In case some of you didn't RTFAs, I'd like to point out that these scientific drilling programs have almost nothing to do with finding oil (the marine scientists leave that to the oil companies for the most part). Instead they are about understanding geologic processes that take place on the ocean floor.
On land, you can usually find a natural outcrop or a quarry or a mine to walk up to and examine the history of the Earth's crust in that area. Sometimes you even get hints to what's going on deeper in the mantle. On the seafloor, deep sea drilling is one of the key ways to get at the same kinds of information. What are the different layers in the crust, and how would they look on a seismic profile? Where do the sediments come from? What can they tell us about past climate change? Did higher temperatures or different atmospheric chemistries get recorded in the shells of oceanic micro-critters? How does fluid move through the crust, and how does that affect the hydrothermal vent communities that live on mid-ocean ridges in extreme conditions (300 degrees C, wierd water chemistries)?
Scientific drilling has very very little to do with extracting fossil fuels and a lot to do with figuring out how the Earth works.
version 10 for OS X?
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
After reading some of the positive feedback on the newest Real free player in the last story about this (the Car Talk one), I decided to give it another shot. The last time I thought about installing Real's player (probably a year or two ago), the whole process was so obnoxious that I gave up long before finishing the installation.
However, to the best of my ability to figure it out, the new, less-obnoxious Real player must not have been ported to OS X yet. The free player I downloaded was still as obnoxious as ever, and I once again gave up before even letting it install itself enough for me to check the version number.
I am a scientist, and lots of money gets put into transforming the tons of numbers that supercomputers produce into images that make sense to the human brain.
The system doesn't have to be chaotic, just complex:
Watching protein folding simulations. Watching full 3-D seismic waves propagate through the Earth. Watching, in general, any kind of 3-D model or simulation of a complex process evolving over time.
A couple links:
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography Visualization Center:
http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu/library/objects/ The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center:
http://www.arsc.edu/news/mdflex.html
And here I was sitting in one of the big MIT computer labs the other day and admiring how MS-free it was...
Microsoft may have taken over aero-astro's flight simulators, but the average MIT student still spends an awful lot of time on MIT's very own special linux / unix distro -- athena. It's in all the main computer labs, all the dorms, and scattered around campus at "quick-stations" for 10-minute log-ins to check your mail or find your new class or get your slashdot fix.
MS-money may have shifted a few department-specific labs, but I don't think MIT is going to be completely MS-ified anytime soon. The article makes it sound as if everyone's stopped paying attention to the iCampus initiative because everyone's been brainwashed into using MS. I think it's more likely ignored because it's taken over a few niches where it performs better and otherwise it hasn't made any impact on the way people work.
Well, I agree with other comments that say that the look & feel of the iTMS has been badly ripped off. iTMS has more genres (the one I noticed as being missing from BuyMusic was folk), however the same album (Great Big Sea's Turn) costs $9.99 at the iTMS and $8.89 at BuyMusic. Doh! Well, as a dedicated Tibook user, BuyMusic wasn't going to be an option for me anyway, but it'll be interesting to see if those price differences go away when iTunes makes it to Windows...
Losing the competitive edge or getting a life?
on
Marriage May Tame Genius
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"Dr Kanazawa suggests "a single psychological mechanism" is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women. "
As a young female scientist, I object to the slightest intimation of the idea that the only way good science gets done is because young (presumably male) scientists are trying to compete for female attention. How many young male scientists out their have managed to impress girls with their thesis results anyway?
On the other hand, I find it entirely plausible that scientists of both genders who get married and have families often find their priorities rearranged. Discovering that having a family means a less obsessive attention to your career shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with a balanced view of life.
Luckily for many male scientists at institutions such as the one where I'm a student (MIT), they DO have wives who often stay home at least part time, enabling them to maintain something close to the obsessively competitive hours they put in before marriage and kids. That applies for all but one of the male professors in my department. For female scientists, it's much rarer to have a house-husband. The two female professors in my department only manage because their salary combined with their husband's allows them to hire people to help with household chores and raising the kids. Any female scientist who can't come up with a substitute for a housewife finds it very, very difficult to compete.
I'm pretty new to the Mac world -- an OS X convert... so I've never heard of these guys. But it sounds like the timing might have followed that of the introduction of the new OS. Was their inability to keep going due to something about OS X?
I love this operating system, but I sometimes wonder how much all the goodies that come with it (X11, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Safari, Mail.app, Address Book.app, and iCal are all in my Dock) are hurting independent developers who innovated for the platform before Apple got around to incorporating those functions into the OS.
One of my favorite childhood memories is my dad reading The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings out loud to me and my younger brother. I'm glad other people are doing that with their kids also, and it's cool that there are more Tolkein stories to delve into.:)
Here's the link to the Southern California version of GPS monitoring (Southern California Integrated GPS Network -- SCIGN). It's run by the Southern California Earthquake Center and used to predict where earthquakes have high probabilities of occurring.
Slashdot Mirror
In case some of you didn't RTFAs, I'd like to point out that these scientific drilling programs have almost nothing to do with finding oil (the marine scientists leave that to the oil companies for the most part). Instead they are about understanding geologic processes that take place on the ocean floor.
On land, you can usually find a natural outcrop or a quarry or a mine to walk up to and examine the history of the Earth's crust in that area. Sometimes you even get hints to what's going on deeper in the mantle. On the seafloor, deep sea drilling is one of the key ways to get at the same kinds of information. What are the different layers in the crust, and how would they look on a seismic profile? Where do the sediments come from? What can they tell us about past climate change? Did higher temperatures or different atmospheric chemistries get recorded in the shells of oceanic micro-critters? How does fluid move through the crust, and how does that affect the hydrothermal vent communities that live on mid-ocean ridges in extreme conditions (300 degrees C, wierd water chemistries)?
Scientific drilling has very very little to do with extracting fossil fuels and a lot to do with figuring out how the Earth works.
After reading some of the positive feedback on the newest Real free player in the last story about this (the Car Talk one), I decided to give it another shot. The last time I thought about installing Real's player (probably a year or two ago), the whole process was so obnoxious that I gave up long before finishing the installation.
However, to the best of my ability to figure it out, the new, less-obnoxious Real player must not have been ported to OS X yet. The free player I downloaded was still as obnoxious as ever, and I once again gave up before even letting it install itself enough for me to check the version number.
Where are the quicktime feeds? O:)
I am a scientist, and lots of money gets put into transforming the tons of numbers that supercomputers produce into images that make sense to the human brain.
e Arctic Region Supercomputing Center:
The system doesn't have to be chaotic, just complex:
Watching protein folding simulations.
Watching full 3-D seismic waves propagate through the Earth.
Watching, in general, any kind of 3-D model or simulation of a complex process evolving over time.
A couple links:
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography Visualization Center:
http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu/library/objects/
Th
http://www.arsc.edu/news/mdflex.html
And here I was sitting in one of the big MIT computer labs the other day and admiring how MS-free it was...
Microsoft may have taken over aero-astro's flight simulators, but the average MIT student still spends an awful lot of time on MIT's very own special linux / unix distro -- athena. It's in all the main computer labs, all the dorms, and scattered around campus at "quick-stations" for 10-minute log-ins to check your mail or find your new class or get your slashdot fix.
MS-money may have shifted a few department-specific labs, but I don't think MIT is going to be completely MS-ified anytime soon. The article makes it sound as if everyone's stopped paying attention to the iCampus initiative because everyone's been brainwashed into using MS. I think it's more likely ignored because it's taken over a few niches where it performs better and otherwise it hasn't made any impact on the way people work.
Well, I agree with other comments that say that the look & feel of the iTMS has been badly ripped off. iTMS has more genres (the one I noticed as being missing from BuyMusic was folk), however the same album (Great Big Sea's Turn) costs $9.99 at the iTMS and $8.89 at BuyMusic. Doh! Well, as a dedicated Tibook user, BuyMusic wasn't going to be an option for me anyway, but it'll be interesting to see if those price differences go away when iTunes makes it to Windows...
"Dr Kanazawa suggests "a single psychological mechanism" is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women. "
As a young female scientist, I object to the slightest intimation of the idea that the only way good science gets done is because young (presumably male) scientists are trying to compete for female attention. How many young male scientists out their have managed to impress girls with their thesis results anyway?
On the other hand, I find it entirely plausible that scientists of both genders who get married and have families often find their priorities rearranged. Discovering that having a family means a less obsessive attention to your career shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with a balanced view of life.
Luckily for many male scientists at institutions such as the one where I'm a student (MIT), they DO have wives who often stay home at least part time, enabling them to maintain something close to the obsessively competitive hours they put in before marriage and kids. That applies for all but one of the male professors in my department. For female scientists, it's much rarer to have a house-husband. The two female professors in my department only manage because their salary combined with their husband's allows them to hire people to help with household chores and raising the kids. Any female scientist who can't come up with a substitute for a housewife finds it very, very difficult to compete.
I'm pretty new to the Mac world -- an OS X convert... so I've never heard of these guys. But it sounds like the timing might have followed that of the introduction of the new OS. Was their inability to keep going due to something about OS X?
I love this operating system, but I sometimes wonder how much all the goodies that come with it (X11, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Safari, Mail.app, Address Book.app, and iCal are all in my Dock) are hurting independent developers who innovated for the platform before Apple got around to incorporating those functions into the OS.
One of my favorite childhood memories is my dad reading The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings out loud to me and my younger brother. I'm glad other people are doing that with their kids also, and it's cool that there are more Tolkein stories to delve into. :)
Here's the link to the Southern California version of GPS monitoring (Southern California Integrated GPS Network -- SCIGN). It's run by the Southern California Earthquake Center and used to predict where earthquakes have high probabilities of occurring.
http://www.scign.org/