Seven Days of Spring Break

Spring break tomorrow, homework today. Wake up to MATLAB. Rain rain snow snow snow, programming weather. Coffee for breakfast. Sherpa for lunch. More procrastinating, more computing. Barely done in time. Again. Sigh. No time to go to Seismic. Rent a tent...rent-a-tent? Three girls and a dude at 5 Guys. Too many fries. Fries dipped in ice cream, yum. Driving driving. Packing packing. Downloading music for the road. Too little sleep.

At dawn we go. Ski bums and traffic. Hunger. Getting off schedule. Oh, well. Walkie-talkie battleship. The Utah sun beating down on my face like it did in my dream in January. So much deposition and erosion. Oh, the glorious erosion. Sitting in a car makes my muscles more sore than Corona Arch hike. More driving, and will we find a campsite? Old western-looking sunset with spires and purple sky. Darkness, and stars. How many engineers does it take to set up a tent at night? Amazing Grace under the Milky Way (as performed on top of a rock acoustically).

Time travel and confusion. Coldness of the desert does not bode well for sleep. No firewood equals no coffee. So much driving. Evading the law GTA style, but not really. Furthest destination: Grand Canyon. Status: reached. It looks like the pictures, and amazing in real life. Extensiveness blows the mind. Arizona sunshine. One point five miles into the heart of the canyon. Crossing layers, crossing time. Even more time travel in DST-less AZ. Professional camp-setting-uppers-at-night. Quick! Be loud before it's quiet hours! Sing! And the story of Henry the tree/boy/man. (Pretty sure we ran over Bob the tumbleweed).

This place has everything, including hot showers. Wat. I got to drive all the way from Grand Canyon to Four Corners. Passing cars...vroom. Sky. Silence, and mostly sleeping (not by me, the driver). When I stopped driving and got 3g, MIT Haystack REU emailed me an offer. Approaching Four Corners, the CO side is obvious: corner with mountains. Snow on ground after crossing state lines. Campground didn't work out...getting super hungry. Golden only six hours away! But actually seven. Operation Straight-Shot. "When I wake up, well, I know I'm gonna be..." plays in Wendy's right after having a conversation about it. Weird. And awesome. Near-elk encounter. Train encounter. THE longest train. I-25 is a boring road to drive. It's not an all-nighter if the sun doesn't rise before you go to sleep.

Solid six hours of sleep after waking up at noon. Then it started to snow. Packing again, then driving some more, but only twenty minutes. Sleep. Warmth.

Whilst jamming: "What am I thinking right now?" "We should go to Village Inn." Yes. Free pie Wednesday. A third-annual tradition, and the last with all three of us being students. Sadface-happyface.

Sleep. And good food. I probably gain so much weight when I go home. Good times with great friends. I don't want to go back to school.

Febru-meh-ry

Slushslushslushyslushslush

One good thing about February is that it's the shortest month of the year. Bad things about February include bitter cold and wind, no real baseball games to attend, and of course, midterms.

I got my first smathering of midterms of the semester last week. It was the worst of weeks: Electromagnetics, then Probability and Statistics, and then Continuum Mechanics. I also received the "Procrastinator of the Year" award for not starting my math homework until after it was due. PotY is a prestigious award created by myself for outstanding feats of procrastination. The award includes eating cupcakes. (I ate two last Friday).

After my great accomplishment, it was nice to relax with the three-day weekend because of President's Day. It was almost a four-day weekend, because Structural Geology is not really a class. I mean, all we do is color. But now I've been studying for a math midterm this Thursday. It's funny how easy a week seems when you only have one test compared to three and homework and a lab report.

This semester has been going by pretty quickly, though. In a couple weeks, it'll be Soiree (a fancy dinner party for Mines girls) and I'll start finding out about REUs. Mines baseball plays their first home series a week after that. A week after that it's Spring Break, during which my friends from InterVarsity and I are going somewhere warm...probably southwest. A couple weeks after that it's E-Days! And Rockies Opening Day! And then the semester is almost over!

Woo. Sometimes when us Geophysics buddies are studying or whatever, we'll be like, "Guys...is it Field Camp yet?" Soon. Very soon. Like 80ish days soon.

The Viscosity of Maple Syrup, and Other Breakfast Properties

The viscosity of a fluid depends on temperature and pressure. It measures how resistant to stress a material is, and is expressed in units of pressure times seconds.

There are a few important things about any material. Strength of the actual material, porosity (or how many pores are in a certain area), and permeability are a few properties.
But some would argue that the most important characteristic would be the fluid inside the material.

This is what I was thinking of when I poured a slightly viscous and mostly sweet non-Newtonian liquid over a layer of permeable pancakes. Those layers of the stack were deposited over time, just as sedimentary layers are.
Yet they resemble the flat overlapping volcanoes on the planet Venus.

Does a pancake's porosity correlate to its taste?
Is there an ideal permeability of the layers that the viscous liquid will have the ideal concentration in?

Grains are classified according to size. There are boulders, cobbles, pebbles, sand, silt, and clay.

The pebbles of coffee beans are eroded down to sand--coarse, medium, and then fine sand.
Depending on how strong I want the coffee to be, I grind it down to silt.

Grain size affects porosity.
Porosity affects strength.
Strength affects taste and how awake I am.

Two heaping scoops for every cup of water, and another scoop for good measure. And maybe another dash to prevent against weak coffee. A semi-quantifiable algorithm.

The tensile strength of bacon, the permittivity of orange juice, and the bulk modulus of scrambled eggs...

Perhaps a pancake's porosity correlates to taste, but taste is only semi-quantifiable as bleh, meh, delicious.

The taste of syrup is positively correlated to viscosity. Making my permeable pancakes filled with viscous maple syrup delicious along with my strong, light-absorbing coffee.

That is how you have physics for breakfast.

Dear Younger Self: Cliched Nonsense

Dear Younger Self,

So I'm going back and reading my older posts with the tag "Dear Younger Self". Two thoughts come to mind:
1. The advice I give my you, my  younger self (or rather students at certain points in college), are pretty cliched.
2. I guess I listened to myself.

The end of the year is always a time for looking back. There are Top 10 Lists of Things in 2013 everywhere. People are talking about the year that was and their resolutions and stuff. And I guess after another successful semester in the books, you're looking for more advice from me, because that's what a cliched end-of-the-year blog post holds.

I could ramble on about the follies of procrastination and how you've seemed to have figured out that you can't NOT procrastinate, that it's in your blood. I can always speak about how very quickly time seems to fly, and how you're nearing the end, so you'd better make it awesome. Or how valuable good friends are. I can give you a heads-up and say things like "can you learn to cook already?", "practice defensive eating during Field Methods", "don't give up on Dynamic Fields because you can make the greatest comeback in the history of ever or something". I could tell my sophomore self that "it gets better; Junior year won't kill you." I could blather about the lessons outside the classroom: about wise time investment, overcoming over-analyzation and over-reaction, learning to have fun by yourself, and letting go of the past (wow, the cliches are killing me).

I could ramble. Because the cliches would all be true, interestingly enough.

But you gotta figure it out without my cliched advice and live it on your own. And maybe, just maybe, after five action-packed semesters, you have figured it out. But most likely there are some curveballs headed your way (gotta throw in a baseball cliche). Still, I hope that Future Self will be writing about the good times that Spring 2014 and Field Session held. Or the crazy things that happened the summer between Junior and Senior Year and the first semester of Senior Year.

So yeah. [Insert cliche phrase that expresses an attitude that one holds when about to embark on a new year and adventures and the such like, that when the phrase is uttered it sends a chill of fear into the heart of the bad guys. Play heroic and inspiring music. Fade out.]

It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great. ~ A League of Their Own

P.S. For real though, it doesn't get easier. As far as material goes, it gets more impossible. Yet more doable.

My First GeoRodeo: Post-Meeting Thoughts

I've had two weeks to recover and process the firehose/volcano/tsunami of information that was dispersed at the AGU Fall Meeting. At the time of my mid-Meeting post, I was in awe of how huge the Meeting is, and had not even presented my poster yet. So Thursday morning, I woke up before dawn and then scurried to a cafe with Emily, my internship friend who was also presenting that morning. Both of us had our poster tubes in hand. Being all official scientists and stuff. 

Where the poster-presenting shenanigans occur.

Presenting my first poster at AGU was a great experience. It really highlighted one of my favorite things about the Meeting: The eagerness of scientists all over the world to learn. Nearly everyone I spoke with was super friendly and had great feedback on my summer research. It was crazy both how quickly and slowly the five hours by my poster passed--that's a long time to be talking science. My throat was dry afterwards. 

Me at 7:59AMish, ready to present.

After my presentation, the Meeting for me winded down, as I attended a great talk given by my mentor later that evening, and then a session called "Geoscience Through the Lens of Art" the following morning. It was the perfect ending to a very exploratory experience for me in my first Fall Meeting.

A few conclusions:

• I'm more than ever certain I want to pursue a PhD. In what specifically? I have some time to figure that out. 
• I'm only 63% done with my CSM Geophysics degree, but AGU gave another glimpse of how good the program is, even if I harp on it sometimes about it being very exploration-focused. It was really cool to hop around learning more about different facets of geoscience, but it was cooler that I could follow what the presenters spoke of, from induced polarization as I learned in Electrical Methods and Dynamic Fields to climate change models as I learned all summer. 
• Sending us to AGU was really the cherry on top of everything from our REU at CMMAP. When I was applying a year ago to research internships, I could not have imagined they would have flown me halfway across the country in an awesome hotel--all for the love of science. Well played, NSF. Well played. It worked. And I highly recommend to my fellow science-lovers to apply to REUs. 
• Hanging out with the seniors and a couple grad students in Mines Geophysics was really cool, especially since I didn't know most of them before. It's always fun to be around like-minded people who love science for science. But it also reminded me of how awesome the class of 2015 is. I can't wait for many of us to travel to San Francisco next Fall. As far as topics go, there will be something for everyone, and as far as the city goes, we're going to have a blast. 
• I really, really, really, really love food. Sushi, sea food, sourdough and chowder, and more...You taste amazing, SF. 

 I will be back next year, San Francisco. I will be back.