge past two or three possibly sleeping people every time I want to get something out from the overhead locker or go to the loo.
9. No matter how hard I try, whenever I try to write ‘ratio’, I always end up writing ‘ration’.
10. To the great distress of those around me, my internal monologue often isn’t.

Categories: bloggery

The dampness within

Posted on March 5, 2007 by Chris Rowan

So much for a honeymoon period; no sooner do I arrive at Scienceblogs than commentators start making demands. Fortunately, the story I’ve been ordered to write about was already in my ‘of interest’ pile, so in this instance it’s not too much trouble to oblige. I just hope I’m not setting a dangerous precedent.

The recent reports on the research of Jesse Lawrence and Michael Wysession highlight a novel application of seismic tomography, which uses the seismic energy generated by earthquakes to peer at variations in the Earth’s internal structure. Tomography requires a set of earthquakes where the time of rupture is precisely known, and a network of seismograph stations. Usually, researchers then look at the differences in the arrival times of seismic waves from a particular earthquake at neighbouring stations to identify places where the waves are traveling unusually fast or slowly: for example, if a stations starts picking up the waves much earlier than its neighbour, then the earthquakes are traveling through the rocks beneath that station unusually fast, and if they arrive later, they are traveling unusually slowly. Such variations are generally thought to correspond to temperature differences – the hotter the rocks are, the slower the waves will travel through them, and vice versa.

Lawrence and Wysession decided to look at something else as well; the differing degree of attenuation, or energy loss, of the seismic waves as they passed through the earth. This gives you information not about changes in temperature, but changes in strength; because they deform more easily, weaker rocks will tend to absorb more seismic energy as earthquake waves pass through them, increasing the observed attenuation.

Here’s what they found: a large zone of abnormally high seismic attenuation in the uppermost lower mantle (700-1400 km) beneath East Asia. The first images has removed the top 1000km of their 3D model to show the lateral distribution of this ‘Beijing anomaly’; the second shows a cross-section through it.

water.jpg

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Categories: geology, geophysics

What’s up, Post-doc?

Posted on March 3, 2007 by Chris Rowan

Head over to Propter Doc for the Post-Doc Oscars, which honours the cream of recent post-doc blogging. My recent activities and moves have earned me the coveted ‘Greatest Achievements in Small Space Of Time’ Award. I’m overwhelmed, this is so unexpected, I’d like to thank my friends, my family, my hairdresser….(sob!)

Anyway, go and have a look, if only to convince yourself that we junior researchers do blog about something other than how overworked, underpaid and exploited we are. Occasionally, anyway.

NB The list of British Science Bloggers I compiled a few months ago contains many other fine post-doc bloggers.

Categories: links

Moving on from Baby Rocks

Posted on March 2, 2007 by Chris Rowan

I’ve spent most of the last five years studying rocks formed in the last 10-20 million years. By normal human standards, that’s quite old. If each of those 20 million years was compressed into a single second, we’re still looking at about 8 months’ worth of geological history: by contrast, the average human lifespan would be about a minute, the whole of recorded history would take up the last hour and a half, and anatomically modern humans were almost literally born yesterday (to be precise, just over two days ago).

But now that I’m in South Africa, suddenly 20 million years doesn’t seem very old at all. Johannesburg owes its existence and wealth to the gold bearing rocks of the Witwatersrand Group (some background), which are almost 3 billion – 3 thousand million – years old. That’s 150 times older; going back to our compressed 1 year=1 second timescale, the Witwatersrand is on the verge of celebrating its first centenary and receiving a congratulatory telegram from the Queen, although it still has to defer seniority to the 140 year-old planet which hosts it. From 8 months to 100 years – it seems that one of the guys here was actually being pretty accurate when he sneeringly referred to my New Zealand mudstones as ‘baby rocks’.
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Categories: deep time, geology